Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century (51 page)

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.

As the
Times of India
’s Indrani Bagchi pointedly wrote:

MEA’s mandarins can be the smartest people alive, but it’s impossible to expect them to ruminate on policy [and take] strategic initiatives, all the while fighting fires every day, several times a day, pushing files, answering parliament questions, receiving dignitaries, assisting the PM during summits, and then greeting returning Indians evacuated from the latest disaster zone in the world at 2 am in the morning before reporting for work at 9 am. And to then work out where India’s global footprint should be a decade from now.

Another acute observer, David Malone, wrote that the MEA’s

headquarters staff work punishing hours, not least preparing the visits of the many foreign dignitaries laying siege to Delhi in ever growing numbers as India’s importance has expanded … India’s overburdened Foreign Service is, on average, of very high quality, but because it is stretched so thin, its staff spends too much of its time conducting India’s international relations through narrow diplomatic channels, managing ministerial and other visits, negotiating memoranda of understanding of no great significance, and by other means that reflect only a fraction of the rich reality of international relations today and of official Delhi’s actual international interests.

The problem has not escaped the attention of the professionals. In 2008, Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon moved a Cabinet note
proposing a doubling of his effective diplomatic strength. The government agreed to increase the cadre by 520 personnel (320 in the IFS category and 200 additional support staff), but the hierarchy-minded bureaucracy immediately stepped in to forestall any dramatic expansion which would have required, for instance, the infusion of external professional talent at all levels of the MEA by mid-career recruitment from the other services or even (perish the thought!) from the private sector. Instead of reaching beyond the government to people who could fill the gaps in the service—more French and Spanish speakers, for instance, or more professional journalists for public diplomacy positions—the implementation of the Cabinet decision was stretched out over ten years by simply increasing the annual intake into the IFS (including promotions from the clerical grades of the IFS ‘B’) by thirty-two a year. Even this has not materialized, since the MEA has not found thirty-two worthy candidates in each of the three years since the Cabinet approved Menon’s proposal. Lateral entrants have not been encouraged; a circular to the other government departments soliciting candidacies have turned up few whom the MEA is excited about. The chronic understaffing is therefore likely to continue for more than another decade.

The Indian diplomatic corps has long enjoyed a justified reputation as among the world’s best in individual talent and ability. It includes men and women of exceptional intellectual and personal distinction who have acquired formidable reputations in a variety of capitals. Indian diplomats over the years have won in print the admiration of Henry Kissinger, Strobe Talbott and other distinguished memoirists who have dealt with them professionally; several have distinguished themselves not only in India’s service but in international organizations and conferences. The critique developed in these pages is not in any way meant to reflect on any member of this capable and widely respected corps. It seeks instead to examine institutional failings which are evident despite the quality of the individuals who operate within them.

The IFS is recruited by competitive examinations held by the Union Public Service Commission across the country, followed by a personality test. The diplomatic corps is selected from the same examinations from which emerge the domestic services, like the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), the Indian Police Service, the Indian Revenue Service,
and so on. The examinations have always been firmly grounded in the generalist tradition, the only three compulsory subjects being an essay, general English and general knowledge. There are five additional papers, three out of twenty-four broad options (such as Indian history, chemistry, etc.) and two requiring slightly more advanced knowledge (British constitutional history was a popular example). The top cumulative scorers are invited to appear before an interview board which tested their knowledge, behaviour and presence of mind and the eventual selection sought to produce ‘bright young men (or women) of 21 to 24 years, who have the requisite intellectual ability, breadth of mind and mental discipline’ for diplomatic service. (The age limit has now been relaxed to twenty-eight.)

For decades the cream of the examination crop opted for the IFS: in the years after independence, when resources and foreign exchange scarcities made travel abroad a rare privilege, a job that took you abroad frequently was prized by the middle-class families whose sons (and sometimes daughters) took the civil service examinations. From the 1950s to the 1970s, it was customary for the foreign service to draw its entrants almost exclusively from the top ten finishers in the annual examinations. This has now changed dramatically. Not only has the far more powerful Indian Administrative Service supplanted the IFS as the service of choice, but even the more lucrative Indian Revenue Service—which places officers in the customs and tax administrations, where financial incentives are considerable—is preferred over the IFS by many applicants. As a result it is now common for the IFS to find itself selecting officers ranked below 250 in the examinations, something that had been unthinkable to the officers currently heading the MEA. (The decline in prestige of the foreign service has also been enabled by the relative ease of foreign travel, which has negated what used to be seen as the IFS’s principal perquisite, and the widespread perception that diplomats neither wield as much clout nor have as many opportunities to salt away a retirement nest-egg as their domestic counterparts.) The further complication of this problem is that several civil service aspirants are thrust unwillingly into the MEA while their real ambition is to serve elsewhere—a far cry from the glory days but one that does not produce a dedicated and proud foreign service.

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.