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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: Indira Gandhi

Indic Diplomacy

14 Sat Jan 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on Indic Diplomacy

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Arthashastra, Condoleezza Rice, Deep Datta-Ray, diplomacy, ethics, foreign policy, Great Power, IFS, India, Indian Foreign Service, Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Krishna, kutayuddha, Mahabharata, modernity, non-alignment, nuclear, Rajiv Sikri, realism, Shivshankar Menon, Union Public Service Commission, UPSC, vasudhaiva kutumbakam

making-of-indian-diplomacyDatta-Ray, Deep. The Making of Indian Diplomacy: A Critique of Eurocentrism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015. 380 pp.

Indian diplomacy has long vexed its observers, occidental and oriental alike. Lacking in a culture of periodical declassification and easy access to past and present practitioners, the workings of South Block remain impervious to methodical scholarship. In this environment, a book that promises to reveal not only how Indian diplomacy is conducted but also why it is such an enigma is a welcome arrival. As the title avers, The Making of Indian Diplomacy: A Critique of Eurocentrism seeks to properly establish the functioning of the members of the Indian Foreign Service in the culture and traditions of their homeland rather than in Christendom’s theories of statecraft.

Several things are of note in this project: first, Deep Datta-Ray, the author, is making a cultural approach to the study of diplomacy and foreign policy. While this may seem perfectly normal to most, it is a method that has had few takers in the historical profession. Though it has become more popular over the last decade, international relations remains firmly in the grip of abstract theories such as realism, constructivism, or Marxism. And yet, diplomats and their political masters do not leave their values and biases at home each day as they come in for work; they are enmeshed in a cultural web which cannot but inform their policies.

Second, Datta-Ray criticises scholars who complain that Indian foreign policy makes little sense for judging it by Western customs of politics, governance, and power. Despite nearly two centuries of British rule – between Crown and Company – over India, cultural transfer from metropole to periphery remained superficial at best. In other words, Thomas Macaulay failed to create brown Englishmen; Indians remain rooted in their traditions and understanding of the world.

Macaulay’s failure would not be a startling revelation in itself but Datta-Ray goes on to argue that the entire modern project in Europe is deeply rooted in its Christian heritage and incompatible to the Indian ethos. The binarism of exclusivist monotheistic cults transcends mere theology and permeates all aspects of culture, resulting in a fundamentally different understanding of the cosmos and man’s place in it. Islam, being an Abrahamic offspring, literally, meshes better with European notions of power relations and the state than dharmic religions do. Again, this is not a new argument: originally put forward in academic circles in the mid-1970s, it has percolated into the awareness of ordinary Indians perhaps a decade ago. However, Datta-Ray’s systematic application of this idea to foreign policy is a first and deserves careful consideration.

Unfortunately, The Making of Indian Diplomacy is filled with turgid prose that could impress only dissertation committees. Such jargon-laden, impenetrable language, the hallmark of cultural studies, is one of the reasons the humanities has lost respect in society. Datta-Ray commits such perversions upon the English language – the Queen was never meant to sound like this – that it would make Guillaume Apollinaire proud! Yet those who brave the presentation are rewarded with some fascinating insights into the workings of India’s Ministry of External Affairs.

Indian history remains, disappointingly, strongly entangled to privileged access and Datta-Ray, son of Sunanda K Datta-Ray, seems to have it. This project needed the personal intervention of then prime minister Manmohan Singh, such was the resistance of the bureaucracy against an interloper. Even then, one MEA mandarin asked the author, “What do you want with our documents? They only reveal process, not intent.” This gives an insight into Indian bureaucratic thinking that marks it different from Western practice. Fortunately, Datta-Ray has used his opportunity well – embedded with the Indian Foreign Service allowed him to observe, talk informally, and interview officially dozens of young aspirants, serving officials, and retired civil servants. The resulting monograph can be understood as discussing the structural and intellectual differences between Western and Indic diplomacy.

