The recent peace initiatives by India and Pakistan were just what Professor M.L. Sondhi strived for all his life. And yet as the two nations edge closer, Sondhi’s efforts to usher in peace lie in the shadow of the Agra Summit. Among his last books was How India and Pakistan can make Peace that he had presented to both Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistan’s President General Pervez Musharraf close on the heels of the Agra debacle, to little effect. It was this over-zealous championship for normalisation of relations between India and Pakistan that earned him the ire of the Sangh Parivar. While the summit was on, Sondhi had presented a parallel path to rethink sub-continental ties at the Indo-Pak Forum in Delhi. The exercise cost him the post of chairman of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) and his friendship with HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi. Eased out of the Sangh-dominated ICSSR two years ago, Sondhi’s last days were spent in a protracted court battle against the government for removing him from the Council’s chairmanship. A Rhodes scholar and topper of the 1959 IFS batch, Sondhi’s initiation into ‘Hindu cultural revivalism’ happened not at an RSS sakha but in Prague where he encountered Sanskrit scholars extolling the greatness of the Hindu philosophy and culture. In a chequered career, Sondhi left Balliol College, Oxford, to join the IFS only to give up ‘‘the stifling T.N. Kaul-protocol-and-alcohol circuit (as he described it)’’ in 1961 for further studies. He soon became part of the Indian School of International Studies (ISIS) and joined JNU when ISIS was incorporated into its newly-established International Relations Department. But he was victimised for his Jan Sangh connections at the Marxist bastion, a close associate pointed out. But then again, when his party ruled the country, Sondhi found himself a lone ranger. The young Turks of the BJP knew little of the times when Sondhi, along with other leaders, took on the Congress government in Parliament between 1967 and 1972 on foreign policy matters. Sondhi remained the lonely ideologue he was till the end.
