Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century (56 page)

Finally, Western scholars have found it increasingly difficult to obtain entry visas for India, the establishment apparently believing that India can be victimized by sloppy foreign scholarship. Intellectual quests for objective inquiry, it appears, are not valued at the expense of the national ‘image’. This hardly accords with the requirement for serious and wide-ranging debate on foreign policy issues in a democracy aspiring to global status.

With the non-governmental intellectual unable to make any substantive impact on foreign policy, it becomes necessary to look beyond the power of reason and argument to that of numbers, to the broader majority of India’s ‘public’. No scholar can definitively pronounce judgement on whether a foreign policy should, by definition, reflect a ‘national will’, a set of popular preferences or only the calculated judgements of the ruling elite. But as the embodiment of a nation’s collective personality and interests on the international stage, a foreign policy is bound to partake of the first two elements—in whatever measure—as certainly as it is bound to reflect the final stamp of the third. It is probably true that the impact of public opinion on foreign policy is everywhere limited, though there are considerable differences of degree among nations. But where the public is cited as constituting the justification for a foreign policy—which is most often the case with external affairs, and certainly has to be so in democratic India—the incorporation of the public’s beliefs in that policy (to echo Falk’s list of desiderata in our opening chapter) is essential.

There are obvious limits to the general public’s interest in foreign policy: most people’s preoccupation with sheer survival and related concerns leaves them with little time to spare for any understanding of the country’s foreign policy. On the other hand, their very ignorance could be exploited by an opportunistic few for domestic political ends, especially since the Indian masses possess the ultimate power over their government, that of the ballot box. Indeed, they use this power somewhat more frequently than the intellectuals of the ‘elite public’: beyond a certain point, any increase in the characteristics of ‘modernization’—rise in the level of education, exposure to mass media and other modernizing influences, and geographical mobility—actually produces not an increase but a decline in voter turnout. The government’s dependence on the votes of the broader public provides the clue to the power of the masses—and therefore of public opinion in the broadest sense—on foreign policy. Concerns about the ‘Muslim vote’, for instance, have dominated Indian policies towards Israel, and the reluctance to display overt friendship to that country—by, for instance, extending invitations to prominent Israelis to visit India—can be traced directly to a desire to avoid provoking a domestic political reaction. India’s frequent electoral contests—there
is an election every six months, it sometimes seems, for one of India’s twenty-eight state assemblies if not for the national Parliament itself—have contributed to a reluctance to take any foreign policy initiatives that could be exploited by other political parties at the hustings. Thus if Shimon Peres never gets to see the Taj Mahal as president—for fear of a Muslim backlash that would count in votes against the ruling party—he only has Indian electoral democracy to blame.

This may sound as if domestic politics has a major impact on foreign policy making, but in fact such impact is superficial: to pursue the same example, sensitivity to Muslim voters’ views would not impinge on the substance of India’s defence purchases from or security exchanges with Israel, even while it might prevent overly visible gestures putting the relationship on display. For in reality, the general public is crippled by its own lack of interest in national, let alone world, affairs. In a country where many are barely conscious of political issues beyond their own village or neighbourhood, let alone national questions, foreign policy is, at bottom, a remote concern.

And yet the world impinges more and more on the daily lives of Indians, especially urban Indians. What does it mean to be a young person in Delhi today? It can mean waking up to an alarm clock made in China, downing a cup of tea from leaves first planted by the British, donning jeans designed in America and taking a Japanese scooter or a Korean car to get to an Indian college, where the textbooks might be printed with German-invented technology on paper first pulped in Sweden. The young Indian student might call his friends on a Finnish mobile phone to invite them to an Italian pizza or even what they think of as an Indian meal, featuring naan that came here from Persia, tandoori chicken taught to us by rulers from Uzbekistan and aloo and hari mirch that first came to India only 400 years ago from Latin America. (And the most desi thing of all, of course, is suspicion of anything foreign.)

The fact is that, as I argued in
Chapter One
, today’s young Indians are facing an ever more globalizing world in which international developments are likely to impact their daily lives more than ever before. As minister, I would say to my young audiences: ‘You should want your government to seize the opportunities that the twenty-first-century world provides, while managing the risks and protecting you from the threats
that this world has also opened you up to.’ This is why they should care more about the substance of India’s engagement with the world and less about the marginalia that currently dominates what little discourse there is about foreign policy among the general public.

We seek to redefine our place in a world that has changed from the one into which we emerged in 1947, just as we ourselves have changed a great deal in the intervening six and a half decades. We are today one of the world’s largest economies, a proud player on the global stage with a long record of responsible conduct on international matters. But is our foreign policy apparatus commensurate with the challenge? Is our society as a whole imbued with a consciousness of the strategic opportunity that engagement with the globe offers? Can we be taken seriously as a potential world leader in the twenty-first century if we do not develop the institutions, the practices, the personnel and the mindset required to lead in the global arena?

Our foreign policy debates in Parliament and the media seem obsessed with Pakistan or with ephemera, or worse, ephemera about Pakistan. There is little appetite for in-depth discussion about, say, the merits of participating in the Non-Aligned Movement or the Conference of Democracies, or the importance we should give to such bodies as SAARC or the IOR-ARC. When I was minister of state for external affairs I suppose I should have been grateful, even relieved, at being allowed to get on with foreign policy formulation without the interference of the general public. But I was not; I was deeply frustrated by the indifference of educated Indians, because in my view foreign policy is too important an issue to be left to the MEA alone. Our society as a whole, and particularly its educated young people, must care enough about India’s place in the world to participate actively in shaping our international posture.

