Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century (55 page)

‘Much is written, even more spoken, every day about India’s foreign policy,’ commented a former diplomat towards the close of Mrs Gandhi’s reign. ‘In Delhi, in particular, especially after the establishment of Jawaharlal Nehru University, dons, area specialists and others wax eloquent on it. They participate in public seminars, give radio and television talks and interviews and publish articles. Their zeal for educating the public and drawing attention to themselves is astonishing.’ Even more astonishing, perhaps, was the barrenness of that activity, its seeming unrelatedness to the empirical realities of Indian foreign policy making and its virtual inability to make the slightest dent in the armour of the establishment, of which it was a major component. Every one of a wide variety of Mrs Gandhi’s top aides and a number of senior MEA officials interviewed by this author in 1977 testified to their disregard of the self-appointed elite public on foreign policy; the only intellectuals who made any impression on foreign policy were those who went beyond
co-optation and actually joined the decision-makers. It is hard to argue that things are that different in 2012.

‘I have no doubt,’ Mrs Gandhi acknowledged early in her rule, ‘that our present administrative system uses the expert inadequately and indifferently.’ As it proved, there was little she could do about it; the anti-intellectualism of the entrenched bureaucracy was too intractable. The concept of the non-governmental expert as a legitimate addition to established channels of policy was not a popular one among either politicians or bureaucrats. Nor did it find much support in India’s sociocultural evolution.

Indian intellectuals are heirs to one of the most elitist intellectual traditions of the world. The post-Vedic Brahmins sought exclusive intellectual distinction in principle, and the caste system confirmed their elitism in practice. Increasingly, however, that elitism became a hallmark of all Indian intellectualism. The search for knowledge, and in turn the entire realm of ideas, was detached from the everyday concerns of the rest of society. Over the years—from the earliest simple divisions between the (priestly and scholarly) Brahmins and the (martial and kingly) Kshatriyas, to the gulf that separates the twentieth-century academic from the politician—intellectuals abandoned worldly affairs to those qualified to act rather than to analyse. In modern India they remained aloof from the quotidian concerns of governmental policy, but this distance no longer bespoke Brahminical superiority. Instead intellectuals were a deprived breed, shorn of that which made their elitist forebears respected: influence over the wielders of power. An increasingly populist politics and a career bureaucracy took over the symbols of state authority. In the new formulation, those who could did; those who could not theorized.

The value preference of middle-class India inevitably reflected these norms. ‘Society’ had come to accord more respect to the lowliest IAS/IFS trainee than it did the most qualified academic or savant. (The rates in the country’s unofficial but pervasive dowry market could confirm this empirically.) Intellectuals, therefore, formed a segment of the educated class from which sprang the country’s rulers, but they did not constitute (in Mosca’s sense) members of the ‘ruling class’. This, many intellectuals came to regret. In independent India they sat
in judgement all too frequently on those whose seats they would gladly have occupied, if they could. Far from constituting a jury of peers in a people’s court on governmental performance, intellectuals are—as the subjects of their prescriptions realized—by and large passing verdicts on their betters. Sentenced to a lower social status, his livelihood subsidized by government grants, the Indian intellectual is a poor relative of the Indian bureaucrat, and he knows it.

The result is, as the sociologist Edward Shils noted, that government officials ‘do not learn to benefit from criticism emanating from the universities; instead, they maintain a secretiveness and touchiness which is injurious to efficiency in economic life and to political democracy’. K. Subrahmanyam, who, as a government official appointed to head the scholarly Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, operated in the twilight zone between bureaucracy and academics, found to his dismay that even government-sponsored academic institutions were disregarded by the MEA in policy formulation. Subrahmanyam attributed this to the MEA’s insecurity about its own competence, and fear that ministers would soon bypass officialdom altogether. Whatever the reason, academics received short shrift in the MEA. A plan briefly mooted by then foreign minister Dinesh Singh to attach a consultative committee of a dozen scholars to the MEA was quickly shot down. One academic on the list suspected that Congress MPs had intervened, but this author learned that it was the then MEA Secretaries who had rebelled against the idea. The extent of interaction between the two communities was restricted to the occasional informal seminar or the even less frequent sabbatical at Jawaharlal Nehru University. For a variety of reasons, there was no direct academic input.

