Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century

by Shashi Tharoor

  The recruits are then trained at the National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, for three months, and then at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) in New Delhi for about a year, attending courses on such subjects as the Indian Constitution, international law, international relations and diplomacy. The stint at FSI includes a month-long district attachment, visits to India’s borders, a tour of the country (‘Bharat Darshan’, or literally ‘seeing India’), a brief exposure to the working of an Indian mission abroad followed by a six-month-long MEA desk attachment. Then there is a final language-training stint of one or two years at a mission abroad. The total amounts to a three-year training period, less than half of which is related to the direct concerns of the professional on the job.

  The IFS has at least managed to overcome its earlier deficiencies in language training. Indian universities had at best limited facilities in European languages, and even less in African, Asian and Middle Eastern ones. Formal linguistic training was poor by international standards; this has now improved, with greater emphasis on learning languages in the countries where they are spoken. Even the coursework IFS recruits underwent was mediocre in such subjects as area studies, for which the Indian academic infrastructure was inadequate, and far too focused on pablum like (in the bad old days) ‘promoting Indo-Soviet friendship’. Opportunities for mid-career sabbaticals were limited to the occasional year in the United States or Britain, the two countries about which the average IFS officer was already well informed. These are still the favoured destinations for those who take the time to go and study abroad, but the choice is now wider.

  Not every diplomat emerges from the training process well enough equipped in the ‘soft skills’ required in international diplomacy to function effectively, though their mastery of their assigned foreign language is now usually impressive. But then language training, too, is not always reflected in assignments: I have frequently come across Indian diplomats in non-Anglophone European capitals whose foreign language was Chinese, a series of ambassadors in Paris who could not speak French, and (as I pointed out in a Parliament question in 2011) not one of India’s nine ambassadors stationed in the countries of the Gulf at that time spoke or had learned Arabic. Surely we can aim at a time when every national language is spoken by at least one Indian officer and an eventual time when every one of our missions is headed by an ambassador who knows the language, be it Khmer or Korean, Spanish or Swahili?

  The effect of the foreign service’s bureaucratic stranglehold on the MEA merits attention, particularly because the Pillai committee too recommended a broader-based recruitment process that would seek out professionals in various fields, between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five, for mid-career employment in the foreign service. The idea was to compensate for the lack of experience and the consequently more restricted vision of the standard process which recruited only twenty-one-to twenty-four-year-olds, who ‘grew’ in the MEA within the norms and confines of the foreign office bureaucracy. The Pillai report suggested that 15 to 20 per cent of the annual recruitment be set aside for older recruits ‘to permit entry of persons with specialized knowledge of international relations and area studies, experience in management and administration and public relations’. The recommendation was never implemented and the thinking behind it continues to be strongly resisted by the entrenched bureaucracy. Ironically the need is even greater today than when Pillai did his work nearly half a century ago. In today’s multilateral diplomacy, for instance, the MEA needs expertise that it cannot provide from its own ranks. For instance, climate change has become a hot-button diplomatic issue that needs to be discussed and negotiated in multilateral forums where other delegations rely on technical and scientific expertise that they find indispensable, but which the MEA eschews because it is unwilling to look beyond its own ranks (or those of its retired grandees). In an era when a certain level of specialization is considered essential by many foreign ministries, Indian diplomacy still abounds in talented generalists. Concomitantly, there is no threat to officialdom’s established way of doing things.

  That ‘way’ originated in the ICS under the British, when Indian officials functioned under the obligation of proving their worth to their white colleagues, and accordingly placed a premium on individual brilliance and success. The first generation of senior MEA officers, raised in this tradition, institutionalized the ego in bureaucratic procedure, undercutting rivals, sheltering behind seniority and seeking self-advancement as the principal priority in their careers. Under Nehru, these tendencies had received full play: he was less interested, as a critic noted, in institutionalizing a policy-making ministry than in creating a body to reflect his views. Originality in thought and action was thus at a discount. This was augmented by the political culture’s emphasis on a ‘non-political’ bureaucracy primarily responsible for implementation of policies made elsewhere; deprived of ultimate authority, officials were largely content to concentrate on their own advancement. While some of this remains true of any bureaucracy, the increasing clout of the foreign service—as the repository of precedent, the storehouse of experience and the legatee of diplomatic practice—in relation to increasingly underprepared political masters, has improved matters considerably. In all fairness, it is essential to state that there are many efficient, achievement-oriented men and women of vision in the MEA—some of whom helped frame this analysis. But their impact was circumscribed by several of the attitudinal and institutional factors traced above.

