Pranab Mukherjee speaks to media in the run-up to the Indian presidential election in New Delhi on 26 June 2012. File photo/Reuters/Adnan Abidi
Reuters
NEW DELHI, India, 31 August 2020
Former Indian President Pranab Mukherjee, who had tested positive for COVID-19 this month, died on Monday after weeks in hospital. He was 84.
New Delhi’s Army Hospital (Research And Referral) said earlier in the day that Mukherjee had gone into a septic shock after coming down with a lung infection. His medical condition had declined since Sunday, it added.
A veteran politician who served as foreign and finance minister in previous administrations led by the now-opposition Congress party, Mukherjee had friends on both sides of the political divide.
“He has left an indelible mark on the development trajectory of our nation,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Twitter, posting a picture of him touching Mukherjee’s feet in reverence.
“A scholar par excellence, a towering statesman, he was admired across the political spectrum and by all sections of society.”
Sad to know that Former President Pranab Mukherjee has passed away. I very much appreciated his meeting with HH The Dalai Lama at the Rashtrapati Bhawan despite Chinese protests. As far as I remember, he is the only President of India who met the Tibetan leader While in office after Dr Rajendra Prasad and Sarvepalli Radhakdishnan who was a writer and a philosopher.
I had hopes that India will gradually shape its Tibet policy to a more Tibet friendly one from the ossified indifference that has been the standard Tibet policy from the times of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. To our dismay, after a few sparks of good will gesture including inviting the Sikyong to Modi’s inauguration ceremony, it was back to square one.
India has been plagued by communist sympathisers in the garb of socialists. VP Krishna Menon was defence Minister from 1957-1962, had eight days of talks with Chao Enlai in Beijing. Being anti-America and anti-colonial crusader and a communist sympathiser, VP Krishna must have been won over by Chao to accept Chinese claims over Tibet.
No British Government had ever accepted Chinese sovereignity over Tibet. It was the controversial and often unhinged VK Menon who must have gone with the Chinese demand because he felt himself at home with his ideological brothers.
Indian leaders today are either psychologically wounded by the Chinese onslaught in 1962 and are too scared to say anything about Tibet or they are often carried away by the flattery the Chinese shower them when they go to Beijing and so they do anything the Chinese demand.
It was therefore courageous of the former President to have the gut to invite HH to the highest office of the land and meet him. I am very grateful to the late former President for his gesture to the people of Tibet.