India’s Foreign Policy in the Post-Covid World: Through the Eyes of Indian diplomats’ (published by Wisdom Tree) edited by former Ambassador Surendra Kumar is not an ambitious book, but it is practical and somewhat unusual one. First, it gives us a slice of the world of Indian foreign policy, specific to the era we are very much living in—that of the great Covid-19 disruption. Second, it does so through the eyes of those who practice diplomacy rather than study it. Kumar has collected a virtual galaxy of retired Indian Foreign Service personnel, including a former National Security Adviser, three former foreign secretaries and five former secretaries in the ministry along with their colleagues, most of them who have served as distinguished ambassadors to various parts of the world.
By choice, many of them have written about the countries they served in thus providing us with a detailed view of the pandemic affected global trends. Such a book is not easy to review because there are more than two dozen separate themes penned in the various essays and in a sense each one of them deserves an analytical write-up. But that is simply not possible in the space allotted. So, to an extent, the bias of this review is towards the articles which have dealt with overarching themes.
Prime Minister Modi had set a scorching pace in his foreign policy approach by his travels in his first term. He set a personalised style by reaching out to foreign leaders like President Trump of the United States and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of Israel. But perhaps his lasting contribution will be the close ties established with the Saudi peninsula, especially with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. But this kind of diplomacy got a major setback in the Chinese occupation of a number of border areas in eastern Ladakh in April-May 2020 just months after the second informal summit between Modi and President Xi Jinping of China.
But foreign policy as the essays in the book suggests is more than just prime ministerial visits and summits. It requires considerable conceptualisation and the ability to translate the ideas onto the ground with skill in a competitive environment with others seeking to do the same.
The tone of the book has been set by essays by two of the stars of the foreign service, former foreign secretary Shyam Saran and former NSA Shivshankar Menon. Both provide a larger picture of the foreign and security policy arena. Not surprisingly, given the Covid-19 pandemic, in his essay, Saran has warned about future Black Swan events arising from possible climate or cyber-related issues. He could well have added “Grey Rhino” developments arising from a crash into issues that are very obviously confronting us. One of these is the lack of a national strategy that can enable us to make informed choices and the other is the persistence of a development path that is simply not sustainable.
Former NSA Shivshankar makes the important point that there is, indeed, “no external existential threat to India.” Whether it is China or Pakistan or a combination of the two, they can, at best “divert and delay us” but they can be managed. Internal security is the most important and here the trend is that while separatist and terrorist violence has, in fact, declined, we now face the challenge of communal violence and individual crimes like rape and assault.
His second important point is that the process of dealing with external threats has led the country to periodically reform and upgrade its instruments and policies. But when it comes to internal security, the key area of policing has been largely unreformed. Shivshankar’s bottom line for the foreign policy of the future is for the need for the South Asian region to respond to its growing centrality in today’s geopolitical environment by coming up with a South Asian policy, rather than one confined to one or the other state of the region.
Clearly, some aspects of our foreign policy require a great deal of self-improvement. Primary among these is our economic policy. Though Rahul Chhabra has rightly summed up the aim of the Aatmanirbhar Bharat as the process of positioning India at the centre of the global supply chain, our achievement remains aspirational rather than real at this stage. It is clear, though, that the Covid-19 pandemic has triggered similar approaches towards re-shoring and near-shoring globally.
The same could probably be said about our regional policy, where the status of our relationship with a country often fluctuates with just who is the leader of that country at that particular point in time. Sheikh Hasina’s Bangladesh is very different from that of Begum Khaleda’s just as our relations with Oli’s Nepal are very different from those with Deuba’s. Here, former foreign secretary Ranjan Mathai makes the important point that a certain degree of patience is called for and this has paid off in the case of Sri Lanka and Maldives. Indeed, there is an element of prescience in his view that India would have to help Sri Lanka with its foreign debt crisis.
The key focus is, of course, the pandemic and as Anjali Prasad reminds us in her essay looking at the World Trade Organisation, there is a lot of work to be done. The pandemic itself revealed the ugly face of Covid-19 protectionism. Now India may confront a situation where it is denied a TRIPS waiver that it has sought on behalf of the developing countries in relation to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics for Covid-19. The challenge to us, Prasad says is larger and requires considerable focus on the part of our leadership to secure our interests, along with those of developing countries.
The editor Surendra Kumar has looked at two important aspects of Indian diplomacy today—that of utilising its soft power and the benefits of the Indian diaspora coming of age. There is little doubt that the Indian diaspora is a remarkable one. At one level it provides high-level scientific-technical people to various countries around the world, on the other, skilled and semi-skilled cyclical migrants keep the Gulf monarchies ticking, even while helping their mother country with huge remittances.
The writer is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.
BOOK
India’s Foreign Policy in the Post-Covid World: Through the eyes of Indian diplomats
Edited by Amb Surendra Kumar (Retd)
New Delhi, Wisdom Tree, 2022.