The Body of the Beast

Before looking at policies and attitudes, Datta-Ray asks who populates the service. He finds that many of the applicants come from modest backgrounds in the hinterland, some not even aware of the IFS until they had cleared the Union Public Service Commission examination! Many come to government service as a means to mediate between it and their village, or enlist its assistance to protect their region from the state. There is less suspicion of the state compared to Western countries, for one primary reason – it is present in the villages, where private corporations find it unprofitable to venture. Ironically, the failure of the state to adequately provide basic necessities for its citizens is also its greatest strength. Many of the incoming civil service cadre seem to hold an organic view of society in which the state remains a place people can come together and lift themselves up through the opportunities it provides. While the cosmopolitan disenchanted may scoff at such idealism, Datta-Ray has revealed an interesting undercurrent that will last as long as a government job is seen as a guarantor of upward mobility. However, is it necessarily different from the West? One would assume that governments world over attract service-minded people, some more fortunate than others, however cynical it may leave them at the end. A quick comparison to a small sampling of other countries would have helped the argument along much better.

The Making of Indian Diplomacy praises how several IFS officers left lucrative careers in the corporate world to enter into government service. Some officers, ironically, do not want to leave home; others see a civil service job as a badge of status despite working conditions that are less than adequate. For example, at one point during the negotiations over the civil nuclear cooperation with the United States, the Indian delegation consisting of a Joint Secretary from the MEA and two lawyers found itself matched by an American official and his team of 55 lawyers! The Joint Secretary in question, S Jaishankar, when quizzed by his astounded counterpart, simply shrugged and replied that Indians make do. Jugaad, the popular term nowadays for making do, seems romantic only to those who never had to resort to it. MK Narayanan, the national security advisor from 2005 to 2011, glibly dismisses this as Indians not being a litigious society. However, the truth might simply be insufficient resources, poor recruiting power, and a deterring application process. Western foreign service departments are a lot more casual about lateral entry hires from industry, ensuring adequate manpower and expertise available to their ministers and senior bureaucrats at all times. These are certainly factors that make the IFS stand out from Western services but perhaps not in a way to be desired!

Datta-Ray reveals an interesting tidbit about promotions in the civil services: everyone gets positive reviews. As a result, personnel files are useless when it comes time to raise one above his peers. One officer confided in the author that this was because seniors were afraid that they would be accused of casteism if they marked anyone down. Datta-Ray uses this state of affairs to argue for a peculiarly Indian “total evaluation” process that goes beyond words on paper to assess the suitability of an officer for a higher position. It is this system that allowed Shivshankar Menon, former national security advisor to Manmohan Singh and successor to Narayanan, to supercede 16 positions to become the foreign secretary in October 2006. Of course, a less charitable view might be that “total evaluation” is making a virtue out of necessity and that it merely conceals an egregious problem in Indian institutions, namely, using caste victimisation as a weapon to conceal incompetence.

Intellectual Weltanshauung

Datta-Ray recounts when Menon explains the role of a diplomat to the incoming batch of IFS recruits as that played by Krishna in the udyoga parva of the Mahabharata. Rather than launch into a scholarly evolution of diplomacy a la Harold Nicolson, Keith Hamilton, Richard Langhorne, Martin Wight, or Ernest Satow, the former NSA latched onto a text most Indians are intimately familiar with. The great epic remains the backbone of Indian political thinking, Datta-Ray argues, because it avoids the pitfalls of viewing the world in false dichotomies just as Indian foreign policy has shown a tendency to avoid.

This is a limited reading of the Mahabharata, and indeed, Indic thought. There are several incidents in the great epic that run counter to Menon’s portrayal that can be recounted: one, Krishna’s urging Yudhishtira to perform the Rajasuya yaga; two, his advocacy of war within 13 days of the Pandavas’ exile; three, when Krishna intercepted the elephant goad thrown by the king of Pragjyotisha, Bhagadatta, at Arjuna despite a promise not to participate in the war in any way except as charioteer/advisor to the third son of Pandu; or four, the infamous manner in which Drona was made to lay down his weapons. These roles do not, strictly speaking, fit our modern imagination of a diplomat’s task. Yet to restrict foreign policy strictly to conference room machinations and champagne is too narrow an understanding of the profession. A diplomat must also provide wise counsel to his political masters, something Krishna unfailingly did for the Pandavas. If the IFS is indeed inspired by the Mahabharata, one wonders if any of them have ever truly engaged with the text. Similarly, the breathtakingly amoral Arthashastra does not shy away from advocating the use of kutayuddha if the national interest required it.

