The towering legacy of diplomat Dasgupta

Transforming the political ‘would like to do so’ to a mathematically valid ‘we have done’ was a uniquely ‘Shekharian’ formulation, one whose validity the Chinese delegate at the conference acknowledged. This acknowledgment was an implicit tribute to Dasgupta’s vision of a unified world perspective, a vision inherent to the ‘Conference of Select Developing Countries on Global Environmental Issues’ convened in New Delhi in April 1990, largely at his initiative.

Multi-faceted: Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, former Ambassador, passed away on March 2. Photo credit: Teri

Ramu Damodaran

Senior Fellow, Centre for Social and Economic Progress, New Delhi

Dippu was how we referred to him; we were the First Secretaries in the Indian Mission to the United Nations in New York in the late 1980s. It was a reference minted as much in affection as in reverence, both of which Ambassador Chandrashekhar Dasgupta — who passed away on March 2 — commanded in palpable measure as our Deputy Permanent Representative.

He came to New York with the most marginal of intergovernmental experience, limited to being an Indian delegate to the arcanely obscure UNIDROIT, the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law, based in Rome where he was the First Secretary in the Indian Embassy, a background that contrasted conspicuously with that of the then Permanent Representative, Chinmaya Gharekhan, whose career had been marinated in mellifluous multilateralism, a distinction that did not remotely inhibit the ease and warmth with which both worked with each other and led our mission.

Dasgupta knew the importance, increasingly ignored in the pace and bustle of the foreign service and its rigidly rotational pattern of postings, of a ‘trade’, to develop an expertise which diplomacy as much as the political leadership in India could count and draw upon. He crafted that trade as much for a focus for his own efforts as that for his nation which, by 1986, had relinquished two major global platforms which gave it particular voice, the chairmanship of the Non-Aligned Movement (1983-86) and membership of the United Nations Security Council (1984-85).

As discussions began in New York on an international conference on environment and development, the offer by Brazil to host the conference in Rio de Janeiro triggered a 20-year-old memory in his mind. A memory that took him back to the May of 1966, when, as a young diplomat in Mexico City, he was acting head of the Indian Embassy at the time of a meeting of the preparatory commission for the ‘denuclearisation of Latin America’. He reported on its proceedings to New Delhi in detail, in particular the stand taken by the legendary Brazilian scholar, Ambassador Sette Camara, that any ‘denuclearisation’ regime must be based on the two principles of ‘universality’ and ‘reciprocity’. Dasgupta elaborated upon these and wrote that the ‘principle of universality’ is interpreted to mean that all countries and territories in the region must accept the treaty before it comes into force.

The Brazilians maintained that if some countries did not accept the obligation, other countries could not feel that their security would be safeguarded if they were to permanently denuclearise themselves. The principle of ‘reciprocity’ requires definite obligations to be accepted by the nuclear powers…there must be an acceptable balance of mutual responsibilities and obligations between the ‘nuclear’ and ‘non-nuclear’ countries.

Fast-forward 20 years later, and he saw in the then incipient debate on climate change, and the very preliminary forays into the idea of sustainable development, the essentiality of the principles Camara had insisted upon — universality and reciprocity —principles essential to preclude ‘climate apartheid’ as they had been to ‘nuclear apartheid’.

Not schooled in the wavering weaves of UN resolutions which can often mean all kinds of things to all who read them, he was impatient with craven caveats in resolutions, such as the one calling for a conference on environment and development with its references to ‘the responsibility for containing, reducing and eliminating global environmental damage must be borne by the countries causing such damage, must be in relation to the damage caused and must be in accordance with their respective capabilities and responsibilities’ and its ‘stressing the importance for all countries of taking effective measures for the protection, restoration and enhancement of the environment in accordance, inter alia, with their respective capabilities,’ formulations he saw as bereft of scientific possibility and daring but only an excuse to find excuses for inaction premised upon a self-assessment of ‘capabilities’, a precursor to the later stock phrase about ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’.

It was an impatience, however deftly and diplomatically disguised, that brought him opportunity when he was, in his own phrase, ‘present at the creation’ in the ‘making of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’, in 1991 and the crafting of an Indian ‘non-paper’ which defined as long-term objective of ‘stabilising the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere… on the basis of an equitable formula requiring, inter alia, that anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide from states should converge at a common per capita level, and which would take into account net carbon dioxide emissions during the century’.

Transforming the political ‘would like to do so’ to a mathematically valid ‘we have done’ was a uniquely ‘Shekharian’ formulation, one whose validity the Chinese delegate at the conference acknowledged. This acknowledgment was an implicit tribute to Dasgupta’s vision of a unified developing world perspective, a vision inherent to the ‘Conference of Select Developing Countries on Global Environmental Issues’ convened in New Delhi in April 1990, largely at his initiative — the first-of-its-kind for developing countries.

Two years before Rio, when he journeyed to that conference in 1992, Dasgupta made it a point to locate and call upon Camara, whose 1966 intervention had so moved him. Camara was 72 and smiled as he recalled that conference and his spirited skirmishes with then Mexican delegate Jorge Castaneda. He then walked to his bookshelf and brought out a volume which had in it a poem from 1931 by the then Mexican ambassador to Brazil, Alfonso Reyes, called The Romances of Rio de Janeiro, which was translated into English by Timothy Ades. One verse reads:

Land runs into water, playing

City touches on country ground

Darkness enters into evening

Equal friendship, open hand.

The verses are evocative of the possibilities of allowing protection of the environment and development to sustain each other, the solidarity of our waters and our lands, our communities rural and urban, the universal moment of the Rio equinox in June where twilight is just another word for sunrise in a part of the world that may be distant but is still open to our open hand of a friendship that is equal, and we to theirs. “All I ask, Rio de Janeiro,” the poem concludes, “Your consent, in my time of test. Let me wander on your beaches when my ship is wrecked and lost.”

Dasgupta set our maps for that wandering; a map defined by the addition he made to the then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao’s speech as its text was finalised on the flight to Rio:

“We inhabit a single planet, but one of many worlds. Such a fragmented planet cannot survive in harmony with itself... we must assure that the affluence of some is not derived from the poverty of many.”