Abstract
Professor Muchkund Dubey, president of the Council for Social Development (CSD) and former foreign secretary, passed away on June 26. He had an illustrious career in the Indian Foreign Service, serving as India’s high commissioner to Bangladesh and the permanent representative to the United Nations (UN) in Geneva. For 30 years after his retirement from Foreign Service in 1991, Muchkund Dubey was a scholar and public intellectual par excellence. He joined the Jawaharlal Nehru University as a professor where he taught for eight years.
Muchkund Dubey was an accomplished diplomat excelling in the worlds of diplomacy, scholarship, public policy, social development, and global justice. He was a polymath: a leading public intellectual, writer, and linguist, proficient in several languages with an abiding interest in Indian literature and vernacular languages. He translated Rabindranath Tagore’s Geetanjali in Hindi in 1953, and more recently the poems of Sufi saint Lalan Shah Fakir of Bangladesh.
As a top diplomat, Muchkund Dubey played a key role in the making of India’s foreign policy and in shaping the UN’s programmes for developing countries and in the promotion of disarmament. He not only represented India but also the aspirations of the Global South in his pursuit of social development, education, and justice. His approach was driven by a normative framework that sought to mould India’s foreign policy towards a greater focus on bettering the lot of the country’s underprivileged and pushing developing countries into collectively pressing for a world order that is fair, equitable and just. He was committed to peace in South Asia and was a votary of dialogue between neighbours, and made an extensive contribution to relations with our immediate neighbours.
Muchkund Dubey had a special interest in public policy motivated by his endeavour to work towards building a just world. His philosophy of life was liberal and egalitarian with a strong commitment to human rights and minority rights. He was a secular intellectual and administrator who staunchly opposed communal politics. He was strongly pro-poor and supported the rights of marginalised communities in every way. This was reflected in his commitment to the idea of common schooling and his support for and encouragement of the Right to Education (RTE) forum housed in CSD.
Social justice was instinctive to him in its comprehensive sense, backed by a resolute commitment to quality education for all Indians. Muchkund Dubey was committed to common education and common schooling as a system to provide education of an equitable quality to all children. To him, common education was most important in building an egalitarian society based on equal opportunities for all. His work on education encapsulated his belief that quality education was a basic right for all children irrespective of caste, class, gender, and religion. Additionally, there must be provision of quality education in both urban and rural areas through public institutions and of universal healthcare through a National Health Service. It was his efforts that convinced the Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar to set up a commission to make recommendations on how common education can be implemented in the state. He headed the Common School Commission of Bihar which submitted its report in 2007. However, he was disappointed that the government did not implement the report. Until his last days, he lamented the lack of political will to implement the Common School System in Bihar and elsewhere.
The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government promulgated the RTE Act, but he was troubled by the gradual weakening of the RTE over the years. He was particularly distressed by the fate of RTE under the present central government, which has virtually killed it. The reduction in the outlay for education is an indication of this but what was equally worrying for him was that instead of opening new schools, the government was shutting down existing ones. The argument is that the schools with a small number of children should be merged with bigger ones.
Muchkund Dubey was an institution builder who made a significant contribution to building and sustaining the CSD as a vibrant institution in keeping with his progressive vision. His passing is a great loss to the many worlds he occupied with great felicity and distinction. He was truly a giant of our times, someone who stood out as a beacon of justice, equity, and commitment to social development.