WASHINGTON: In one of the earliest hot mic moments in global diplomacy that occurred during his visit to India in 1978, then US President Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on Tuesday, told his Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, to draft a “cold and very blunt” letter to India’s then Prime Minister Morarji Desai, castigating New Delhi’s rejection of safeguards for US supplied nuclear fuel for the Tarapur Atomic Reactor.Similar in many ways to Carter, Desai was a spartan pacifist (he died in 1995 ten months shy of 100), but the disagreement, among other issues, soured US-India ties to such an extent that it took another 22 years for an American President to visit India — Bill Clinton in 2000.
Still, in an effort to celebrate the visit, the then Janata Party government renamed Daulatpur, a village just outside Delhi, as Carterpuri, after the US President went there to commemorate his mother Lillian Carter’s service as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s. Annual US largesse to the village did not rescue it from withering, but US-India ties eventually blossomed at the turn of the century.
Although Carter continued to adopt a hawkish position on New Delhi’s continued nuclear push, characterising the Republican President George Bush’s nuclear deal with India as a “clear incitement for other countries to violate the nuclear non-proliferation treaty,” he retained a personal affection for the country. In a 2006 interview with this correspondent, he fondly recalled his mother’s service at a leper colony in Vikhroli, which he described as a “village outside Mumbai.” He also supported India’s bid for the UN Secretary General’s post, saying “it is very productive for India to have a candidate,” although Shashi Tharoor eventually did not win.
Carter returned to India for the first time after his Presidency in 2006 to build homes in Lonavala, Maharashtra, under the aegis of Habitat for Humanity, a Christian NGO that builds affordable housing for the poor. Illustrative of his fundamentally secular ethic laced with Christian values, he told ToI he assumed most of the recipients will be Hindus, but there will be no proselytization.
“There is something ennobling in building homes of the poor,” he said recalling how he became a hobbyist carpenter after being presented a toolkit when he demitted office, and how it kept him mentally and physically fit and healthy. He continued to build homes well into his 90s before entering hospice care only a few months ago, telling his grandson Jason Carter, that he hopes to make it to November 5 so he can vote for Kamala Harris.