By Karan Pradhan / News 9live
The influence of Hindu nationalism on Indian diplomacy is a topic that is debated in many a newsroom in this country, and possibly beyond. And yet, most conversations on the matter either get caught on the hooks that are foreign policy analysis or a discourse on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s persona. And yes, the word ‘muscular’ tends to pop up a lot. What has been sorely lacking from the review is the lived experience of career diplomats in the Indian Foreign Service, whose job it is to conduct everyday diplomacy. This is what a recently-published article by Dr Kira Huju in International Affairs, titled Saffronising diplomacy: the Indian Foreign Service under Hindu nationalist rule seeks to address. Dr Huju, Departmental Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, states that the article is based on “85 candid semi-structured interviews between February and June 2019”.
Of these, 33 were career diplomats who had personally served under Modi, 47 had retired by the time of his swearing-in ceremony in May 2014, one was a BJP affiliate working for the Ministry of External Affairs, and two were Indian foreign policy experts. At the outset of the article, the author asks an important question: “Can one learn anything of substance by engaging with individuals whose careers are premised on smoothing out rough edges and persuading an interlocutor of the truth of any matter, however implausible or unpopular?” She proceeds to examine three key aspects of Indian diplomacy: – changes to diplomatic discourse, protocol and training initiated under India’s 14th prime minister; – how diplomats have adjusted to or resisted the saffronisation of their service, and how they navigate their commitments to the international community; – the idea that saffronisation is emblematic of the analytical need to understand populist challenges to conventional diplomacy not merely as ideological critiques of internationalism but as sociological responses to the elites with whom these ideologies are associated.
This article presents a first draft analysis of a moving target, still developing its institutional shape: the saffronization of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS). Saffronization—a process named after the colour saffron that adorns Hindu nationalist symbols—involves imagining India as a Hindu nation, both by reconstructing an imaginary past defined by Hindu unity and by refashioning political institutions to reflect majoritarian ideals.1 Inside the Indian state bureaucracy, saffronization began in 2014 with the election of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and has gathered pace since his re-election in 2019. Institutional path dependencies and the capacity constraints of a severely understaffed service mean that individual Indian diplomats have unusual autonomy in respect of day-to-day diplomatic conduct.2 Yet very little is known about how Indian career diplomats have made sense of the change in political power in New Delhi. It is this gap that this article addresses.
The experience of Indian diplomats invites a broader question in the global age of populism: how do contemporary diplomatic services adjust to a nationalist regime coming into power? I suggest that the slow internalization of new political norms and diplomatic practices is only partly a function of ideological misalignment between an internationalist bureaucracy and a nationalist government. What also matters is the extent to which the status of the social class represented by the bureaucrats is undermined by the government’s political project. Old school internationalist diplomats resist populist incursions into diplomacy partly because these incursions threaten to conform to Pareto’s theory of elite circulation: radical regime change does not occur when rulers are overthrown from below and an elite-less future is born, but rather when one kind of elite replaces another.3
In India, career diplomats are caught in a double bind. Hindu nationalism represents a rejection of much of the foundational dogma and diplomatic tradition that have defined the IFS since independence in 1947. Yet saffronization also promises its own kind of diplomatic elite circulation: the once dominant Anglophone class of diplomats is to be replaced by a new Indian elite invested in Hinduism, the Hindi language and a narrower sense of nationalistic pride. Many diplomats feel personally excluded from this narrative of ‘authentic’ Indianness. In fact, the traditional upper echelons of the IFS represent precisely the kind of cosmopolitan, secular, westernized, upper-class India that Modi’s populist rhetoric has sought to devalue in the eyes of the nation. Therefore, it is not only non-Hindus whose status is threatened under Hindu nationalist rule, but also the traditional elites who have long presided over the governance of postcolonial India.
