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.
The problems persisting from the earliest days are compounded by the crippling affliction of severe understaffing in the MEA. India is served by the smallest diplomatic corps of any major country, not just far smaller than the big powers but by comparison with most of the larger emerging countries. At just about 900 IFS officers to staff India’s 120 missions and forty-nine consulates abroad, India has the fewest foreign service officers among the BRICS countries. (In addition, there are some 3000 stenographers, cyber experts and clerks in the IFS ‘B’ service that provides support staff to the MEA.) This compares poorly not just with the over 20,000 deployed by the United States, and the large diplomatic corps of the European powers — UK (6000), Germany (6550) and France (6250) — but also to Asia’s largest foreign services, Japan (5500) and China (4200). The picture looks even more modest when compared to the 1200 diplomats in Brazil’s foreign ministry. It is ironic that India — not just the world’s most populous democracy but one of the world’s largest bureaucracies — has a diplomatic corps roughly equal to tiny Singapore’s 867. The size and human capacity of the IFS suffers by comparison with every one of its peers and key interlocutors. While this may partially be a tribute to the quality and the appetite for work of the 900 who staff the foreign service, it lays bare some obvious limitations. I remember the frustrations of the nineteen LAC ambassadors in New Delhi at the near-impossibility of getting an appointment with the sole joint secretary (assisted by one mid-ranking professional) who was responsible for all their countries. At a time when India is seen as stretching its global sinews, the frugal staffing patterns of its diplomatic service reveals a country punching well below its weight on the global stage.
A few examples will suffice. The joint secretary in charge of East Asia has to handle India’s policies regarding China, Japan, the two Koreas, Mongolia, Taiwan, Tibetan refugees, and the disputed frontier with China, in addition to unexpected crises like those relating to India’s response to the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. Inevitably China consumes most of his attention and relations with the other crucial countries within his bailiwick are neglected or assigned to one of the five junior officials working under him. Another joint secretary is responsible for India’s relations with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, while a colleague of equivalent rank handles Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and the Maldives, all countries of significant diplomatic sensitivity and security implications. One more joint secretary has been assigned the dozen countries of Southeast Asia, with Australia, New Zealand the Pacific thrown in! It is instructive that the US embassy in New Delhi, with a twenty-person political section, has more people following the MEA than the MEA has to deal with the US embassy — in its own country.