Mahatma Gandhi saluted him as his ‘conscience keeper,’ Richard Nixon described him as ‘infinitely wise,’ and Walter Crocker compared him to Arnold Toynbee. Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, whom Adlai Stevenson called the ‘the old sage of Madras,’ (known to his friends and followers as Rajaji and C.R.) was all these, and much more. But what is less known about Rajaji is his global campaign against nuclear weapons.
Deeply pained by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing, Rajaji argued that nuclear tests were a ‘wholly illegitimate attack on the health of the present and future generations.’ Aghast at the nuclear tests conducted by the U.S and the USSR, two cold war powers, he urged them to stop the ‘mindless arms race.’
In 1954, when he met Richard Nixon, then the US Vice-President, he spoke emotionally about the horrors of atomic bombs. “It is an evil thing, and it will destroy those who discovered it,” he said to Nixon.
In his memoirs, Nixon recounts how Rajaji’s passion left a lasting impact on him. He writes about how important his meeting with Rajaji was – and acknowledges that he used many of Rajaji’s thoughts and ideas in his speeches. When Paul Hoffman, the man who had supervised the Marshall Plan, described Rajaji as one ‘of the world’s most gifted men,’ Nixon felt that this description was an understatement.
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