Abstract: Very little is known about how Indian diplomats have made sense of the change in political power in New Delhi since 2014, when the election of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi signalled a radical break from the internationalist credo of the Nehruvian Congress establishment. Attending to this gap in knowledge, this article engages with the ongoing debate about the influence of Hindu nationalism on Indian diplomacy, but departs from the conventional emphasis on foreign-policy analysis or Modi's persona. Instead, it centres on the lived experience of career diplomats in the Indian Foreign Service to whom it falls to conduct everyday diplomacy under Hindu nationalist rule. This focus invites a broader question in the global age of populism: how do contemporary diplomatic services adjust to the arrival of nationalist governments? I suggest that the delays in the internalization of nationalist norms and diplomatic practices are only partly a function of ideological misalignment between an internationalist bureaucracy and a nationalist government. What matters is also the extent to which the status of the social class represented by the bureaucrats is invalidated by the government's political project. Building its arguments on the back of 85 elite interviews and archival research in India, the article considers changes to diplomatic discourse, protocol, priorities and training, and details how Indian diplomats have adjusted to and resisted Hindu nationalism. It suggests that we study nationalist critiques of ‘cosmopolitan elites’ both as an ideological denunciation of internationalist commitments and as a social rejection of the elites who hold them.
Sandra Destradi (sandra.destradi@politik.uni-freiburg.de), Professor and Chair of International Relations, University of Freiburg, reviews:
How does populism impact foreign policy? (This research question is addressed in the project ‘Populism and Foreign Policy’ funded by the German Research Foundation. For more details, see www.populism-internationalrelations.com.) This is a question that a growing number of studies have started addressing in the past few years, although the international consequences of populism had been largely neglected in the academic literature. While the substantive effects of populism on foreign policy and international politics are still the object of much debate, most scholars agree that populism certainly has an impact on the processes of foreign policymaking. In particular, populism – most commonly conceptualized as a thin-centred ideology entailing the notions of anti-elitism and people-centrism – is considered to lead to a centralization and personalisation of foreign policymaking. Indeed, populist leaders claim to embody the ‘popular will’, and therefore frequently marginalize all kinds of intermediary institutions that would undermine the presumed direct link between them and the ‘people’. Moreover, populist leaders’ professed anti-elitism may lead to the marginalisation of those actors who seem to be particularly detached from the ‘true people’. In foreign policy, these actors are – quite obviously – diplomats. Indeed, foreign policy bureaucracies have a long tradition of operating in closed and elitist circles, of negotiating behind closed doors, far away from public scrutiny and following centuries-old rituals. Who could be more detached from an assumed ‘true people’ than diplomats?
It is exactly diplomats who are the object of analysis of a brilliant recent article by Kira Huju. In her piece, titled ‘Saffronizing diplomacy: the Indian Foreign Service under Hindu nationalist rule’, Huju explores in great detail the changes that the Indian diplomatic corps has been undergoing over the past years, since India’s populist Prime Minister Modi took office. The main focus of Huju’s analysis is not populism as such, but rather the ‘thick ideology’ of Hindu nationalism to which Modi’s populism is linked. In her path-breaking study based on extensive field research and a large number of interviews with active and retired Indian diplomats, Huju uncovers the processes through which a populist government can make its foreign policy bureaucracy more pliable. The focus is therefore not necessarily on the marginalisation of diplomats and of India’s Ministry of External Affairs, but on the subtler process of the establishment of a hegemony of Hindu nationalist ideas and discourses among bureaucrats. In particular, Huju traces what she terms the ‘saffronization’ of the Indian Foreign Service: the adoption of ideas and practices related to Hindu nationalist ideology through a variety of processes, including the hiring of a growing number of new diplomats sympathetic to Hindu-nationalist organizations, the drive towards the use of Hindi instead of English, and the emphasis on public diplomacy elements that focus on Hindu traditions. In her article, Huju traces how all these apparently subtle changes have led to important shifts among what was traditionally a cosmopolitan elite, inducing it to embrace the governing party’s Hindu nationalist ‘thick ideology’.
Existing research in the field of Foreign Policy Analysis would greatly benefit from more studies like Huju’s, uncovering the micro-foundations of the relationship between political ideologies and foreign policy change. Also, the burgeoning literature on the international consequences of populism would benefit from studies that address in greater detail the processes and pathways of centralization and personalization of political power. Ultimately, these procedural and bureaucratic processes have the potential to lead to substantive policy change. Among other mechanisms, they might impact foreign policy by limiting the number of alternative and critical voices in foreign policymaking, thereby narrowing the scope and focus of countries’ foreign engagements.
Kira Huju, Departmental Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Oxford, responds:
I am grateful to Sandra Destradi for her generous reflections on the article, which deftly positions it within a broader research context which queries the intersections of populism and IR. Destradi is right to point out that my analysis is more geared towards the “thick ideology” of Hindutva. An avenue for further research would be to pursue the “thin ideology” of populism, which in many ways is the idiom in which much of Hindutva ideology is articulated.
The most obvious opening here, perhaps, is the politicisation of the IFS’ very elite nature, and its distance “from the people”. Indeed, Indian diplomats’ own uneasy relationship with an imaginary Indian “people” comes through in memoirs going back to the 1940s – or, in the case of IFS officials who once served in the Indian Civil Service of the British Raj, back to the colonial period. Here, we find a cadre of Anglophone, English-educated officers seeking to make sense of their liminal status in the racialized and classed hierarchies of world order – neither an organic part of the Indian people they represent nor of the cadre of imperial gentlemen they seek to mimic.
What emerges in interviews to this day is another expression of unease around cultures of elitism: diplomats grapple with the lexical tension between “representability” (fitting a transnational elite aesthetic of diplomatic representation) and “representation” (abiding by the imperative to represent the Indian people in all its diversity).
The fraught debates around the gradual “democratization” of the IFS since the 1980s internalize and institutionalize this tension: “the people” are now, in fact, entering the hallowed spaces of exclusive Indian diplomacy. How they have been greeted there at entry (a topic I explore in my upcoming book) is a tale often narrated in the language of professional efficiency or institutional homogeneity, but ultimately playing on themes of elite belonging and exclusion. The tension between “elites” and “the people” is not theoretical; rather, it shapes the everyday habits and hierarchies of the IFS.
Destradi also points out that a prominent feature of populist foreign policy making concerns a certain impatience with mediating institutions between populist leaders and “their” people. One way this impatience is reflected in India is the rapid centralization of decision-making and executive functions in the hands of the Prime Minister’s Office, at the expense of the IFS. A more sustained study of the “thin ideologies” permeating the IFS would perhaps elaborate on these more procedural questions, too.
The full article is open access and available here.