Katyayani Shankar Bajpai

He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1952,^[4] and had stints in Turkey and Pakistan. He accompanied Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri for the Tashkent summit.^[5]

In 1970, he was appointed the Indian political officer in Sikkim. Bajpai served in that capacity during the Indian annexation of Sikkim, and was put in charge of the administration during the transition.^[6]

He served as Ambassador to Pakistan (1976–1980), China (1980–1982) and to the United States (1984–1986). He was the Indian ambassador to the United States during Rajiv Gandhi's state visit in 1985.^[7]

After retiring from the IFS in 1986, he taught as a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, Berkeley.^[3][5] He later became the first professor of non-Western studies at Brandeis University. In 1994, he founded Delhi Policy Group, an independent think tank. From 1995 to 2000, he worked as a Senior International Adviser at Merrill Lynch in New York.^[7]

He continued to be informally consulted by the Indian government on matters relating to India-United states relations. Bajpai died in 2020 at the age of 92 after contracting COVID-19.^[8] At the time of his death, he'd been working on a biography of his father.^[5]

He was married to Meera Bajpai and had two sons.^[5] His brother Uma Shankar Bajpai was a former Indian High Commissioner to Canada. Kanti Bajpai, the son of Uma Shankar, is a noted academic. His interests included poetry, films, and cooking.^[4][9]