E.S. Reddy, Who Led U.N.’s Efforts Against Apartheid, Dies at 96

From 1963 to 1984, Mr. Reddy oversaw the U.N.’s efforts against apartheid first as principal secretary of the Special Committee Against Apartheid and then as director of the Center Against Apartheid.

He campaigned for boycotts and other economic sanctions against the white South African government, which segregated and oppressed Black people and subordinated the country’s large population of Indian immigrants.

He also lobbied relentlessly for the release of Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned anti-apartheid leader who was finally freed in 1990 and then elected South Africa’s first Black head of state four years later.

“There is no one at the United Nations who has done more to expose the injustices of apartheid and the illegality of the South African regime than he has,” Sean MacBride, a former U.N. commissioner for Namibia and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, said of Mr. Reddy in 1985.

In a 2004 interview for the book “No Easy Victories” (2007), Mr. Reddy, influenced by Gandhi’s strategy of nonviolent resistance to India’s British colonial rulers, explained the genesis of his interest in South Africa:

“I was already interested in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1940s, when the struggle in South Africa took on new forms and Indians and Africans were cooperating in the struggle. During the Second World War, the United States and Britain talked about four freedoms in the Atlantic Charter, but those freedoms didn’t apply to India or South Africa.”

The vast pool of Indian contract workers who had immigrated to South Africa starting in the late 19th century had found common ground with Black citizens as another oppressed minority there. India was among the first countries to join what became an international movement to isolate South Africa through commercial and cultural boycotts, and to exert economic leverage by pressuring corporations, universities, foundations and pension funds worldwide to divest themselves of holdings in South African companies.