Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century

  To make matters worse, problems of internal coordination are multiplied externally, since from the very start the MEA, as the newest and least entrenched of the government’s bureaucracies, faced stiff competition from the established ministries regarding their respective areas of jurisdiction. In the Indian gerontocratic tradition, the older ministries won the administrative battle; and in addition to being burdened with an irrational divisional structure, the MEA found that it had to look elsewhere for inputs into several vital areas of foreign policy. UNCTAD, the EU and similar organizations came within the bailiwick of the Ministry of Commerce, and Mrs Gandhi herself admitted to me that in her time commercial foreign policy generally originated there; however, the foreign minister would, she noted, ‘be kept closely in touch’. (This is still the case in 2012.) In practice even that elementary courtesy was rarely adhered to, and in other instances even the intent did not exist. Matters relating to Indian businesses abroad, trade missions and agreements were the province of the Ministry of Commerce as well (or that of foreign trade, in the years when that designation existed), rather than a foreign trade division within the MEA. UNESCO, the ICCR (India’s foremost arm for ‘cultural diplomacy’) and exchanges of scholars remained for years the business of the ministry of education, though in a 1970 reorganization the ICCR did pass into the MEA’s hands. The ministry of food and agriculture decided upon India’s participation in conferences regarding agriculture, relations with the Food and Agriculture Organization and foreign food agreements. The ministry of health and family planning dealt with WHO and medical training abroad. The ministry of labour determined India’s participation in the International Labour Organization; the ministry of works and housing kept UNIDO to itself. The department of atomic energy determined technical aspects of nuclear policy and dealt with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). There were also the well-known involvements of the information and broadcasting ministry, whose information service officers once functioned virtually as a parallel diplomatic corps; the defence ministry, with its paramountcy on national security matters; and the finance ministry, which in addition to dealing exclusively with foreign investment, foreign aid and foreign exchange questions, controlled the budget of the MEA. Finally, foreign intelligence was first in the hands of the home ministry and then of the prime minister’s secretariat (later, since 1977, redubbed ‘PM’s Office’), which undercut the already limited information resources of MEA officials by offering an alternative channel for analysis and judgement to the political decision-makers, bypassing their nominal superiors in the diplomatic system under whose cover the intelligence officers did their work.

  This administrative heterogeneity not only made coordination a chimera; it undercut such internal MEA divisions as those relating to the UN, most of whose logical responsibilities were apportioned to a variety of other ministries. Even such matters as the selection of delegations was largely out of the MEA’s hands. South Block effectively chose the delegation of India to the UN General Assembly, which was largely staffed on political considerations anyway. The hostility of various domestic bureaucracies towards enhancing the privileges of the diplomatic corps also undermined the MEA’s effectiveness. For instance, foreign training was for many decades rendered virtually impossible by the opposition of IAS officers, who would largely be ineligible for it, and their tacit acquiescence in parliamentary demagoguery against such training for their IFS colleagues. (This has mercifully ceased to be the case.) Even postings abroad are not the sole privilege of the MEA. The ambassadorship to the European Union in Brussels alternates between the IAS and the IFS, though diplomatic skills are essential in this multilateral assignment, and that to the World Trade Organization in Geneva remains the exclusive preserve of the commerce ministry. On the only occasion a prime minister (the NDA’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee) appointed a competent IFS officer to be the Indian ambassador to the WTO, the powerful IAS lobby fired from the shoulders of the then commerce minister, Murasoli Maran, a coalition ally of the prime minister’s, to get the appointment scuttled.

  Though in that instance the prime minister came off second best, in general the increasing concentration of power in the hands of the prime minister, his or her advisers and the PMO could not but diminish the role of the MEA. As one veteran diplomat lamented:

  The centre of gravity, always a rather shifting entity in the Ministry of External Affairs, now seems to be capable of making frequent long weekend visits to other habitats. Nothing could be more deleterious to the operation of our foreign policy than that it should be devised and manipulated from outside the Foreign Office. The right course to adopt when a Foreign Office does not deliver the goods is not to order the goods from elsewhere, but to overhaul the Foreign Office.

