Opinion Heritage clause

Empire in India devoted much of its military energy to securing the restive north-western frontier and preparing for potential military invasions across the Hindu Kush.

India can learn from its diplomatic history only when it ends the pretence that our global engagement began at the stroke of midnight on August 15,1947. Independent India eagerly embraced the many instruments inherited from the Raj for the conduct of

India’s foreign relations. Post-colonial Delhi also held on to many principles of British India’s foreign policy.

Talking of the institutions,the history of our Foreign Office dates back to 1783,when the Secret and Political Department was formed by the East India Company to deal with the sensitive political communication with the various kingdoms within the subcontinent and on its periphery. The Secret and Political Department was run by the “Persian Secretary” (all inter-state communications in the subcontinent were then in Persian),the oldest predecessor to the current “Foreign Secretary”.

The Secret and Political Department was renamed the Foreign Department in 1843; it was reorganised again in 1914 as the Foreign and Political Department,with two separate secretaries. The Political wing dealt with the princely states and other Asian kingdoms,while the Foreign Department focused on engagement with the European powers.

In 1937,the Indian Political Service,the forerunner of the Indian Foreign Service,was created. Long before they were incorporated into a separate service,our earliest diplomats in the modern period were known as the “politicals”.

What does this brief institutional history of our diplomacy have to do with its current problems? If New Delhi wants to expand its regional and global influence,its diplomatic corps must necessarily recapture some of the romance and risk-taking that defined the Indian “politicals” in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The “politicals” operated in the remote corners of the Indian Ocean littoral and Asia,outsmarted rival powers to influence local rulers to win special privileges for Calcutta.

Our Foreign Office today might also want to learn from the past in co-opting critical elements of the Indian establishment at the national and local levels rather than proclaiming an unenforceable monopoly over the nation’s external engagement.

Not all the “politicals”,for example,were attached to Calcutta and later Delhi under the British. The Bombay Political Department,for example,was responsible throughout the 19th century for India’s diplomatic intercourse with Persia,Mesopotamia,Arabian Peninsula and East Africa. India,as a collective,can immensely benefit if the South Block finds ways to mobilise the state governments as well as the regional political and business elites for more effective conduct of relations with our periphery.

Not all the “politicals” were “civilian”. The early Indian diplomatic corps was happy to recruit from the army and the navy. In 1890,for example,nearly 40 per cent of the “politicals” were from the armed forces.

Today when military diplomacy has become an important element of our external interaction,the IFS cannot only gain from greater collaboration and cross-recruitment with the armed services. The

Indian navy by its very nature is a perfect partner for the Indian Foreign Service in projecting Indian power and influence abroad.

If learning from the institutional past is difficult,acknowledging that India might have had a foreign policy before Independence is quite painful for our political classes. It is even more difficult for them to accept that the founder of independent India’s foreign policy preserved many elements of the Raj legacy,especially in dealing with our neighbours. The first three treaties Jawaharlal Nehru signed after independence during 1949-50 were slightly modified versions of the 19th-century agreements that Calcutta negotiated with Bhutan,Sikkim and Nepal.

The proposition that all that preceded 1947 was “colonial” and therefore negative and irrelevant has cut us off from the rich diplomatic experience before independence. While imperial London was surely an important driver of Indian foreign policy then,so were the geographic and political imperatives that were rooted solely in the subcontinent’s history and tradition. Reclaiming that diplomatic legacy might better prepare India to cope with its changing status in the international system.

A rising India finds that her current foreign policy priorities are similar to those Calcutta faced a hundred years ago — gaining secure access to raw materials outside the subcontinent,promoting free trade and opening markets,pacifying India’s periphery,limiting the role of hostile greater powers in our extended neighbourhood,offering protection to small states,calibrated use of force beyond borders to maintain regional peace,and protecting the Indian Ocean maritime commons.

Unlike India,the other rising Asian giant,China has begun to transform all its major institutions,including its foreign service,in preparing them for new global responsibilities. In mandating a new mindset for its mandarins,Beijing is searching for useful ideas from its own past as the middle kingdom. A rising India can draw from a more recent and a far richer legacy of acquiring and exercising power; to gain from that heritage,Delhi must first look for it.

The writer will hold the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the John W. Kluge Centre,Library of Congress,Washington DC during 2009-10 express@expressindia.com