7. Popular Pressures on Foreign Policy: Public Opinion, Interest Groups and the Press

One of the vital aspects of political development in a democracy is the growth and performance of the public organs of discussion, and the opportunities that exist for popular inputs into the policy-making and review processes. Traditionally, these are manifest in the forms of articulated public opinion, interest groups and the mass media of communication. As we have seen in Chapter II, the effectiveness of public opinion on foreign policy in India was circumscribed by illiteracy, limited access to information, and poorly developed means of communication. The vast majority of the voters-the rural and the illiterate-did not bestir themselves in the foreign policy arena, and public opinion on foreign policy never, therefore, threatened to assert itself at the ballot box. The "effective" public in foreign affairs was, accordingly, an elite who could distract, embarrass or influence the government, but never challenge it by strength of numbers. Its impotence was axiomatic, and was enhanced by several factors emerging from the socio-political environment under Mrs. Gandhi.

Elite Public Opinion: The Intellectual Ignored

"Much is written, even more spoken, every day about India's foreign policy," commented a former diplomat towards the close of Mrs. Gandhi's reign. "In Delhi, in particular, especially after the establishment of Jawaharlal Nehru University, dons, area specialists and others wax eloquent on it. They participate in public seminars, give radio and television talks and interviews and publish articles. Their zeal for educating the public and drawing attention to themselves is astonishing."[1] Even more astonishing, perhaps, was the barrenness of that activity, its seeming lack of relation to the empirical realities of Indian foreign policy-making and its virtual inability to make the slightest dent in the armour of the establishment, of which it was a minor component. Every one of a wide variety of Mrs. Gandhi's top aides and a number of senior MEA officials interviewed by this author testified to their disregard of the self-appointed elite public on foreign policy: the only intellectuals who made any impression on foreign policy were those who went beyond co-optation and actually, joined the decision-makers.

"I have no doubt," Mrs. Gandhi acknowledged early in her rule, "that our present administrative system uses the expert inadequately and indifferently."[2] As it proved, there was little she could do about it; the anti-intellectualism of the entrenched bureaucracy was too intractable. The concept of the non-governmental expert as a legitimate addition to established channels of policy was not a popular one among either politicians or bureaucrats. Nor did it find much support in India's socio-cultural evolution.

Indian intellectuals were heirs to one of the most elitist intellectual traditions of the world.[3] The post-Vedic Brahmins sought exclusive intellectual distinction in principle, and the caste system confirmed their elitism in practice. Increasingly, however, that elitism became a hallmark of all Indian intellectualism. The search for knowledge, and in turn the entire realm of ideas, was detached from the everyday concerns of the rest of society. Over the years-from the earliest simple divisions between the Brahmins and Kshatriyas, to the gulf that separates the twentieth century academic from the politician-intellectuals abandoned worldly affairs to those qualified to act rather than to analyse. In modern India they remained aloof from the quotidian concerns of governmental policy, but this distance no longer bespoke Brahminical superiority. Instead intellectuals were a deprived breed, shorn of that which made their elitist forbears respected-influence over the wielders of power. An increasingly populist politics and a career bureaucracy took over the symbols of state authority. In the new formulation, those who could, did; those who could not, theorised.

The value preference of middle-class India inevitably reflected these norms. "Society" had come to accord more respect to the lowliest IAS/IFS trainee than it did the most qualified academic or journalist. Intellectuals, therefore, formed a segment of the educated class from which sprang the country's rulers, but they did not constitute (in Mosca's sense) members of the "ruling class". This many intellectuals came to regret. In independent India they sat in judgment all too frequently on those whose seats they would gladly have occupied, if they could. Far from constituting a jury of peers in a people's court on governmental performance, intellectuals were-as the subjects of their prescriptions realized-by and large passing verdicts on their betters. Sentenced to a lower social status, his livelihood subsidised by government grants, the Indian intellectual was a poor relative of the Indian bureaucrat, and he knew it.

The result was, as Edward Shils noted, that government officials "do not learn to benefit from criticism emanating from the universities; instead, they maintain a secretiveness and touchiness which is injurious to efficiency in economic life and to political democracy."[4] K. Subrahmanyam, who, as a government official appointed to head the scholarly Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, operated in the twilight zone between bureaucracy and academics, found to his dismay that even government-sponsored academic institutions were disregarded by the MEA in policy formulation.[5] Subrahmanyam attributed to this the MEA's insecurity about its own competence, and fear that Ministers would soon bypass officialdom altogether. A senior MEA official agreed that bureaucrats did fear the challenge, but went on to add that academic standards were not very high either.[6] Whatever the reason, academics received short shrift in the MEA. A plan briefly mooted by Dinesh Singh to attach a consultative committee of a dozen scholars to the MEA was quickly shot down. One academic on the list suspected that Congress MPs had intervened, but this author learned that it was the then MEA Secretaries who had rebelled against the idea. The extent of interaction between the two communities was restricted to the occasional informal seminar or the even less frequent sabbatical at Jawaharlal Nehru University. For a variety of reasons, there was no direct academic input.

