Newsmaker: Chandrashekhar Dasgupta

The unlikely delegate

Dasgupta may have been involved in climate change negotiation for 15 years, but Copenhagen is different.

He threatened to submit a dissent note and then withdrew the threat. His peers were somewhat incredulous that Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, a bureaucrat who has always walked the straight and narrow, should have turned subversive after coming into contact with the minister for environment, Jairam Ramesh, in the run-up to the Copenhagen meeting on climate change. Dasgupta first said he disagreed with Ramesh, then persuaded himself to agree, and is now in Copenhagen, presumably because now he and Ramesh are on the same climate change page. Some newspapers have criticised Dasgupta, who has spent more than three decades in the Indian Foreign Service, for being an obstructionist. Others conceded cautiously that he may have had a point.

So what was Dasgupta saying that Ramesh wasn’t ?

The story starts in October, when a letter written to the Prime Minister by Ramesh was leaked. In his missive, Ramesh expressed concern that India’s intransigence on climate change was making it a pariah among developed countries, jeopardizing its bid for permanent membership at the United Nations Security Council. He suggested that India delink itself from the Group of 77 developing nations resisting forced emission cuts without compensation, and instead make a pact with the Group of 20 rich countries pushing for climate action.

This created a storm in Parliament and though at that point Dasgupta made his views public, he did not contradict the minister directly, or dissociate himself from government policy. His position was that it would be counterproductive for developing countries to implement mitigation measures involving substantial incremental costs since this would slow down development and impair adaptive capacity. He also noted that the climate change convention required developing countries to implement these measures only where the incremental costs were covered by affluent developed countries. At the risk of being dubbed a dinosaur, he said talk of delinking from the Group of 77 was “rubbish” because this would result in more isolation of India, not less.

Ramesh persisted. His argument was that standing still could not be a policy but the world did not have to know the extent of emission cuts India was prepared to undertake. Relying on data from the Planning Commission about projected emissions in relation to India’s development targets, he announced a policy called Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions. He emphasised that there would be no emission cuts; all India was doing was announcing carbon intensity cuts. And in any case these were not binding; they were just a declaration of good intent.

But this was not good enough for Dasgupta. He said he was opting out of the delegation to Copenhagen if India intended to make unreciprocated concessions. He raised concerns over India’s basic position on per capita emission principles, transfer of technology, verification and domestically financed programmes. The minister called him and held a meeting. The substance of the meeting was: Of course, India is not selling out to the West. Dasgupta was persuaded into agreement and he is now in Copenhagen.

The whole saga was punctuated by another development: The Prime Minister said at first he wouldn’t go to Copenhagen, and then said he would. India thus had a delegation in which every drummer was marching to his own tune.

There have been worse negotiating stances. Dasgupta may have been a competent bureaucrat and may have been involved in climate change negotiation for 15 years, but Copenhagen is different. Here, the checks and balances that are part of India’s political system will be presented to the world to see and note.

Dasgupta joined the foreign service in 1962 and retired in 2000. He was Ambassador to the European Union, Belgium and Luxembourg, and China and High Commissioner to Tanzania and Singapore. He was also Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative at the United Nations in New York. So he is not a babe in the woods. Ramesh is equally clear; lofty principles alone won’t secure national interest.

Judging by his moves, the Prime Minister’s position seems to be akin to that of a conductor, making music out of cacophony. Ultimately he has the prerogative to silence the tones that are out of tune. He used his privilege to sort out similar differences in the approach between Special Envoy Shyam Saran and Jairam Ramesh. He may have to do so again.