Jitendra Nath Misra

Enrica Lexie Case: A Diplomatic Wrangle Nears Resolution

The episode shows how difficult it is to dismantle the pragmatic pillars of a relationship lacking a fundamental clash of interests.

History is replete with instances where realpolitik becomes a casualty of hubris. When we invoke pride and principle, we forget that pragmatism is the gold standard of diplomacy. The Enrica Lexie case is an example.

India’s attempt to exercise criminal jurisdiction over state officials was unlikely to succeed without Italy’s consent. Yet, both sides won points – Italy over jurisdiction and immunity and India over freedom of navigation and compensation.

Also Read: Enrica Lexie: Did India Lose Case Against Italy Because of Lapses By its Own Supreme Court?

How did the dispute impact the relationship?

As the media went into overdrive in both countries and foreign minister Giulio Terzi resigned, nationalist passion blindsided diplomacy. Italy and India have no common borders or conflict of interests. Yet the cycle of retaliation threatened to derail ties.

Relations hit turbulence when, in 2013, Italy refused to honour a promise for the marines to return after voting in an election. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called this “unacceptable,” warning of “consequences.” The Supreme Court barred Italian ambassador Daniele Mancini from leaving India. UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon stepped in, calling for a peaceful resolution of the dispute. Italy chose de-escalation by sending the marines back.

Basant Gupta, India’s ambassador to Italy at that time, tells me “high- level contacts were frozen,” and no meetings of the Joint Commission or of defence officials took place. His own departure for Rome had been deferred, and Italy twice recalled its ambassador. In 2015 Italy blocked India’s admission into the Missile Technology Control Regime. It took a 2016 visit to Rome by external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj to soothe feathers.

With the crisis going into high gear, the EU stepped in. In 2014 Federica Mogherini, the newly-appointed EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs became the activist. The EU Parliament criticised India for detaining the marines without charges and violating their human rights. The 13th India-EU summit, due in 2015, was postponed at the EU’s behest, and was held only in 2016.

Ahead of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the Italian Football Federation released two t-shirts with the marines’ names. Ferrari displayed ensigns of the Italian Navy on cars competing in the 2012 Indian Grand Prix, prompting the Ministry of External Affairs to protest this was not in “the spirit of sport.”

An Italian Navy flag is seen on the nose cone of Ferrari Formula One car during the second practice session of the Indian F1 Grand Prix, October 26, 2012. Photo: REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

Was there lasting damage to ties?

Nations grandstand, but interests put pause on hardline positions. “I had no problems. They were very nice to me at a personal level,” Gupta tells me. The Italians recognised the importance of the Indian envoy as an interlocutor. To avoid travelling to India, colleagues of the two marines had no other option than to appear at the Indian embassy in Rome to give testimony via video conference.

This episode shows how difficult it is to dismantle the pragmatic pillars of a relationship lacking a fundamental clash of interests. Once the dispute went into the multilateral legal domain, the Italian tone softened. The same Mogherini, speaking to the Economic Times after Kashmir’s internal reorganisation in August 2019, expressed understanding of “India’s security preoccupations.” In 2016, India gained admission into the Missile Technology Control Regime.

Why did the two sides pull back from hardline positions?

Italy is a major nation, due to hold the G-20 presidency in 2021. With GDP at $1.8 trillion in 2018, the nation was the world’s 8th largest economy, the 3rd largest economy in the Eurozone, the 6th largest manufacturing nation and the 8th largest exporter, says Stefania Benaglia, writing for Observer Research Foundation. Such compulsions explain why, even before the crisis had ebbed, Air India launched flights to Rome and Milan in 2014.

Even as the dispute peaked “business continued unhindered,” Gupta asserts, and “trade increased by a billion Euros between 2014 and 2015.” In 2017 trade stood at $8.7 billion, Benaglia says. Italy is India’s 10th largest market, and Italian investments in India between 2000-2018 were $3 billion. Italy regards India among its top five partners for international business. The Indian diaspora in Italy stood at 180,000 in 2018, the third-largest in Europe after Britain and the Netherlands.

