The only departure from this norm is when intellectuals turned to the daily newspapers, the proliferation of media outlets offering them multiple avenues for the expression of opinion. But despite exceptions, these had at best a limited impact on both the public and the MEA. Outside the academic community and some sections of the press, there is little interest or competence in foreign policy analysis. This is not true of the final category of intellectual who writes on foreign policy, the retired diplomat, though too many evade responsibility for conceptual soul-searching by devoting themselves to repetitive reminiscences, such as K.P.S. Menon’s syndicated variations in the 1960s and 1970s on the theme of Indo-Soviet friendship. In more recent times, former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal has become a prolific commentator on foreign policy issues from a distinctly hard-nosed realpolitik perspective. But with honourable exceptions like Salman Haidar and T.P. Sreenivasan, there has been little attempt to put practical experience in the field, so lacking in other intellectuals, at the service of institutional re-examination.
There are also limitations on the Indian intellectual that run deep in the political ethos. There are few Indian equivalents of the contextual documents and white papers issued by the British or Australian Parliaments (and earlier by Nehru). As for the annual report of the MEA, an inscrutable collection of banalities and itineraries, one critic bitingly observed that ‘the only explanation for this consistently dull, drab and un-illuminating document is the assumption at the political level that the conduct of foreign policy is an esoteric subject best known to its practitioners’.
The problem of insufficient quality in public discourse about foreign policy is further augmented by an increasing resort to direct censorship of such material as is available. Publications from Taiwan, for instance, ‘which contain statements on political issues relating to international affairs which are likely to prejudicially affect friendly relations [with China!]’ were once forbidden, though mercifully no longer so; while, paradoxically, the Indian Council of World Affairs was once obliged to withdraw a book from the press because it contained banned Chinese editorials. As an editorialist in the Statesman protested at the time:
Censorship action under the Sea Customs Act is merely frustrating to the occasional scholar, who wants to know what attitudes others are taking, without affording any significant protection to the public. Many foreign books on Indo-Pakistan relations, for instance, now have the maps removed before export …. This helps nobody here while foreigners continue to see erroneous matter which Indians cannot prevent them from reading and are, by deprivation, less well-equipped to refute.
Such restrictions on unpopular foreign opinions also impinge on the Indian citizens’ right to hold the same views. But even that right has been abridged by far-reaching legislation. Freedom of expression under Article 19 of the Indian Constitution, already modified to include ‘reasonable restrictions’ to protect national security, was amended further by Mrs Indira Gandhi’s government to proscribe material that impinged on ‘national sovereignty’. In 1967, an Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act was passed to penalize any action by an individual or association ‘(i) which is intended, or supports any claim, to bring about on any ground whatsoever, the cession of a part of the territory of India from the Union or which incites any individual or group of individuals to bring about such cession or secession; (ii) which disclaims, questions, disrupts or is intended to disrupt the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India’. As the then home minster explained to Parliament, ‘If someone says that Government should settle the dispute with China or Pakistan peacefully, it would be a legitimate thing. But if it is said that India should give away territory to China or Pakistan to purchase peace it would certainly become unlawful.’ Apart from rendering one part of the Swatantra Party’s foreign policy platform illegal and depriving Indian intellectuals, policy advocates and columnists of a legitimate option for discussion, the act in effect denied the public the right to advocate what has since become India’s de facto position, freezing the status quo on the northern borders.
Finally, Western scholars have found it increasingly difficult to obtain entry visas for India, the establishment apparently believing that India can be victimized by sloppy foreign scholarship. Intellectual quests for objective inquiry, it appears, are not valued at the expense of the national ‘image’. This hardly accords with the requirement for serious and wide-ranging debate on foreign policy issues in a democracy aspiring to global status.
With the non-governmental intellectual unable to make any substantive impact on foreign policy, it becomes necessary to look beyond the power of reason and argument to that of numbers, to the broader majority of India’s ‘public’. No scholar can definitively pronounce judgement on whether a foreign policy should, by definition, reflect a ‘national will’, a set of popular preferences or only the calculated judgements of the ruling elite. But as the embodiment of a nation’s collective personality and interests on the international stage, a foreign policy is bound to partake of the first two elements — in whatever measure — as certainly as it is bound to reflect the final stamp of the third. It is probably true that the impact of public opinion on foreign policy is everywhere limited, though there are considerable differences of degree among nations. But where the public is cited as constituting the justification for a foreign policy — which is most often the case with external affairs, and certainly has to be so in democratic India — the incorporation of the public’s beliefs in that policy (to echo Falk’s list of desiderata in our opening chapter) is essential.
There are obvious limits to the general public’s interest in foreign policy: most people’s preoccupation with sheer survival and related concerns leaves them with little time to spare for any understanding of the country’s foreign policy. On the other hand, their very ignorance could be exploited by an opportunistic few for domestic political ends, especially since the Indian masses possess the ultimate power over their government, that of the ballot box. Indeed, they use this power somewhat more frequently than the intellectuals of the ‘elite public’: beyond a certain point, any increase in the characteristics of ‘modernization’—rise in the level of education, exposure to mass media and other modernizing influences, and geographical mobility — actually produces not an increase but a decline in voter turnout. The government’s dependence on the votes of the broader public provides the clue to the power of the masses — and therefore of public opinion in the broadest sense — on foreign policy. Concerns about the ‘Muslim vote’, for instance, have dominated Indian policies towards Israel, and the reluctance to display overt friendship to that country — by, for instance, extending invitations to prominent Israelis to visit India — can be traced directly to a desire to avoid provoking a domestic political reaction. India’s frequent electoral contests — there is an election every six months, it sometimes seems, for one of India’s twenty-eight state assemblies if not for the national Parliament itself — have contributed to a reluctance to take any foreign policy initiatives that could be exploited by other political parties at the hustings. Thus if Shimon Peres never gets to see the Taj Mahal as president — for fear of a Muslim backlash that would count in votes against the ruling party — he only has Indian electoral democracy to blame.