by John Elliott
Formal links with Europe have not developed across a wide front since they were established in 1963 with the then European Economic Community (EEC), though they were given a boost in the 1990s and early 2000s.14 India prefers to deal with individual countries and does not rate the European Union as a top priority or vital entity15 even though, taken together, the countries involved are its major trading partner and it has been trying to negotiate a trade treaty. France is primarily seen as a useful and flexible supplier of defence and nuclear equipment. The UK is treated as a friendly, once-significant but now over-eager and occasionally condescending player. It is important at a business and people level – there are 1.5m residents of Indian origin in the UK along with substantial investments, including the Tata group, which is the largest private sector employer. Prime Minister David Cameron hopes unrealistically for a ‘very special partnership’ and for the two countries to be ‘inextricably linked’, as he spun it on a public relations-oriented trip to India.16
Losing the Argument
It is, of course, easy to take a negative view of India’s approach, and especially the sanctimonious way that its foreign affairs have often been conducted with attitudes of arrogant pomposity that have little clear end-purpose. I irritated the external affairs ministry with a column in the Business Standard in 2001 at a time when India was losing arguments internationally, especially in the US and UK, over its problems with Pakistan and the future of Kashmir. ‘India’s failure to get its message across internationally is, of course, not new. Pakistan has for years had more pro-active and effective diplomatic and public relations, especially in Washington and London,’ I wrote. ‘While India strutted pompously for years on the world stage, irritating other countries by self-defensively protesting its importance but failing to follow through with sound diplomacy, Pakistan has won hearts and minds’.17 When diplomats did get into negotiations, they characteristically became bogged down in agreement-defying detail.
My view was based partly on comments I had heard for a long time from many of the neighbouring countries’ diplomats about ineffectual posturing and personal arrogance – a word that has been picked up by Antonio Armellini, a former Italian ambassador to India in a book, If The Elephant Flies.18 He wrote about India’s ‘arrogance – or the exaggerated self-confidence if one prefers – that can adversely affect the country’s decision-making and its overall ability to correctly assess opportunities and limitations’. He scathingly coupled that with ‘the tendency to take one’s expectations for facts’ which ‘influences political orientations and often leads to errors that are regularly ascribed to the hostility of others rather than one’s own misjudgements’.
Such a critique was harsh but, taken point by point, it was accurate and is borne out by others. Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser from June 2013, is reported to have said that she had become a ‘lot less patient’ with India after having a ‘tough relationship’ over votes on Libya and Syria with her Indian counterpart (Hardeep Singh Puri, a blunt Indian diplomat), when she was the US ambassador at the UN during the first Obama administration.19 Having watched Indian diplomats perform at the UN, David Malone, a former Canadian high commissioner in Delhi, has written, ‘The cleverest person in the room may win many arguments, but still not win the game’.20 A retired senior Indian diplomat admitted to me that ‘we have to give up our unrealistic pretensions that we have a monopoly of wisdom’.21 Adding to that, a retired British diplomat told me that India had ‘neither the will nor mechanisms to look at internal issues and pursue them’, adding wearily, ‘it takes offence at the slightest excuse and is slow to forgive and forget’.
In Washington, says a seasoned American foreign affairs expert and diplomat, Indian ambassadors rarely show the diplomatic and social aplomb of top European countries and the Israelis, and thus lack the access, opportunity and ability to influence decision-making.22 Even though India was by mid-2012 well established and popular in the American capital, he said that ‘it is hard to find an example of a US policy where India has had real influence – not on Pakistan, nor Afghanistan nor China’. Some foreign diplomats suggest that their Indian counterparts do not have a sense of direction or purpose and are reluctant to discuss issues, maybe because they are under-briefed and (or) are ambivalent about India’s role in the world. India has also disappointed countries in Southeast and eastern Asia by not doing enough to build relationships beyond routine diplomatic exchanges, despite a look-east policy adopted in the 1990s. In practice, India is drawn in different directions by its wish to be a player, as it has been, for example, on climate change, and still carry the non-involved tag.
There is also criticism inside India as well as outside that the country lacks internationally recognized foreign affairs think tanks that could produce consistent analysis comparable to America’s Brookings Institute and the Heritage Foundation. The importance of an occasional thematic speech like Menon’s in August 2011 illustrates the potential. There are many small policy institutes in Delhi on defence as well as foreign policy issues, happily headed by retired foreign secretaries and other diplomats and the occasional admiral or general, but none has the authority at home or abroad of a major centre of thought and analysis. The Observer Research Foundation in Delhi, founded and partially funded by the Reliance Industries of Mukesh Ambani, fills some gaps but it has a far wider remit than foreign affairs, while the long-established Centre for Policy Studies has small rooms housing bright experts but does not aspire to collective clout.