Policy planners and MEA diplomatists are privately scathing in their contempt for intellectuals. Academicians, the bureaucrats argue, were inadequately informed about contemporary problems, and had no idea of empirical reality or the mechanics of policy implementation; their involvement in policy-making would only introduce impracticalities and impair stability and continuity. Devoid of an independent socioeconomic base, unable (unlike journalists) to express their views in influential publications on a regular basis, and often anxious to please the government of the day, India’s intellectuals are not seen by policy-
makers as a respectable community of minds but as irrelevances not worth treating seriously. The occasional conscientious MEA official reads scholarly journals and attends seminars at the Indian Council of World Affairs, subject to the limitations of time and his convenience. But the techniques by which the MEA keeps abreast of non-official opinion are few and far from searching, and the foreign policy bureaucracy remains insulated from most advances in thought outside the ministry.

To a great extent, however, the failure of the Indian intellectual goes beyond the imperviousness of officialdom. Standards, rarely high, have been further diluted under populist pressures for the expansion of higher education. In the upper reaches of academe, style rather than substance tends to prevail—when the Indian intellectual is not seduced by plausible theories, since ideology in Indian academia proves too often a facile substitute for original thought. There is a congenital lack of empiricism in most academic critiques; the tyranny of hypothesis and the absence of a discipline of facts abound in most intellectuals’ views of government policies. These traits particularly manifested themselves in foreign policy critiques. ‘With a very few exceptions,’ one commentator noted, ‘the Indian intellectual has been incompetent when he has not been unctuous, and afraid of embarking on a rational inquiry when he has not been afraid of the establishment.’ Since independence ‘there has not appeared a single significant work by an Indian writer discussing these fundamentals [national interests, options, means] with any depth or originality … To expect a good essay on the theoretical aspects of foreign policy is to expect the impossible.’ Accordingly, an ‘air of unreality’ prevailed in most analysis of foreign affairs, which suffered from what former US secretary of state Dean Acheson had termed ‘the clichés, the moralism, the emotionalism, the bad history, faulty analysis and just plain ignorance’ of much American foreign policy criticism in the post–Second World War years.

The Indian intellectual’s lack of interest in developing specialized knowledge in foreign policy led to an undue focus on marginalia, rather than on the conceptual basis of foreign policy. Foreign policy seminars tend, as one analyst put it, ‘to make major comments on external political issues, rather than to come to grips with India’s policies towards these issues’. The study of international affairs also lacks a solid academic
infrastructure in the universities. Frequently conformism emerges, possibly because it was natural for the intelligentsia of a newly emergent nation to identify itself with that nation’s posture in world affairs, though this is fortunately waning six and a half decades after independence. This attitude extended even to attempts to acquire specialization. Till the 1990s, the Soviet studies programmes at Jawaharlal Nehru University and similar institutions were more concerned with promoting Indo-Soviet friendship than with disinterested academics. It was, therefore, not very surprising that officialdom preferred to disregard intellectuals as lacking in critical integrity. Their anxiety not to offend the government only invited the scorn of those they wished to please.

These inherent weaknesses—lack of social approbation, resistance from the entrenched foreign policy bureaucracy, low standards of achievement and willingness to conform—were exacerbated by the guilt that Edward Shils had traced long ago: ‘The Indian intellectual charges himself, and even more bitterly and frequently his fellow-intellectuals, with being “out of touch with the people”.’ While Shils saw this largely as an imaginary problem, it was a very real one for the intellectual elite. By their very acquisition of the attributes of intellectualism, they lost the direct mass contact that alone would have enabled them to influence either rulers or ruled. For many, their status as intellectuals symbolized privilege, and made them acutely conscious of (as well as vulnerable to attack because of) their distance from the concerns of the masses. In some cases, reflexive guilt drove them to mortgage themselves to the most visible self-proclaimed representatives of the masses—the political leaders. As a result the ‘elite public opinion’ represented by Indian intellectuals was neither well informed nor effective. Opinion bore little relation to analyses of reality, and even less to prospects for action. While opinion was expressed, it was usually without expectation that policy change would result from it. Ambassadors learned quickly that urgent and passionate discussions of policy were commonplace while action to change policy was rare. Discussion is an ‘art form’ in India, an egocentric ritual of simulated conviction or, at best, a second-hand expression of conscience. Its vitality is attenuated by its own irrelevance.

