Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century (50 page)

As I have argued, in the information age, it’s not the side with the bigger army, but the one with the better story, that wins. India must remain the ‘land of the better story’. To be a source of attraction to others, it must preserve the democratic pluralism that is such a civilizational asset in our globalizing world. An India that is open, accessible, diverse and creative, and that succeeds at creating a more decent life for its citizens, is always more likely to remain a positive force in the eyes of the world than its less admirable neighbours.

I believe that the India that has entered its seventh decade as an independent country is one open to the contention of ideas and interests within it, unafraid of the prowess or the products of the outside world, wedded to the democratic pluralism that is India’s greatest strength, and determined to liberate and fulfil the creative energies of its people. Such an India will tell stories the rest of the world wants to hear and is glad to repeat—and that will offer it an inestimable advantage in the global mass media of our information age. Today’s India truly enjoys soft power, and that may well be the most valuable way in which it can offer leadership to the twenty-first-century world.

But one essential fact remains: what really matters is not the image but the reality. If we can make India a healthy and prosperous place for all Indians, the brand will be burnished all by itself. Then, and only then, might we even return to ‘India Shining’.

Back in 1977, as a doctoral student aged twenty-one, I found myself prowling the corridors of the Ministry of External Affairs at South Block in New Delhi for the first time, researching the thesis that was to become my first book,
Reasons of State
. I was callow, curious and opinionated—a useful combination of attributes in one who hopes to break new ground in scholarship—and my analysis was, with hindsight, overly critical of the received wisdom about Indian foreign policy making. Thirty-two years later, I found myself, after an election victory, seated in South Block as a minister of state, with an insider’s view of the issues I had written so boldly about. It was instructive to realize how much had changed, and how little.

In
Reasons of State
, a study of how foreign policy was made during Indira Gandhi’s first stint as prime minister (1966 –77), I was struck by the fact that while formal institutionalization existed in the Indian political system, official processes and decision-making channels were significantly modified in their operation to accentuate Mrs Gandhi’s personal, and her advisers’ informal, dominance over institutions. It did not help that in her stints in office, the logic of the parliamentary system was inverted in a way that has not been seen since: the concept of a prime minister as
primus inter pares
in a Cabinet, accountable to a political party and responsive to the demands of a parliamentary system, was not realized in actual practice, which instead concentrated powers in the executive along presidential lines. This is simply no longer true in Indian politics, but it prefigured a continuing tradition of wide leeway for the prime minister’s office (PMO) in foreign policy making, which persists to this day.

Studying the domestic underpinnings of Indian foreign policy making, I found that public opinion hardly factored in it in those days: there was inadequate articulation of mass views on foreign policy, both urban and rural, underscored by the restricted nature of political communication, and such elite articulation as did take place was largely ineffective. The result was that public pressure on foreign policy—whether through the opinions of the general public, their votes in elections, the activities of interest groups, the arguments of the press, or the positions of intellectuals through or outside the media—failed to influence the creation of foreign policy, even though public opinion always had a major impact when it came to domestic policy formulation. Equally, the organized political Opposition in Parliament, even when it was in power in some of the states, had very little demonstrable impact on foreign policy making, despite paying voluble, if in several ways limited, attention to it. Policy-makers made policy with very little regard to the constraints of elite or mass public opinion. This is noticeably less true today, though again policy-makers have more freedom to disregard, or go beyond, public opinion on foreign policy issues than they do in the domestic arena.

Finally, the principal governmental instrument for the formulation and execution of policy—the MEA—struck me at the time as a flawed institution staffed by superbly qualified and able diplomats. I concluded in 1977 that problems of structure, coordination, personnel and planning in the ministry prevented the bureaucracy from developing the professional expertise and authority that could compensate for the failings of individual dominance by the prime minister in policy-making. That was an unduly critical judgement, which even at the time needed to be somewhat qualified. But three decades later, many of the weaknesses I had spotted in the ministry as a student came back to strike me as surprisingly still relevant.

