Diplomat's insights

This work on Indian foreign policy is built on solid research and calm reflection with a unique sweep and insights that only a diplomat can provide.

DAVID M. MALONE belongs to an aristocracy of intellect some of whose members came to reside in New Delhi as envoys of their respective countries; men like Count Stanislas Ostrorog of France, Alva Myrdal of Sweden, John Kenneth Galbraith of the United States, Octavia Paz of Mexico and Escott Reid of Canada. David Malone's work reminds one of Reid's books Envoy to Nehru and Hungary and Suez. His book is a product of solid research and calm reflection. He had met very many Indian diplomats, especially when he was at the Centre on International Cooperation at New York University. As Canada's High Commissioner to India (2006-2008), he interacted with an amazingly wide range of Indian academics, diplomats and writers. Diligent research followed after retirement. This book has flashes of insights that only one who has served as a diplomat in India and is himself cerebral can provide. He is currently president of Canada's International Development Research Centre.

The book is dedicated to his Indian friends. He writes: Regular contact with strong and curious students is a wonderful way of having one's certainties challenged. Wherever I had gone in recent years, I had either been associated with or taught at local universities, as I did in New York at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs while serving as an ambassador at the United Nations. And, naively, I had hoped to do likewise in Delhi. Reaching that great city, I thought of India's leading graduate teaching and research institution, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). But I was rebuffed, very politely. The relevant Dean there explained to me that several faculty members feared my bias', perhaps being comfortable only with their own. It was the JNU's loss.

This is a belated review; for the reviewer hesitated long on whether or not to write one. David M. Malone is a good friend; a generous mention of the writer in his book was an added inhibition. Disclosure of interest apart, what impels one to review this book is its unique sweep history, economics, domestic politics and diplomacy detachment charged with empathy and rich insights. Sample this. As a university student, he travelled to Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and both parts of Kashmir. I have visited no place outside Iran closer in atmosphere, style, and inclination to Persian manners, customs, and outlook than the Kashmir valley, and I loved it on contact, as I still do. How many Indians have noticed those affinities, pronounced as they are? In May 1970, while on a visit to Srinagar, the editor of a leading periodical exclaimed to the reviewer: This place is a part of Central Asia!

The compass of his book is best set out in his own words. The scope of the topic is vast and daunting. This may explain the few scholarly attempts at surveying Indian foreign policy of late. Most authors, even memoirists, tackle one or a few of the themes of Indian foreign policy of interest to them, often ones that were particularly salient during the period covered. Picking just a few angles is, in many ways, easier than attempting to order the features of Indian foreign policy as a whole. The latter allows for the inclusion of many issues and relationships but requires the exclusion of others, a painful business, particularly for an author having delved into more than can be conveyed in a book of reasonable length.

Inevitably, this volume slights a number of India's partners, in an attempt to avoid the deadening effect that a cataloguing of bilateral relationships or Indian involvement in a myriad of multilateral institutions would produce. Hence, the following chapters, in both what they include and exclude or touch upon only tangentially (for example, my own country Canada), represent a debatable set of choices of the countries, forums, and diplomatic processes that have mattered the most to post-independence India, do so today, or are likely to emerge as dominant in the near future. Accordingly, India's relations with Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole are not discussed at length (in spite of strong Diaspora links with the Commonwealth Caribbean and increasingly meaningful economic links with Brazil, Mexico and Chile). Likewise, India's relations with much of Africa, long seen through the prism of Indian trading communities spread around the continent, particularly along its shores, are addressed mainly through the prism of India's growing anxiety about its access to the natural resources for which its economy will increasingly hunger. While the pages of this volume develop only a few major themes, each chapter ends with some conclusions deriving from its earlier paragraphs, a drafting device more helpful perhaps to the author than to the reader. Self-deprecating humour is an engaging trait.

India has produced writers, artists, economists, scientists, historians, administrators and diplomats of world class. It has not produced a single scholar on the Cold War. The contest is always viewed through the prism of India's foreign policy and its own national interests; perceived narrowly, almost always. Not surprisingly, there is little interest in the works of the great masters who wrote on the very fundamentals of international politics Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, E.H. Carr, George Kennan, Louis Halle and Walter Lippmann. Little notice is taken of the writings of John J. Mearsheimer. This Indian self-absorption (narcissism?) accounts for touchiness; elation at praise and deep resentment at criticism, of a piece with this is a consistent refusal to acknowledge interests other than one's own, especially those of Pakistan and China. A discussion of Pakistan along with India's other neighbours brings out several Indian pathologies when dealing with neighbours.

