‘Saffronizing diplomacy: the Indian Foreign Service under Hindu nationalist rule’, International Affairs, Volume 98, Issue 2, March 2022, Pages 423–441.
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.
Vineet Thakur, University Lecturer in International Relations at the Institute for History, Leiden University, reviews:
In the early 1950s, on the invitation of the Indian government, Dean Paul Appleby, an American scholar of public administration, submitted a 30,000-word report on the reorganisation of the Indian administrative structure.
A few years earlier, several Congress leaders had called for dismantling the Indian Civil Service (ICS) – ‘neither, Indian, nor civil, nor service’, as H.V. Kamath famously called it. In this moment, the ICS’s saviour was Vallabhbhai Patel who threatened to resign. Patel argued that the bureaucrats were merely ‘tools’ of governance, who couldn’t be blamed for the politics of the colonial government. Only a bad worker quarrelled with their tools, he argued in their defence.
Appleby analysed the lessons India’s bureaucracy took from the uncertainty that accompanied the change from a colonial regime to the postcolonial one. He reasoned that the colonial character of British India’s bureaucracy meant that it did not have to adjust itself to popular sentiments and needs. In this culture, ‘political neutrality’ became a byword for the distance that the bureaucrat maintained from the colonised population. Considering this assumed political neutrality gave them a lifeline in the new dispensation, the lesson was obvious: leave political decision making to the politicians but guard internal structures from their interference. In the Nehruvian years, this led to what Geof Wood would later call, ‘a process of greater bureaucratization’. Bureaucracy conceded the domain of politics to the politician and shielded even more zealously its internal autonomy – the matters of promotions, procedures, positions, and personnel – from politicians. The internal domain or organisational culture was conceived of as a space of meritocratic and professional rationality, sequestered from any political, and therefore partisan, intervention.
In the early years of India’s Ministry of External Affairs, this meant that bureaucrats hardly pushed Nehru on his foreign policy decisions – even when they disagreed with him. But even Nehru could not intervene in matters of internal structure. To his credit, Nehru refrained from meddling in organisational matters, and gave his top bureaucracy complete autonomy to manage internal affairs. He also made sure that the foreign policy bureaucracy was protected from political interventions.
Kira Huju’s essay sketches a transformation within the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) which could easily be considered the most dramatic since independence. She suggests that the supposed iron wall between politics and professionalism is crumbling, as Hindutva casts the IFS in its image. The ideological churn of post-2014 India has transformed the IFS, like every other institution in India. The Hindutva challenge rejects both the internationalist, liberal, and secular political vision of Indian diplomacy as well as the elites who claim to hold them. The rejection this time is total – of both the politics and the professional. Consequently, under the assault of widescale saffronisation, the IFS can no more retreat to the safety of its organisational culture.
What goes on inside the IFS is often not well known. Its excessive elitism, whose slow passing the retired diplomats in Huju’s article lament, is partly responsible. Studies on the organisational culture of the IFS are few and far. Some years ago, an academic was for the first time allowed to work in the ‘field’ with trainees of the IFS and the IAS. The permission was less a testimony to the willingness of the IFS to open itself for study, and more to the elite networks of the academic. In fact, the study turned the author’s elite status and family connections into a methodological prop – ‘Producer Centered Research’ or PCR – and the result was a book which revealed more about an obsession of some ‘critical’ theorists with tedious prose rather than about Indian diplomacy. In a context where previous works on the IFS have obfuscated rather than elaborated the workings of the IFS, Huju’s work brilliantly analyses the slow but sure eclipse of the secular tradition in the foreign service.
Three qualifications however ought to be made. Firstly, the conflation of elite culture with a secular tradition would need more critical evaluation. Aside from the fact that the current establishment is headed by a career diplomat, the recent open letters (this, and this) by retired diplomats may very well point to the opportunism of those riding the bandwagon – or the rath, to use a more appropriate metaphor. But this could also potentially indicate the opposite: that the secular culture of the IFS was always a myth.
