The Indian foreign service has become the envy of the world: for the wrong reason. From Australia to Argentina, from Moscow to the backyard island capital of Male, diplomats are beginning to harbour a secret wish to be in the IFS. The reason: you can get away with anything in this elite service provided you know what you want and have the right strings to pull in New Delhi. Not since Rajiv Gandhi arrogated to himself the effrontery to dismiss the foreign secretary, A.P. Venkateswaran, at a nationally televised press conference, has the IFS faced a crisis of confidence of the kind that it is facing now. Because a few members of the IFS are getting away with anything, in violation of both rules and standards of decency, morale among Indian diplomats is at an all-time low. To say that morale is non-existent in Indian chanceries across the world - not to speak of South Block - would be a more accurate description of Indian diplomacy today. The irony is that such a sorry state of affairs has come about at a time when India, under the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government, has notched up the most impressive foreign policy gains in the country's half-century-plus of independence. Worse, it has come under a dispensation in which the prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, has a long and distinguished record in handling external affairs. What is more, in Jaswant Singh, India has a foreign minister with whom his counterparts from Tokyo to Washington feel comfortable. Foreign leaders do not hesitate to admit that Singh is the first Indian foreign minister in a long, long time who can grasp or go beyond the brief prepared by his South Block aides and tell these leaders something that they would want to remember or act upon after a meeting. It would be logical to ask why anyone should, therefore, complain about morale in the IFS. The work that the diplomats are supposed to do is, after all, being done the way it should be done, the objectives of Indian diplomacy are being achieved: so nothing else should matter. Such an argument is fallacious if the situation in South Block is put in context. The BJP-led government assumed office with unprecedented goodwill among India's diplomatic personnel. This columnist cannot help recalling scenes in South Block in the days immediately after December 6, 1992. The P.V. Narasimha Rao government had summoned to New Delhi most of its key ambassadors from their stations, to be briefed on the Ayodhya demolition. A.N. Verma, then principal secretary to the prime minister, was to lend an ear to these ambassadors and brief them on what they should do in the capitals where they were stationed. But days passed, and aptly reflecting the confusion in the Rao government at that time, Verma had no idea of what to tell them. In the absence of any briefing, the envoys huddled in South Block in the rooms of their respective joint secretaries. Naturally, all the talk was about Ayodhya. Not many of them viewed the events of December 6 through the same prism as their former colleague, Mani Shankar Aiyar, notwithstanding the Congress culture which had been carefully nurtured in the IFS over four decades. Few of them thought India had crossed the Rubicon when the disputed structure at Ayodhya was demolished. Indeed, in discussions off the record, the opinion of the majority of Indian envoys present in South Block in those momentous days converged with those expressed by L.K. Advani. This is not to say that these civil servants were closet BJP men: it is doubtful if many of them would have voted for the BJP had not Vajpayee been the party's prime ministerial candidate. But they were pragmatists who wanted to put their best foot forward for India. When the BJP came to power in 1998 and exploded the nuclear bomb, the goodwill in the IFS for the new government turned into pride, in spite of the hostile challenge that Indian envoys faced abroad as a result of Pokhran II. Then came Kargil and Indian diplomats did a commendable job of not only making India's version of events heard, but also accepted in the most unlikely capitals of the world. If the line of control in Kashmir - which is merely a euphemism for the ceasefire line - is today accepted by all the leading members of the international community as sacrosanct, much of the credit for this goes to the IFS. What is it, then, that turned a situation tailor-made for success so sour and so suddenly? Why is it that rules in South Block are being flouted as never before, rendering administration virtually redundant? To start with, the government got carried away by the successes it has had with the Clinton administration in Washington and at the United Nations in New York. No doubt, the way the Vajpayee government turned around its nuclear policy both in Washington and in New York should go down in the history of diplomacy as a lesson for future generations of mandarins. And these twin-successes had a chain reaction in other capitals as far as the nuclear issue was concerned. But this success, it turns out, has been achieved at a great cost and South Block is now paying for it. The Vajpayee government paid so much attention to New York and Washington that it completely neglected the rest of the world. Notwithstanding the successful spin that the ministry of external affairs has given to its various foreign policy initiatives in the media, South Block's dealings with the world outside White House and the UN headquarters in the post Pokhran II phase has been sorely devoid of vision. A former prime minister, whose record in foreign policy is outstanding, recently compared his achievements to those of the BJP-led government in a conversation with this columnist. 'When I achieved something in external affairs', he said, 'I always underplayed that success. But this government, even when it has nothing to show, tom-toms everything as an unprecedented achievement'. This ex-prime minister reflected, with the wisdom of hindsight, that perhaps his policy was politically unwise, but he had no doubt at all that he was morally right and was acting in the best interests of the country. The gradual erosion of its vision after overcoming the Pokhran II challenge, indeed, the complete absence of policy deprived the IFS of the motivation and zeal with which India's diplomatic personnel had begun its engagement of the BJP's South Block. The turning point came when the Vajpayee government surrendered to terrorists in Kandahar: This surrender shattered the illusion in Indian chanceries across the world that the government led by the BJP was any different from its predecessors. The next and more recent turning point was the choice of the new foreign secretary. The political leadership had the opportunity to stem the rot and arrest the slide by bringing in as the head of the IFS someone who had the vision and the experience to restore morale among its diplomats and impart a sense of purpose to the functioning of South Block. Moreover, with a large number of retirements, the government had a rare chance to refashion the MEA in a new image. The opportunity to do the former was lost when Vajpayee and Singh gave in to political correctness and decided that discretion was the better part of valour in taking on a discontented section of the IFS. The latter effort became a non-starter when senior diplomats, reading the writing on the wall, resolved that they would not move to Delhi and be tainted by working under a foreign secretary, who is easily the most ill-equipped in the entire history of the IFS for the job. Even a cursory look at her curriculum vitae will show that there are joint secretary level officers in the MEA who have done more substantive work than the incoming foreign secretary. Who knows, now that the challenge of nuclearization is behind it, the government perhaps wants to reduce the MEA to a mere passport-issuing post. After all, the new foreign secretary's expertise has been in the passport office, the coordination division and the Kuwait compensation cell where she spent the bulk of her time in Delhi. If only the prime minister's office had taken the unconventional, but wise, step of talking to the staff at the Indian embassy in Dublin, where she is currently posted, it would not have succumbed to the temptation to be politically correct in making Chokila Iyer the head of IFS. Since her appointment was out of the blue, virtually every Indian mission has been tapping its counterpart in Dublin in recent weeks to find out what stuff the new foreign secretary is made of. The stories that have been told have caused unease in the IFS. If someone who cannot manage a small mission in Dublin can successfully run South Block and its 120-plus missions abroad for the next 13 months - not to mention the challenge of interacting with the rest of the Indian government and key foreign countries - it will be a miracle that deserves unalloyed praise.