NEW DELHI: Jyotindra Nath Dixit, who passed away on Monday, was known to be an uncompromising diplomat. 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 to wage war against the 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.
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 would have negative implications for India's own unity.
Fiasco or not, Dixit went on to become foreign secretary between 1991 and 1994 and skilfully 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.
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 the Mujahideen resistance.
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 and an attempt by a suicide squad to blow up parliament house was the blame at Pakistan's door and led to a massive military mobilization 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" mobilization and quiet withdrawal without results was a costly blunder. He wanted the Indian army to cross into Pakistani Kashmir.
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. -Dawn/The Inter Press News Service.
