Former Foreign Secretary Muchkund Dubey, who steered India’s foreign affairs establishment towards the end of the Cold War and the post-Cold War phase in the early 1990s, passed away here on Wednesday at a private hospital, Research and Information System for Developing Countries, a think tank he was associated with, announced.
Mr. Dubey entered the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) during the Prime Ministership of Jawaharlal Nehru in 1957 and worked closely with several Prime Ministers including Rajiv Gandhi, Vishwanath Pratap Singh and P.V. Narasimha Rao. He was India’s 17th Foreign Secretary during 1990-91.
“He served as Secretary (East) and then took charge as the Foreign Secretary and worked side by side with External Affairs Minister I. K. Gujral when the war began in the Gulf and India had to evacuate a large number of citizens from the region,” said his former colleague K. P. Fabian.
Mr. Dubey was born in 1933 in Jasidih, which was then part of the Santhal Pargana of Bihar (now Jharkhand). Recollecting his life for The Hindu in 2017, Mr. Dubey had said that he grew up in a multilingual environment as his childhood was spent near the pilgrimage centre of Deoghar which attracts a sizeable number of pilgrims from all parts of India, especially Bengal. As a result, Mr. Dubey acquired fluency in Hindi, Bengali and English during his childhood.
Subsequently, upon joining the service, Mr. Dubey also learnt French and Persian. He was part of the IFS officers who joined the service during the first decade (1948-58) of the service and benefitted from the elaborate training that the Government of India had mandated for the IFS officers of that era. He was trained abroad as part of this policy and underwent districts-level and language training. The specific six-part training module for the Indian diplomats that Mr. Dubey underwent was discontinued after 1958.
Mr. Dubey’s diplomatic career took off after the 1956 Suez crisis which left a mark on the foreign policy orientation of India. The end of his career in 1991 coincided with multiple global developments including the dissolution of the USSR, end of the Cold War, the Mandal agitation, and, at home, with the economic liberalisation of India. He served as the Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh and also as the Permanent Representative of India at the United Nations in Geneva during 1982-85. Upon retirement from the post of Foreign Secretary, Mr. Dubey worked for nearly eight years as a teacher in the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. During this time, he emerged as a seasoned commentator on international affairs in the Indian television channels.
Apart from being a foreign affairs expert, Mr. Dubey was a renowned translator and literary critic. He translated Rabindranath Tagore’s Geetanjali in Hindi in 1953 and subsequently translated the poems of Shamsur Rahman, the leading poet of Bangladesh. Because of his scholarly contributions, Mr. Dubey was honoured with a D.Litt (Honoris Causa) by the Calcutta University in 2015. In 2017, he translated the poems of Sufi saint Lalan Shah Fakir of Bangladesh. Over the past three decades, Mr. Dubey had emerged as one of the prominent intellectuals in the discussion circle of the India International Centre here and was often seen engaging in government policy-related discussions with friends and former colleagues. He served till his death as the president of the Council for Social Development.
