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 problems 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.
So in India, the Opposition is generally only able to use Parliament for limited ends, such as the ‘agenda-creating’ function of raising an issue for debate. Effective parliamentary action in any democracy requires a united and focused Opposition, with some strong resonance for its views among the general public outside Parliament and particularly in the media, and the ability to threaten the ruling party’s majority in Parliament. These conditions have almost never obtained on a purely foreign policy issue. The exception may be on foreign economic policy, such as FTAs and FDI, which have obvious and direct domestic political consequences. But India approaches such external initiatives in a strategic manner, evaluating their impact both internationally and domestically (for example, the FTA with ASEAN was not merely a foreign trade initiative, but an opportunity to reform the agricultural and plantation sectors of our economy). India has tended to take on such foreign obligations with a positive rather than a defensive approach, while being fully aware that any FTA has a domestic political impact and could be portrayed as causing short-term losses for important domestic constituencies. While the ASEAN — India FTA was judged to be a crucial element in India’s engagement with Southeast Asia and persisted with despite the opposition of the coconut-oil producers of Kerala, the initiative to permit 49 per cent FDI in the retail sector was withdrawn the moment significant opposition emerged, not only from the formal Opposition parties but from members of the ruling coalition like the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal.
The FDI experience points to a larger reality in an era of coalition politics, where a ruling party often feels far more vulnerable to its own supporters than to the Opposition. While parties without a majority in Parliament can at best be humoured and at worst be ignored, parties that actually help constitute the ruling majority must be appeased if they feel strongly enough about an issue of policy — including foreign policy. The ever-present threat of a withdrawal of support by a coalition ally, which could even bring a government down, is far more potent than the most eloquent arguments of the official Opposition. Thus Mamata Banerjee, the Trinamool chief minister of West Bengal (Paschimbanga), single-handedly stymied a major agreement with Bangladesh on the sharing of waters from the Teesta River, which flows from West Bengal to Bangladesh. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in Tamil Nadu had similarly attempted to influence New Delhi’s positions on the Sri Lanka civil war, but had proved less effective — not so much because of the intractability of Indian foreign policy, but because it was rightly believed that the DMK would not genuinely threaten the survival of the government by withdrawing support, something that it was not possible to say about Trinamool. In an earlier era, the DMK had similarly made strong noises about New Delhi’s intention to cede the disputed island of Kachchativu, a favoured watering-hole of Tamil fishermen, to Sri Lanka, but the Government of India did so anyway.