Indian Fossil Service

The foreign service may have some of the finest minds and cushiest jobs but as an institution, it has failed at making a mark globally.

The Ministry of External Affairs, New Delhi | Manisha Mondal / ThePrint

Which is the least modernised, globalised and reformed part of your Bharat Sarkar? Which is the most conservative and puritanical, most resistant to change, new ideas and thinking, most zealous—and also most successful—at protecting its turf, privileges and, even if that one word is such a giveaway, immunity?

Further, which is the one part of the mai-baap sarkar that has the least to speak of by way of achievement except status quo, sitting in policy trenches and bunkers which have grown deeper by the year. To their credit, you could say they’ve never given an inch. They haven’t taken one from anybody either.

The Ministry of External Affairs is also unique in achieving more or less nothing but making its living out of organising “highly successful” foreign visits for our prime ministers—actually more successful in putting the necessary spin on these “achievements” before and after these visits.

Take the prime minister’s latest visit to China. The spin, as we have seen on all our front pages, has been that while India has done nothing new other than “reiterating” its old line on the Tibetan Autonomous region being a part of Chinese territory, China has made a huge concession in accepting “de facto” India’s ownership over Sikkim. Now we have known all along how smart, intellectually-superior and strategically all-conquering our own foreign service has always been.

The state of our relationship with each one of our neighbours and our exalted position on the world stage speaks so eloquently for that. What we did not realise meanwhile was how stupid the Chinese are. A couple of whiffs from our mandarin’s cigar, a nudge from his Oxbridge turn-of-phrase and a reminder of India’s moral and cultural superiority is all it took for them to realise the historical folly of questioning Sikkim’s accession to India and to understand the perils of their continuing cartographic indiscretions. What they did not tell any of us, and least of all to the fellow-travellers of the MEA press corps, is the fact that the idea of opening trade along the Sikkim border was floated by the Chinese as far back as in 1997 and it was our foreign policy establishment that had been stalling it on grounds of security one day, and on the argument that India should settle for nothing short of a formal Chinese acceptance of Sikkim’s accession and not indulge in “sophistry” on the other. Now, with pressure from the political leadership, particularly the prime minister, mounting to show some movement, they have delivered this lemon and want us to believe it is such a great achievement of Indian diplomacy.

Let me, at this point, make two perilous (for me, probably) propositions. One, that foreign policy is one area where our much-maligned political class has been a lot more progressive and flexible than the professional policy-makers. Two, that of all wings of the government, including the defence forces, the one to have traditionally got the friendliest press is the Ministry of External Affairs. I may be wrong and if I get any responses questioning these statements I will be more than happy to publish them. But let me elaborate on these two.

The major policy initiatives—or shifts—of the past decade or so have all come from very determined political leaders who, in each case, have had to defy not just cynicism and bureaucratic stalling but also sabotage. Narasimha Rao was almost done in by his Moscow mission, then loaded with Leninists, into taking a suicidal “this is a lesson for reformers in a hurry” line the day Gorbachev was removed in a coup. Our mission in Moscow was jubilating, presuming that the communists had struck back and the old glory days of the revolution would be back again. But editorials on Rao’s grand statement had not even been written when politics radically more reformist than Gorbachev’s was taking over Moscow and pulling down the statues of revolutionary leaders. Rao had the intellect—and determination—to recover and to also succeed in pushing a more affirmative policy towards the US and opening up to Israel. But when he writes his real memoirs he will tell you how much stalling, how much resistance, he faced from the same foreign service that now wallows in the glory of the new equation with the US, the growing relationship with Israel.

Gujral was the next one to dare to be different. He tried to open out to Pakistan but it was then open knowledge in South Block how his initiatives were being sabotaged, to the extent of senior officials not merely leaking information with damaging spin to the media but also reaching out to leaders of the BJP, which was then poised for power, to prevent the “sellout”. Even when he became prime minister, his policy of reaching out to the other neighbours, or the so-called Gujral Doctrine, was openly sneered at and sabotaged.

That Jaswant Singh was able to succeed with his Washington initiative is more a tribute to his own intellect, conviction and persistence than any evidence of winds of change blowing in South Block. The foreign policy establishment’s more ossified worldview became evident even much afterwards in the line on Iraq that so hopelessly confused not just us lesser mortals but even their own minister. How tardily they have moved after the prime minister’s Srinagar initiative now is only one more example of how it is the professional policy-makers that are incapable of keeping pace with our fuddy-duddy politicians than what conventional wisdom would suggest.

There are two reasons why the foreign service is able to keep the media so captive and friendly. First, is the general lack of intellect and enterprise on the part of the journalists who are most disinclined to do any basic research, even cull the wisdom routinely available in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs or in the writings of a Fareed Zakaria or Thomas Friedman. Their keyhole view of the big, wide world comes from that unique institution called the “briefing”. Usually it consists of some silly questions dismissed and even sillier answers at the spokesman’s office, but the more enterprising (or the friendlier) ones may be accorded the privilege of a briefing by the relevant desk. How persuasive these desk officers must be is evident from how easily almost the entire media swallows the line thrown by them. If only our diplomats’ foreign counterparts were to find them just as persuasive. Or, rather, if only they were to be as gullible as us Indian journalists.

As a patriotic Indian, therefore, my heart should fill with outrage and anger—with the rest of the world—when I read the words of my foreign secretary spoken at the venerable IFRI, the French foreign policy institution (www.indiaconsulate.org.br). He said, in so suitably wounded a tone: “India is a country wounded by terrorism. Virtually all our neighbours, by choice or default, by acts of omission or commission, compulsions of geography or the terrain, have been involved in receiving, sheltering, overlooking or tolerating terrorist activities from their soil directed against India.” Then he goes on to explain how not just Pakistan and Bangladesh but even Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan are harbouring terrorists striking at India. We have to be a unique nation that wants a UN security council seat as a matter of right given our size, stature and moral authority but would probably tomorrow ask George Bush to lean on the King of Bhutan to stop cross-border terrorism against us.

The foreign service does have some very fine minds. Individually, so many Indian diplomats rank among the best in the world. Individually, they also have bright ideas, a sense of where the world is headed and how and where India should get on to this train of change. But, institutionally, the ministry is not merely caught in a time-warp, it has also built this formidable immune system that strikes out the moment it is infected with change. At a time when the rest of the world is dismantling border checkpoints, when there is more to-and-froing from academia to diplomacy than ever, our establishment is unique in curtailing even its own members’ participation in international seminars for fear of contamination. It has resisted approaches from foreign services of other countries (notably Britain) to routinely send officers on exchanges even while the defence forces continue sending officers to each other’s institutions. At a time when international trade and diplomacy are converging, our services are still fighting over who should represent us at the WTO.

The MEA is also unique in running such a huge bureaucracy not merely overseas but all over the country in the form of the regional passport offices, a job that is best left to the Home Ministry. If you want to see the difference between its institutional commitment to the nation’s image and their own privileges and perks, visit any Indian mission overseas and see for yourself the difference in the way the chancery and the ambassador’s residence are maintained. If you want further evidence of the same self-serving hypocrisy see the way so many retiring foreign secretaries discover so many new ideas of change, join political parties, control the opinion industry on our editorial pages and lecture us on everything we should be doing that they didn’t do when they were in service. And it’s done so artfully, your heart goes out to the poor fellows of the IAS, especially the ones slogging away in their districts nervously looking over their shoulders for their next shunt-out order.

The article was first published in June 2003.