NEW DELHI, 4 January 2005 — India’s national security adviser, J.N. Dixit, a key behind-the-scenes international negotiator and an architect of the country’s post-Cold War foreign policy, died suddenly yesterday of a heart attack. He suffered a massive heart attack and was declared brought dead at All India Institute of Medical Sciences.
The pipe-smoking Dixit, 68, whose funeral will be held tomorrow, played a central role in the Congress-led coalition government that took power last May and had an illustrious diplomatic career.
Paying tribute, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said he had “lost a close friend, a valued colleague” while India had “lost a true patriot, a great diplomat and a wise strategist.” President Abdul Kalam, Manmohan and the chief of India’s ruling Congress Party Sonia Gandhi were among mourners who flocked to Dixit’s official residence in New Delhi where his body lay to pay their respects.
Dixit, whose last post before retirement a decade ago had been as foreign secretary, was named national security adviser when Congress won office.
He was a prime mover in pushing forward the nascent peace process with nuclear rival Pakistan, with which India has fought three wars, two over the thorny issue of Kashmir. Foreign policy analyst C. Uday Bhaskar said Dixit’s death would cause no “discontinuity ... at an institutional level” in India’s drive to normalize relations with Pakistan.
“But it will take time for whoever steps into Dixit’s shoes to pick up the threads in terms of the personal rapport that he had established in the past six to seven months,” he told reporters.
Pakistan, where Dixit had served as high commissioner during his diplomatic career, praised him in a statement as “a known and respected Indian professional” with a “profound understanding” of South Asia. Dixit was also a key driver of talks to demarcate the border with China with which India fought a brief bitter border war in 1962.
Born to a poor family in the southern city of Madras, Dixit studied international relations at New Delhi’s School of International Studies, now a part of the Jawaharlal Nehru University. He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1958 and rose swiftly through its ranks to serve in many senior posts at the UN Security Council, the International Atomic Energy Agency and in the Non-Aligned Movement.
Dixit was a “man of enormous experience,” said Bhaskar. “He served as envoy to key countries at crucial times” whether in setting up India’s mission in Dhaka after the 1971 war between India and Pakistan that ended with creation of Bangladesh “or as New Delhi’s envoy to Pakistan when India-Pakistan relations going through turmoil” in the late 1980s, he said. He also served as envoy to Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.
Retired Indian diplomat G. Parthasarthy recalled Dixit as a supporter of India’s nuclear weapons program. “Dixit was like many of us who for long felt that India needed a nuclear deterrent,” he said.