  No meaningful change could be attempted, however, since every prime minister has understandably chosen to dominate the foreign policy making process, a natural tendency exacerbated by the era of summitry in which we live. Prime ministers who are frequently in contact with heads of state and government across the world and are running into them every other month (and receiving phone calls from them every day) tend naturally to preserve the major foreign policy issues for themselves, leaving the foreign ministry to deal with the more mundane details. India, for the reasons described, is a classic example of this. In general, it remains true that the MEA is considered most useful in the implementation of policy rather than in its formulation, except on matters of low priority to the prime minister. Major decisions—such as India’s decision in 2007 to break with precedent and vote against Iran on the board of governors of the IAEA, or that in 2012 to set a new precedent by voting against Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council—were taken in the PMO and not by the MEA.

  The tragedy of 26/11 confirmed yet again how much we need greater coordination among the many programmes and players in government involved with security and other international issues, and how essential is the modernization of our domestic and international instruments to keep Indians safe. We will have to work harder in government, and with Indians from all walks of life—including business groups interested in foreign markets and in international investors—to ensure that we break down the ‘narrow domestic walls’ that Tagore wrote about and promote a coherent, visible Indian approach to the world, backed with sufficient resources to take action and to get our messages across clearly. This will help ensure that India remains influential on issues of concern in an increasingly competitive world.

  Within this broad picture, there are a number of positives. The foreign service has become much better at the ‘non-political’ aspects of diplomacy, a welcome change from the days when pinstriped diplomats schooled in the niceties of political relations disdained economic issues as the preoccupation only of shopkeepers. Today IFS officers are made acutely conscious of the fact that promoting business opportunities and facilitating trade and investment are as much a part of their job as writing cables about the political insights gleaned from their last state banquet. The notion of an IFS officer as a travelling salesman for ‘India Inc.’ has gained ground to a degree that was literally inconceivable when I was a doctoral student.

  Relations between the ministers and bureaucrats in the diplomatic service also appear to be generally satisfactory. All foreign ministers have conducted frequent consultations with their senior officials, though most have been seen as in thrall to them, except on the rare occasions, such as during the tenure as minister of K. Natwar Singh, a former IFS diplomat himself, who in addition to his political rank also benefited from the traditional habits of bureaucratic deference to his career seniority on the part of his officials. In general, however, the ministers appeared to prefer to leave matters in the hands of their Secretaries; while this betokens the kind of receptivity to the advice of the MEA professional that I called for in Reasons of State, it sometimes goes much further than is entirely healthy in a political democracy, with some foreign ministers seen as accepting bureaucratic judgements uncritically.

/>   Receptivity to ideas from outside has also improved dramatically since my earlier study of the phenomenon. I believe foreign policy is much too important an issue to be left to the foreign ministry alone. Discussion of international relations should not be confined to the seminar rooms in Delhi, and that is why I was delighted, when I was minister, to lead a seminar on Indo-Arab relations in Kochi, another on ‘Look East’ in Shillong, and to lecture on ‘why foreign policy matters’ at Aligarh Muslim University. All Indians, even 2000 kilometres away from the nation’s capital, have a vital stake in the development of our foreign policy. While progress has certainly been made since the days when, in Reasons of State, I had observed the MEA disregarding almost all opportunities to draw upon intellectual and academic resources available to it from outside the ministry, much more could usefully be done. I would welcome much greater and more spirited exchanges between MEA officials and academia, the corporate sector and civil society—in person, through regular meetings and even email—respecting confidentiality but not fighting shy of ideas or opinions that challenge entrenched mindsets.

