Abstract
A man of many parts, Muchkund Dubey (1933–2024) was amazingly multifaceted. He was a fine scholar, national and international civil servant, professor, economist, bridge and tennis player, music lover, public intellectual, and activist.
My focus is to dwell on him as a career diplomat. Dubey’s personality was formidable and he suffered no fools. His forté in drafting and negotiation was not just because of his superior skills but also his reputation of never using guile or equivocation to get the better of his interlocutors. His interactions were invariably frank and frontal and he persuaded his discussants by his forceful argument and transparent sincerity. Coming from a rural background, he was largely self-taught in English.
Dubey was elected chairperson of the Group of 77 (G77) in New York when he was just a young First Secretary at the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations (UN). In that capacity, he shaped the International Development Strategy (IDS) for the Second UN Development Decade (1971–1980). Some years later, Dubey was unanimously elected chairperson of the General Assembly Preparatory Committee for formulating the IDS for the Third UN Development Decade. Dubey continued to be a force behind the efforts made by the developing country members of the G77 and the Non-Aligned Movement to articulate their priorities in the UN. The multilateral ethic he sought to promote fell afoul of vested interests.
A similar fate befell Dubey’s hopes for increased regional integration in South Asia. He was India’s nominee in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Group of Eminent Persons, set up in 1998 to define a ‘long-range vision’ for the organisation. The group had proposed a three- stage plan for regional cooperation in South Asia culminating in a South Asian Economic Union in its final phase, after establishing a South Asia Free Trade Area and a South Asian Customs Union. SAARC has failed to progress in recent years and has not met at the summit level since the 2014 Kathmandu summit.
Dubey served as Foreign Secretary at the intersection of twin transitions: externally, the world had just one remaining superpower after the dissolution of the former Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and internally, there were rapid political changes. He served three different prime ministers (PMs), each with a distinct temperament, in preparing the future of India’s foreign policy: V. P. Singh, Chandra Shekhar, and P. V. Narasimha Rao. All three trusted Dubey’s advice. From the time of the first appeal of the Six Nation Five Continent Peace Initiative (when Dubey was Ambassador and Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations and other International Organisations in Geneva) until the Action Plan for ushering in a nuclear-weapon-free and non-violent world order unveiled by PM Rajiv Gandhi at the UN General Assembly in 1988 (before becoming Foreign Secretary, Dubey was Secretary [East] and Additional Secretary [International Organisations] at headquarters since 1986), he worked closely with Rajiv Gandhi. During this period, he was the principal resource person and draftsman of many of these documents, which had his imprimatur.
As Foreign Secretary, much of his thinking was devoted to adjusting to the transition in global geopolitics. Dubey believed in overcoming the long estrangement in India–US relations, to free them from ‘the prejudices and stereotypes of the past,’ as he used to say. In response to Indian gestures, such as India voting in favour of the UN Security Council resolution 687 on Iraq, there were signs of a slow shift of the USA in a positive direction. The US Permanent Representative to the UN, Thomas Pickering, consulted Dubey on the text of the resolution. In 1991, Lt. Gen Claude M. Kicklighter, the commander of the United States Army Pacific, brought proposals for military-to-military exchanges and joint exercises between the United States and Indian armed forces. A bilateral Steering Committee formalised the arrangements. Reginald Bartholomew, the US Under Secretary of State for International Security Affairs, briefed Dubey in Delhi on his way back from Beijing about the hard conversations he had with his Chinese counterparts in Beijing about China’s supply of solid-fuelled M-11 tactical missiles to Pakistan. This was also the time when India established full diplomatic relations with Israel.
After heading the Bangladesh Division in the Ministry of External Affairs, Dubey served as India’s high commissioner (HC) to Bangladesh (1979–1982). The Bangladeshis valued Dubey whom they considered their well-wisher and friend, even if sometimes he had difficult dealings with the Foreign Office in Dhaka. Dubey maintained this balance because, while staunchly defending India’s vital interests, he maintained the distinction between the nation and its people on the one hand and the government of the day on the other. If this maxim were followed, arguably, India’s relations with its neighbours can improve. Dubey believed in it even before his induction into the Indian Foreign Service. When interviewed by the Union Public Service Commission, he was asked why India should remain in the Commonwealth (just months earlier, the United Kingdom (UK) had provoked the Suez crisis and India and the UK at the time had a raging debate about the handling of the Indian sterling balances), Dubey quoted the Labour Party leader, Aneurin Bevin, as having said in the British parliament that it was prime minister Eden’s private war.
He loved Bengali literature and music and was a Rabindra Sangeet buff. His rendering of Lalan Shah Fakir’s poems into Hindi finally appeared in 2017. He had translated the poems of Rabindranath Tagore and Shamsur Rehman earlier. Mrs. Lalita Dubey took music lessons from Sohrab Hossain on Nazrul Geeti when Dubey was HC in Dhaka. Their residence had several musical baithaks [sessions] during this period.
Whether as a diplomat, professor of South Asian Affairs at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, or the president of the Council for Social Development, Dubey kept up his strong social vocation. He believed India could only become a leading nation and a partner of choice for both the developing and developed countries if India met the challenges faced by its people, such as poverty and unemployment, fostered inclusion and equity, and invested adequately in public education and health. His passing depletes the voices of sanity in our troubled world.