The Making of Indian Diplomacy gets to the crux of the matter when it asks why India should become a Great Power. Datta-Ray asks this in the context of Menon’s meteoric elevation and an internal memorandum by Rajiv Sikri, one of the bypassed officers. Sikri, he finds, has fallen into the trap of Western modernity and advocates Great Power status for India for its own sake. This does not satisfy Datta-Ray, who declares such a quest as un-Indian. In support, he quotes former external affairs minister, Natwar Singh’s response – that India’s goal is to remove poverty, not become a Great Power – when US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that the United States intended to help India become a major power in the 21st century. According to Datta-Ray, Indian diplomacy avoids the anarchic and binary world of power politics by understanding the international community and India’s place within it as a unified cosmos. All states are interlinked and, therefore, foreign relations is not a zero-sum game. This explains why India continues to deal with Pakistan despite the constant terrorist attacks Islamabad supports against India, or why Delhi de-links its territorial dispute with China from other facets of its relationship. In essence, the view that vasudhaiva kutumbakam, or, the world is one family, guides Indian diplomacy.

This, continues, Datta-Ray, is seen even in India’s nuclear weapons policy – Nehru and Indira Gandhi both rejected Western rationality even at the risk of appearing irrational to pursue their own reasoning. In this, they did not even trust their senior-most bureaucrats for fear that they would push India into the same anarchic-binary world Nehru had avoided through his non-alignment. Finally pushed into crossing the nuclear rubicon, India refrained from weaponisation until 1998 when circumstances forced it to take the next step. Even then, Indian diplomacy maintained its traditional roots. K Subrahmanyam, one of the architects of India’s nuclear doctrine, echoed Nehru and his daughter when he reasoned that in the nuclear age, the main purpose of foreign policy should be to prevent wars; humanity must unite and cooperate to survive.

There are a host of problems with this interpretation of Indian foreign policy. The first is to use Nehru as the yardstick of Indianness. The first prime minister, influenced on the one hand by Mohandas Gandhi’s asceticism and on the other by British notions of progress, can hardly be an example of the traditional Indian values Datta-Ray has deployed throughout his argument. Nehru certainly did not view himself the way Datta-Ray seems to. As he himself wrote in The Discovery of India that he came to India as a foreigner; Nehru had also remarked to John Galbraith, the US ambassador to India, that he was the last Englishman to rule in India. In fact, the question arises that if the IFS really is imbued with the Nehruvian spirit, is it relying on the corpus of Indic works and experiences or on a Leftist, perhaps Christian socialist version of Western thinking?

It is unfortunate that public perception of India has been captured by Gandhi’s misinterpretation of dharmic values. Vasudhaiva kutumbakam was not, as Sarvesh Tiwari has ably shown, a recommendation but an admonition. Ashoka, the great renouncer became so only after he had conquered his enemies. Ahimsa, fashionably misappropriated by Gandhi against the British, was described in a very different context by Buddha and Mahavira. In fact, Indic ethics, which are carried more in the works of literature than philosophy, speak very much in a language of realism – about proportion, balance, alliances, caution, and strength.

If anything, the examples Datta-Ray gives shows the Indian diplomatic establishment in its worst light: not trusted even by prime ministers, animated by the values of an ingabanga leader, wracked by  the low quality of its recruits, unable to attract fresh talent, and riven by its own politics and demons, it mirrors much of what is wrong with Indian institutions and its polity. With decision-making centred around the prime minister’s office, foreign policy resembles more a fiefdom and India a flailing state rather than a robust and rising democracy. Did the Mahabharata, the text that informs so many IFS officers, not have counsel on governance, the limits of authority, and power?

Despite his questionable choice of examples, Datta-Ray does convince, with just his anecdote about Menon and the Mahabharata, that there is indeed an Indic way of thinking about foreign policy, even if the wrong lessons seem to have been drawn here. However, he must be cautious in making the jump from the IFS knowing about the epic, to actually following its precepts. Indeed, there is much folk wisdom and rhetoric on how Indians view themselves as part of a bigger cosmic whole; Man does not stand above nature but is a part of it. Yet it is unclear how much this thinking dictates everyday function. Despite such concerns about the environment, for example, the Ganga has turned into toxic sludge, tree cover is receding, and the air in urban centres is unbreathable. To know or to have read Aristotle is not to do as he advises.

