Chandrashekhar Dasgupta (born 2 May 1940) is an Indian civil servant, diplomat, writer and a former Indian ambassador to the European Union, Belgium, Luxembourg and China.

Early life

Dasgupta was born on 2 May 1940, He graduated with honours in Economics from the

Delhi University Delhi University (DU), formally the University of Delhi, is a collegiate university, collegiate Central university (India), central university located in New Delhi, India. It was founded in 1922 by an Act of the Central Legislative Assembly and ...

Career

Dasgupta entered Indian Foreign Service in 1962 and worked as a diplomat till his superannuation in 2000. During this period, he served as the Indian ambassador to China (1993–1996) and Belgium and Luxemburg and the European Union (1996–2000). Prior to his postings as an ambassador, he was the high commissioner to Singapore (1981–84) and Tanzania (1984-86) and held the vice-chair of the preparatory committees of

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) established an international environmental treaty to combat "dangerous human interference with the climate system", in part by stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in th ...

(UNFCCC) and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), popularly known as the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Dasgupta, a distinguished fellow of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), has delivered several keynote addresses on Climate and Climate policies. He is a member of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and is a former chairperson of the China Task Force. He served as the co-chairman of the EU-India Round Table and presented one of the key reports at the 12th EU-India Round Table held at Paris in July 2008. He sat in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights from January 2007 to December 2010 and is an incumbent member of the ''Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change''.

Works

* While on his assignment with the European Union in Brussels, Dasgupta made frequent visits to London to consult the British archives at the

India Office Library The India Office Records are a very large collection of documents relating to the administration of India from 1600 to 1947, the period spanning Company and British rule in India. The archive is held in London by the British Library and is public ...

. The information from the archives forms the core of the material in ''War and Diplomacy in Kashmir, 1947-48'', which covers the onset of the Kashmir conflict in October 1947 and the conduct of Indo-Pakistani War of 1947 along with the diplomatic developments in which Britain played a central role. Most of the book is about British strategies which showed a decided tilt towards Pakistan in the Kashmir dispute, earning the British the epithet

Perfidious Albion "Perfidious Albion" is a pejorative phrase used within the context of international relations diplomacy to refer to acts of diplomatic slights, duplicity, treachery and hence infidelity (with respect to perceived promises made to or alliances f ...

in the Indian public discourse. The book was received in India with much acclaim, and was republished in 2014 as a "SAGE classic". Dasgupta's conclusions were broadly confirmed by Rakesh Ankit in 2013, based on the newer Dominion Office material made available in 2008–2009.

Awards

The Government of India awarded him the third highest civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan, in 2008, for his contributions to Indian civil service.

Early life

Career

Works

Awards

See also

References

Further reading