Can you imagine that on a metro ride in Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai or Chennai, you might be sitting next to an overseas student who would one day turn out to be a head of government? If it comes to pass, the student’s experiences in India may well turn out to be significant for his or her country’s foreign relations someday.
My countless rides on Delhi University’s special buses came flooding into memory last week as I read of the visit by Sri Lankan Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya to her alma mater, Hindu College, where she recalled her days at the institution. Amarasuriya was a sociology student admitted in 1991 on an Indian government scholarship, as her own country was ravaged by violence and strikes. Her recollections included teachers who encouraged her to think critically.
Sushila Karki, who was named Nepal’s first woman prime minister this year as head of an interim government after having served as the chief justice of her country, received a master’s degree in political science from Banaras Hindu University in 1975. The university was also the place where she met her future husband, Durga Prasad Subedi.
Amarasuriya and Karki are no oddball exceptions, though it might seem so to Indians who have grown up reading about their own leaders having been educated in the West. Jawaharlal Nehru and Manmohan Singh went to Cambridge in the UK, and Mahatma Gandhi to University College London, while Sardar Patel studied law at London’s Middle Temple. Bhimrao Ambedkar received a doctorate in economics from Columbia University in the US and another from the London School of Economics.
Even leaders associated with rugged socialism were adorned with Western degrees. Jayaprakash Narayan hopped through Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, and California’s Berkeley as a university student. Ram Manohar Lohia held a PhD from Berlin’s Humboldt University before turning into a pioneering ideologue for India’s backward castes.
While colonialism made many of India’s aspiring young men and women look to the West in those days, things changed after independence, when India emerged as an affordable, often inviting, education hub for those who could sense in the country the prospects of a reverse swing from the colonial era.
Like Amarasuriya, Myanmarese opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi made headlines when she visited her alma mater, Delhi’s Lady Shri Ram College, in 2012—48 years after her graduation. She credited the college for building her self-confidence as she described herself as “partly a citizen of India”.
Hamid Karzai visited Shimla in 2006 as president of Afghanistan, 23 years after he took a master’s degree in political science from Himachal Pradesh University. He had arrived as an exchange student in 1979, the very year that Soviet forces entered his country, and learnt English from the young women of a family he was staying with. The university awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2003, shortly before he became president.
The list of India-educated leaders is long but often goes unnoticed. Two former Nepali prime ministers, Girija Prasad Koirala and Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala, also studied at BHU like Karki, while Baburam Bhattarai studied architecture in Delhi.
The current prime minister of the Pacific island nation of Fiji, Sitiveni Rabuka, controversial as an instigator of two coups but now a democratically elected coalition leader, graduated from the picturesque Defence Services Staff College at Wellington in Tamil Nadu’s Ooty Hills. Though he acquired some notoriety for his stance against ethnic Indians in the multi-cultural nation, Rabuka, a much-decorated soldier who rose to be a major general in Fiji’s army, also received a master’s degree in science from the University of Madras in 1979.
Being educated in India is, of course, not a guarantee that a foreign leader is a friend of India or a democrat. Pakistan’s military dictator Gen Zia-ul-Haq, studied at Delhi’s St Stephen’s College, while Field Marshal Ayub Khan and former PM Liaquat Ali Khan studied at Aligarh Muslim University—though all that was in colonial India.
Bhutan’s King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck studied at the National Defence College in New Delhi, while Olusegun Obasanjo, who served as Nigeria’s president from 1999 to 2007, is also a Wellington DSSC product like Rabuka.
I only recently learnt that my own claim to reflect alumnus glory rests with Bingu Wa Mutharika, former president of Africa’s Malawi, who studied at Delhi’s Shri Ram College of Commerce and later at the Delhi School of Economics.
What is abundantly clear to me is that India’s role as an education centre is somewhat overwhelmed by Western institutions, even though there are plenty of MBAs and IITians from India leading global companies. Our universities and colleges also serve as instruments of soft power alongside fusion jazz and Bollywood movies, as we can see in the case of Karzai and Amarasuriya, who arrived in India as part of what one might call education diplomacy.
Apart from state-run universities, India’s new private universities are also attracting foreign students, aided by memorandums of understanding with overseas educational institutions.
All that should not surprise us. After all, Nalanda and Takshashila were renowned centres of higher learning in ancient India. Given the UGC’s recent policy for collaboration and twin degrees with foreign universities, we may well expect more foreign students in India—and maybe some nostalgia mixed with diplomacy.
Madhavan Narayanan | REVERSE SWING | Senior journalist
(Views are personal)
(On X @madversity)