The saffronization of the IFS matters for the larger quest to understand how diplomatic bureaucracies respond to populist leadership, as well as for a grounded understanding of rising India as a global player. First, a ‘nascent and burgeoning scholarship on the nexus between populism and foreign policy’ is emerging at the intersection of International Relations, comparative politics and sociology;4 but little work exists on the role of career diplomats in it, especially in non-European contexts.5 A study of Indian diplomats contributes to a globally relevant reading of how diplomats operate under populist leadership. India’s case is particularly fascinating, since its career diplomats have unusual autonomy—and, unlike in US state bureaucracy, for example, there is no tradition of lateral recruitment of specialists from outside government service which could be used to expedite institutional change through political appointments.6
Second, interrogating the lived experience of diplomats makes for a more socially attuned understanding of rising India. The IFS plays an outsized role in Indian foreign policy-making. Therefore, if its character is changing, this is likely to have consequences for the behaviour of a major rising power. Scholars of Indian foreign policy such as Rajesh Basrur, Ian Hall, Manjari Chatterjee Miller and Kate Sullivan de Estrada have persuasively argued in the pages of International Affairs and elsewhere that Modi’s purportedly transformative approach to foreign policy has failed to defy any basic tenets of India’s long-running foreign policy doctrines.7
I suggest, however, that change is afoot elsewhere: among the elite diplomatic cadre to whom it falls to conduct everyday diplomacy under Hindu nationalist rule. While they may be incremental, one would expect changes in diplomatic tone, professional priorities and personal conviction among diplomats to manifest themselves in interactions with foreign counterparts, especially over politically charged subjects such as Indo-Pakistan relations or the very question of India’s role on the world stage. To gauge whether these changes will reflect Hindu nationalist priorities or internal resistance to them, we must first understand how diplomats perceive Hindu nationalism. The saffronization of a historically secular and relatively liberal bureaucracy like the IFS raises questions of future impact across the wider Indian state machinery, too—particularly about the degree to which more politically exposed and domestically orientated bureaucracies like the Indian Administrative Service or the Indian Police Service might come under challenge. These changes may transform the very nature of India’s bureaucracy precisely as the country’s global footprint is growing.
The article builds its arguments on the back of a larger research project on the IFS, for which I conducted 85 candid semi-structured interviews between February and June 2019 in New Delhi and Bangalore. Of the interviewees, 33 were career diplomats who had personally served under Modi, 47 had retired by the time of his swearing-in ceremony in May 2014, one was a BJP affiliate working for the Ministry of External Affairs, and two were Indian foreign policy experts. I also conducted interviews with some former ministers and current or former members of the Rajya Sabha, India’s upper house of parliament. Additionally, the article draws on archival research in the National Archives of India, and on papers and oral histories found in the archives of the Nehru Memorial Library in New Delhi.
Interviewing Indian diplomats is a fraught endeavour. Scholars such as Manjari Chatterjee Miller, Deep K. Datta-Ray and Swapna Kona Nayudu have conducted such interviews on diplomats’ social attitudes and working practices.8 These have not, however, addressed diplomats’ engagement with Hindu nationalism. Can one learn anything of substance by engaging with individuals whose careers are premised on smoothing out rough edges and persuading an interlocutor of the truth of any matter, however implausible or unpopular? Is there not a self-censorship that permeates conversation in an age of accelerating attacks on academic and press freedom in India?9 There was often the hint of a taboo on discussions of Hindu nationalism, both because diplomats worried that dissenters would be vilified as out-of-touch elites and because the clash with the existing institutional culture was striking enough to elicit strong views in both directions. Yet the anonymity accorded to interviewees relaxed the boundaries of acceptable speech beyond the standards that commonly govern commentary on Indian diplomacy in the age of Modi. Recently retired officers were most forthright in their assessments, but serving diplomats often ventured their own commentary too, even during interviews in which I raised no questions on the government myself. Sometimes diplomats offered subtle gestures, which I discuss below, that allowed them plausible deniability. Indeed, these interviews, conducted around the time of Modi’s re-election for a second term, may have been considerably more uncensored than comparable interviews in the future will be, as Hindu nationalism cements itself as the dominant ideological idiom in New Delhi.
The article proceeds in three stages. First, it considers changes to diplomatic discourse, protocol and training initiated under Modi. Second, it details how diplomats have adjusted to or resisted the saffronization of their service, and how they navigate their commitments to the international community under changing domestic conditions. In the third section, I consider saffronization as emblematic of the analytical need to understand populist challenges to conventional diplomacy not merely as ideological critiques of internationalism but as sociological responses to the elites with whom these ideologies are associated. Conversely, diplomatic resistance to populism also reflects a worry that nationalist leadership will invalidate the social status of the kinds of cosmopolitan, elite-educated individuals that diplomatic services often attract.
This article first appeared on news9live.com
