Chandrashekhar Dasgupta: The unparalleled legacy of a scholar-diplomat

Our prayers are with his wife Devika and the rest of his bereaved family

Chandrashekhar Dasgupta’s passing away this afternoon has been received with profound grief and sense of loss by his family and his legion of friends and admirers. His reputation as an erudite historian surpassed his already formidable credentials as one of India’s finest diplomats.

His foreign service career stretched from 1962 to 2000 during which he served as India’s ambassador to China (1993-96) and the European Union in Brussels (1996-2000). My own association with him goes back to the international conference on climate change at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 – popularly known as the Earth Summit – where Chandrashekhar Dasgupta