  These limitations on effective professional performance were underscored by other factors, notably inadequate specialization and training. The IFS recruits’ initial three-year training included little of direct applicability in a diplomatic situation. Academic coursework was no substitute for professionalism, and a few months spent in those days in the Indian countryside did not compensate for poor grounding in foreign life and customs. Paradoxically there was greater need for IFS recruits to be exposed to Indian conditions in order to make them more representative of their nation than they were; but a few weeks in a village as visiting government officials were hardly enough. At the same time, the ersatz Westernization of the urban elite was no better preparation for international diplomacy than it was for rural uplift. But advocates of a year’s training at a foreign institution (such as selected entrants received at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in the early 1950s) were defeated by the domestic bureaucrats, whose anxiety to maintain a par between the IAS and the IFS was matched by their desire to be involved as much as possible in India’s external affairs. This too has finally changed, with stints at institutions abroad becoming much more widely available at various stages of a diplomat’s career. But as one retired ambassador observed, ‘Training at any level in the IFS means listening to a series of lectures. These vary in quality and usefulness. At no time is any training given for two of the most important functions expected of officers at every level: political and economic reporting and recording of conversations [or record of discussions (RODs), as this is known in MEA parlance].’ The neglect of these basics has created a service that, at its junior levels, is woefully underprepared for the obligations of international diplomacy.

  The training process has been strengthened with the establishment of the Foreign Service Institute, which provides some induction as well as mid-career training, but reports of its efficacy are mixed. Assignment to the FSI is not prized by the best of the MEA’s professionals, who tend to regard a stint there as the equivalent of being sidelined, and this in turn has had a direct bearing on the way the fresh crop is tended. Although the FSI has acquired impressive new premises close to Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), the physical infrastructure has not been matched by faculty development or even by the development of a standardized and modern curriculum (much depends, one recent trainee told me, ‘on the whims and fancies of the dean’). The FSI has no institutional or accreditation links with JNU or any other university and is yet to develop into a centre of excellence
in its own right.

  Mid-career training is still a blight on the MEA’s performance. The IFS is the only service in India’s bureaucracy which does not have an effective, well-structured mid-career training programme (or MCTP, which the department of personnel and training of the Government of India encourages all branches of the All India and Central Services to devise). While most services have well-organized training programmes spread over various phases of an official’s career—which includes training in the relevant service institute and a foreign component—the MCTP for IFS officers is rather limited in scope and design. It is confined to two phases, the first of which (required to be completed for promotion from the rank of director to joint secretary) includes only answering some assignment questions and writing a monograph. (Given the years the average director must have spent on writing policy documents, Cabinet notes and notes verbales, this is hardly a training exercise, since the skills needed should have been acquired on the job anyway.) The second phase (required for promotion from joint secretary to additional secretary) includes a week’s training in a management institute and one week at the FSI—negligible in comparison with global standards and hardly adequate to keep up with the worldwide revolution in the concepts and practices of foreign policy planning and implementation. IFS officers are also systematically denied exposure to how other diplomatic services and foreign policy establishments work, on the specious grounds that IFS officers do not need foreign exposure as they are in any case serving around the world. Despite the occasional authorized stint (often at the individual officer’s own initiative) in a foreign institute’s seminar or course, there is little world-class training imparted to the mid-career diplomatic professional. It is clear that the training programmes of IFS officers are not on a par with what other diplomatic services are providing and not even with what other domestic services are doing for their officers.

  Moving to a different aspect of organizational culture, Indian diplomats have too often acquired a reputation for being more interested in the amenities than in tasks of their jobs. The scramble for the plum assignments continues to be facilitated by the classification of posts as ‘hard’ or ‘soft’, not in accordance with the political importance of the nation but on the basis of the facilities available. Postings continue to be dictated by the comfort or hardships endured in a previous assignment rather than by the skills and expertise of a diplomat for a particular region or task. The lobbying involved is often deleterious to morale; as retired ambassador T.P. Sreenivasan put it in 2009:

  There are no established criteria for selection and the competition is most often unequal and unfair. A recent tendency is to blur the gradation of posts in relation to the grades to which officers belong. A grade I officer can be replaced by a grade III officer [rather than the post itself bearing the grade]. Promotions become irrelevant as both in terms of work and compensation, stations matter rather than grades.

