Nuclear disarmament advocate P.R. Chari passes away

Mr. Chari, a former officer of the Indian Administrative Services, served two terms in the Defence Ministry, and was also a former Director of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Analysis (IDSA)

One of India's most well-known proponents of nuclear disarmament, P.R. Chari, passed away in New Delhi on Friday. Speaking about him, renowned American expert and Brookings Institution scholar Stephen Cohen told The Hindu, "Mr. Chari was a world-class and very wise strategic thinker, and believed heavily in investing in the next generation."

Mr. Chari, a former officer of the Indian Administrative Services, served two terms in the Defence Ministry, and was also a former Director of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Analysis (IDSA) from 1975-1980. Both the assignments would have involved adopting a more "hawkish" position on India's strategic doctrine, but he was instead known for promoting a "consensual approach on the nuclear issue," according to Commodore Uday Bhaskar, also a director at the government-affiliated IDSA.

After his retirement in 1992, Mr. Chari, who took up fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Illinois, took to writing extensively on the subject of disarmament. According to the IDSA website, Mr. Chari published more than 1400 op-ed articles and more than 130 monographs and major papers abroad and in India. In one of his last big papers in June 2014, Mr. Chari wrote for the Carnegie Endowment, he critiqued India's nuclear doctrine, faulting it for "lack of transparency" and "focus of objectives", and called for a full review of it.

Mr. Chari was closely associated and even related to K. Subrahmanyam, India's strategic guru who was a supporter of the nuclear programme. Mr. Subrahmanyam (whose son is Foreign Secretary S.Jaishankar) also preceded and succeeded Mr. Chari at IDSA. However, in his writings Mr. Chari took the opposite view to Mr. Subrahmanyam and most other strategic thinkers of his time, advocating instead on the need for India to give up nuclear weapons. "Later he came to accept India's nuclear bomb and pushed for India's membership to nuclear regimes like MTCR , Wassenar arrangement, Australia group and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which is what the government is doing now," recalls an associate, Vidya Shankar Aiyar.

P.R.Chari was a co-founder of the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies in Delhi, and mentored scholars there until he passed away due to a heart failure, aged 79, on Friday. Mr. Chari's last rites will be held in Delhi on Sunday.