In places, it seems Datta-Ray has created a straw man out of Western civilisation; the notion of acting with purpose rather than for its own sake that the author sees in Indic ethics sounds similar to the value Niall Ferguson sees in his very Western, Kantian Henry Kissinger. There are, indeed, differences between how Indic and Abrahamic traditions view the world but as most critics of the West are prone to do, Datta-Ray exaggerates the divergences and homogenises the West in a manner he finds problematic for India or the East.

A book must be judged not only on its argument but also the questions it tickles in the readers’ minds; in the latter, Datta-Ray has succeeded spectacularly. He is among the first to try and apply Indic frameworks to modern challenges, ambitiously threatening to subvert the normative understanding of modernity. It is perhaps too much to expect perfect coherence in the first attempt.

 

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Going to the Holy Land

18 Sat Apr 2015

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, Israel, Middle East, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on Going to the Holy Land

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Ariel Sharon, Atal Behari Vajapyee, Avotaynu, Bharatiya Janata Party, Binyamin Netanyahu, BJP, diaspora, INC, India, Indian National Congress, Indira Gandhi, Israel, Jaswant Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru, Kargil, Mossad, Narendra Modi, RAW, remittance, Reuven Rivlin

The subject of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s possible response to an invitation by Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and president Reuven Rivlin to visit their country has set tongues wagging both domestically and internationally. Arab News, a Saudi broadsheet owned by one of King Salman’s sons, warned that the Indian prime minister was making a risky gamble on relations with Israel while domestic tabloids indicated bureaucratic unease with the strengthening of relations between India and Israel, at least at this juncture. This is quite a strong reaction to a potential state visit to a country that has so far only existed on the periphery of Indian political thinking. No matter, the Indian prime minister must go to Israel and not fall prey to this tactic of unmaking government decisions before they are made.

Israel occupies an odd place in Indian thinking. Despite the extension of recognition by the Indian government to the Jewish state in 1950, formal diplomatic ties were not established until 1992. Jawaharlal Nehru blocked Israel’s entry into the Non-Aligned Movement and turned the organisation into an unequivocally pro-Arab forum. India refused to accept Israeli assistance in improving agriculture in its semi-arid regions and in the mid-1960s, refused to even accept famine relief sent by Israel in response to a plea by the UN Secretary General, U Thant – lest it hurt relations with Arab nations! In the United Nations, Delhi was persuaded by its own rhetoric of third world solidarity and established a long record of voting against Israel. Indira Gandhi went so far as to vote in favour of UN Resolution 3379 in 1975, which equated Zionism with racism. Interestingly, none of this was without domestic opposition, political as well as in the media, but it was they heyday of Congress hegemony. Support for Palestine even merited a privileged mention in the manifesto of the Indian National Congress for the general elections of 2014.

Despite an avowedly pro-Arab stance, India initiated clandestine relations with Israel in the late 1960s. This has been documented as much as is publicly possible in B. Raman’s The Kaoboys of R&AW: Down Memory Lane as well as Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman’s Every Spy a Prince and most recently Srinath Raghavan’s 1971 – A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh. Indian intelligence received training from Mossad and assistance in the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971. According to Harsh Pant, professor at King’s College, London, India received tacit support even earlier, during the Chinese invasion in 1962 and the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965. Since, Israeli assistance has continued clandestinely despite official diplomatic insults. Its intelligence agency was quite capable of serving as an alternative diplomatic service, providing military and other assistance to countries who would prefer their ties to Israel not be known. More recently, it has been acknowledged in academic and military circles alike that Israel’s role in the Kargil War in 1999 was timely and critical for the Indian war effort.

