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

  In India, the Opposition members of Parliament enjoy a wide range of formal powers and responsibilities in the field of foreign policy—at least theoretically. Under Article 246 of the Indian Constitution, Parliament is empowered to legislate on ‘all matters which bring the Union [of India] into relation with any foreign country’. Article 253 gives Parliament the exclusive legislative authority to implement treaties and international agreements, and Article 51 urges it to promote peace as a governmental endeavour. Parliament is also the ultimate authority in regard to the budget, its financial control over the appropriations of each individual ministry affording it a means of influencing the ministry’s actions. The Lok Sabha meets normally for three or four sessions a year, for a total of seven to eight months, and at each session debates a statement by the foreign minister on the international situation. Once a year it also discusses the annual report of the MEA and the ministry’s demands for grants (I was entrusted in 2011 with the responsibility of leading the Treasury bench’s response to the Opposition’s assault on the government’s foreign policy in the Lok Sabha). Other opportunities for the expression of views on foreign policy come in parliamentary resolutions, moved by individual members, on such aspects of world situation as move them, from Chinese border incursions to the perennially popular issue of US arms to Pakistan.

  The routine proceedings of Parliament include several devices for Opposition pressure on the government in the foreign policy field. Each house begins its day with Question Hour five days a week, followed by a ‘zero hour’ at which further issues could be raised. Most questions, ‘starred’ (requiring a verbal response), ‘unstarred’ (requiring a written reply) and ‘short notice’ (which usually meet with a verbal response), are submitted at least two weeks in advance, in order to enable the ministry concerned to formulate a reply. The Speaker, who admits relevant questions under the Lok Sabha’s rules of procedure (Rules 38–58), also permits up to about six supplementary questions. None of these are particularly well informed, so they are not difficult for a well-briefed minister to handle.

  Another possible technique is the use of the proviso for ‘half-hour discussions’ to seek clarifications of answers provided by the government during question hour. Under Rule 55, these relate only to matters of ‘sufficient public importance’ to warrant the extra time, and require three days’ notice by at least three MPs. Rule 193 also provides for a short-duration discussion without notice, usually to draw the government’s attention to a problem it has ignored, but it has not widely been resorted to. This is probably because the Opposition has access to a more potent device, the calling-attention motion, proposed by a member for precisely that purpose. Once such a motion is admitted by the Speaker, the government is obliged to answer it immediately or to seek time to make a statement. Such motions tend mostly to be on domestic issues, but can also provide the first clue to parliamentary interest in an international issue as well—as was the case with the Sharm el Sheikh joint statement with Pakistan in 2009—and generally oblige the government to take a stand on the question (which, in the case of Sharm el Sheikh, involved some serious back-pedalling).

  Of even more serious import are adjournment and no-confidence motions. Under Rule 56 of the Lok Sabha, a motion could be raised to adjourn the house on an issue of urgent public importance; such motions have often been raised on foreign policy questions. No-confidence motions, or resolutions censuring the government, are relatively infrequently resorted to on foreign policy questions, the most significant exception being that relating to India’s nuclear deal with the United States, which nearly brought down the UPA government in 2008. The Opposition can also seek to amend the President’s annual address to Parliament, setting forth the government’s general policy for the year at the start of the budget session in February or early March. In all these instances, the Opposition has opportunities to make its presence felt; it is consulted on the arrangement of business, the allocation of time (usually distributed among the various opposition groups in proportion to their strength in the legislature) and granted numerous opportunities to speak.

  In addition to debates on the floor of the House, the Opposition is represented on parliamentary committees with responsibilities in the external affairs arena. Of these the most important is the Joint Consultative Committee on Foreign Affairs, created in 1953 at the suggestion of an independent member. The committee is an informal body, broadly representative of the composition of Parliament, which ‘consults’ with the minister for external affairs, who chairs its sessions, as opposed to the Standing Committee on External Affairs, which is chaired by an Opposition MP and can summon MEA staff to brief it, though it loses a lot of time on receiving visiting parliamentary delegations and inspecting passport offices. Other useful bodies are the Estimates Committee of the Lok Sabha, which examines the MEA’s estimates of expenditure and in one instance (in 1960– 61) was responsible for the reorganization of the ministry and its posts abroad; the Public Accounts Committee, which reviews government spending; and the Committee on Governmental Assurances, established in 1953, to check on the speedy implementation of ‘assurances, promises, undertakings, etc. given by the Ministers from time to time on the floor of the House’. These committees help ensure the government’s accountability to elected representatives for its foreign policy, but are rarely able to question the fundamentals or to have a direct impact on specific issues of India’s external affairs.

