Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century (54 page)

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.

Inevitably the MEA tends to place a greater premium on pragmatic ad-hocism than futuristic projections. The top policy-makers largely function on the basis of single-page assessments. Senior Indian policy planners and MEA officials tend to be a little defensive on the subject; several suggest that responsibility for policy planning should reside in the substantive territorial divisions, rather than be assigned to a separate entity with no particular expertise in the areas for which policy needed to
be planned. It is not unreasonable to argue, as well, that policy planning is never missed in most governments until a crisis erupts and people start frantically seeking a plan. Inevitably, though, the substantive divisions are too busy with the immediate preoccupations of their daily in-boxes to have time for the luxury of long-term thinking. The result is that hardly anyone in the MEA is able to create policy plans that are anything but extrapolations from past policy.

Ashley Tellis, too, has lamented India’s failure to develop state institutions that ‘enable the development of rational-purposive strategies and the mechanisms for undertaking the appropriate implementing actions’. Shorn of academic jargon, his argument echoes my own. The conspicuous shortcomings of our policy-planning and national security decision-making institutions, the absence of reform in our defence establishment, and the limited size (and therefore capacity) of the foreign service have unavoidably, in Tellis’s words, ‘undermined India’s ability to make the choices that advance its own interests’. It has also, he argues somewhat more contentiously, ‘left the country unable to respond to various American (and other international) overtures of cooperation’. David Malone makes the same point: ‘India’s foreign policy has tended to be reactive and formulated incrementally, case-by-case, rather than through high-minded in-depth policy frameworks.’

Our conclusion is clear. India has evident, and significant, global responsibilities: these require it to review and reform the capacity, structure, functioning and reach of its foreign policy apparatus and its national security establishment. The challenge of engaging credibly with the global community is no trifling matter. It involves dealing with the wide range of issues involved in conducting relations with the rest of the world from the position of a serious, indeed major, power: political and strategic issues, economic and trade-related questions, cultural exchanges and public diplomacy. And it requires a country like India to be staffed and equipped to take initiatives, not merely react to world events. The MEA has to bear the brunt of the blame when Indian foreign policy is criticized in Parliament and abroad for lacking vision and failing to develop a unified strategy for India’s role in the world.

Numbers are an essential part of the reforms needed. It is absurd that in South Block only five officers (some very junior) are assigned
to cover all of the Americas, or that the number of Indian diplomats at our embassy in Washington has not changed since the days of our estrangement from Cold War America, or indeed that India has more diplomats posted in West European capitals than in East Asian ones. This situation, replicated ad infinitum across the geopolitical map, has prompted analysts like Daniel Markey to suggest that India lacks the institutional structures to even become, let alone conduct itself as, a global power.

In his landmark 2009 paper, ‘Developing India’s Foreign Policy “Software”’, Markey outlined what he saw as ‘significant shortcomings in India’s foreign policy institutions that undermine the country’s capacity for ambitious and effective international action’. These accord largely with the ones I had identified three decades earlier, in
Reasons of State
. They include the modest size of the IFS, its inadequate selection process, stunted mid-career training and reluctance to avail of external expertise; the absence of compensatory ‘high-quality, policy-relevant scholarship’ by India’s few, under-resourced foreign policy–oriented think tanks; the very modest output of our ‘poorly funded, highly regulated’ universities, which have few worthwhile international relations programmes (on which more later); and the inadequacy of our media and private-sector companies in promoting foreign policy issues. He went on to propose ‘steps that both New Delhi and Washington should take, assuming they aim to promote India’s rise as a great power’. These include: expanding, reforming, paying for and training the IFS to attract and retain high-calibre officers who could make a real difference to India’s engagement with the world; bringing external recruits into the MEA; encouraging world-class international studies in Indian universities; and building capacity for foreign policy research and policy advocacy in India’s think tanks. No reasonable person would dissent from any of these prescriptions.

Markey is undoubtedly correct that the intellectual and institutional infrastructure for foreign policy making in India is still—three and a half decades after I first formulated the case in
Reasons of State
—‘underdeveloped, in decay, or chronically short of resources’. Unusually for a foreigner, Markey comments on the IFS itself, painting a portrait, in the words of former foreign secretary Salman Haidar, ‘of a service
wrapped up in its own ways, insufficiently responsive to change and mired in outdated methods’. Markey notes practices like the almost automatic promotion system, which involves no weeding out of dead wood before people become senior enough to do real damage; and the extent to which senior policy-makers are bogged down by daily operational responsibilities. His observations on the administrative shortcomings of the MEA prompted a former ambassador to wax indignant about the skewed careers of the ‘blue-eyed boys’ with which the MEA is said to be replete: ‘Those who have remained in neighbouring countries or in multilateral posts [the most desirable foreign postings] for long have done so by hook or by crook, not by the government’s deliberate design.’

This clearly has to change. There is room for additional ideas that such studies have overlooked, such as doing unto the MEA what India does unto other nations—outsourcing some of its tasks and functions (especially routine protocol matters) to lesser, lower-paid entities in the private sector. Some of the needed reforms, if implemented, would beget other reforms; if the recruitment policy were changed, for instance, even if it simply involved a doubling or tripling of the annual intake, as India’s place in the world would justify, there would be an inevitable promotion logjam in a couple of decades as the number of entrants would vastly outstrip the number of senior positions available. This would itself oblige the MEA to create a more rigorous evaluation and promotion policy that would reward efficiency and effectiveness, rather than mere seniority.

Some other proposals, however, face difficulties going beyond the terms of the argument Markey makes: India’s few think tanks, for instance, have to struggle to have access to any official documentation or reliable inside information, so that their studies, in Salman Haidar’s mordant words, ‘tend to be at a remove from official preoccupations’. This may be gradually changing, for instance with the establishment in Mumbai of Gateway House, a foreign affairs think tank seemingly modelled on New York’s Council on Foreign Relations, but without (yet) the resources, the convening power or the clout of its comparator. But there is for now no equivalent of the Council in India. There is no shortage of seminars and discussions, however, including some—such as the annual India meetings of the World Economic Forum—which serve as a platform and
a location for policy discourse as well as for international networking and image building.

The lack of a coherent and effective declassification policy compounds this problem. It is difficult for analysts to understand Indian foreign policy making from Indian sources, as the analysts have no legitimate access to such sources or to any documentation at all, other than material of historical value (though even many in that category have not been declassified, including material relating to the wars of 1962 and 1971). Other ideas, like improved pay to make diplomacy a more attractive career option, cannot be pursued in the IFS alone; as Haidar points out, some of the reforms suggested by the likes of Markey or myself ‘cannot be undertaken without much broader reform within the civil services as a whole: the MEA is not an island to itself.’

In India, therefore, some changes in essential areas will be slow to come because they cannot be pursued in other areas. There is a mountain to be climbed before the IFS and the MEA become more effective instruments of India’s global interests in a globalizing world.