India’s rabidly anti-Israel position was diluted significantly after it established official diplomatic relations with the Middle Eastern democracy in 1992 – the last non-Arab, non-Muslim country to do so. There have been several high-level visits from both sides though support for Israel is deeply partisan in India. Though ties between the two countries were normalised under PV Narasimha Rao, the first foreign minister to visit Israel was the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Jaswant Singh and it was Atal Behari Vajpayee who first invited then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon to India in 2003. No Indian prime minister has ever visited Israel, though Modi has been to the country when he was the chief minister of Gujarat in 2006. Pace the Indian ruling class, the Jewish people and Israel have always been viewed warmly by Indians at large. In a 2009 survey done by Israel’s Ministry of External Affairs, it was found that the popularity of the Middle Eastern country was the the highest among the Indians. Interestingly, a 2014 survey by the BBC showed the majority of Israelis neutrally disposed towards India and only a small section of Israeli society as positive about the South Asian giant, presumably because of Delhi’s policies in the past. As the Jewish genealogical journal Avotaynu observed of India a few years ago, “Bene Israel flourished for 2,400 years in a tolerant land that has never known anti-Semitism, and were successful in all aspects of the socio-economic and cultural life of the people of the region.”

Modi’s rise to power has raised hopes in Jerusalem. Having dealt with Modi during his tenure as the chief minister of Gujarat, Israelis have developed a fondness for a man whom they see as very Israeli in many ways. Very tachles is how one editorial described him, a Hebrew slang word that means the ability to talk about the bottom line, the concrete, the tangible…basically, getting down to business. Israeli businessmen invested billions in infrastructure, energy, pharmaceuticals, water treatment, agriculture, desalination, and semiconductors in Gujarat during Modi’s tenure, finding the environment in the state to be business friendly and less bureaucratic than the rest of India. If Modi carries even a fraction of the same enthusiasm for ties on to the national level, it would mean an unprecedented boom for the Israeli economy. Non-military trade between India and Israel has risen from the paltry $100 million in 1992 to slightly over $5 billion in 2015 but this could double if a free trade agreement that has been in the works is concluded while creating much employment through the Make in India campaign simultaneously.

Beyond the obvious economic drivers to closer relations with Israel, there is, of course, the strategic imperative. Although Brajesh Mishra, Vajpayee’s National Security Advisor, nearly caused an aneurysm in some circles when he openly called for a strategic India-Israel-United States alliance in 2003, the fact remains that both India and Israel suffer from the same Islamist plague, whether it comes in the form of Hamas or the Laskhar-e-Taiba. Cooperation in counter-terrorism measures and intelligence has only grown between the two nations as has the supply of defence equipment to India – Israel now stands third behind only Russia and the United States in supplying the Indian military. Despite its size, population, and political turmoil, Israel is a high-tech island in the Middle East that has much to offer a technology-hungry India that is looking to leap past a couple of stages of development.

An unpleasant truth, perhaps, but there is, of course, another reason that Modi is popular among many of Israel’s lawmakers. His profile as firm and outspoken opponent of Islamic extremism, a common enemy, particularly in the wake of the Bombay attacks of November 2008 that targeted the Jewish community, among others, makes him more appealing than other Indian leaders. Then, the Indian representative to the United Nations had condemned the attack in his speech and while naming the several locations in Bombay the terrorists had attacked, left out the Jewish synagogue in Colaba, Chabad House.

Despite the obvious synergies between the two countries, any talk of closer ties is usually dampened by a heavy shroud of caution and pessimism. Israel’s relationship with China and India’s connections to Iran are frequently seen as obstacles to close ties between Delhi and Jerusalem. This interpretation does great dishonour to Israeli tachles: Jerusalem has made it clear that its relations with Beijing are purely commercial while it views ties to Delhi as strategic as well as economic. Israel has not made particular efforts to augment its arms sales to China in recent years, in large part because its primary ally and investor, the United States, imposes strict restrictions on the sale of weapons and technology to the rising superpower. With India, however, these restrictions have substantially weakened and Israeli firms frequently push for maximum cooperation on technology as well as weapons platforms with India, wiling to discuss not just sales but even manufacturing under license and co-development.

On Iran, cooler heads in Jerusalem accept that commercial ties with Iran are crucial for India not just for the obvious hydrocarbon trade but also as access points via Chabahar into Afghanistan and Central Asia. Greater Indian influence in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran may even work to Israel’s advantage eventually, securing one middleman in the region who is not the Great Satan. With the second largest Muslim population in the world, India’s bonafides are beyond suspicion. To revive an old worldview of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, India is the new periphery state for Israel, at least in the East. Unlike during the Cold War, this new periphery cannot survive on hard power alone. Delhi’s soft power in the region may be of great use if it can only be reinforced with some hard power.

