M. Hamid Ansari is the Vice President of India and Chairman, Rajya Sabha since August 2007. He is the only person to be elected to this high office for two consecutive terms since Dr S. Radhakrishnan.
In a diplomatic career spanning four decades, he served as India’s Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, as High Commissioner to Australia and Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations in New York. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Centre of West Asian and African Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University and at the Academy for Third World Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia; Vice Chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University; and Chairman of India’s National Commission for Minorities.
M. Hamid Ansari is the author of Travelling Through Conflict: Essays in the Politics of West Asia (2008) and edited Iran Today: Twenty-Five Years After the Islamic Revolution (2005). An earlier collection of his speeches, Teasing Questions: Exploring Disconnects in Contemporary India, was published in 2014.
