POLITICS: Demise of Ace Diplomat Jolts India’s Foreign Ministry

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jan 5 2005 (IPS) - It was not for nothing that Jyotindra Nath Dixit, who passed away on Monday, was called ‘The Viceroy’ – affectionately by his colleagues and somewhat resentfully in the capitals of India’s smaller neighbours where he served most of his life as top diplomat.

Dixit, though affable and disarmingly frank for a career diplomat, was known to be uncompromising especially when it came to defending India’s interests in its own backyard.

In fact, he earned the appellation of ‘Viceroy’ during a turbulent stint as India’s High Commissioner in Sri Lanka between 1985 and 1989 when he was able to get India’s armed forces, which normally shies away from getting involved in civilian disputes, to wage war against the formidable Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on behalf of Colombo.

That adventure was a military as well as a political disaster with the Indian army finally withdrawing in disgrace and the LTTE extracting vengeance by assassinating Rajiv Gandhi – under whose prime ministership the army was sent into Jaffna.

Gandhi had also become the target of Sinhalese chauvinists although history may record that if it weren’t for Indian intervention, Sri Lanka would have split into two nations.

Dixit himself later defended the armed intervention by saying that the LTTE’s insistence on the creation of a separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka, based on ethnic, linguistic and religious considerations, would have far-reaching negative implications for India’s own unity and territorial integrity.

”I was convinced that the LTTE’s objective of creating a separate political entity, purely on the basis of language, ethnicity and religion, would be a challenge to the plural multi-dimensional democratic identity of India as well as other similarly placed countries in the region,” he was quoted as saying.

Fiasco or not, Dixit went on to become foreign secretary between 1991 and 1994 and skillfully steered India’s foreign policy at a time when its principal military ally the Soviet Union had just collapsed – after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The end of the Cold War saw India in a serious balance of payments problem, as a result of its socialist policies and economic dependence on the former East bloc countries.

Dixit was also closely associated with India’s other military interventions in the neighbourhood and in fact served as India’s first high commissioner to Bangladesh after that country was created in 1971 following a brutal civil war between the east and west wings of Pakistan.

As India’s ambassador to Afghanistan between 1981 to 1985, Dixit watched the former Soviet Union’s influence grow in that country as well as the rise, with Washington’s blessings, of the fundamentalist Mujahideen resistance which later morphed into the dreaded Taliban that overran Kabul in 1996.

Dixit advocated a closer role for India in Afghan affairs but any move in that direction was stymied by the collapse of the Soviet Union which was triggered, at least in part, by its colossal military failures in Afghanistan.

Between May 1989 and November 1991, Dixit served in the most challenging of all assignments for an Indian diplomat. He was high commissioner in Islamabad and it was a fitting prelude to his future position as foreign secretary – which he held until his retirement from the diplomatic cadre in 1994.

But Dixit was not a man to fade off from the world of diplomacy, which he thoroughly enjoyed. Frustrated by the amateurishness of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had seized national power in 1998, he made a plunge into politics by joining the Congress party at a time when it was down and out.

The BJP years saw India’s relations with Pakistan on a roller coaster – teetering between former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpyee’s symbolic bus ride to Lahore in 1999 and warfare later that year at Kargil on the Line of Control (LOC) in disputed Kashmir.

An invitation to Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, by the BJP government, to come to India on a state visit failed to make any breakthrough. The invitation, instead, was reciprocated by an attempt by a suicide squad to blow up Parliament House.

Vajpayee laid the blame at Pakistan’s door and ordered a massive military mobilisation involving 700,000 troops along the long common border between the two countries, which had in May 1998 declared themselves as nuclear powers.

It was only through the diplomatic intervention of the United States – then already engaged in a war with he Taliban in Afghanistan – that troops and armour were finally withdrawn.

But Dixit was not satisfied. He said the ”noisy” mobilisation and quiet withdrawal without results was a costly blunder. He wanted the Indian army to cross into Pakistan-held Kashmir in hot pursuit of Islamic militant groups based there soon after the attack on Parliament House.

When the Congress Party made a surprise comeback after the May elections last year, Dixit found himself swiftly appointed to the powerful job of national security advisor, which among other things meant that he had control over the ‘nuclear button.’

When he died suddenly of a heart attack on Monday, it was probably because he had too much on his plate – from leading peace initiatives with Pakistan to settling a decades-old border dispute with China.

Nonetheless, Dixit was a diplomat with contradictions. He had been a hard act to follow and a stunned government now is grappling with the problem of finding a suitable successor.

”The nation has lost a patriot, a great diplomat and a wise strategist,” said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Indeed, there are few in this country that would disagree.