Proponents of the status quo in Indian foreign policy towards the Middle East also bring up the potential fate of India’s large diaspora in the region. Of the almost 22 million Indians living overseas, about six million still reside in the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait, and Qatar accounting for 5.2 million Indians between them. If an overtly pro-Israel policy is adopted by Delhi, it is feared that the Gulf countries might curtail the employment of Indians and even send some back. Not only does this create unemployment at home but it will also reduce the remittance flow into India; last year, India was the highest recipient of diaspora remittances with about $70 billion out of which almost $19 billion came from the Middle East. Furthermore, the Middle East is a premier destination for Indian exports and equally importantly, the source of some 60 per cent of India’s hydrocarbons.

However, it is unlikely that any move by the Modi government will see a drastic shift on the ground: it is unlikely that the Gulf states will expel thousands of Indians or refuse to sell oil to India on the basis of a single state visit. Indeed, their greatest benefactor, the United States, has been one of Jerusalem’s closest allies for decades. India can move significantly closer to Israel all the while espousing almost the same rhetoric as Modi’s predecessors used: India still wishes to see a peaceful resolution to the Palestinian question and supports a two-state solution. Since Delhi is not a major player in the Middle East, it will not be called on for more details, wherein the devil resides. Without such a clear break, there is ample wiggle room for India to play on the differences between the Gulf states themselves: Qatar and Saudi Arabia, for example, have had somewhat of a prickly relationship over the past decade or so, and Oman stood against its GCC comrades on a joint military command perceivably to counter Iran.

Yet what makes a Modi visit to Jerusalem unpalatable to Arab Street at this particular juncture is Netanyahu’s recent outbursts – regarding Palestine and the two-state solution as well as the allegedly racist observation that Israeli Arabs are bringing out the vote – in the heat of the recent closely contested Israeli general elections. That, in concert with his adamant opposition to the potential outcome of the ongoing negotiations on the Iranian nuclear programme are said to be major landmines for an Indian diplomatic overture at this moment. As one diplomat explained, “That whole region is already on fire, and what Netanyahu is doing is to throw a tanker of oil into that fire.” However, it is an unbelievably naïve view of politics and human affairs in general to assume that one agrees with and supports every view of any interlocutor one happens to chance upon. By the same token, would dialogue with Pakistan be seen as an endorsement of terrorism against India? Modi goes to Israel strictly in pursuit of Indian interests; to read anything else into it is mischievous.

Allegations that a potential state visit by Modi might upset the delicate balance in the Middle East also puts too much import on the power of one summit. Additionally, it views – wrongly – the Israeli-Arab knot as a zero-sum game, for even outsiders. In 1992, when India sought to normalise relations with Israel, it sought approval from the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinians told India, ”There are signed accords between us [and Israel] and we are now talking to the Israelis; your establishing relations with Israel helps us.” It is difficult to believe otherwise now.

Modi must indeed respond positively to Netanyahu’s invitation and visit Israel soon. The Middle East’s problems are not India’s to solve and to think it carries much weight in the region at present is comical. So far, Delhi has mistreated a potential ally in the region and tolerated humiliation by those whom it desperately wished to befriend. It is time Raisina Hill replaced this obsequiousness with a more balanced and pragmatic policy that works on a simple quid pro quo. If even this simple stance is to be feared as jeopardising relations with other states in the region, perhaps those relations were never worth having in the first place. After all, it is India’s interests Modi must pursue and not any other. If a prime minister cannot unabashedly pursue the interests of his nation, who else can?


This post appeared on FirstPost on April 20, 2015.

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The Prickly Indian

09 Tue Jul 2013

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, South Asia

≈ 5 Comments

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Alden Pyle, arrogance, Chen Yi, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, diplomacy, foreign policy, Graham Greene, Henry Kissinger, India, Indira Gandhi, Jaswant Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru, KPS Menon, Loy Henderson, Morarji Desai, Richard Nixon, Stephen Cohen, The Prickly Indian, The Quiet American, Thomas Fowler, TN Kaul, VK Krishna Menon