  One major contrast between the era I first studied and the one of today relates to the willingness of the government to entrust bureaucrats with politically sensitive assignments. All too frequently in the past, Mrs Gandhi used to bypass the MEA in sensitive diplomatic missions, as in 1971 when she used politicians and academics like D.P. Dhar in Moscow and ‘JP’ Narayan and Sisir Gupta on a global conscience-stirring crusade, while MEA officials remained in the dark on the unfolding of policy. It was, indeed, while Indira Gandhi was in sole charge of the MEA (during an interregnum between foreign ministers) that she denounced India’s ‘generalist’ bureaucrats who, in the absence of authoritative government, had ‘developed a mystique both of infallibility and of transferability of talent’. In recent years, the number of political appointees in key diplomatic assignments has dwindled, and the majority of them have in fact been retired diplomats, kept on after their retirement date on a contractual basis as ‘political’ appointees by prime ministers they had impressed in the course of their careers. Even special envoys—a designation used in the past to send politicians or eminent academics on diplomatic assignments to specific countries for particular purposes—are now overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, serving or retired diplomats. Even a purely political controversy such as the dispute in 2012 over a Norwegian court taking two Indian children away from their parents—the sort of problem that in the United States a Jesse Jackson might have flown in to resolve—saw a Secretary in the ministry being sent to Oslo as special envoy. The presumption of ‘infallibility and of transferability of talent’ seems to be back in full swing.

  Other changes have cut both ways. Factors of both recruitment and size had, in the initial decades, rendered the IFS an elite cadre in a country where the top civil services still attracted many of the most promising minds in the country. But the foreign service’s elitism went beyond merely intellectual or educational snobbery. A socio-economic study in the late 1960s found that IFS recruits spanned a very narrow social range, hailing almost exclusively from a very thin upper stratum of Indian society. The criteria for the selection to the IFS, stressing as they did fluency in English and social graces, placed a premium on the Westernized urban India, and almost half the IFS recruits were the children of civil servants. Though the tyranny of the Raj-era ICS—the subject of a memorable twenty-one-page deposition by Ambassador Dhamija before the Pillai committee—subsided with attrition, the IFS officers who rose to replace them acquired many of the same colonial-era attitudes to their profession, to the point where many Indian diplomats were described by a critic as ‘foreign even to their own country’s culture, history and problems’. For many years and all too frequently, it was the exceptional rather than the average diplomat who could relate to and speak for the Indians he claimed to represent.

  This has changed dramatically with the democratization of recruitment and the IFS becoming a noticeably less elitist service, including in its ranks many entrants who do not speak English fluently at the time of recruitment, an unthinkable attribute till the 1980s. But whether these young people are also the best to represent India in a world where articulation in English is almost a basic qualification (and one that used to be taken for granted in Indian diplomats) is another matter. As former ambassador T.P. Sreenivasan observed, ‘Of late, even proficiency in English is not insisted upon. When it was suggested that those who did not write their papers in English should not be considered for foreign service, some argued that it would be unconstitutional to be discriminatory! We will soon have diplomats without proficiency in English.’ When political pressures for greater democratization and the use of the vernacular come up against the diplomatic case for Anglophone sophistication, there is little doubt in India that the former will prevail.

  The MEA’s financial resources are also far from commensurate with the globe-spanning tasks with which it is saddled. The ministry’s revised budget for the year 2011–12 was 7836 crore ($1.56 billion), of which the amount actually budgeted for ‘external affairs’ (as opposed to administration, overseas aid, etc.) was 3814 crore (about $762.8 million, or 48.6 per cent of the budget). The rest was largely allocated to technical and economic cooperation with foreign countries. The cost of running India’s embassies and overseas missions was 1464 crore ($292.8 million, or 18.6 per cent). The MEA’s overall budget in 2012–13 was slated to go up to 9661 crore ($1.93 billion), but again most of the budgeted increase was earmarked for additional aid to Afghanistan, Bhutan and African countries. Not every year witnesses an increase: indeed, in 2005–06 and 2009–10, the MEA’s actual expenditure patterns showed negative growth (–3.42 per cent and –5.12 per cent respectively). It is not unreasonable to conclude from these figures that the MEA does not dispose of adequate resources for the challenges of global diplomacy.

