Hardeep Singh Puri

Some Lesser Known Facts About Hardeep Singh Puri

• Hardeep Singh Puri is an Indian politician and former Indian Foreign Service officer. In July 2021, he became the Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas and Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs in India.

• In an interview, Puri confessed that his grandfather was among those who protested at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919.

• In the same interview, he claimed that his father was a partition refugee and was one of the persons who took the Frontier Mail from Pakistan to Amritsar in 1947. While talking about his father in an Instagram post, he said,
  

  Being a partition refugee he started his life from a scratch & faced great difficulties. A source of strength & a role model, he sacrificed his comforts to give my younger brother & me a decent education & life.”

  

• His childhood dream was to become a pilot, but he could not fulfil his dreams as he joined the IFS. In an Instagram post, he wrote,
  

  Sitting in a state-of-the-art & as real as it gets flight simulator of a prototype of 777x at the CAE Facility, I got an exhilarating opportunity to live a part of my childhood dream! Tough job but!”

  

• While pursuing his studies at the Hindu College, he won many university prizes. He was also the Prime Minister of the college Student Parliament from 1971 to 1972.

• After his post-graduation, Puri taught History at St. Stephen’s College, the University of Delhi.

• In 2013, he retired from the Indian Foreign Service and joined as the Senior Advisor at the International Peace Institute (IPI), New York, an independent non-profit lobby group that specialises in multilateral approaches to peace and security issues. He worked there from June to December 2013. Subsequently, Puri served as the Vice President at IPI, a position he left on 31 March 2016.

  

• He also served as the Secretary-General of the Independent Commission on Multilateralism (ICM) till April 2016.

• He is a writer who has written articles in many publications. He wrote an article titled ‘Libya: Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and the Ghost of Rwanda’ (2016) for The Globalist and ‘Trade Policy Dilemma and the Role of Domestic Reform’ for Carnegie India.

• In 2016, he penned the book ‘Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos,’ which was published by HarperCollins.
  

• Puri gave a public discourse on the topic ‘India and the Western Liberal Democratic Order’ at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, in 2017.

• In March 2017, Hardeep was commissioned at the Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS) as the President of the Governing Body and Chairman of the Governing Council.

  

• In 2018, he became the author of another book titled ‘Delusional Politics: Back To The Future,’ which was published by Viking Press.
  

• Hardeep Singh Puri and the Indian politician and attorney Arun Jaitley were close friends. They met for the first time around 1970-71 when Puri was in the final year of his college, and Jaitley was in the first year at Shri Ram College of Commerce. Puri and Jaitley were part of the debating circuit at Delhi University. They often challenged each other in the university discourses. Their friendship remained even after Puri took the path of diplomacy and Arun politics. In his Instagram post, he wrote about Arun,
  

  Even as a young student he was full of ideas & had great political acumen. He did well in his chosen profession. He emerged as a ‘go to’ person in his long political career & had contacts across party lines.”

  

• In his leisure time, Hardeep likes travelling and reading.