As Prime Minister Narendra Modi approaches a decade of his stewardship of India’s foreign policy, a fundamental achievement has been that the purpose for which Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) was created in 1948 has been restored to this institution.
The ministry was born again in Modi’s second term after he brought in diplomat-turned-politician S Jaishankar as external affairs minister. Sushma Swaraj, Modi’s choice for the top political job at the MEA in his first prime ministerial term, had reduced her ministry into a high-velocity consular agency. She had no time or inclination for regular diplomacy, which had to be conducted by and large from the Prime Minister’s Office.
After the populist Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs was merged with the MEA in 2016, Swaraj chose to be the go-to person for non-resident Indians (NRIs). She was nowhere nearly as enthusiastic in engaging her counterparts from foreign countries for any serious diplomacy. This job was left mainly to successive foreign secretaries and the three other MEA secretaries. The problem was that under-secretaries and deputy secretaries in South Block, the MEA headquarters, were overwhelmed by chasing the passport applications of NRIs or overseas citizen of India cards for persons of Indian origin (PIOs) with the home ministry.
They had to commiserate NRI deaths, arrange the repatriation home of dead bodies and send status reports to the minister’s office. South Block’s draft policy papers originate with these junior officials and are later fleshed out and refined as they go up the official ladder to one of the MEA secretaries. But under-secretaries and deputy secretaries no longer had time for such work.
The situation was no different abroad. The head of one of India’s largest diplomatic posts in the Western hemisphere told me in 2018 that “we have become the biggest service delivery organisation in the world”. The “we” in question was the MEA and “delivery” referred to passports, attestations, renunciation certificates and other sundry consular documents. Bright young men and women who joined the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) as probationers feared that their hopes of learning any diplomatic work were going up in smoke.
What has Jaishankar changed? The genuine demands of NRIs and PIOs are still being met sans fanfare, but they are not the incumbent minister’s main constituency. Passport and emigration services are leaner, more efficient, less ridden with corruption and more accessible with a profusion of Passport Seva Kendras. Indian embassies, especially in the Gulf, are going to Indians by holding ‘open houses’ in remote places instead of blue-collar workers having to travel to the missions or their outsourced agencies. Evacuations from troubled spots such as East Europe and West Asia are taking place in an orderly manner. But they are no longer publicity-hounding causes célebres like in the 2014-19 period. There is now a balance between consular work and broader diplomacy in South Block and in Indian missions and posts abroad.
If Jaishankar returns as foreign minister in the event of Modi’s victory in the next Lok Sabha elections, he has his next mission cut out for him. Which is to distance the MEA’s work from ruling party apparatchiks, who are doing much damage—often unseen—to Indian foreign policy. In this task, he can take a leaf out of Brajesh Mishra’s book during the six years when Mishra was Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s principal secretary to the prime minister and India’s first national security adviser during a part of Vajpayee’s tenure. Mishra completely ignored the BJP’s foreign policy cell and kept its convenor, a retired IFS officer, at arm’s length. At one point, Mishra persuaded Vajpayee to send this convenor as lieutenant-governor to a city that is the farthest away from New Delhi. Present day ruling-party apparatchiks who want to meddle in foreign policy write for the media, but their writings are mostly cut-and-paste jobs from what has already been written by genuine experts.
A more dangerous tendency is to convey their pretended wisdom in private to foreign ambassadors in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi’s diplomatic enclave. They also relay their pretensions to influencers, some of whom receive such wisdom even though it may not have even a grain of truth. What happened after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel is an example. For full five days, the MEA was totally silent on the flare-up in West Asia. Then the South Block spokesperson gave his considered official reaction at his weekly briefing. During this period, when the government was fine-tuning its policy and taking every aspect of a developing situation into consideration, ruling party apparatchiks told editors and columnists—including this writer—that the MEA had issued a formal statement in support of Israel and against Palestinians.
Some editors who do not go through everything that comes out of South Block with a fine toothcomb believed them, because these people belonged to the BJP at a senior level. After the MEA reiterated on record India’s consistent and long-held stand on Israel and Palestine, at least one apparatchik had the humility to apologise to some editors. But by then, considerable damage had been done. The Jewish lobby in the US made the most of this anomalous situation, which was to their advantage.
Diplomacy will be ineffective when it is conducted through newspaper columns and television screens. This week’s developments in the Maldives point to the need for such discretion. Till the time of writing, the MEA has not said a word about them, although it may change as the situation evolves. When that happens, it will likely be a mere reiteration of what has happened in bilateral interactions with Malé, not any acrimonious defence of the prime minister, who does not need some of his self-styled friends rushing in with proclamations of support. Proportion is also important. Malé is not Washington or Beijing. Jaishankar, who has lived in both capitals, knows this as a trained diplomat who is not a party apparatchik.
(Views are personal)
K P Nayar, Strategic analyst