  Early conceptions of Indian diplomacy had required that India’s global presence be wide but inexpensive, a real challenge for a country whose diplomacy spread itself too thin and not too efficiently. Indian diplomats had long tried (with uneven success) to maintain standards of style and hospitality on limited resources while avoiding the appearance of either miserliness or vulgarity. Yet while on the one hand the India of the 1970s could not afford a direct system of communication between the MEA and the embassies, and had to rely on commercial telegrams (on which ambassadors were regularly advised to economize), it also permitted colossal waste in the allocations of such resources as it did not possess. For instance, in a perverse genuflection towards the former colonial masters, India House in London in the early 1980s was overstaffed (with nearly 400 employees), overpriced (it operated on a budget that amounted to a seventh of the total expenditure on all Indian embassies) and maladministered (security guards assigned from India were paid a pittance and not permitted to bring their families with them, while a ‘medical adviser’ earned twenty-five times as much even though, as a non-registered practitioner in Britain, he could not legally fill a prescription). Though the resources available to today’s MEA have gone up considerably with the country’s two decades of booming economic growth, such anomalies in the allocation of resources persist, despite India having had to open a slew of new embassies in the former Central Asian Republics of the Soviet Union, and needing considerably to augment its presence in Latin America and in Africa.

  On a more positive note, however, the efforts of Indian diplomats are being actively augmented by the Indian private sector, which in recent years has demonstrated a considerable penchant for playing a diplomatic role. The major business associations, particularly the Confederation of Indian Industry and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, have been significant players at events such as the World Economic Forum in Davos or the annual meetings of the Aspen Institute. They have also conducted ‘strategic dialogues’ between titans of Indian industry and influential opinion-makers in countries like the United States, Japan and Singapore, and
organized important trade delegations, such as a major group that made a breakthrough visit to Pakistan in 2012. The private sector has already convincingly demonstrated the capacity and the talent to serve as a ‘force multiplier’ for Indian diplomacy, particularly in its public diplomacy efforts and in national image building overseas.

  Aside from tight budgets, another legitimate concern about the MEA’s conduct of India’s international affairs relates to India’s inadequate foreign policy planning and research facilities. As far back as 1965, the reactive rather than anticipatory nature of Indian diplomacy had prompted the creation of the policy planning and review division of the MEA. The division, first headed by a joint secretary, reported to a policy planning and review committee, chaired by the foreign secretary. In theory the committee was to receive the division’s recommendations and suggest, on their basis, guidelines and directives for future policy, but in practice the committee paid little attention to the division, which after submitting a few disregarded papers rapidly fell into desuetude. It was reactivated during the Bangladesh crisis, when it served as D.P. Dhar’s base of operations and masked his great authority as the fulcrum of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Bangladesh policy; but once the war was over and Dhar moved on, the unit reverted to its earlier insignificance. It was revived again in 1974 under former ambassador G. Parthasarathy, whose eminence won him regular meetings with the prime minister and the foreign minister, and then collapsed again with Mrs Gandhi’s defeat in the elections of 1977, never to be resurrected as a formidable force. The fundamental weaknesses in policy planning therefore remain; the ascendancies of Dhar and Parthasarathy were a function largely of their personal influence with the prime minister, rather than of enhanced institutionalization of a policy-planning process in the MEA. When I came to the ministry and found myself assigned overall supervision of the policy planning and research division, I was dismayed to find it was a backwater largely used to park officials for whom a more challenging assignment could not be identified. Perhaps the only tangible output of the division is the MEA’s annual report, that too prepared by it on the basis of inputs from the other divisions of the MEA. The government’s traditional ‘political’ interests and congenital disregard for strategic thought; MEA officials’ limited access to widespread sources of information, their lack of time and opportunity for reading and the narrowness of their functional data base; the nature of the power structure and prime ministerial supremacy; and, above all, the bureaucratic imperatives in favour of immediate and evident results rather than long-term dividends, all militate against the creation of effective policy-planning structures.