Chandrashekhar Dasgupta: The unparalleled legacy of a scholar-diplomat

Chandrashekhar Dasgupta’s passing away this afternoon has been received with profound grief and sense of loss by his family and his legion of friends and admirers. His reputation as an erudite historian surpassed his already formidable credentials as one of India’s finest diplomats.

His foreign service career stretched from 1962 to 2000 during which he served as India’s ambassador to China (1993-96) and the European Union in Brussels (1996-2000). My own association with him goes back to the international conference on climate change at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 – popularly known as the Earth Summit – where Chandrashekhar Dasgupta was leading the Indian negotiating team and I was part of Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao’s delegation.

Not many people are aware of his seminal contribution to the historic Rio Convention, including in the drafting of its several key provisions. I remember the US Vice-President Al Gore, who was leading the American delegation, paying personal tribute to Dasgupta’s outstanding contributions during his meeting with PM Rao.

Dasgupta remained engaged with the climate change agenda thereafter and was a part of our delegation to the various Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. We worked closely together when I served as the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for Climate Change during 2007-2010 and I have no hesitation in acknowledging the immense value of his experience and advice.

At the climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009, Dasgupta was his usual firm but affable self in upholding our negotiating red lines. At one point, in an informal gathering of several heads of state/governments, a frustrated Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France, reacted to Dasgupta’s refusal to concede on a particular point, remarking that the latter was a mere functionary in a gathering of summit leaders. Dasgupta smiled and replied in measured tones that he was representing India and its Prime Minister and that Sarkozy’s remarks were disparaging to India and not to him personally. Sarkozy was taken aback and, to be fair, apologised to him immediately.

Dasgupta could be obstinate and unbending if there was a matter of principle involved but he was never unpleasant or aggressive in his dealings with an interlocutor. This is the reason why he was so highly respected in diplomatic circles across the world and looked up to by his younger colleagues. He was a role model par excellence.

But Dasgupta gained even greater acclaim as a historian, authoring two meticulously researched books, one entitled War and Diplomacy in Kashmir 1947-48 and a more recent one published in 2021, India and the Bangladesh Liberation War. The earlier volume, published in 2002, is based on a comprehensive and deeply analytical reading of the archives, in particular the India Office Library in London.

Dasgupta was able to adduce documentary evidence of the partisan and often devious role played by the British in enabling Pakistan to occupy and retain Gilgit and Baltistan during the initial years of Indian independence. The book remains an indispensable reference work on the subject.

In writing his subsequent masterpiece on India and Bangladesh, Dasgupta once again drew upon the extensive archival material related to the Bangladesh War, which he pored over with meticulous rigour over a period of 18 long years. But this book is different because Dasgupta also served at the newly established Indian diplomatic mission in Dhaka from 1972 to 1974 and brought that personal experience and ring-side view to add unusual depth and perspicacity to his insights.

As he himself wrote in the introduction, the book sought to highlight how, in a rare alignment of stars, India was able to execute a grand strategy where diplomatic, military and economic resources of the state were brought together to achieve a defined objective. This is rarely how the Indian state works and the value of Dasgupta’s compelling analysis is precisely in driving home the message that a whole of government approach aimed at a well-defined political objective can yield impressive results.

We have lost one of India’s finest diplomats, who was both a brilliant strategist and a consummate practitioner – a somewhat rare confluence of qualities. I remember him as a valued friend, an exemplar and, above all, a true patriot who one could always rely upon to uphold India’s interests.

Our prayers are with his wife Devika and the rest of his bereaved family.

May his soul rest in peace.

The writer is a former foreign secretary