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’.
Chapter Nine ‘Eternal Affairs’: The Domestic Underpinnings of Foreign Policy
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.