The only departure from this norm is when intellectuals turned to the daily newspapers, the proliferation of media outlets offering them
multiple avenues for the expression of opinion. But despite exceptions, these had at best a limited impact on both the public and the MEA. Outside the academic community and some sections of the press, there is little interest or competence in foreign policy analysis. This is not true of the final category of intellectual who writes on foreign policy, the retired diplomat, though too many evade responsibility for conceptual soul-searching by devoting themselves to repetitive reminiscences, such as K.P.S. Menon’s syndicated variations in the 1960s and 1970s on the theme of Indo-Soviet friendship. In more recent times, former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal has become a prolific commentator on foreign policy issues from a distinctly hard-nosed realpolitik perspective. But with honourable exceptions like Salman Haidar and T.P. Sreenivasan, there has been little attempt to put practical experience in the field, so lacking in other intellectuals, at the service of institutional re-examination.

There are also limitations on the Indian intellectual that run deep in the political ethos. There are few Indian equivalents of the contextual documents and white papers issued by the British or Australian Parliaments (and earlier by Nehru). As for the annual report of the MEA, an inscrutable collection of banalities and itineraries, one critic bitingly observed that ‘the only explanation for this consistently dull, drab and un-illuminating document is the assumption at the political level that the conduct of foreign policy is an esoteric subject best known to its practitioners’.

The problem of insufficient quality in public discourse about foreign policy is further augmented by an increasing resort to direct censorship of such material as is available. Publications from Taiwan, for instance, ‘which contain statements on political issues relating to international affairs which are likely to prejudicially affect friendly relations [with China!]’ were once forbidden, though mercifully no longer so; while, paradoxically, the Indian Council of World Affairs was once obliged to withdraw a book from the press because it contained banned Chinese editorials. As an editorialist in the
Statesman
protested at the time:

Censorship action under the Sea Customs Act is merely frustrating to the occasional scholar, who wants to know what attitudes others are taking, without affording any significant protection to the public.
Many foreign books on Indo-Pakistan relations, for instance, now have the maps removed before export …. This helps nobody here while foreigners continue to see erroneous matter which Indians cannot prevent them from reading and are, by deprivation, less well-equipped to refute.

Such restrictions on unpopular foreign opinions also impinge on the Indian citizens’ right to hold the same views. But even that right has been abridged by far-reaching legislation. Freedom of expression under Article 19 of the Indian Constitution, already modified to include ‘reasonable restrictions’ to protect national security, was amended further by Mrs Indira Gandhi’s government to proscribe material that impinged on ‘national sovereignty’. In 1967, an Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act was passed to penalize any action by an individual or association ‘(i) which is intended, or supports any claim, to bring about on any ground whatsoever, the cession of a part of the territory of India from the Union or which incites any individual or group of individuals to bring about such cession or secession; (ii) which disclaims, questions, disrupts or is intended to disrupt the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India’. As the then home minster explained to Parliament, ‘If someone says that Government should settle the dispute with China or Pakistan peacefully, it would be a legitimate thing. But if it is said that India should give away territory to China or Pakistan to purchase peace it would certainly become unlawful.’ Apart from rendering one part of the Swatantra Party’s foreign policy platform illegal and depriving Indian intellectuals, policy advocates and columnists of a legitimate option for discussion, the act in effect denied the public the right to advocate what has since become India’s de facto position, freezing the status quo on the northern borders.