Myths and metaphors

In most narratives of standard works, the specific disputes which caused estrangement in relations are either glossed over or smothered under comfortable myths and metaphors, or the record is recalled with palpable falsehoods.

A former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan returned after a brief tenure to spout hate. An American expert, whose writings are peppered with factual errors galore, quotes him with apparent approval that an India-Pakistan reconciliation is like trying to treat two patients whose only disease is an allergy to each other. Malone might have done well to omit this puerile comment in a serious book. It implies that the two countries can never be friends. Not surprisingly, that envoy advocated in December 2001 stoppage of the river water flow to Pakistan; a fine testimonial to professional competence and grasp of the Indus Treaty.

India-Pakistan ties

His thesis is, of course, utterly false. But it is the kind of falsehood that makes us live comfortably with our impossible positions. India-Pakistan relations were warm in 1953 (Nehru went to Karachi); were promising in 1960 (Indus Treaty); in 1962-63; in 1997-98; and from 2004-2007. In the first three cases, Nehru's intransigence on Kashmir wrecked the dtente. He had admitted to Sheikh Abdullah privately in a Note of August 25, 1952, that as early as 1948 he had all but decided against a plebiscite. Nawaz Sharif fought the 1997 general election on a plank of friendship with India only to be deceived by Inder Kumar Gujral, who reneged on their accord on a working group on Kashmir. Incidentally he, of the bogus Gujral Doctrine, offered Nepal in 1990, as it was in the throes of an upheaval, a draft treaty worse than the one of 1950, which all Nepali parties denounce. And, from 2004-2007 India and Pakistan had drawn up the basics of an accord on Kashmir.

All of 1959-60 China sought to arrive at a fair accord on the boundary, conceding the McMahon Line and asking for the Aksai-Chin area. But Nehru had decided way back in 1954 that the map of that year, which showed a firm line in Ladakh, was not negotiable. The official maps of 1948 and 1960 depicted the boundary from the Sino-Indo-Afghan tri-junction in the west right up to the Sino-Indian-Nepal tri-junction in the east as undefined that is, in both the western and middle sectors. One wishes the author had discussed this crucial aspect of India's self-righteous policy in greater detail. Most of the media dutifully follow up the official line, TV channels especially. At the end of September, a senior anchor of a leading TV channel exclaimed: Behind one lies the McMahon Line. He was in Ladakh.

The book makes a timely appearance now that both India's economy and diplomacy are reaching what Rostow called the take-off stage. The year 1991 was a significant turning point in Indian politics, economic orientation, and foreign policy. It coincided with the collapse of the post-Second World War world order.

India's policies became more pragmatic and its pronouncements less doctrine. The manner in which India's international relations evolved assisted India in creating higher levels of economic growth and earning greater global influence. However, India still grapples with a number of important security and political challenges at home, in its region, and globally. On the domestic front, while the opening up of the political space to new social groups has deepened democracy in India, it has also led to severe political fragmentation and often creates obstacles to effective policymaking. India's region is fraught with security threats arising out of unstable, often weak states such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Afghanistan, a near-neighbour in which India is much invested. Further afield, India could serve as a pivot in a new triangle (much promoted by geo-strategic commentators) involving the USA, China and India. Beyond the sphere of enjoyable geostrategic speculation, India has in recent times benefited from cooperation with the USA, while it grapples with perennial potential security threats emanating from China. India's regional and global security concerns are reflected in its policies relevant to military modernisation, maritime security, and nuclear policy. But domestic security concerns overwhelmingly predominate. They are just the ones which remain unaddressed not least because of a volatile public opinion shaped by unscrupulous politicians and a self-righteous, ignorant media, bar a few honourable exceptions.

