Their Good Offices

Against the great tragedy of his premature passing, the fact that Mani couldn’t edit his finale hardly matters, but he would surely have corrected various errors, typographical and substantive. Considering it is almost the first book since Gopal’s life of Nehru for which the government has relaxed its mindless rigidity about (not) opening its archives, greater disclosure of who took what view about what would have been an added attraction, but there are few quotes and no footnotes. There is any amount of detail, but given time Mani would have rather told us illustrative anecdotes of which he had a rich fund rather than things like the Dean of the Foreign Service Institute "attended a Trainer’s Workshop...in Hyderabad from 24 to 26 September, 1997". One would have liked more about individuals whose personalities and ways of working make for such good reading in the very few worthwhile memoirs left to us, such as Y.D. Gundevia’s and Badr Tyabji’s.

Mani does cite, at length, three documents that bring out the basic issues of organising an institution new to our country and hard to fit into our broader system of performing the duties of a state. The fates of the departmental note on setting up the service, and the Pillai and Sen committees’ reports on enabling it to function more effectively illustrate the difficulties of securing general acceptance within the vast edifice of governance—or among the public—of either the concept or the mechanics of diplomacy.

Relations between states are inevitably, inescapably relations of power, and power is something we have had great difficulty in grasping intellectually or handling practically. This has been one of the most harmful legacies of being colonised: no Indian had exercised the highest powers of the state for at least a century—and infinitely longer when it comes to dealing with the world abroad; to this day, most of those who hold office cannot think beyond patwari power—something confined to getting or granting favours. How state power is used for state purposes still escapes general understanding—or even interest.

Pronouncements by those who led us to freedom indicate a mistrust, almost an aversion, towards power, which cost us heavily. Painful experience did secure acceptance of military needs, but almost driving us to the extreme of relying on military strength alone, albeit with formal acknowledgement of the relevance of economic power. The importance of anticipation and pre-emption, of dialogue and persuasion, of the arts, of politics and statecraft—all that goes into the practice of diplomacy—has yet to become part of our make-up.

A foreign office must thus constantly think in terms of what the rest of our government does not comprehend and disdains. Also, while the responsibility for handling our international relations rests with our foreign office, the authority lies elsewhere—the home, defence, finance, commerce ministries in particular. Increasingly, the world over, foreign affairs now require direct involvement of the head of government. This does help the MEA overcome some obstructionism, but when a governmental apparatus has become as expert as ours in frustrating even cabinet decisions, it can’t help as much as it should and causes resentment.

As the great British statesman Salisbury observed, "there’s nothing dramatic" about a diplomat’s work: it consists "of a judicious suggestion here, of an opportune civility there, of a wise concession at one moment and a far-sighted persistence at another; of sleepless tact, immovable calmness and patience that no folly, no provocation, no blunders can shake". These, alas, are not the ways or the virtues appreciated in our system, with press and politician demanding the dramatic. ifs officers thus suffer the double handicap of handling issues for which the rest of the government machinery has no affinity, and through methods for which the rest have no patience. Mani fully recognises the service’s weaknesses, and the need for self-reform; but those so eager to see India perform as a major player will also have to understand what a diplomat’s job is, and help them overcome what Dixit calls "the constraints of functioning under the cross-currents" of our politico-governmental system as a whole.

(K. Shankar Bajpai is ex-ambassador to Pakistan, China & the US.)