Enrica Lexie. Photo: Wikipedia/CC BY 3.0

Thus, Italy ticks every box in India’s foreign policy preoccupations. If securing international support for the nation’s development is a strategic necessity, Italy is India’s partner of choice. Showing alacrity in fence-mending, India played host to prime ministers Paolo Gentiloni and Giuseppe Conte in 2017 and 2018. Visits by the head of a nation in successive years are unusual, but so were the circumstances.

Besides, if a ruling does, in the end, meet a nation’s objectives, conflict draws down. Even while arguing the right to try the marines, India had never claimed they were guilty. If Italy reneges on conducting the trial, India can refer back to the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Even if the judgment had been passed by an Indian court, the marines still might have been allowed to face the sentence in Italy, some speculate.

Also Read: Is it the End of the Road for India in the Enrica Lexie Incident?

What are the lessons from this crisis?

When nations draw into nationalism, their actual achievements shift into the shadows. In such pantomime wars, politicians exploit foreign policy for profit. In India, the government could not ignore a charged Kerala, an important state. The Italians perhaps injected excessive emotion into the dispute. Act culturally, strategy suffers. As reluctant nationalism took charge in both nations, the trap had been laid.

Now both sides appear relieved. The Indian government has swiftly asked the Supreme Court to act on the verdict. Italy will be hard put not to meaningfully address compensation. How can it disregard a binding ruling, having gone to court in the first place? India will need to ensure that the trial in Italy is fair and the compensation just.

In this dispute, law was chasing politics. This reinforces what we know – a legal argument can win the case, but a political resolution is the prize. In 2016, when the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled in the Philippines’ favour by rejecting China’s nine-dash-line territorial claim in the South China Sea, the latter rejected the verdict, calling it “null and void.” In contrast, in 2015 India accepted a ruling by the same court that awarded most of the disputed maritime territory to Bangladesh. The example of Italy resembles that of Bangladesh, where political calculation was primary.

Jitendra Nath Misra is a former ambassador and, until recently, advised the government of Odisha on sports, as well as being a visiting professor at Jamia Millia Islamia.

Sport in the Age of the Coronavirus

Far from breaking social barriers, the COVID-19 crisis actually reinforces them as elite sports coronate high achievers from India’s despairing hinterland.

In Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, as plague claims half of Europe, a knight challenges Death to a game of chess to save himself and his friends. What follows is a celebration of the precious human life embodied in all of us.

In these perilous times, little plagues have lodged in our minds. Fear feeds on a dodgy social media. Millions of the poor are quarantined in neediness. From ringing bells to tapping pans, lighting candles to clapping hands, watching the Ramayana to setting up virtual conversations with loved ones, we need to calm our nerves.

What are the white knights of world sport doing? Pore through the Internet, switch on the television and enjoy retro sports and replays. Even chess, the most contemplative of sports, has gone virtual. Saina Nehwal’s last hurrah in the Olympics is doubtful. Hockey player Gurjit Kaur calls the crisis a blessing in disguise. Really?

We see little Olympic sports where India has had success: hockey, shooting, boxing, wrestling, and weight lifting. So, fasten on to Star Sports’ rewind of Pakistan’s 0-7 World Cup defeats to India. Watching our pantomime warriors, we might be forgiven for thinking of the real ones, conducting raids across frontiers and aerial strikes against a sneaky enemy.

Television is orphaned of live sport. We get insomniac watching our beloved stars underperform in legacy tournaments. Who cares about the real stars – health workers, law enforcement officials, ordinary citizens – who are proving yet again that India works better in a crisis than in normal times?

Questions are swirling around in sport. Will athletes accept voluntary pay cuts? Will the ICC be chastened by nature’s revenge on its pleasure alleys? Will sports figures speak up about our abuse of Mother Nature? Doubtful.

