Muchkund Dubey (1933-2024): A Foreign Policy Sage with a Holistic Worldview | Gouri Sankar Nag

TRIBUTE

THESE DAYS ARE stormy, with war clouds thickly fixed on multiple hotspots with no indication of dissipating soon. So are the recent elections in South Asian countries, in Europe and other parts of the world where the pendulum is ticking not very optimistically. Back home, our entire foreign service seems roughly polarized between two groups, with many in-service cadres taking pro-government stance while many of the old guards sulky and critical of the government’s lack of stance on current crisis like Ukraine and the worsening Palestinian situation. Given such a schism or quandary that characterises Indian foreign policy at the present juncture, we are perhaps even more worried for want of those rare personas who served the nation both during and after the Cold War, had candid way of looking, judging and bridging the gaps with prodigious maturity in terms of experience, accomplishment and acumen.

They saw the evolving trajectory of the nation’s growth and subscribed to far deeper holistic perspective than cosmetic foreign visit or emotional posts on the Instagram. That being said, professor Muchkund Dubey, formerly a faculty of the Jawaharlal Nehru University where he taught for nearly eight years and retired from the prestigious Indian Foreign Service as the Foreign Secretary, was certainly among those few and far-between versatile genius whose career was redolent with impeccable track record of service in the domain of teaching-learning and diplomatic profession.

He spent a span of long five years at the Headquarters of the United Nations and the United Nations Development Programme in New York (Hussain & Dubey edited Democracy, Sustainable Development and Peace, Oxford University Press, 2014, pg.617). This apart, he also served on the Executive Board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. With his demise, the era founded by the Kantian sort of scholar-diplomats can be said to come to an end.

I agree with Prof Amitabh Matto that our strategic community is never short of talent. Still, a figure like Professor Dubey cuts the niche for himself for his peerless scholarship and erudite vision that guided his thoughts so ineluctably. As anyone who followed his discussion – say on India-Bangladesh relations – inevitably discovered his bent towards economic diplomacy, a field in which he contributed profoundly, of course, with a distinct signature of his own.

As he always believed in ‘inclusive growth’, not merely in India’s flamboyant high-growth performance, for he was worried about multiple dimensions of exclusions and more so, the market exclusion and imperfections that were creeping in the aftermath of India’s pro-liberalisation policy shift. He always shared the Founding Fathers’ vision of inclusive society and for that matter, his was of the view that the ‘de-citizenization of any segment of society is antithetical to the spirit of democracy’. Today when the central government is bent on implementing its new Citizenship Act that has triggered a divisive controversy inside the country, Professor Dubey’s suggestion in this context sounds like an unmistakeable ethical obligation, with solidarity as its central tenet of public policy.

Dubey could, therefore, aptly assert that any distortion in this regard ‘results in shrinkage of the very narrow margin on which foreign policy operates’. This viewpoint seems pertinent when the nation witnesses the rise of Hindutva 2.0, which is the new variant of earlier Hindutva agenda in sync with current trends of neoliberalism. It makes clear how benign voices from eminent experts like Dubey were gradually undermined in Indian foreign policy during the second decade of the new century when despite his warning that any tilt towards majoritarian communalism would put Indian foreign policy to a more severe test than would be warranted otherwise, the rise of Hindu nationalist cultural power led to a more exclusive vision of India’s identity – unbecoming with her ambition to emerge as a truly global leader based on consensus.

Today another challenge before us is, how to operate in a satisfactory manner in an open economic system that is vulnerable to externalities and how well can we compete in the new tech scenario that puts huge pressure on the sinews of our gigantic, yet slow-moving economy. Here we have to bank on our South Asian neighbourhood, where we have ample scope to consolidate and synergise the regional voice – instead of taking either big-brotherly approach or narrow securitisation perspective. To quote Dubey, ‘a holistic approach to the conduct of foreign policy’ demands ‘to take into accounts not only military threats to security but also non-military threats and not only external, but also internal threats. It is, therefore, important to build simultaneously military, economic and psychological leverages’. It is worth mentioning in this context that Professor Dubey was always an advocate of ‘new regionalism’ during the late 1980s and even beyond, throughout 1990s when several new mega-sized groupings came into being. His advice for India was to join as many of these regional groupings as possible, while at the same time to strengthen the regional grouping to which she geographically belonged, that is the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).

However, an account of Professor Dubey’s contribution would not be complete without two prominent points that he realised and flagged, one being his sagacious advice to take guard against the local and foreign media, strategic thinkers and foreign political leaders who often provoke us to be ‘bold and active’. He made clear that ‘their only measuring yard of innovation and boldness in the conduct of Indian foreign policy is how rapidly India aligns its policies with the Western powers’. Instead, he always preferred to go by India’s economic and diplomatic capacity, constraints of resources and consistency with national interests.

Similarly, he can be hailed to be a ‘people’s diplomat’ insofar as he intended to allow more space for the plebeian and their right to participate in formulating foreign policy through open and constructive debates. As it was lacking in several occasions like the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations and on the Indo-US nuclear deal, he unreservedly opined that ‘the government has actually misled the people on those issues’ (Dubey, India’s Foreign Policy, 2013, Orient Blackswan, pg.30.)

While these insights remain influential beckons for Indian foreign policymakers for days to come, Dubey’s relatively less reference of Pakistan in his works is an analytical lacuna in his otherwise brilliant journey as an admirable educator, eloquent speaker, prolific writer and exemplary ambassador qua contemporary thinker.

(Author: Gouri Sankar Nag is Professor, Department of Political Science, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, West Bengal)