Ambassador Muchkund Dubey, who died last week, was a polymath excelling in the worlds of diplomacy and scholarship, poetry and public policy, social development and global justice. In the story of independent India’s diplomacy, Dubey holds a special place for driving the nation’s quest for a just world order.
Dubey’s diplomatic career coincided with India’s “peak multilateralism”. After he stepped down as foreign secretary at the end of 1991, India’s multilateralism had to modify if not discard many of the old ideas to adapt to a rapidly changing world. The defiant idealism of newly independent India had to give way to supple pragmatism by the end of 20th century; India’s universalist multilateralism yielded eventually to ad hoc minilateralism.
By the time Dubey passed away, though, the old ideas such as “Global South” that animated him, had returned to the Indian diplomatic vocabulary. After playing deep defence to fend off the multilateral infringement of national sovereignty in the vulnerable 1990s, a rising India gained in confidence and learnt to exercise influence on the global order in the 21st century.
Dubey, who joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1957, brought extraordinary personal conviction, formidable intellect, and a fierce commitment to India’s campaigns from the late 1960s to transform the post-War global order in favour of developing countries and build a more ethical international system.
In the 1950s and 1960s, India had moved on from the decolonisation agenda and charged into new battles for development, disarmament and the democratisation of the global order. As he rose through the ranks of the foreign office, Dubey spent time at the United Nations and related institutions in New York and Geneva. At the headquarters, he led India’s multilateral diplomacy on promotion of universal disarmament, the “New International Economic Order”, South-South cooperation, and regionalism in the Subcontinent.
These battles, however, had taken an unexpected twist at the turn of the 1990s amid change in the external environment (end of the Cold War) and India’s own reorientation (driven by the reform agenda) on key issues. The tension between India’s traditional positions in the multilateral arena and the new global demands began to grow in the final years of Dubey’s career (the second half of the 1980s), and burst into the open in the 1990s.
Nowhere was this tension more palpable than in the arena of disarmament. Dubey crafted an ambitious plan for the time-bound elimination of all nuclear weapons by the end of the 20th century that was unveiled at the UN by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in June 1988. Even as India articulated a well designed schema for nuclear abolition, Delhi was moving inexorably towards the building of an atomic arsenal in the late 1980s. As the world sought to curb India’s nuclear weapons programme in the 1990s, India moved to demonstrate its nuclear weapon capability in 1998.
Since then the story of India’s nuclear diplomacy has been less about promoting universal disarmament and more about consolidating its own interests as a nuclear weapon power. India held back from signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that it once championed with much enthusiasm, refused to sign the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and sought to join export control groups, like the Nuclear Suppliers Group, that Delhi denounced as “discriminatory” in Dubey’s era of multilateralism.
Dubey also presided over a major transition in India’s economic diplomacy. The Uruguay Round of trade talks launched in 1986, under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, was a wrecking ball against the vision of the New International Economic Order that Dubey and his colleagues had sought to promote. Many developing countries had abandoned the notion of “collective bargaining” against global capitalism and begun to make national adjustments to their own.
With the economy facing bankruptcy at the turn of the 1990s, India had to alter its developmental strategy and undertake significant moves towards liberalisation and globalisation. The challenge for Indian diplomacy at the turn of the 1990s was to create time and space to respond to the changing imperatives of the global economic order.
Dubey’s last years in the Foreign Office saw a new engagement with the idea of South Asian regionalism. Long accustomed to unilateralism or “beneficial bilateralism” in the Subcontinent, Delhi had to deal with the new imperative of regional multilateralism marked by the creation of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation in 1985.
Promoting South Asian cooperation became a lifelong intellectual passion for Dubey. But the prospects for Subcontinental regionalism were torpedoed by the breakdown in India-Pakistan relations at the turn of 1990s. Rawalpindi’s nuclear capability, its support for cross-border terrorism and the rise of militancy in Kashmir in the last years of Dubey’s tenure made it hard for India to build on the promise of South Asian regionalism.
Has India lost the world of Dubey’s multilateralism? Pessimists will say yes; optimists will disagree. Optimists would insist that the shift towards pragmatic multilateralism has led to greater Indian say in global institutions. As a member of like-minded coalitions led by the West, India is in a better position today to shape the global rules on disarmament, arms control and non-proliferation.
As a growing economic power, it is now part of an effort to build “de-centred globalisation” around trusted geographies and resilient supply chains. Although the SAARC is going nowhere, Dubey’s ideal of regional integration is unfolding, if slowly, in the eastern Subcontinent through sub-regional initiatives. Optimists will add it is a matter of time before a rising India will rediscover the virtues of a world order underwritten by norms.
On its way up the greasy pole of the international hierarchy, India had to inevitably move its multilateralism away from high moral politik. As it reaches the top of the heap, though, it will need more than realism to shape the world order. It needs to ideate a normative framework, of the kind Dubey championed, in order to draw support from the widest sections of the international community and lend legitimacy to India as a major power.
The writer is a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express