Had Graham Greene written his 1955 bestseller on India instead of the United States, it would have been titled, The Prickly Indian. Made into a film twice, once in 1958 (Audie Murphy, Michael Redgrave) and again in 2002 (Brendan Fraser, Michael Caine), Greene’s The Quiet American tells the story of a British journalist, Thomas Fowler, and an American undercover CIA agent, Alden Pyle, in Vietnam. Pyle, the quiet American, has little “real world” experience and has learned everything he knows about Southeast Asia from books. While Pyle’s story is about a young and idealistic American brimming with superpower hubris and itching to introduce a strange and ancient culture to a better way of life, the American dream, the Indian version of the saga would be of a middle-aged man with a veneer of warmth but aloof, arrogant, and quick to take offence. As one journalist wrote, Oscar Wilde’s observation about the United States, that it went from barbarism to decadence without the intervening stage of civilisation, can be adapted to India thus, that the Indian went from abject humility to outright arrogance without the usual interval of healthy self-esteem.

India’s founding fathers made up in idealism what they lacked in ambition in matters of foreign policy. The continuity of this trend has been amply reflected by their successors in their slavish loyalty to moribund ideology and doctrine, and the lack of strategic vision has provided abundant cover for deeper failings of Indian diplomats. Even after 65 years of independence, India has neither developed close and strategic relations with any country (US-UK, US-Israel) nor has it fostered a coterie of like-minded states (EU, GCC) in furtherance of its national interests.

Most analysts of India’s foreign relations assume the cool and formal tone South Block oozes to be a combination of the cultural importance Indians give to protocol and the failure of strategic thinking. There is some truth to this, but a third and often-overlooked ingredient to Delhi’s aloofness, apparent more to practitioners of diplomacy rather than its scholars, is prickliness or arrogance. This personal shortcoming in many of India’s top politicians and bureaucrats has done irredeemable damage to the country’s interests over the years.

Among the more famous and early examples of Indian arrogance is recorded by the US ambassador to India (1948-1951), Loy Henderson, who wrote of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister,

“Nehru has had an anti-American bias since his school days in England. There he obtained the idea that the United Sates was an overgrown, blundering, uncultured, and somewhat crass nation, and that Americans in general were an ill-mannered and immature people, more interested in such toys as could be produced by modern technique and in satisfaction of their creature comforts than in endeavouring to understanding great moral and social trends of this age.”

Even if one dismisses Washington’s perspective on Nehru because of its disagreement over India’s non-alignment, Nepali Prime Minister Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala’s similar assessment is harder to ignore. In a conversation with an American diplomat, Koirala said that Nehru’s impatience often alienated him, and that Chinese diplomats were more refined than their Indian counterparts. Koirala’s words are still echoed in Nepal to this day.

Were the sentiment reserved to just one Indian official, even the prime minister, international exasperation with India might have been less. Yet this was not to be so. Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon, arguably India’s most controversial defence minister, has been described as vitriolic, intolerant, arrogant, and abrasive by British as well as American officials. Another Menon, this time India’s ambassador to China, Kumara Padmanabha Sivasankara Menon, was also described by the PRC foreign minister, Chen Yi, as arrogant during discussions on the border issue on the eve of the Sino-Indian War of 1962.

Moving on to the next decade, it should come as no surprise that India’s ambassador to the United States, Triloki Nath Kaul, a man hand-picked by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, found it difficult to get along with officials from his host state. In a cable written by Washington’s man in Delhi, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the US State Department was warned not to accept Kaul as India’s ambassador. The telegramme relates the opinion of several western diplomats about Kaul – sly, opportunistic, arrogant, and with a propensity for misconstruing cleverness for sophistication. Moynihan himself wrote, “Kaul, like [the] Nehru family, is a Kashmiri Brahmin, self-assured to point of arrogance by birth.”

The more popular story from the 1970s is of Indira Gandhi’s interaction with US president Richard Nixon and his famous National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger on the eve of the South Asia Crisis of 1971. The Americans found Indira Gandhi intolerable, and declassified US documents reveal the colourful language Nixon and Kissinger used to describe the Indian prime minister. However, unlike Kaul, Indira Gandhi did not earn the ire of almost everyone she met – while cool and aloof to the White House, she charmed other leaders in her whirlwind tour of major international capitals, drumming up support for India’s position on the flood of Bengali refugees from the east and the West Pakistan’s campaign of genocide against their  hapless, ethnically different countrymen.