Diminished Britain sulks at loss of cricketing privilege, so Michael Atherton called the IPL disruptive. But human greed is inexhaustible. As India took charge, England and Australia scrambled to late fence- mending to stay in the game.

Why would anybody want the IPL to lose its allure? Why would the BCCI start a real conversation with a world in lockdown? Global climbers do not step down voluntarily. But what will BCCI do with its wealth? We hear little about philanthropic instincts.

A policeman walks past a logo of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) during a governing council meeting of the Indian Premier League (IPL) at BCCI headquarters in Mumbai April 26, 2010. Credit: Arko Datta/Reuters/Files

Elsewhere, things may be better. The Players Association announced England’s centrally-contracted male cricketers will donate $613,000 to the England Cricket Board and charities. The women’s team has taken a three months’ voluntary pay cut. Teams in football’s Premier League will provide an advance of $153 million to the Football League and National League sides.

The crisis has knocked the life out of sport. Wimbledon has been cancelled, a first since World War II. Scores of tournaments – the World Athletics Indoor Championship; the Olympic boxing qualifiers; field hockey leagues in England, the Netherlands, Germany and Spain; the hockey Pro League; the Azlan Shah Cup; the Hockey Women’s Asian Champions Trophy and football’s Asian Champions League – have been abandoned or postponed.

Postponement of the Tokyo Olympics could impact between 0.5-0.8% of Japan’s GDP, according to the research firm Fitch. Postponement of Euro 2020 will cost Euros 250-300 million.

With events gone or deferred, we are back to training. For some time we heard brave, morale-boosting words from athletes about remaining fit. No more. Sportspersons struggle to make the virtual look real: doing routines like robots doing theirs in a quarantined piece of real estate on a celestial body.

In fairness, we can’t blame athletes for lacking motivation to push hard. How can we train at home, without the trainer and support team? Starved of games (no team likes the long tour Down Under), Australian hockey has turned its drills into art, winning everything. Alas, India lacks the tacticians who might replicate such routines.

The one tactician available is the state. A crisis is the state’s moment. It is the lifeline for both sages and self-servers. We are expected to exercise voluntary restraint on excesses. The state is watching.

Abhinav Bindra titled a chapter of his autobiography “Mr. Indian Official, Thanks for Nothing”. Lately, sport in India has had forward movement because the state has loosened controls. Are we back to the age of meddlesome governments?

Elite athletes in India now get paid. Stars can fall by the wayside, paralyzed by the lockdown. But in Indian sport, athletes don’t pay to play. Sport is a means to land a job in the government. Welfare is fashionable. If there were pay cuts, how would sportspersons respond?

Athletes can be immersed in their day jobs, from home. But since they are primarily players, how will they maintain motivation and morale in the uncertainty of the calendar?

This has raised issues of mental health. The postponement of the Olympics is “a step too far,” says retired British Olympic rowing gold medallist Tom Ransley. Losing nerve, elite badminton players have criticized the BWF for putting players’ lives at risk by going ahead with the All England Championships, drawing a sharp rejoinder.

So, it is doubtful that bonding in sport will deepen. How many of us have offered comfort to sportspersons who may be in depression, thinking about the wasted years of training? Far from breaking social barriers, the crisis actually reinforces them. Elite sports coronate high achievers from India’s despairing hinterland, giving them a social lifeline. Yet, we just don’t talk to athletes in India, it is not us. The rich simply sit on their perch.

We need earnest reasoning to heal our way out of the crisis. This means going back to the basics: the schoolboy joy of a 100-metre run, or Usain Bolt’s trademark celebration after winning Olympic gold.

Jitendra Nath Misra is a former ambassador and, until recently, was the advisor to the government of Odisha on sports.

The Deep, Unsettling Impact of ‘Alone in Berlin’

This film is a cinematic paradox that only the best acting resolves: it moves at a slow pace, but instead of getting bored we remain in suspense.

If a film can trigger unexpected emotions and sensations that connect us to our surroundings, it would have done its job. Such a film is Alone in Berlin, starring Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson, which never made it to India but I saw in Toronto several years ago.