Under Nehru, many observers had already discerned the marked influence of one individual’s view of the world and its reaffirmation by an exclusive but largely powerless elite entrusted with its implementation. This trend continued, I had argued, under Mrs Indira Gandhi, leading to the inadequate development of institutions to organize and conduct foreign policy; the low salience of foreign policy concerns in public
opinion; the weakness of popular political and legislative inputs; and the low correlation between foreign policy as conceived and articulated by decision-makers and national interests in security and geopolitical terms.

There is no doubt, of course, that in a democracy it made sense to pay attention to the domestic background, support structures and constraints within which foreign policy is made. Jawaharlal Nehru bequeathed to his successors a conception of a foreign policy as not the prime minister’s or the Congress party’s but the nation’s, transforming opposition to its fundamentals into opposition to India’s very independence. Nehru’s brilliance at giving conceptual shape to that policy and expressing it in terms of the national zeitgeist rendered his own place at the peak of the foreign policy elite secure. But this also meant that foreign policy, unlike other arenas of action in the nascent Indian democratic polity, was not formulated by the same process of pluralistic bargaining and interest reconciliation that marked domestic politics in the same period. It became the preserve of a few men who elevated the national genius above the national interest and were rarely checked by popular pressure or public opposition. This chapter seeks to examine the contemporary reality, while anchoring itself firmly in this heritage.

All those years ago, while ferreting into the interstices of India’s foreign policy making, I learned that recruits to India’s diplomatic corps were given a picture of the ‘ideal foreign minister’ during their training lectures. I have no idea if that is still the case—and I thought it politic not to ask, given my own recent departure from the ministry—but the earlier conventional wisdom struck me as pretty sound. According to the 1977 lecture notes of a distinguished (and already then retired) ambassador, I.J. Bahadur Singh, it stated that the ideal foreign minister (and in those days it was assumed it had to be a ‘he’) must possess the following attributes:

(1) His position in the party and the Lok Sabha must be strong. (2) He must enjoy the confidence of the Prime Minister and his voice must carry weight within the Cabinet. (3) He must not be too immersed in
Party affairs to devote his full attention to his office. (4) He must be the kind of politician who can temper the professionals beneath him, by knowing enough about foreign policy to assess advice, by having a mind of his own and making his views clear to the bureaucracy and by being self-assured enough to delegate responsibility. (5) Finally, he must possess the temperament and stamina required for success in the world of diplomacy.

As with most ideals, such a picture bears little resemblance to the empirical reality during much of independent India’s existence. While India’s ministers of external affairs have almost always been senior figures in the ruling party, thereby fulfilling the first two requirements in the list, the remaining criteria have rarely been met. As a result, few foreign ministers can truly be said to have been in a position to challenge prime ministerial dominance of foreign policy making. While this was evidently true during Mrs Indira Gandhi’s occupancy of the highest office, when the prime minister, as by far the strongest figure in the party and the government, brooked no challenge, it has been no less true under a succession of later prime ministers of considerably less political heft. Far too many foreign ministers were individuals whose seniority in the ruling party was their principal qualification for office, a quality not necessarily matched by an interest in, time for or expertise at the time-consuming mastery of international issues. As a result, many were seen as little more than relay systems for the views of their professional bureaucrats, reading out the speeches and talking points presented to them. In one or another respect, therefore, India’s ministers of external affairs, with very few exceptions, never quite emerged as credible and autonomous sources of policy-making, let alone strategic thinking, in their own right, and in their failure to do so they vacated the policy-making arena to the prime minister.

