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As the Narendra Modi government marks its hundred days shortly, its glaring shortcoming in foreign policy is an appalling deficiency of intellectual inputs in the making of that policy. Over decades, for better or worse, the edifice of India’s foreign policy under successive governments has come to be built around one individual: the seat of that individual has shifted from time to time between the Prime Minister’s Office and the ministry of external affairs. In recent years, the PMO has decisively influenced the framing of policy. Rare exceptions to this rule include J.N. Dixit, easily the most powerful of foreign secretaries in recent memory, who also had a vision of India’s place and role in the world even in shifting circumstances.
On the PMO side, Brajesh Mishra, the first national security adviser, who also held the potent post of principal secretary to the prime minister, was the last word on the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government’s diplomacy, often acting entirely on his own in many critical situations, knowing that at the end of the day Vajpayee would have backed him in retrospect.
Partly because the country’s diplomatic establishment has become used to such policy-making practices, the galling absence in Modi’s set-up of such an individual who can provide rational choices — and the rationale for those choices — to a prime minister who is new to international affairs is rapidly creating a vacuum in foreign affairs, where knee-jerking and missteps pass for diplomatic initiatives.
On the prime minister’s recent trip to Brazil for the summit of five emerging economies that hold the key to future world alliances, the official to whom the PMO, the MEA and the rest of the government is used to looking up to for diplomatic leadership slept for the entire duration of the long flight from Berlin to Fortaleza except when he was woken up for meals by the ever-charming stewardesses of Air India One, the special aircraft that ferried Modi.
The usual quota of 34 journalists no longer being on the prime minister’s special aircraft does not mean that New Delhi’s grapevine does not get minute accounts of what transpires on the VVIP flight. The national capital is such an incestuous city for its power elite that it is simply not possible to bottle up what takes place on board the Indian equivalent of the United States of America’s Air Force One, the presidential aircraft, or for that matter, at 7 Race Course Road, Modi’s home office.
Traditionally, the flight that carries the prime minister on his or her trips abroad is a beehive of activity: intellectual, diplomatic, perceptive, oratorical — and never short on libations, of course. Even at the nadir of Manmohan Singh’s prime ministership, Air India One was a tremendously exciting place, albeit for the wrong reasons. During Singh’s travel to Brasilia for the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa summit, similar to Modi’s first big multilateral trip, excitement on board the VVIP flight was hard to contain because the prime minister had to decide on his return home if Shashi Tharoor would be asked to resign as minister of state for external affairs over the cricket Indian Premier League controversy. On a visit by Singh to the US, during the second term of the United Progressive Alliance, the excitement on the flight was over a note by the finance ministry, then under Pranab Mukherjee, which allegedly alluded to the culpability of the home minister, P. Chidambaram, in 2G allocations.
According to multiple accounts, Modi’s flight to Brazil for the BRICS summit was remarkable for the paucity of people on board who normally trigger insightful conversations or bring up out-of-the-box ideas on such occasions. One official on the plane joked that subsequent developments on Pakistan proved that Rip Van Winkle is not a fictional character for the new government.
A veteran diplomat who is a walking encyclopedia on Pakistan and worked for many years with P.V. Narasimha Rao and Dixit — not one of those who offer self-serving prescriptions to India-Pakistan problems night after night on English television channels — drew this scenario for me last week as we discussed the cancellation of foreign-secretary-level talks.
“No, Mani, I have to go there next month,” Rao would have told his foreign secretary, Dixit, at an inter-agency meeting called to discuss the subject of Pakistan threadbare. (“Mani” was the name by which Dixit was addressed by those who had a special equation with him; “there”, in Rao’s observation, meant Washington for a summit meeting at the White House.) Rao would have continued if Dixit was in favour of cancelling a resumed dialogue with Islamabad — which he would not have been, going by his record as foreign secretary and earlier as an extremely effective high commissioner to Pakistan. “I do not want to sit there and listen to advice on the need to avoid a nuclear war in South Asia. I want to discuss our relations with America, how to improve them. I do not want this opportunity to be wasted by time-consuming discussions on India-Pakistan problems.” (India was not a declared nuclear power in Rao’s time but the Americans knew that both the South Asian adversaries were within a hair’s breadth of testing the bomb even then, and every American visitor to New Delhi used to proffer unsolicited advice on the need to avoid a nuclear holocaust.)
Rao would have advocated — and Dixit wholeheartedly agreed — that the talks must go on. “Never mind if there are no results, Mani. Let us get the international community off our backs on this. We should not be blamed for not talking.” Vajpayee followed every step in Rao’s footsteps when he was at 7 Race Course Road.
A scenario such as this is unlikely to be played out in Modi’s set-up today because there is no one in his establishment who has the intellectual prowess to correlate intricate international developments to India’s diplomatic footwork and offer innovative advice to the new prime minister. And next month at the White House, there will be an opportunity cost for Modi for this serious lacuna. The foreign secretary has too much on her plate already. In any case, she is doing a commendable job of putting the house in order in South Block, which is long overdue to the point where the MEA would have become completely dysfunctional if she had not attempted some highly praiseworthy internal changes.
The world is changing by the day, and so far the response within Modi’s inner circle has been that of the proverbial ostrich. To be fair, despite such a handicap, the prime minister, who is new to Delhi diplomacy, is doing a commendable job. Read what he told Vladimir Putin in Fortaleza. The tragedy is that we have to read it on Russian official websites. The PMO version of the Modi-Putin meeting put out by our Press Information Bureau is fit to be cited in an English class to explain the meaning of ‘pathetic’. But it is clear from the Russian transcript that Modi spoke to Putin from his heart, without the benefit of any worthwhile talking points or even a substantive briefing by his closest aides.
“Mr President, thank you for calling me to congratulate me after our party won the election.” That is how Modi began his conversation with Putin. We know now, thanks to Russian openness despite a PMO that put the lid on Modi’s spontaneity. “I visited Moscow when I was chief minister of Gujarat. We also organised relations between Astrakhan and Gujarat... I later visited Russia again and on that occasion went to Astrakhan once more. We in Gujarat have the feeling that Astrakhan is very close to us…” What is clear is that these words did not come out of any conventional briefing he got — rather, they came from the lack of it. Here is a head of government who is holding himself up quite well despite the absence of worthwhile support from his office. No prime minister should have to put up with that a hundred days after being sworn in.