The film is about a German couple which lives in a Berlin working class neighbourhood. It is 1940, the war has begun, and a militarised Germany is in full swing. We are straightaway introduced to their trauma – Otto and Anna Quangel have lost their only son in the war.

But in grief, they find liberation. Through perilously brave actions, this couple leaves the sort of positive legacy that thousands of ordinary people must have done in those terrible times, even if forgotten and unsung.

Otto and Anna resolve to resist Nazi tyranny in an ingenuous way. But it is not just personal tragedy they are fighting. The Nazi thugs and common criminals who ransack the home of an elderly Jewish woman also create a counterpoint to their grief, and these two events gives the couple the strength to begin their resistance.

Their protest takes the form of postcards with anti-Nazi texts, which they leave in public spaces for common people to read. Otto is finally found out when the cards slip out of his pocket in the workplace, and the couple meet their end on the guillotine.

Also read: Perfection Comes at a Price in Latest Adaptation of Austen’s ‘Emma’

This film is a cinematic paradox that only the best acting resolves: it moves at a slow pace, but instead of getting bored we remain in suspense. Gleeson’s understated dignity and stoic determination anchors the film’s moral underpinning. The ending, where the Nazi police officer, brilliantly portrayed by Daniel Bruhl, releases the pile of “freedom cards” through the window, as passersby pick them up to read, and then shoots himself, delivers a posthumous vindication of the dead couple’s steadfast loyalty to the common good, never mind the overwhelming Nazi power lurking in every alley of the decrepit neighbourhood.

When humans have no choice but to find their freedom in death, the implications can be terrifying. I could not escape the film’s power to unsettle the audience, even at its languid pace, and each scene was carved in abundant morality. This is a marker for Europe’s continuing trauma, and its inability to bring closure to the Nazi epoch. One might wonder how Germans view this film.

In India, we see very few films like this. Alone in Berlin never got a release in India. It is, after all, a European film, not a Hollywood blockbuster. But when it comes to nuanced acting, Europe continues to lead, poking our eye with the subtle ambiguities of every ordinary event.

The streets, the costumes, the tension between common sense and Nazi vitriol, the bleak snow of the late evening, with the only cheer provided by the lights of the tram cars, all of these bring to us the smells and atmosphere of the Berlin of 1940, of that “low and dishonest decade,” as W.H. Auden wrote in the poem ‘September 1, 1939’.

The film’s deeper impact on me went beyond cinematic enjoyment. For an Indian, connecting with European culture is easier than understanding the West beyond the Atlantic. European cities use space in an imaginative and economical manner, and that is how the working class Berlin neighbourhood is depicted in this film.

My best memory of Lisbon, where I lived four years ago, is its plentiful walkways and compactness. In Toronto, where the soaring towers are like instant short cuts to the heavens, we are unable to create intimacy with our surroundings, or even a dialogue, or a sense of community with passers-by, who are so dwarfed by the skyscrapers. What is happening above us is so far above that we are not even aware of it, yet there is plenty of life on the upper reaches of these buildings.

Also read: Albert Speer and the Myth of ‘the Good Nazi’

Lisbon had no such buildings, and I felt as if I was part of the city’s wider conversations. The best landscapes are the ones that create multiple sensations, both at the psychological and visual levels.

This cinematic experience on a cold and wet day reminded me of our chance encounter with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at Niagara on the Lake a few days earlier, where he delivered a speech by the lake, to mark World Environment Day. Amid the perils of global warming, which might have brought unexpectedly cold and wet weather to the Toronto of June, we can see how connected humanity is, and how fragile our planet has become. That is why the Nazi trauma is my own trauma, and European cities make me think about what the great medieval cities of India and China might have been like. Watching a film, after all, can have multiple rewards.

Jitendra Nath Misra is a former ambassador, and vice president of the Jawaharlal Nehru Hockey Tournament Society.