When I first studied Indian foreign policy making, I discovered that a decade earlier, Mrs Gandhi had inherited a ministry of external affairs acknowledged in her predecessor’s day to be in complete disarray. One typical critique of the ministry in the days of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri catalogued a long list of woes. The MEA was described as being in woeful shape: civil servants, the critique ran, had neither expertise nor
courage, and proffered as advice what they thought the politicians wanted to hear. There was no coordination in policy-making, least of all in the MEA itself, where three Secretaries shared responsibility. The Indian Foreign Service (IFS) was short staffed and demoralized by the most sought-after diplomatic positions going to non-career appointees. The MEA’s publicity division clashed with the information and broadcasting ministry, and foreign service recruits refused to speak to information service officers at several posts. The MEA itself was ‘misorganized’, with a cumbersome administration, an irrational division of labour and a dilatory decision-making mechanism. In general, it suffered from lack of consultation among those making policy and a lack of coordination among those implementing it.

To remedy these ills, Mrs Gandhi’s predecessor, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, appointed a committee on the foreign service, headed by a retired MEA secretary-general, N.R. Pillai, in June 1965. The Pillai committee was asked ‘to review the structure and organisation of the Indian Foreign Service, with particular reference to recruitment, training and service conditions, and to consider any other matters conducive to the strengthening and efficient functioning of the service at headquarters and abroad, and to make recommendations to Government’. The committee circulated a comprehensive questionnaire, took oral depositions, and held seventy-seven meetings before submitting its report to the Indira Gandhi government in October 1966. It is startling how, more than forty-five years later, so many of its concerns and recommendations are still worth repeating in any discussion of the MEA’s structure and functioning.

The Pillai report discerned four basic weaknesses in the Indian Foreign Service and the MEA. The diplomatic corps, then 300-strong, was not large enough and did not draw on wide professional experience; coordination within the MEA was poor; coordination with other ministries which dealt with foreign policy was almost non-existent; and, finally, professional training was limited and, where it existed, inadequate. (Every one of these conclusions could be repeated today.) Among other recommendations to redress these limitations, it urged increased recruitment and the selection of older professionals; the revival of the post of secretary-general, abolished by Shastri upon the appointment of a full-time foreign minister (Nehru had been his own foreign minister,
a practice Shastri wisely eschewed), to facilitate coordination of policy and administration within the MEA and with other ministries; and better training facilities as well as increased specialization in the foreign office. The Pillai report also stressed the importance of the non-political aspects of diplomacy, calling particularly for greater economic and commercial expertise.

M.C. (Mohammed Currim) Chagla, who assumed the foreign ministry soon after the submission of the report, made every effort to consider its recommendations earnestly. He went over it every morning with his three Secretaries in an attempt to utilize its workable provisions. Those minor suggestions that could be implemented directly by the MEA were put into practice, but the prime minister and the Cabinet revealed a singular reluctance to act on the report’s other recommendations. The Pillai report died of inattention even where (and this was not always the case) its suggestions constituted useful responses to a crying need. And yet, except perhaps in the area of training, which has seen modest improvement—with some mid-career opportunities available to Indian diplomats to improve their skills and international exposure—everything that Pillai said in 1966 remains oddly relevant in 2011.

The recruitment, training and orientation of the generalist bureaucracy called the Indian Foreign Service provide a useful indication of how foreign policy is made and executed. The quality of the diplomatic corps provides significant clues to its efficacy in meeting the goals of the system. In India, this is particularly relevant because the elite Indian bureaucracy originated in the pre-independence days and traced its expertise to the colonial vision. The consequent strains of adjustment to imperfect political direction, and the subjugation of the ‘supremacy of administration’ to the ‘sovereignty of politics’, has constituted the stuff of many a political developmentalist’s view of India. Yet while the bureaucrats submitted themselves to political direction, they were also given the means for their own perpetuation. This went back to the days when the shaping of the post-independence foreign service was left almost entirely in the hands of pre-independence Indian Civil Service
(ICS) men—Sir Girija Shankar Bajpai, M.J. Desai, K.P.S. Menon, R.N. Bannerji, N. Pillai. The service they created made its mark on the nature, direction and style of Indian diplomacy.