And yet the picture around us is a pretty dismal one. International relations is a neglected subject on our campuses; my own alma mater, the prestigious St Stephen’s College which has produced a legion of IFS officers and a slew of foreign secretaries, does not offer a course of study in international relations. The few colleges that do offer the subject do so in a formalistic and formulaic fashion that ill-equip the student to understand the realities of our contemporary world. JNU apart, few can hold a candle to the universities in China, Russia or the West that teach
international relations to young people of a similar age. We do have a handful of thinkers about international issues and a fistful of think tanks, but in size, quality of expertise and range of output they all have a long way to go before they match the role played by, for example, their equivalents in the United States.

And what about the young people who must shape the future orientation of India to the world? A young scholar, Raja Karthikeya Gundu, recently wrote:

Few Indian students go beyond the West for study, and even if they wanted to, there are barely any scholarships or resources from government or private sector to do so. The average Indian has barely any understanding of foreign cultures, norms and worldviews, and satellite TV and Internet have not managed to change this. Hence, in the absence of global exposure, Indians continue to be an inward-looking nation burdened by prejudice. Thus, it is no surprise that when Indians travel abroad for the first time in their mature years, they are often culturally inadaptable and even mildly xenophobic.

This strikes me as somewhat overstated, and yet there is a kernel of truth in it.

The situation will not improve unless we can improve the study of international affairs at our colleges and universities. In 2008 I was invited by my Singaporean friend Kishore Mahbubani to join a gathering, organized by his Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, of some of the most eminent scholars of international relations (or ‘IR’, as it is known to the cognoscenti) to brainstorm on improving the current state of the discipline in India. I couldn’t join his effort, but one scholar who did, Amitabh Mattoo, observed that ‘There are few other disciplines in India … where the gulf between the potential and the reality is as wide as it is in the teaching and research of IR at Indian universities. Interest in India and India’s interest in the world are arguably at their highest in modern times, and yet Indian scholarship on global issues is showing few signs of responding to this challenge.’

Today, IR is taught in more than a hundred universities in India, but in Mattoo’s words, ‘most of the IR departments have a shortage
of qualified faculty, poor infrastructure, outdated curriculum and few research opportunities’. More than half the departments do not even have access to the Internet, and are so deprived of the rich wealth of online resources that students elsewhere in the world can command. Books and journals are in short supply. Little expertise has been developed in specific areas or countries of concern to India; to take one example, despite all the fuss about the reference to Balochistan in the joint Indo-Pakistani statement at Sharm el Sheikh in 2009, there is no major scholar of Baloch studies in India to whom either the MEA or its critics can turn. Foreign languages are poorly taught, resources for study trips abroad are scarce, research is of varying quality and opportunities for cross-fertilization at academic conferences practically non-existent. Whereas China, a latecomer to the field, has already developed, in the last three decades, a critical mass of students and scholars of IR, we are behind where we were in the heady days of the Nehruvian 1950s when we established bodies like Sapru House and the Indian Council of World Affairs, which we have allowed to atrophy.

The scholar Kanti Bajpai has argued that ‘Rising powers seem to get the IR they need.’ But it won’t just happen. We need to change the way we all think about international relations—my younger readers, the future leaders of this country, and we, its present ones. The MEA has to be willing to play its part, in collaboration with those responsible for educational policy, to bring about the change I have been calling for, but there is no institutional proposal yet in place to make that happen.

To return to Amitabh Mattoo, he warns that ‘India’s inability to develop a sophisticated and comprehensive understanding of the world outside will have more serious consequences than just the dwarfing of a discipline. It could well stunt India’s ability to influence the international system.’ That is an outcome that, for all the reasons I have described, we can ill afford.

So much for the MEA, think tanks, public and intellectual opinion; but what about the formal structures in India’s domestic politics that constitutionally could impact foreign policy making: the formal
Opposition in and out of Parliament, and the state governments in India’s federal system? A vital element of India’s governmental consensus, going back to the days of the independence movement, has been the parliamentary system of government, with its structure of an elected majority being confronted daily by an organized Opposition. Former British Prime Minister Lord Attlee testified to this on the basis of his experience as a member of a British constitutional commission. Indians, he noted, ‘believed that the Westminster model is the only real one for democracies’; when he suggested the US presidential system to Indian leaders, ‘they rejected it with great emphasis. I had the feeling that they thought I was offering them margarine instead of butter.’ Indian politicians, including the communists, turned to the system with great delight, revelling in adherence to parliamentary convention, down to the desk-thumping form of applause, and complimenting themselves on their authenticity. (The CPI leader Hiren Mukherjee proudly asserted once that British Prime Minister Anthony Eden had felt more at home during question hour in the Indian Parliament than in the Australian.) Faith in the parliamentary system was reaffirmed in the open jubilation of the Indian political class when the post-war regimes of Pakistan and Bangladesh both opted to discard the presidential form of government; in the wide regret when the latter nation reverted to it; and in the public outrage that Mrs Gandhi should, during the Emergency, have contemplated abandoning the parliamentary system for a modified form of Gaullism.