R. D. Pradhan

Ram D. Pradhan (born 1928) is a retired Indian Administrative Service officer, who served as Union Home Secretary and Governor of Arunachal Pradesh during the Rajiv Gandhi government. Pradhan played a major role in the signing of the Assam Accord and the Mizo Accord. He has held Secretary-level positions at the international and national levels in the areas of commerce, defence and home. He was in service of the government of India for 36 years.

Pradhan was an IAS officer of the Maharashtra cadre. He joined as a Bombay State officer. For the next five years he worked in Gujarat. Later, he was an Indian representative diplomat in international trade and commerce in Geneva for ten years. In December 2008 he was appointed to lead a two-man panel to investigate the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Rajiv Gandhi, who was then the General Secretary of the Congress (I) party, was impressed by the work done by Pradhan, who as Chief Secretary of Maharashtra, had promptly handled and provided administrative services during the Bhiwandi communal riots of 1982. When Rajiv became the Prime Minister in 1984, he invited Pradhan to join his government. Pradhan chose the post of Union Home Secretary which Rajiv accepted.

Pradhan worked under Home Ministers S. B. Chavan and Buta Singh, and Minister of State for Home Arun Nehru.

The first major task Pradhan took up as Home Secretary in February 1985, was to assess the political situation in Punjab. Politics in Punjab had become secessionist in nature and the Akali Dal party was calling for an independent country of Khalistan. Following the previous Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's ordering of Operation Blue Star to flush out the militants, and her subsequent assassination by her own Sikh bodyguards sympathetic to the Khalistan cause, the situation in Punjab had become tense. Pradhan suggested re-initialisation of dialogue with the Akali Dal, and as a precursor suggested replacement of Punjab Governor K.T. Satarawalla, with a person of political background.

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