A little less than a decade ago, in 2015, an American diplomat asked me in great frustration why the Indian government was going to such great lengths at the United Nations to block the US on Syria. I tentatively explained that India had looked upon the US intervention with great concern, had opposed the intervention in Libya, and felt that such interventions, without a plan for a “day after,” left only chaos and misery in their wake.
India has millions of its citizens working in West Asia, and a loss of security has a direct impact on Indians there, as well as the remittance economy that helps India substantially.
All of this is true, and is line with the long-term foreign policy interests that India has pursued, as effectively argued by the former foreign secretary Shyam Saran. but there were other reasons as well, particularly when it comes to the Modi regime that had just come to power in India in 2014.
This was underscored by the visit of Walid al Moallem, the deputy prime minister, foreign minister and major player in Basher Al Assad’s regime to India in 2016. During his high-level state visit to India, al Moallem went out of his way to lambast “terrorists,” which is how the Al Assad government defined all the enemies of its regime. Notably, he also made it clear that his regime was totally supportive of the Indian government’s stance on “terrorism.”
India’s foreign policy blunders in the case of Bangladesh, Syria and Myanmar
This follows the same queasy script that the Modi regime has pursued vis-à-vis Bangladesh and Myanmar, where the Indian government has also focussed on cooperation with an authoritarian state and a military junta respectively.
In the case of Bangladesh, again, one can find a whole host of both Indian commentators and Awami League leaders highlighting the issue of “terrorism” as the reason that the Indian government had to stand by dictatorial leaders that faced increasing protests and gradually lost legitimacy. In Myanmar, it seems that it is the inertia of a system that cannot be bothered to actually do diplomacy and is just sticking with the devil they know – the junta – rather than the devil they don’t – everybody else.
In all three cases the outcome has been the same. There have been large political changes – in Myanmar they remain ongoing – with significant impact to Indian interests, particularly the strangulation of India’s Look East or Act East policy (which has also been impacted by our long neglect over the violence in Manipur).
The Indian government has neither foreseen such changes or had any deep interaction with people other than a corrupt and hated regime. Syria could be written off as a mistake, and one far away from our borders where India was not the only state to be surprised by the sudden fall of the regime. But when the same things happen in our bordering states, this cannot be so easily dismissed by the incompetence of a senior official or two. Three similar blunders seem to point to a deeper malaise in how we are conducting foreign policy.
Part of it can be explained by the fact that there does not seem to be any foreign policy vision. For a long time, this was covered up by the embrace of George W Bush’s “War on Terrorism,” whose logic led, inevitably, to the embrace of governments like Al Assad’s or Hasina’s that were corrupt, criminal, and routinely used murder, torture, enforced disappearances and everything else to prop up their rickety regimes.
Also Read: The Collapse of the Syrian Regime Is Welcome, but the Replacement Is Equally Bad
Some of the opponents of these regimes were indeed terrorists, but the regimes attacked all those that challenged how they ruled. For all the talk of them being inclusive and tolerant, the corruption inherent in authoritarian regimes has never been kind to marginalised communities. New stories are coming out from Bangladesh, but even older stories shed a light on the destruction wreaked upon those not in power.
There is no data to support the contention that authoritarian regimes are good bulwarks against extremism or majoritarianism. In fact, by attacking all critics, what authoritarian regimes do is gift legitimacy to extremists, making them look like actually representatives of local opinion.
We can see how this has played out in Pakistan, with its so-called ‘liberal’ Army, with the whiskey drinking generals repressing democratic aspirations, we can even see this closer to home in Kashmir, where the rigging of elections and repression of any opposition helped spark off and legitimise an insurgency that still has not died.
Diplomats not doing the very basics of their job
But even a lack of vision does not explain the haplessness of the Indian state on the global stage. Any minimally competent diplomatic cadre seeks to have contacts across the political spectrum, even when it comes to authoritarian regimes, maybe especially in them.
The lack of a foreign policy does not explain why Indian diplomats are not doing what should be the very basics of their job. This contrasts with the hyper-energetic nature of how the Modi regime has practiced its foreign policy, which seems to be based on Modi energetically hugging as many foreign leaders as possible.
In reality, these are part and parcel of the same problem. If the current regime has chosen to project its prime minister as the country, and his personal contacts and those of his envoys are the whole of our foreign policy, then engaging with a wider range of contacts goes against this foreign policy. The long-term outcome, though, is that when these leaders inevitably fall, the Ministry of External Affairs is left with absolutely nothing to work with except to bleat pathetic statements of a “peaceful, inclusive transition”.