Brahma Chellaney, a Delhi-based strategic affairs specialist, criticizes India from a different angle, arguing that it ‘gives, and gets nothing in return’, and does not recognize that ‘reciprocity is the first principle of diplomacy’. He lists India’s generosity on land issues ranging from surrendering British-inherited extra-territorial rights in Tibet in 1954, to giving back strategic gains after the 1965 and 1971 Pakistan wars and, more recently, facing pressure to cede control on the Siachen Glacier where the two countries have had a high altitude confrontation since 1984. Chellaney is an expert on the region’s river water disputes and says that the ‘world’s most generous water-sharing pact is the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, under which India agreed to set aside 80.52 per cent of the waters of the six-river Indus system for Pakistan, keeping for itself just the remaining 19.48 per cent share’.23
Power of the States
India’s relations with its neighbours are becoming disrupted by the politics and attitudes of its states that border the other countries and increasingly interfere in national diplomacy. This raises the question of how much – or how little – support Delhi can expect from regional politicians, and whether it has the will, patience and skill to involve them in the development of foreign affairs. It is a question that has yet to be tackled by the policy makers and it risks weakening India’s already poor handling of neighbourhood diplomacy. This is not new, but it has become more serious in recent years.
There have always been inevitable links between Jammu and Kashmir and India’s policy on Pakistan because Kashmir is disputed territory, and between Tamil Nadu and policy on Sri Lanka because of links with the island’s Tamil minority. India’s north-eastern states and West Bengal have interests in India’s relations with neighbouring Bangladesh and Myanmar, as do Bihar and Uttar Pradesh with Nepal. Further afield and less controversially, the southern state of Kerala has interests in policy on the United Arab Emirates and other Middle East countries because of its people working there and its dependence on the money they send home.
Such issues have become a bigger problem now that state-level political parties are members of India’s coalition governments. The parties have become more assertive and independent-minded, usually pushing populist policies that win support in their states, irrespective of whether they gel with national priorities. The central government has failed to respond to this and has not developed an approach that would maintain its leading role on foreign policy. The problems were clearly stated b
y K. Shankar Bajpai in a December 2010 article: ‘Drowning national needs in local politics, emotional or outdated ideological illusions, playing to the galleries or simple ignorance is mortally dangerous. Consider some random instances: Tamil Nadu’s parties competed to embarrass Delhi’s handling of Sri Lanka, states around Bangladesh connive at illegal immigration, Uttar Pradesh has no thought for its responsibilities vis-à-vis Nepal.’
Bajpai’s Tamil Nadu reference stemmed from the way that, in order to protect the Congress party’s political relationships in the state, India’s 2004–2014 government allowed two rival regional political parties to affect diplomacy with Sri Lanka. The parties sought local popularity by objecting to India working with the island’s chauvinistic Sinhalese-dominated government, and disrupted sporting and other links. Their influence even led to Manmohan Singh staying away from a Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Sri Lanka in November 2013. These political sensitivities left space for China and Pakistan (and Israel) to strengthen ties after they provided aircraft and other weaponry and training to help Sri Lanka defeat Tamil separatists in the 2000s.24 China was then able to make the island one of its ‘string of pearls’ by building a port and airport and other projects with soft loans and other assistance.
A cross-border treaty with Bangladesh on the Teesta river waters was upset by Mamata Banerjee, the irascible and unpredictable chief minister of West Bengal, just as it was about to be signed in 2011 by Manmohan Singh.25 This held up work on other issues affecting the two countries’ 4,000-km border, including India possibly having transit rights across northern Bangladesh to its north-eastern states. On the other side of India, Narendra Modi, the BJP chief minister of Gujarat, objected just before his state’s last assembly elections to negotiations on a possible settlement of a disputed part of Pakistan at Sir Creek on the Gujarat-Sindh maritime border.26
Banerjee’s opposition seems to have stemmed at least partly from pique that she was not consulted. Sumantra Bose, a political scientist who knows her, says he believes that her opposition was ‘due as much to her resentment of the Congress-ruled Centre’s failure to adequately involve her state government in the process as it is to her substantive concerns that the treaty could prove to be detrimental to West Bengal’s interests’.27
This opens up the question of what rights a state has to influence and dictate national foreign policy in federal India.28 It also points to the need for the central government actively to recognize and involve the states when new policies and treaties are being developed. That was done in 1995 by I.K. Gujral, when he was foreign minister (H.D. Deve Gowda was prime minister). Gujral encouraged Bangladesh’s Awami League government to liaise with Jyoti Basu, the communist leader of West Bengal’s government, on negotiations over a barrage at Farakka on the River Ganga.29 His sort of pragmatic statesmanship was not displayed by Manmohan Singh.
Inadequacies
Many senior officials are severely critical – sometimes publicly after retirement and confidentially before that. One of the most outspoken is K. Shankar Bajpai. ‘Our apparatus for interacting with the world is inadequate, in concepts and in mechanics,’30 he wrote shortly after Obama’s address to the Indian parliament in November 2010.31 Obama had listed issues that he must have known India would not find easy to accept. He specifically mentioned the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that India has always refused to sign, and challenged India to forsake its friendship with Iran – which it would not do for historic and oil-supply reasons – and condemn the military regime in its neighbouring country of Myanmar, which it was rightly loath to do because of China’s growing role in that country.