  The rot sets in much earlier. The mandarin-style approach to recruitment—which requires all entrants to come through one-size-fits-all civil services examination, the same one that produces generalist administrators, tax officials and police officers—has evident limitations. Since working abroad for the government has lost some of its allure, this is no longer the best way to find the most suitable diplomats; indeed, for many applicants the IFS is a third or even fourth preference among the career options available to those who do well in the exams. I feel strongly that a diplomat should not be someone who fell short of his or her ‘real’ goal of becoming an administrator, a customs official or a crime-busting sleuth. We need internationalist-minded young Indians who see the chance of serving the country abroad not only as a privilege, but as something indispensable to India’s growth and prosperity. A separate foreign service exam is one possibility; another would be to recruit bright students, with an extrovert orientation, adaptability and curiosity about the world, directly from universities, and then train them in diplomatic skills before gauging their aptitude and confirming their appointments. Whatever is decided, the time for reform is desperately overdue—though little of the urgency required is visible in the corridors of South Block, once known, in the early 1960s, as the ‘Ministry of Eternal Affairs’.

  In my short stint as minister of state I nonetheless found much to admire in the MEA—many able, smart and overstretched staff, fine traditions of diplomatic practice, and in some cases a sense of the nobility of serving the nation on the world stage. But some matters were less admirable. Administrative procedure runs along lines that, except by Indian bureaucratic standards, were extraordinarily cumbersome. I still recall with fondness admixed with horror the many files that reached my desk, their contents still tied, literally, with the proverbial red tape that has become the symbol of Indian administration. Though the advent of email in the late 1990s permitted more direct and rapid written communication on routine matters than had previously been possible, the official files still rule the roost, and the stranglehold of antediluvian bureaucratic norms (and attitudes) generally hold sway throughout South Block, as they do throughout the Government of India. Yet my friends in the MEA assure me that bureaucratic efficiency is high in their ministry compared to other government departments, so I shall let that pass.

  One important area of progress in the MEA is that bureaucratic rivalries do not affect the MEA’s functioning as much as they were alleged to in the past. In the 1960s, the three co-equal Secretaries used to meet once a week to discuss policy problems, but in Shastri’s time they were more concerned with one-upmanship than coordination. The Pillai report had found it essential to revive the post of the Secretary-General; the creation and strengthening of a foreign secretary position has worked well enough in this respect, with the ‘FS’ the unchallenged kingpin of the MEA bureaucracy, whose word is law whether in relation to transfers and postings, discipline or political judgement. At the official level there is clearly, at the head of the ministry, someone who not only helps devise and pursue an integrated policy across the board but also can speak with authority for the ministry as a whole.

  But the MEA’s problems of coordination went deeper than that, into fundamentals of both organization and attitude. The territorial divisions, for instance, were drawn up according to somewhat eccentric principles with little geopolitical logic, but sanctified over the decades by the level of interest in them on the part of the powers-that-be. Thus there were four territorial divisions dealing with India’s neighbours, but only one for all of non-Arab Africa (subsequently divided into two, but without regard to the Anglophone–Francophone divide). The responsibility for promoting India’s ‘soft power’ assets remains dispersed among different entities—the public diplomacy division, the external publicity division, the ICCR, the Indian Council on World Affairs, and so on—with no coordinating arrangements among them below the level of foreign minister! The post of special secretary for public diplomacy, a recent (and somewhat occasionally filled) creation, although often manned by very capable officers, is not being functionally utilized to achieve this coordination. The organizational dysfunctionality thus epitomized was compounded by bureaucratic inertia, rigid adherence to procedure and hierarchy (it is striking how Indian diplomats feel obliged to call everyone slightly senior to them ‘sir’, in a striking contrast with the collegiality of other foreign services) and an informal caste system that set the IFS officers apart from and above the IFS ‘B’, including the ‘promotees’ who had attained senior positions but were sneered at behind their backs by officers who had entered the elite service by examination. (Other things, however, have improved considerably over the years: gone are the days when Foreign Minister Chagla discovered that his Secretaries turned up at South Block each morning only at 10.30 a.m.—after their round of golf!)

  The government’s solution to the coordination problem in the 1960s was to create a coordination division with a director and a staff, to oversee the economic and political divisions in subjects that involved other ministries. Th
is meant that frequently they had, in effect, to coordinate the work of their superiors, a task that scarcely ensured their success. De facto coordination now takes place at the level of the foreign secretary himself—an official with a span of control so impossibly large (including substantive responsibility for India’s relations with all the major powers) that he would need to be Superman to do justice to all the tasks incumbent upon him. One outside observer, Daniel Markey of the Council of Foreign Relations in the United States, suggested that the position needed to be split in two, to have a political head of the service and an administrative one. But no senior Indian official is prepared to relinquish control over the promotions and postings that represent his ultimate control over the bureaucracy below, and the idea was given short shrift when it was floated.