By Dipankar De Sarkar, IANS
London : Laxmi Mal Singhvi, who died aged 76 in Delhi Saturday, helped take Indo-British ties to a new high during his reign as one of the longest-serving Indian high commissioners to Britain.
But he also oversaw what was possibly the most difficult period in bilateral relations in the past decade.
Singhvi, an eminent jurist, came to London as high commissioner early in 1991, when Chandra Shekhar was prime minister. And one of the first things he told London-based Indian journalists was that he had come to London with the backing of all major Indian political parties – a fact that was borne true in later years.
A string of prime ministers came and went in New Delhi but Singhvi stayed on as India’s envoy in London until late 1997 – lending this key post a measure of continuity and stability.
Singhvi, who came to London as bilateral ties were warming, had a fierce nationalistic passion for Indian historical and art objects and closely tailed the auctions of letters and manuscripts by eminent Indians.
Among priceless objects returned to India, courtesy of Singhvi, were a smuggled Chola-period bronze of the dancing Nataraj, original hand-written letters by Mahatma Gandhi and rare manuscripts by Rabindranath Tagore.
In fact, he persuaded two prominent non-resident Indian businessmen, Sir Ghulam Noon and Nat Purie, to purchase the Tagore manuscripts and then donated them to the Indian government on their behalf – at a ceremony attended by then West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu.
It is due to Singhvi’s energetic efforts that Tagore’s is today the only other bust in the home of William Shakespeare at Stratford upon Avon in southeast England and a street in central London is named after Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.
Singhvi was probably the most high profile of Indian high commissioners here in living memory – reportedly on first name terms with both Prince Charles and his estranged wife Princess Diana. It was he who persuaded Diana to visit the Taj Mahal in the mid-90s, where a photograph of hers sitting in lonely grandeur in front of the monument to love captured the world’s imagination.
But Singhvi had to harness all his firefighting skills and repair damaged ties during the prime ministership of Inder Kumar Gujral when a remark on Kashmir by then premier Tony Blair’s foreign secretary Robin Cook gave offence to New Delhi.
It is in no small measure due to Singhvi’s astute diplomacy that the ties between India and Britain not only recovered from that low, but are today at their warmest.