Bajpai said that Obama’s message was ‘welcome to the high table, now show us what you can bring to it’. India’s problem however was an inability, indeed refusal, to project its views persuasively. ‘Issuing statements, or rushing around canvassing at the last minute, cannot substitute for timely, sustained advocacy,’ wrote Bajpai. ‘Our missions abroad mostly glean our stand from the press. briefings, if given, are like the banalities we get away with at home, ineffectual with hard-headed foreign offices or media analysts. Our domestic vices spoil our international image. Others treat you as they estimate you: a strong, well-organised state, seen as knowing what it is doing and able to do it efficiently, inspires respect, circumspection, even cooperativeness — an invaluable shield against mischief. The shorter we fall of such stature, the greater our vulnerabilities.’
Jan Egeland, a Norwegian politician and a former senior UN official, has been even more blunt. ‘You can’t be a superpower in the Security Council in the morning and a poor development country in the afternoon,’ he says.32 ‘You can’t behave like an eagle and sweep into the Security Council and then behave like a chicken.’ Egeland’s view reflects frustration that India expects to win a permanent seat on the Security Council but is not prepared to play a role – a euphemism for taking sides – on major issues such as Syria with its human rights abuses and Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Such critics argue that Nehru understandably wanted to stay neutral in the Cold War while tilting towards the Soviet Union, but India should behave differently now that the NAM justification for inaction no longer exists. India sees it differently and, as Menon said, wants to pursue its domestic goals ‘without distraction or external entanglement’.
While its critics complain that it does not pull its weight in the Security Council and other international forums, Indian diplomats say they have a coherent policy at the UN – for example, pushing development as a leading priority, calling for a global anti-terrorism campaign, pushing human rights issues and humanitarian operations, plus individual concerns like the Middle East (where it backs Palestine). It has also had a leading role in UN peacekeeping since the 1950s, having taken part in 46 operations with a total of 130,000 troops, the third largest number among the countries involved.
India is perhaps more comfortable playing an international role in economic affairs, though its domestic-oriented agenda inevitably means that it does not line up with the West on issues such as trade negotiations and climate change – both areas where it has played an opposition role. There has also been frustration that, while refusing to break off relations with Iran, India neither developed a diplomatic strategy for dealing with the country, nor tried to lead an international attempt at compromise which, many diplomats say, it has been uniquely positioned to do. This often goes back to a basic criticism that India finds it easier to block initiatives than lead constructive coalitions – suggesting that as a country, and like its people, it is not basically a consistent team player.
Many Indian diplomats, especially younger ones, think that India should be more robust, especially in the UN, and less proselytizing, as do various pundits. ‘It is time for us to give up moralistic pretensions assuming we have a monopoly of wisdom,’ says a retired top diplomat. C.Raja Mohan, a leading foreign affairs analyst and journalist, argues that it is time for India to stop behaving like a weak power and ‘learn to be the regionally active – not war-mongering but showing strength.’33
The biggest external pressure on India to shake off its current approach is coming from the US, which sees it primarily as a counterweight, and maybe one day an ally, against China’s growing power, so wants to edge it into a wider role. Obama aired the frustration during his 2010 visit, though he showed little sensitivity for India’s priorities, calling for it to be tougher on Iran without acknowledging India’s historic links and need for Iranian oil. He also wanted it to condemn the military regime in neighbouring Myanmar, without even partially recognizing that India needed to have some form of bilateral relations to counter China’s growing role and to deal with cross-border problems. ‘If I can be frank, in international fora, India has often avoided these issues,’ said Obama. ‘But speaking up for those who cannot do so for themselves is not interfering in the affairs of other countries. It’s not violating the rights of sovereign nations. It’s staying true to our democratic principles. It’s giving
meaning to the human rights that we say are universal. And it sustains the progress that in Asia and around the world has helped turn dictatorships into democracies and ultimately increased our security in the world.’
The basic differences were paraded in Delhi two years later at a joint India-US dialogue run by FICCI, a business federation, and America’s Brookings Institution. Menon said that the two countries shared the same goals in the Middle East (West Asia) of stopping Iran gaining nuclear weapons and helping the development of a moderate and democratic Syria, but that they differed on the method. He teased the West about its interventions and regime-change tactics for seeming to ‘empower extremist, fundamentalist and even terrorist groups’.34 Brookings’ president Strobe Talbott countered this robustly, saying it ‘would be helpful if India would focus a little more on Iran’s dangerous side’, adding provocatively that the country ‘is in your neighbourhood’.
On Syria, Talbott said inaction had ‘its own consequences’ and that ‘letting that situation burn itself out or play itself out’ was not a good option. India had voted in favour of sanctions against Syria, but abstained from a vote at the United Nations General Assembly denouncing the government because the resolution was ultimately aiming at regime change, which India, opposes on principle.35 By the end of 2013 however, India was becoming more involved in international moves to find a peaceful Syrian solution. This may turn out to be one of the first signs that it is prepared to play a more active role in world affairs, while opposing intervention in other countries’ internal policies.