  Formally, therefore, the Indian Parliament enjoys considerable opportunities to influence the creation and conduct of foreign policy. Though it does not possess the rights of some other legislatures to ratify treaties, confirm ambassadors or dictate the composition of diplomatic and trade delegations, its legitimate role in foreign policy goes back to Nehru’s very first speech on the subject, wherein he sought Parliament’s approval for the course he charted for India in world affairs. Constitutionally, the executive initiates policy and Parliament scrutinizes and (thanks to its financial power over the ministry’s grants) controls it.

  The complicating factor, however, involves the limits ingrained in India’s political culture on Parliament’s involvement in foreign policy. Formally, Indian policy-makers pay great respect to the theory of parliamentary involvement—one former foreign minister, Y.B. Chavan, on one memorable occasion, seeking ‘some mandate, some direction, some instructions, some suggestions from this honourable House’—but in reality the government seeks no real mandate from Parliament, considers no new directions, accepts no substantive instructions and responds to few suggestions. This may have devolved from a conception of the legitimate distinction in a parliamentary system between a law and a policy; the former emerges from open parliamentary discussion, the latter does not. ‘It is, of course, essential,’ declared one former Indian diplomat, ‘for Government to keep Parliament in touch with the broad lines of its foreign policy, but for the government to conduct its foreign policy through Parliament is to invite confusion and deny itself any room for manoeuvring.’ Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, for instance, was blunter than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would ever be in firmly restricting the right of policy creation to the government: ‘We have the responsibility,’ she noted, ‘whereas those who are not in power have the freedom and the right to advocate courses which may not necessarily be responsible.’

  The prevalence of this assumption in Indian governmental philosophy may be illustrated by a statement from another end of the chronological spectrum, which encapsulates thinking before and since. Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri asserted in the Lok Sabha in 1965, ‘I want to make it absolutely clear that to run the Government is our responsibility and we are going to discharge it. We do take broad guidance from this Honourable House on matters of policy. But we cannot be given executive directions every day. It would be an impossible situation and I cannot accept it.’ This was, of course, a reasonable view. But where does it leave Parliament in general, and the Opposition in particular, on foreign policy? It would seem that
their only role is to raise issues that may be discussed but would have no tangible impact on policy.

  It is true that even Jawaharlal Nehru, the great nurturer of Indian democracy and its institutions, insulated foreign policy from parliamentary influences. His government did not seek parliamentary advice on or consent to a single treaty or international agreement, including the Panchsheel declaration with China, and the agreements with Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim. Nor did Nehru’s administration tell Parliament of Chinese encroachments on India territory till 1959, after they had begun. At the same time, foreign emissaries, especially from China and the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, were given information not publicly available to the Indian people or their representatives in Parliament. The military and psychological disaster of 1962 exposed the bankruptcy of this policy. One key lesson from Nehru’s China debacle must be that taking Parliament into confidence in advance offers a vital insurance to the government in the event of a foreign policy disaster, whereas a Parliament that discovers issues from the media after the event—as happened with the Sharm el Sheikh episode involving Pakistan in 2009—can express enough outrage as to constitute a constraint on the government’s foreign policy options thereafter.

  The various legislative devices outlined above make little difference. Despite Article 246, the field for parliamentary legislation in foreign policy is a limited one. Parliament’s finance power has literally never been exercised, primarily because of the sheer weight of numbers disposed of by any government with a parliamentary majority, which is always able to push through the MEA’s demands for grants without emendation. Private members’ resolutions very rarely get passed, and never against the direct concerted opposition of the government. The foreign policy resolutions that have in fact been passed in Parliament over the years have been on such issues as the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the US invasion of Iraq, India’s relations with specific countries, foreign aid, the repression of minorities in Pakistan, the execution of freedom fighters in the white-ruled Rhodesia and Chinese encroachments on the Indian frontier, issues on which either both government and Parliament were demonstrably helpless, or on which the passage of a resolution would appease critics without seriously affecting policy.

  Question hour could have afforded better opportunities, but it has been ill-used on global issues. For one thing, it focuses on foreign policy only infrequently: one estimate is that questions dealing with the MEA only account for 4.5 per cent to 5.5 per cent of the total number of questions asked. Most questions raised in Parliament are of purely national or even local importance, since the MEA only comes up on one of the five days of the work-week in each House, and in any case not all questions are admitted to the floor of the House and the luck of the draw may leave the foreign minister with no question to answer on his allotted day. The Speaker, officially neutral but always a nominee of the ruling party, can and does disallow questions and adjournment motions, terminate debates, reprimand members and rule on disputes, and this authority can be and has been misused to disallow inconvenient questions and to shield ministers by preventing embarrassing supplementaries. Even when questions of import get through, the government devises ingenious ways of evading them, because of the ignorance of the MPs or sometimes through loopholes left by a careless Opposition.