Secondly, and relatedly, Huju argues that we must distinguish between Hindutva and Hinduism. The latter is theoretically compatible with secularism and internationalism and indeed several diplomats who hold on to secular vision are not opposed to promotion of Hinduism. Yet further analysis may be needed on how far this analytical distinction holds in practice. Promotion of international yoga day or of Hindu festivals abroad may seem in many ways innocuous ‘soft power’ practices, to which those with secular Hindu worldviews would hardly have any objections. Yet these are Hindutva projects. The slope from secular Hinduism to Hindutva, it seems, is now more slippery than ever.
Finally, the ‘internationalism of the old’ and the ‘nationalism of the new’, as key distinctions, are also perhaps convenient characterisations. Partly the danger is of conceding the term ‘nationalism’ to Hindutva – considering the ever-expanding tribe of supposed ‘anti-nationals’ in the country. But equally, it would be a mistake to see Hindutva as a project without an international vision. Indeed, as far as the deployment of diplomatic language is concerned, Indian diplomacy is using the anti-western idiom of the Indian postcolonial period to legitimise the Hindutva project. Indian Foreign minister’s speeches on New India are often just tired repetitions to the old India, a mere crafting of the old diplomacy in new forms where secular projects of ‘autonomy’ and ‘self-sufficiency’ are recast as Hindutva ideas.
Huju’s work opens critical directions in thinking about the sociology of Indian diplomacy – its past, present, and future. This is a work of tremendous importance.
Kira Huju, Departmental Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Oxford, responds:
I would like to thank Vineet Thakur for his close reading of the article, which rightly draws our attention to some of the editorial acts of simplification that go into producing academic work for a broader policy audience. I find myself very much in agreement with his pushback.
Firstly, there are imperfect overlaps between “elite culture” and “a culture of secularism.” It is in the nature of officially sanctioned truths that individuals may feel compelled to pay lip service to them, even in the absence of personal conviction. Indeed, this is the disciplinary function of any institutionalized culture: it rewards compliance, sanctions divergence, and often obscures the very existence of internal contestation. Unlike insular diplomatic services, the latter is also not something that scholars frequently get the opportunity to study – this leads to certain scholarly exaggerations when it comes to the solidity and uniformity of institutional culture.
Thakur is right to suggest that the adherence to secular principles may have, in some cases, been brought about by opportunism or careerism, with diplomats compelled to play up their secularist credentials. At the same time, the “elite secularism” of the IFS has not asked much of its adherents: it has mostly excluded more difficult questions about caste and castelessness, for example. One question, then, is certainly to what extent “a culture of secularism” was ever more than a heuristic devise in the IFS – I tend to think it was, in fact, deeply rooted, but concede that internal fissures have always existed alongside institutionally sanctioned ideologies. The other question, however, is to what extent “elite secularism” in a historically upper-caste institution was always somewhat unambitious in its egalitarian ambitions.
Secondly, the binary between Hindutva and Hinduism does, in fact, often appear elusive. The mass appeal of Hindutva makes it hard to hold up any meaningful distinction in everyday political speech. The suspicion in left-wing circles of Congress politician Shashi Tharoor’s attempts at finding a middle ground in his book Why I am a Hindu are indicative of this unease. It is also indicative of the difficult electoral balancing acts which seek to move majority opinion in a more secular direction without alienating those one seeks to win over. At the same time, insofar as personal political conviction among many diplomats is concerned, this distinction still seems to hold: in my interviews with them, many diplomats who described themselves as devout Hindus abhorred the idea of being associated with religious diplomacy. I maintain that a theoretical distinction matters greatly, not least so that we do not cease holding space for the possibility of a clearer separation.
Thirdly, I share Thakur’s suspicion of a neat binary between nationalism and internationalism – as well as a weariness about its political weaponization. This is why the article sought to emphasize that Nehru’s celebrated internationalism was in fact a crucial component of his Third World nationalist vision. There was never a sense that nationalism needed to be regressive, insular, or conservative to prove its rootedness. Indeed, the nationalism of the decolonial moment was premised on the hope that emancipatory nationalism would transform the very foundations of world order.
A further line of inquiry might be to ask not only what place such an emancipatory reading of nationalism might have in “naya Bharat” but also what, precisely, the international purchase of Hindutva itself is. In other words, we might question not only the silent presence of “nationalism” in Indian diplomatic tradition but the forms of “internationalism” – perhaps in the form of the BJP’s diaspora politics, for example – today.
The full article is open access and available here.