Comments on Afghanistan bear quotation in extenso. Aside from similar nations such as Bhutan and the Maldives, perhaps the one country in the region where India's involvement has not played against it to the Pakistani establishment's distress is Afghanistan. Indians tend to see Delhi's policy as altruistic, in the words of a recent editorial: Delhi's partnership with Kabul has thrived because Delhi has neither geographic access to Afghanistan nor a political agenda of its own. What India wants is a moderate and stable Afghanistan that is in harmony with its neighbours.' This assessment glosses over a simple calculus in Delhi's policy towards Afghanistan to prevent Kabul from tilting excessively towards Pakistan, and allowing itself to be subsumed by Islamabad into its security space. Delhi worries that when the U.S.-led NATO forces begin to pull out, as several NATO members have signalled they wish to do soon, Kabul could submit to the combined influence of Pakistan (supported by China) and the Taliban, leaving India as the loser in a geostrategic tug-of-war. These worries as of mid-2010 are not ill-founded: desperate for an exit strategy of its own, Washington appears to be encouraging a negotiated' solution to the conflict that could only strengthen Pakistan's hand locally. India consistently cultivated Prime Minister Hamid Karzai as an ally, but recently is rumoured to have opened up channels of its own with the Taliban despite maintaining that there is no distinction between good' and bad' Taliban. A Western withdrawal from Afghanistan would leave numerous Indian assets highly vulnerable; even under present circumstances the Indian embassy was attacked twice in fifteen months in 2008-9. Delhi's remaining option, were that scenario to unfold, of seeking (perhaps with Moscow) to revive the Afghani Northern Alliance, would doubtless prove a disappointing and expensive consolation prize. On October 4, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Hamid Karzai concluded in New Delhi an agreement whereunder India agrees to assist, as mutually determined, in the training, equipping and capacity building programmes of Afghan National Security Forces. Its implications will be far-reaching.

The work covers the whole gamut of India's relations with the U.S., Russia, the European Union, Japan, the Gulf States, Iran and South-east Asia, besides the neighbours. India's policy was appreciated with much more moderate enthusiasm by the West, which, with overweening superiority, and the assumption that any democracy worthy of the concept should align on it, indulged quite frequently in bullying tactics towards Delhi (while also assisting it economically, particularly with food aid). The Western, particularly U.S., tactics viewed with hindsight today were distasteful, and, in any event, proved consistently counter productive in compelling India's compliance.

Russia was eventually able to acquire India as an ally, virtually by default, through a more relaxed projection towards India of its ideological posture, through patience with Indian rhetorical flourishes, and a realist appreciation that India mattered in the balance of power in Asia. Indian needling of the West, particularly of the USA, the fruit of its anti-imperialist sentiment, and the high-minded nature of much Indian speech-making at the U.N. and elsewhere, was congruent with its eventual alliance with Moscow, but the latter was unable to assist India much with several of its pressing needs. This is a fair assessment of the policies.

So is this one on India's conduct of its foreign policy, its diplomacy. Indians are mostly brilliant, hard-working, loquacious, fluent, and creative. They generally cleave to engagement with others, and this works wonders at the bilateral level, where the parameters of national interests are perhaps most clearly defined on both sides. In bilateral diplomacy, India has made many friends. Multilaterally, however, while generating for itself a reputation as a country that always needs to be contended with, India has achieved less to date, with its financial diplomacy an honourable exception. The perceived need to outflank all potential or actual rivals and impress all comers sometimes leads Indian practitioners to monopolise attention through rhetorical brilliance and to spend as much time on impressing the gallery as on tending effectively to Indian interests. The cleverest person in the room may win many arguments, but still not win the game, as suggested in the previous chapter. Many of those interviewed for this book in India itself, in South Asia, and beyond have commented that Delhi's negotiating style too often exhibits no give' while rarely hesitating to communicate non-negotiable principles and demands.

Coming as it does from a committed friend of India, these remarks must be taken to heart. This is a work of enormous worth. Its author's appraisals are balanced and sound. At the strategic level, India is not yet a particularly significant player beyond its own neighbourhood. International experts view only the Indian navy as having developed both a strategy and the political support and resources to implement it in expanding India's global reach. Time and history are on India's side as it struggles to recover from several centuries of foreign domination and its consequences. Its re-emergence, particularly if it manages its significant domestic challenges with success, will be one of the major shifts of the twenty-first century. It will have been hard won, and should gladden both students of history and of foreign affairs the world over. Twenty or thirty years from now, the tentative, contingent nature of many of my judgments today may well seem over-cautious. I certainly hope so.

Over 40 years ago, Dorothy Woodman, another friend of India, wrote: India today seems to be the victim of three traumas: Kashmir, the Aksai Chin, poverty. To try to resolve the first two by vast military expenditure can only direct her funds and energies from the struggle against poverty. To settle for the present stalemate is to condone a militarily active frontier across Asia ( Himalayan Frontiers, page 321). The situation in 2011 is not much more promising than it was in 1969.