Stephen Cohen, a South Asia expert at the Brookings Institution, reiterates this image of the prickly Indian in India as a World Power but is far more understanding than others in the foreign service community. Finding the excessive moral hectoring and arrogance of Indian diplomats and politicians as off-putting as his international colleagues do, he nevertheless asks that we understand the “defensive arrogance and acute sensitivity to real and perceived slights” in the context of India’s history and experience with the outside world.

Despite the urge to be defensive, there have been a few – very few – in Delhi who have lamented the poor standard of Indian officials and understood its multiplier effect on all aspects of international relations. In his autobiography, A Call to Honour: In Service of an Emerging India, former external affairs minister Jaswant Singh acknowledges the problem: “In diplomatic discourse and conduct, India has tended to carry many chips on its shoulder, almost always moralistic, needlessly arrogant, argumentative, mistaking such attitude as being an assertion of national pride.” Echoing Cohen, Singh writes that the “weight of so many centuries of servitude” has created in Indians “such an acute sense of hearing that quite often it hears insults where none exist or are even implied.”

It is not that India is the only country plagued with an arrogant foreign service corps; the United States is notorious for its share of Alden Pyles too. However, US arrogance comes backed by military and economic power, while India is yet to embrace machtpolitik. However, for most smaller states, it is easier to put up with arrogance that also promises aid than with paupered prickliness.

In a study that interviewed many US and Indian officials, one US military officer said, “Indians can be accused of having many cockeyed views,” but “they always have a substantive knowledge of the historical interactions, which makes it difficult to counter their arguments. They always raise the history of events during meetings.” This view was echoed by many others., that while the United States had an arrogance of power, the Indians had an intellectual arrogance. The study concluded,

“The Indian elites are quintessential intellectuals. They thrive on fine-tuned arguments and logic. But US military officers and businessmen are not interested in intellectual arguments—they are interested in practical issues. Consequently, they find India’s intellectual arrogance off-putting and counter-productive.”

As one US official framed it, it was American Calvinist arrogance versus Indian Brahminical arrogance, and as Thucydides reminds us, men’s indignation is more excited by a legal or intellectual wrong than by a violent wrong; the first looks like being cheated by an equal, the second like being compelled by a superior.

Unfortunately, many Indian scholars have imbibed their diplomats’ prickliness. India has failed to produce sufficient numbers of qualified foreign policy analysts on its own, and the government’s paranoia regarding declassification of state records has forced scholars to work from foreign sources and cultivate privileged access, not all of which is kosher. Usually due to widely varying sources (for example, the British Archives versus an interview with a former Indian bureaucrat), Indian foreign policy wonks have reacted harshly to “outsiders” like William Dalrymple, Bruce Riedel, Francine Frankel, and George Perkovich, oftentimes unfairly or for perceived intentions rather than their scholarly output. This attitude does not further understanding of Delhi’s thinking and only creates polarised minefields where there ought to be research.

To be clear, an arrogant disposition does not lower the merit of one’s case but merely the likelihood of it being heard favourably. Nixon’s relations with the subcontinent serve as the best example of the power of personal charm in diplomacy. The US president could never warm up to the Nehru-Gandhi family or other top Indian officials such as Morarji Desai (when he was Vice President), but got along famously with Pakistan’s military dictators even when President Dwight Eisenhower had already begun to express doubts about the wisdom of CENTO. Even if foreign officials perceive an arrogance that is not there, the impact on India’s national interests can be costly.

Diplomacy is a human activity, dictated as much by personality and psychology as by the hard-headed realism of rational actors. Arrogance might be a tool in the diplomat’s arsenal whose skilled use might goad one’s interlocutor towards a desired behaviour. However, Delhi has been too liberal with its dispensation, approaching international partners as a precocious teenage debating champion than as a seducer par excellence. Little wonder, then, that the Pakistan lobby has a stronger presence in Washington and other Great Power capitals than India’s idiot savants do despite the latter’s greater economic and military potential. Perhaps it is time these learned men of Hindustan applied that ancient counsel from the Manu Smriti: सत्यं ब्रूयात्प्रियं ब्रूयान्न ब्रूयात्सत्यमप्रियम् । (satyam bruyat priyam bruyat, na bruyat satyam apriyam)

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