  This leaves only the committees and the debates themselves. The parliamentary committees in India dealing with foreign policy are bodies of very little impact, with the Consultative Committee on Foreign Affairs being more akin, as Krishna Menon noted, to a conference than a committee. Though composed of all the parties in relation to their strength in the House, the committees are not bound by the MPs’ party stands, and their meetings are designed as a frank exchange of views, but often descend into ritual exercises and empty exchanges designed for no greater purpose than to justify the MPs’ presence and allowances. The committees meet sporadically, and indulge in little more than a question and answer session. Under official guidelines, their discussions are strictly off the record, and no reference can be made to them in Parliament, which considerably diminishes their utility. As a non-statutory body, the consultative committee cannot summon witnesses, demand files or examine records, and the government is not bound to accept any of its recommendations, even unanimous ones. There is no record of any policy initiative emerging from the committee’s consultations. The Standing Committee on External Affairs is not much better off, spending much of its time receiving delegations from an assortment of foreign countries for exchanges that are often mind-numbing in their formality. It does, however, review draft legislation relating to the MEA, and the minister is obliged to respond to its reports and comments on the MEA’s work.

  Similarly, parliamentary debates are unable to make a tangible impact, because they usually follow rather than precede governmental policy actions and because, when it comes to a vote, the Opposition is usually hopelessly outnumbered. From the government’s point of view, debates on foreign policy have three time-honoured uses: they provide the outside world with evidence of Indian democracy at work, they have an educative impact on MPs and those members of the media and public who pay attention to foreign policy, and they help (if the government defends itself ably) to make policy acceptable. As Krishna Menon put it years ago, ‘it’s always the same; there are speeches, but all ends well’. In political development terms, they conferred legitimacy to the foreign policy making process, while doing little to augment its responsiveness to Opposition opinion. The government claims actively to encourage parliamentary participation and understanding, by such expedients as appointing MPs to parliamentary UN and goodwill delegations going abroad. In practice, such appointments operate as rewards for quiescence or support, and frequently compromise, rather than enhance, parliamentary independence. In any case, the tradition both in the committees and on delegations abroad to treat foreign policy as consensual meant that Opposition MPs were easily co-opted. Party differences, an Opposition MP explained to me when I carelessly mentioned political affiliation in one of my first meetings of the Standing Committee on External Affairs, ended when we met foreigners; before them we were Indians first, not political partisans.

  It was significant that it was in fact an Opposition member who made this point to me, since both leading parties have tended to treat foreign policy as largely an emanation of self-evident national interest. Thus the policy platforms of the various political parties (with the exception of the communists, who still wax indignant about American imperialism) are largely devoid of disagreements on foreign policy, and even differences expressed are rarely pursued with much conviction. This is particularly the case when political parties in Opposition take positions not out of conviction but expediency—the belief that it is the basic duty of the Opposition to oppose. Thus the BJP opposed the Indo-US nuclear deal in 2007–08, even though it was the direct result of efforts begun under BJP rule, and constituted an outcome that the BJP would undoubtedly have presented with pride to the country had they negotiated it. As Wikileaks has since revealed, BJP leaders were privately assuring American diplomatic interlocutors that they were in fact supportive of the agreement, even while expressing vociferous opposition to it in Parliament and in the streets. The BJP’s vote in Parliament against the Indo-US nuclear deal had far less to do with the substance of the agreement than with the opportunity it afforded to split the Left away from the ruling coalition and move a no-confidence motion that might have toppled the government. In other words, foreign policy considerations were subordinated to domestic politics once again.

  It may perhaps be argued that no legislature can or should be expected to provide effective inputs to foreign policy. Yet that is precisely what the US Congress and the Israeli Knesset have frequently done, and the British Parliament has—with varying degrees of success—strived to do. Admittedly the limitations of Opposition performance I have traced are far from uniquely Indian, and would find parallels in several other democratic polities. Some of the pr
oblems are common to all parliamentary systems, where voting across party lines is rare on issues of national importance and the majority party is therefore not seriously threatened in foreign policy debate. Yet the ability of an articulate Opposition to propound the views of an important segment of the ruling elite—that ‘effective public’ that dominates discussion of policy in the media and thus indirectly in the coffee shops—and thereby to influence the government, is central to all conceptions of democracy. That it has failed to function as such in India is, at the very least, a pity.

  The rise of regional parties in Indian politics has only underscored this phenomenon. Such parties, for the most part, see themselves as custodians of narrowly defined regional, caste or ethnic interests; national and international issues are far removed from their preoccupations. They are thus inclined to formulate their foreign policy positions with purely domestic politic considerations in mind—except when the issue has no impact on the government. Thus the leader of the Samajwadi Party, which bailed the government out in the no-confidence vote on the nuclear agreement, occasionally vents his spleen in Parliament on China’s dark designs on India, but has never sought to ensure that his prejudices actually shape Indian policy. Nor, to my knowledge, has he ever made China an issue in any of his stump speeches on the electoral trail in Uttar Pradesh, the state that constitutes his political base.