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The diplomats who built India’s foreign policy
Summary
The Indian Foreign Service's history comes alive through the dynamic individuals who formed its policies
At a time when it is fashionable in some circles to assert that India’s “real independence" came in 2014, and everything that took place before that was “slavery", Kallol Bhattacherjee has done a great service. His book, Nehru’s First Recruits: The Diplomats Who Built Independent India’s Foreign Policy, is a reminder that India’s foreign policy did not take shape in the hands of the current external affairs ministry, but has been built on a long legacy of a storied foreign service founded in 1948 by India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
As the title suggests, Bhattacherjee’s book is about India’s very first diplomats, the men and women recruited to the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) in the first dozen years after independence who helped shaped an independent foreign policy for a country that had been a British colony for nearly two centuries. Through their stories, the author—a journalist who has been reporting on India’s foreign policy for more than two decades—has woven a narrative of India’s early and expansive engagement with the world even as its leaders were preoccupied with steering a big ship—large, poor, diverse and democratic—through the choppy waters of communalism, sectarianism and wars with various neighbours.
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Bhattacherjee makes the many characters in the book, all of whom had important roles in the early days of the shaping of Indian diplomacy, leap out of the pages with their colourful back stories: a journalist working as foreign correspondent in Indonesia; Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s aide who watched horrified as the idea of Pakistan took shape in his boss’s mind and in his speeches and decided to quit; the ruler of a princely state who decided to give his own statement on the Vietnam war as the consul in south Vietnam; an executive of the Imperial Tobacco Company, whose family owned several sugar mills, and who died by suicide while posted in Vienna.
Then there was the poet, none other than Harivansh Rai Bachchan, hired as a translator by Nehru, who coined the Hindi name for the external affairs ministry—Videsh Mantralaya. Bachchan and Nehru were friends from their days in Allahabad, but they differed over Nehru’s “common form of language"—a middle ground between Hindi and Urdu.
Language was often a sticking point in the early days of nation-building, and while rashtra bhasha (national language) debates may not seem pertinent to diplomacy, Bhattacherjee brings these incidents in to illustrate the many challenges that came in the way of building a diplomatic corps that was to represent India to the world.
He recounts a time when a translation of a speech in English by then President S. Radhakrishnan to a joint session of Parliament had to be read out in Hindi by Vice-President Zakir Hussain immediately after. The “complexity" of the literary Hindi in Bachchan’s translation had Nehru “fuming" as it made the text “obscure". With hours to go before the speech was to be delivered, Nehru summoned Bachchan and pointed out that Hussain “won’t even be able to pronounce some of the words". When Bachchan responded with the quip that the speech should have been translated into Urdu instead, “Nehru exploded". “There is enough trouble in this country. Even if we get it translated into Urdu, we’d have to call it Hindi—and what’s the difference between the two anyway?" Nehru said.
Politics both at home and away play out in this book as a young country grappled with issues of varying importance, and Bhattacherjee’s telling brings perspective to the many compunctions and compromises of keeping the home base happy while building relationships abroad. Despite the many internal challenges, India’s foreign service was in place and all the posts filled by 1958. The decision to form the IFS to look after India’s external interests at home and abroad was made in October 1946, a month after an interim government headed by Nehru was formed in Delhi as Britain prepared for India’s independence.
Work on foreign policy began almost immediately. Chandra Shekar Jha, a young Indian Civil Service officer, was sent by the interim government in 1946 as part of a fact-finding mission to look into and report on the tensions between Indian communities and Africans in East Africa as well as suggest solutions. This mission’s report was one of the first submitted to Nehru, and was instrumental in the government of independent India making a decision to announce scholarships for African students, a policy that exists to this day. This, in turn, laid the foundation for academic science and technology co-operation with African countries that gained independence soon after India.
Jha was joint secretary in the ministry of external affairs from 1954-57, during which he witnessed the “creative phase" of Nehru’s diplomacy. At the pathbreaking Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955 (the Asia-Africa conference when 29 governments of Asian and African nations gathered to discuss economic development and decolonisation), Jha sat behind Nehru and watched him on the last day as he took notes. At the end of the proceedings, Nehru showed him what he was jotting down—the time that each of the 19 speakers had taken, totalling 102 minutes. Nehru’s speech, at 17 minutes and in which he laid out the principles of non-alignment, was the longest. He gifted the chit of paper to Jha as a souvenir of the conference.
“1955 was the year of Indian diplomacy; it’s when New Delhi emerged as one of the most visited capitals of the post-colonial world," writes Bhattacherjee. Apart from the Bandung Conference, Nehru rekindled ties with the then Soviet Union and visited the country. Later in the year, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and Premier Nicolai Bulganin arrived in Delhi. “The Soviets had given a grand welcome to Nehru, and the understanding was that the Indian welcome would have to match that of Moscow," he writes. The job fell on Mirza Rashid Ali Baig, the ministry’s protocol officer, who got his wife to help him plan the extravaganza. The lengths to which Baig went to put up the grand welcome tells us that the G20 hoopla that we all recently witnessed in Delhi also follows in a long tradition of extravagance that began seven decades ago.
Many of the first recruits were men and women with a variety of experiences both within and outside government. Cyril John Stracey was one of them—an Anglo-Indian officer who joined the British Indian Army in 1938, he switched sides to join Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army (INA) in 1942 and fought for independence as a senior INA officer till 1944. Stracey then designed and supervised the construction of a memorial to Subhas Chandra Bose in 1945 in Singapore to deliver a message to victorious British forces who were expected to land on the tiny island after the Japanese surrender. (The British would later blow up the monument.) Stracey then joined the IFS in 1948 and went on to serve in the Indian missions in Bonn, Paris and Antananarivo, eventually retiring as ambassador to Finland. Other former INA soldiers who were recruited into the first batch of the Indian foreign service include Abid Hasan Safrani, K.M. Kannampilly and N. Raghavan. India’s first woman career diplomat was C.B. Muthamma, who joined the service in 1949.
Bhattacharjee builds a hold-all narrative of Indian diplomacy, world history and geopolitics in this book composed of many nuggets about the early days of the Indian foreign service. The writer’s research, and indeed the brilliant idea of writing on this particular subject, deserved a far better editor who could have brought some method to the chaos of information that he serves up in no particular order.
Nirupama Subramanian is an independent journalist.
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