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Resolute voice

As the only person to serve on five international commissions focused on global issues, Shridath ‘Sonny’ Ramphal became familiar with the daunting tasks that face the Global South

Shridath ‘Sonny’ Ramphal Sourced by the Telegraph

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
Published 05.07.25, 07:04 AM

It sounds cheeky to suggest that Shridath ‘Sonny’ Ramphal’s response to the crises that are tearing the world apart today might have been to appoint an eminent persons’ group to examine all aspects of every problem and suggest and execute remedies. If he agreed to a conference, ostentatious ceremony, table-thumping histrionics and thundering speeches would have yielded to quiet retreats that produced exhaustive reports on the impact of universal voting or the effects of a rising sea level.

When he was secretary-general of the Commonwealth — the second and longest-serving one — from 1975 to 1990, New Zealand’s prime minister, Robert Muldoon, known as 'Piggy Muldoon', noted (jeered?) that Sonny was “more general than secretary”. But the story starts much earlier. According to his son-in-law, the Caribbean diplomat, Ronald Sanders, the Reverend C.F. Andrews, who visited Guyana in 1929 at Mahatma Gandhi’s request, looked into the infant Ramphal’s eyes and declared, “This child will have a long and rewarding life.”

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Some would push back the fight for equality and human rights even earlier to his great-grandmother who reputedly became an indentured labourer rather than commit sati. A speaker at the July 1 thanksgiving ceremony and celebration in the Queen’s Chapel of London’s Marlborough House, which has housed the Commonwealth Secretariat almost since the previous occupant, Queen Mary, died, traced the possible roots of Ramphal’s fierce opposition to any kind of injustice. I knew from his dedicated aide, the late Patsy Robertson, an old friend through whom I first met him, and as devoted a Commonwealth champion as he was, that after the group’s 1983 New Delhi summit, Ramphal slipped away to pay an incognito visit to the Calcutta docks from where his ancestors had set out for their indentured exile. I didn’t know until the fifth Patsy Robertson lecture which followed last Tuesday’s thanksgiving that the trip honoured a double act of defiance.

When Ramphal’s great-grandmother, who had gone to Dutch Guiana as an indentured labourer, returned after a few years, she was rejected by her Indian family because she had crossed the polluting kala pani. So she went back into a second indenture, this time in British Guyana. She cannot have known then that Cheddi Jagan, another ethnic Indian from the sugarcane fields of Guyana, who called the colony “a vast prison” and incurred Winston Churchill’s personal enmity, was to make history there in 1953 by becoming the first ethnic Indian to head a government outside the Indian subcontinent. As for Ramphal, the world was full of causes.

The challenges this time are global. Multilateralism is under severe attack. The United States of America is saddled with an eccentric egoist. Britain’s lacklustre Labour government has bought time but can collapse at any moment. No one dares thwart Vladimir Putin’s ambitious pursuit of the Czar’s empire. Nor has anyone told reckless Israelis that the phrase, 'Next year in Jerusalem', does not mean that Zionists will ride roughshod over world opinion next year. Or that all Muslims will be eliminated. The last is precisely what attracts Benjamin Netanyahu’s callous Asian admirers gloating over the privilege of being allowed to call him 'Bibi'.

Shunning publicity, Ramphal tackled bravado with meticulous investigation. Interminable exchanges of views, exhaustive discussions and voluminous reports followed by action plans identified and strengthened areas of potential agreement. He helped to end Ian Smith’s rebellion in erstwhile Southern Rhodesia and that standing affront to humanity that was South Africa’s outrageous apartheid regime. As the only person to serve on five international commissions focused on global issues, he became familiar with the daunting tasks that face the Global South, the perceived conflict between democracy and development, climate change, protectionism, and threats to small and vulnerable entities.

The Brandt Commission on international development, Palme Commission on disarmament and security issues, the Brundtland Commission on environment and development, the Independent Commission on international humanitarian issues, and the South Commission, in all of which he laboured, were not platforms for garrulous politicians seeking votes. Nor for sycophants to applaud recitations of the master’s achievements. Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990 after 27 years of incarceration in an island prison is attributed to such quiet backroom diplomacy. When Sanders acknowledged his role at a reception hosted by Queen Elizabeth II, Mandela said, “Thank you for remembering me!” His understated style was again evident when I presented my wife to him at a Calcutta Raj Bhavan dinner. Mandela’s welcome “Ladies before governors!” pre-empted the ever-courteous Nurul Hasan easing himself out of his chair.

Given his implacable opposition to prejudice and discrimination, Ramphal “was seriously unloved in the upper echelons of the British government”, according to The Guardian. He bore the burden with equanimity because “it came with the territory”. There was no such problem with India’s political first family. Ramphal recognised Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision in making it possible for independent countries like India and Guyana to voluntarily become full members of the Commonwealth. He appreciated the importance of secularism in holding together in harmony the many faiths of a diverse nation instead of trying to force everyone into the straitjacket of one religion. He encouraged Rajiv Gandhi to welcome Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan back into the Commonwealth after 17 years of exclusion.

Unlike many other observers, he did not think Indira Gandhi was indifferent to this seeming relic of Empire. “I was close to her. I think she related to me”, he told Sue Onslow, now editor of The Round Table, the Commonwealth’s journal of record. “She was a very special kind of person. She was not effusive, but if she was with you, she was with you. And I think I have, by that personal relationship, [been able] to keep India with the Commonwealth.”

Of course, even the best of leaders are often also politicians with axes that need grinding. But there is undeniable scope for dispute resolution mechanisms beyond the stultifying bureaucracy of the United Nations and for using collective pressure (or action) by people whose lives are affected by conflicts such as Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza or Russia gobbling up Ukraine in bits and pieces. But coercive force to resist bullying is not to everyone’s liking. Listening to the tribute to Ramphal by the Nigerian chief, Emeka Anyaoku, I was reminded of the Australian tale that when Anyaoku and Malcolm Fraser were both candidates for the secretary-general’s job, Margaret Thatcher is believed to have said that of the two Blacks, she preferred the African.

Many in London believe that but for Queen Elizabeth’s stout support, the Commonwealth secretariat would long ago have been turfed out of Christopher Wren’s stately Marlborough House. While Thatcher called African National Congress activists “terrorists”, Patsy, heading the Commonwealth secretariat’s information department, was at the centre of a worldwide network of liberal politicians and journalists who helped to turn the tide of opinion. “The Commonwealth is not to be trifled with”, she warned me, arching an eyebrow in a telltale gesture.

Legend has it that Mandela was the only outsider to address Her Majesty by name. “Elizabeth!” he reportedly bellowed, ignoring protocol. I have always wondered what he called Britain’s formidable prime minister who fought and won the Falklands War. Whatever it was, the world can only benefit if the Commonwealth that was Mandela’s theatre regains its voice. “We cannot negotiate for the world,” Ramphal is quoted as saying. “But we can help the world to negotiate.”

The Commonwealth’s 56 member-nations boast 2.7 billion people, 95% of whom live in Asia and Africa. They provide a coherent voice for democracy, equality and international solidarity. India cannot forget that they also comprise the only global platform that is not overwhelmed by China.

Op-ed The Editorial Board Shridath Ramphal Commonwealth Of Nations England Queen Elizabeth
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