Jagat S Mehta

Jagat S. Mehta was born in Udaipur in 1922 into one of the then princely state’s most prominent families. After degrees from Allahabad and Cambridge universities, he joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1947. He was chargé d’ affaires in China between 1963 and 1966, launched the foreign ministry’s policy planning division in 1966, was high commissioner to Tanzania between 1970 and 1974, and became Foreign Secretary in 1976, a post he held till 1979. During his career he led the ministry’s negotiations on many issues of critical importance including the Sino-Indian boundary question (1960), the comprehensive normalization of India-Pakistan relations (1976), the Farakka Agreement with Bangladesh (1977), and preventing the militarization of Pakistan after the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan (1978). He was a Fellow at Harvard in 1969-70 and again in 1980-81. He was at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC in 1981-82 and the Tom Slick Professor of World Peace at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, Austin, from 1983 to 1985. He later held the post of visiting professor at the university from 1986 to 1995. Jagat S. Mehta is the author of Militarization in the Third World (1985); The March of Folly in Afghanistan (2002); Negotiating for India (2006); and Rescuing the Future (2008). He has also published articles, inter alia, on diplomatic negotiations; democracy and South Asian security; world politics after the Cold War; international riparian problems; Non-Alignment; and India’s relations with China, Pakistan and Nepal. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2002. He remained associated with voluntary organizations in Udaipur until his death on 6 March 2014.