This may sound as if domestic politics has a major impact on foreign policy making, but in fact such impact is superficiaclass="underline" to pursue the same example, sensitivity to Muslim voters’ views would not impinge on the substance of India’s defence purchases from or security exchanges with Israel, even while it might prevent overly visible gestures putting the relationship on display. For in reality, the general public is crippled by its own lack of interest in national, let alone world, affairs. In a country where many are barely conscious of political issues beyond their own village or neighbourhood, let alone national questions, foreign policy is, at bottom, a remote concern.
And yet the world impinges more and more on the daily lives of Indians, especially urban Indians. What does it mean to be a young person in Delhi today? It can mean waking up to an alarm clock made in China, downing a cup of tea from leaves first planted by the British, donning jeans designed in America and taking a Japanese scooter or a Korean car to get to an Indian college, where the textbooks might be printed with German-invented technology on paper first pulped in Sweden. The young Indian student might call his friends on a Finnish mobile phone to invite them to an Italian pizza or even what they think of as an Indian meal, featuring naan that came here from Persia, tandoori chicken taught to us by rulers from Uzbekistan and aloo and hari mirch that first came to India only 400 years ago from Latin America. (And the most desi thing of all, of course, is suspicion of anything foreign.)
The fact is that, as I argued in Chapter One, today’s young Indians are facing an ever more globalizing world in which international developments are likely to impact their daily lives more than ever before. As minister, I would say to my young audiences: ‘You should want your government to seize the opportunities that the twenty-first-century world provides, while managing the risks and protecting you from the threats that this world has also opened you up to.’ This is why they should care more about the substance of India’s engagement with the world and less about the marginalia that currently dominates what little discourse there is about foreign policy among the general public.
We seek to redefine our place in a world that has changed from the one into which we emerged in 1947, just as we ourselves have changed a great deal in the intervening six and a half decades. We are today one of the world’s largest economies, a proud player on the global stage with a long record of responsible conduct on international matters. But is our foreign policy apparatus commensurate with the challenge? Is our society as a whole imbued with a consciousness of the strategic opportunity that engagement with the globe offers? Can we be taken seriously as a potential world leader in the twenty-first century if we do not develop the institutions, the practices, the personnel and the mindset required to lead in the global arena?
Our foreign policy debates in Parliament and the media seem obsessed with Pakistan or with ephemera, or worse, ephemera about Pakistan. There is little appetite for in-depth discussion about, say, the merits of participating in the Non-Aligned Movement or the Conference of Democracies, or the importance we should give to such bodies as SAARC or the IOR-ARC. When I was minister of state for external affairs I suppose I should have been grateful, even relieved, at being allowed to get on with foreign policy formulation without the interference of the general public. But I was not; I was deeply frustrated by the indifference of educated Indians, because in my view foreign policy is too important an issue to be left to the MEA alone. Our society as a whole, and particularly its educated young people, must care enough about India’s place in the world to participate actively in shaping our international posture.
And yet the picture around us is a pretty dismal one. International relations is a neglected subject on our campuses; my own alma mater, the prestigious St Stephen’s College which has produced a legion of IFS officers and a slew of foreign secretaries, does not offer a course of study in international relations. The few colleges that do offer the subject do so in a formalistic and formulaic fashion that ill-equip the student to understand the realities of our contemporary world. JNU apart, few can hold a candle to the universities in China, Russia or the West that teach international relations to young people of a similar age. We do have a handful of thinkers about international issues and a fistful of think tanks, but in size, quality of expertise and range of output they all have a long way to go before they match the role played by, for example, their equivalents in the United States.
And what about the young people who must shape the future orientation of India to the world? A young scholar, Raja Karthikeya Gundu, recently wrote:
Few Indian students go beyond the West for study, and even if they wanted to, there are barely any scholarships or resources from government or private sector to do so. The average Indian has barely any understanding of foreign cultures, norms and worldviews, and satellite TV and Internet have not managed to change this. Hence, in the absence of global exposure, Indians continue to be an inward-looking nation burdened by prejudice. Thus, it is no surprise that when Indians travel abroad for the first time in their mature years, they are often culturally inadaptable and even mildly xenophobic.
This strikes me as somewhat overstated, and yet there is a kernel of truth in it.
The situation will not improve unless we can improve the study of international affairs at our colleges and universities. In 2008 I was invited by my Singaporean friend Kishore Mahbubani to join a gathering, organized by his Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, of some of the most eminent scholars of international relations (or ‘IR’, as it is known to the cognoscenti) to brainstorm on improving the current state of the discipline in India. I couldn’t join his effort, but one scholar who did, Amitabh Mattoo, observed that ‘There are few other disciplines in India … where the gulf between the potential and the reality is as wide as it is in the teaching and research of IR at Indian universities. Interest in India and India’s interest in the world are arguably at their highest in modern times, and yet Indian scholarship on global issues is showing few signs of responding to this challenge.’
Today, IR is taught in more than a hundred universities in India, but in Mattoo’s words, ‘most of the IR departments have a shortage of qualified faculty, poor infrastructure, outdated curriculum and few research opportunities’. More than half the departments do not even have access to the Internet, and are so deprived of the rich wealth of online resources that students elsewhere in the world can command. Books and journals are in short supply. Little expertise has been developed in specific areas or countries of concern to India; to take one example, despite all the fuss about the reference to Balochistan in the joint Indo-Pakistani statement at Sharm el Sheikh in 2009, there is no major scholar of Baloch studies in India to whom either the MEA or its critics can turn. Foreign languages are poorly taught, resources for study trips abroad are scarce, research is of varying quality and opportunities for cross-fertilization at academic conferences practically non-existent. Whereas China, a latecomer to the field, has already developed, in the last three decades, a critical mass of students and scholars of IR, we are behind where we were in the heady days of the Nehruvian 1950s when we established bodies like Sapru House and the Indian Council of World Affairs, which we have allowed to atrophy.