Ramphal, one of the eminent Caribbean personalities, along with Sir Vidia Naipaul, attending the current three-day conference organised by the Indian Government on "India and the Diaspora", co-chaired the first plenary session with India's Foreign Minister Shri Yaswant Sinha.

The Guyana-born Chancellor of the University of the West Indies and former Commonwealth Secretary General, is the author of "Inseparable Humanity", an anthology of his reflections published in 1988 to mark the 150th anniversary of Indian indenture to the West Indies that started in Guyana on May 5, 1838.

Following is the text of his presentation:

"The winds of history have scattered far and wide the seeds of the tree of India. The currents that have carried them across the world have followed so many varied courses that the resulting blooms are much unlike each other, save only in their common root. The Indian diaspora is as multi-faceted as India itself.

My homeland is Guyana and my identity Caribbean. India was the home of my ancestors and specially of a great-grandmother who, out of the wretchedness of widowhood and poverty, crossed the dark waters from Calcutta to British Guiana 120 years ago - indentured to labour on a sugar plantation.

It was a sugar plantation once owned by an English merchant, John Gladstone, whose son William, endowed by the sale of the Guyana plantations, was to become the Prime Minister of Britain. In fact, the whole system of indenture to the Caribbean - ‘another kind of slavery’ - began with a letter written by John Gladstone to the firm of Gillanders, Arbuthnot & Co. on 4 January 1836, a firm then in Calcutta.

My widowed ancestor had left India in rebellion for refusing to die on her husband’s funeral pyre which the law forbade but the family’s orthodoxy demanded. In family disgrace, she left for Benares to be cleansed of her wrong. Her fate was recruitment with promises of a good life across the waters.

She was recruited to Dutch plantations in Suriname with her young son of three. She served her indenture of five years and exercised her right to repatriation convinced that she had purged her offence and would be welcomed back by her family.

In fact they swept the dust before her on the basis that she had now twice offended, for in indenture she had lived among meat-eaters. Back to Benares and this time lured by the assurance of the recruiters that British planters were not as cruel as the Dutch and a better life awaited her in British Guiana. I am the product of that double encounter with the indenture system.

She did not survive long; and her young son grew up in the care of Canadian Presbyterian missionaries. His son, my father, became a teacher and a pioneer of education in Guyana, fighting and winning particular battles for the education of Indian girls. I was the first of my family - third generation from that brave great-grandmother - to have visited India; and when I did, in 1972, it was as Foreign Minister of an independent Guyana.

Our pathways from India are all very different, and those differences are reinforced over the years as generations evolve in their new countries.

As we gather in India this week, it is well to remember the advice that Jawaharlal Nehru, as Prime Minister of India gave: that people of Indian origin settled overseas should give their loyalty to the countries they had adopted (Lok Sabha, 2nd September and 17th December 1957).

This has been wise Indian Government policy consistently over the years. Such loyalty is a concomitant of belonging, and it is advice by which the Indian diaspora must always live; consistent with pride in Indian ancestral roots. We honour India best by being honourable citizens of our new homes.

And what should be the ways by which India forges a constructive relationship with the diaspora? Not, it follows, an activist way; which will contradict and confuse the role of the diaspora itself in its new orientations.

The diaspora is not India abroad. Rather, that constructive relationship should be on a higher plain endowing the India diaspora with renewed pride in India’s achievements - achievements across the board, in the economic, social and cultural spheres; in the civil and political ones.

The most constructive relationship should not be a functional, but an inspirational one. A relationship rooted in the areas of values, of principles, of example. Values like tolerance and caring, values like social inclusion and the breaking down of ancient barriers - values which the diaspora itself seeks to infuse within the global neighbourhoods of which it is a part.

As someone whose life has been spent largely in global affairs, India’s ethical internationalism, for example, has always been for me, as Tagore so lyrically wrote:

The lantern which I carry in my hand makes enemy of the darkness of the
farther road.

India carried that lantern bravely. That India was the first country to sever diplomatic relations with apartheid South Africa was a reinforcement of such relationships.

That India fathered the Non-Aligned Movement in the earliest days of the Cold War and still lives by those of its tenets that have transcended that era, like a democratic and humanitarian global order that rejects imperialism under any guise, is leadership of which the Indian diaspora can always be proud - and more than proud, strengthened and encouraged.

The most constructive relationship with the diaspora that India could cultivate lies in India being true to its highest traditions. If India retreats from those lofty ideals, so will the diaspora from India.

If India does not retreat, but more and more assumes its role as part of the coterie of countries that are the conscience of the world, then its example will shine in the darkness that from time to time threatens humanity, as it does now.

And the Indian diaspora will take heart from its ancestral links and guard that relationship well. The Indian diaspora that yearns for that light will be encouraged and strengthened and will in turn fulfill its own highest ambition to contribute to human betterment.

I have recalled publicly before - and, indeed, here in New Delhi - how 40 years ago as Guyana’s first Foreign Minister, when asked how should we vote at the UN outside the many complex areas in which our fledgling Foreign Service had no clear instructions in a national or regional sense, I answered: 'Be guided by how India votes'.

That was not a response dictated by sentiment. A multi-racial Guyana saw functional value in being guided by India’s internationalism in those early days of Third World leadership.