Policy-planners and MEA diplomatists were, in private interviews, scathing in their contempt for intellectuals. Academicians, the bureaucrats argued, were inadequately informed about contemporary problems, and had no idea of empirical reality or the mechanics of policy-implementation; their involvement in policy-making would only introduce impracticalities and impair stability and continuity. Devoid of an independent socio-economic base, unable (unlike journalists) to express their views in influential publications on a regular basis, and often anxious to please the government of the day, the intellectuals were not, to a close Gandhi aide, a respectable "community" of minds but mere "harlots", not worth treating seriously.[7] The occasional conscientious MEA official read scholarly journals and attended seminars at the Indian Council of World Affairs subject to limitations of time and convenience. But the techniques by which the MEA kept abreast of non-official opinion were few and far from searching, and the foreign policy bureaucracy remained insulated from most advances in thought outside the Ministry.

To a great extent, however, the failure of the Indian intellectual went beyond the imperviousness of officialdom. Standards, rarely high, were further diluted under populist pressures for the expansion of higher education. In the upper reaches of academe, as a leading sociologist argued, style rather than substance remained the ultimate criterion.[8] Indian intellectuals were also easily seduced by plausible theories; ideology proved too often a facile substitute for original thought. A senior government official was not alone in bemoaning the lack of empiricism in most academic critiques, the "tyranny of hypothesis" and absence of a "discipline of facts" in intellectual views of government.[9]

These traits also manifested themselves in foreign policy critiques. When non-alignment turned from policy into theological dogma, one commentator noted, the Indian intellectuals shared in the tragedy, for both in their denunciations and praise there had been little analysis of fundamental policy assumptions.[10] "With very few exceptions," he went on, "the Indian intellectual has been incompetent when he has not been unctuous, and afraid of embarking on a rational inquiry when he has not been afraid of the establishment." Since Independence "there has not appeared a single significant work by an Indian writer discussing these fundamentals [national interests, options, means] with any depth or originality... To expect a good essay on the theoretical aspects of foreign policy is to expect the impossible." Accordingly, an "air of unreality" prevailed in most analyses of foreign affairs, which suffered from what Dean Acheson had termed "the clichés, the moralism, the emotionalism, the bad history, faulty analysis and just plain ignorance" of much foreign policy criticism in the post-war years.[11]

The Indian intellectual's lack of interest in developing specialised knowledge in foreign policy led to an undue focus on marginalia-dramatic incidents like Rabat and the Czech invasion-rather than on the conceptual bases of foreign policy. Foreign policy seminars tended "to make major comments on external political issues, rather than to come to grips with India's policies towards these issues."[12] The study of international affairs also lacked a solid academic infrastructure in the universities. Frequently conformism emerged, possibly because it was natural for the intelligentsia of a newly emergent nation to identify itself with that nation's posture in world affairs.[13] As one well-known author (arguing, ironically, for greater conceptual analysis) put it, nonalignment "means expressing one's national identity as an independent state in international relations. No sensible person can object to such a policy."[14] This attitude extended even to attempts to acquire specialisation. The Soviet studies programmes at Jawaharlal Nehru University and similar institutions were more concerned with promoting Indo-Soviet friendship than with disinterested academics.[15] It was, therefore, not very surprising that officialdom preferred to disregard intellectuals as lacking in critical integrity. Their anxiety not to offend the government only invited the scorn of those they wished to please.

These inherent weaknesses-lack of social approbation, resistance from the entrenched foreign policy bureaucracy, low standards of achievement and willingness to conform-were exacerbated under Mrs. Gandhi by a blatant politicisation of intellectualism. This process was marked by a new doctrine of "commitment", in theory to social progress but in practice to the ruling party, which culminated in the Emergency with a profusion of "national forums of intellectuals"-lawyers and educators wedded to "socialism, secularism and democracy" and the propagation of Mrs. Gandhi's twenty-point programme. Mrs. Gandhi was merely exploiting the guilt that Shils had traced long ago:

The Indian intellectual charges himself, and even more bitterly and frequently his fellow-intellectuals, with being 'out of touch with the people.'[16]

While Shils saw this largely as an imaginary problem, it was a very real one for the intellectual elite. By their very acquisition of the attributes of intellectualism, they lost the direct mass contact that alone would have enabled them to influence either rulers or ruled. For many, their status as intellectuals symbolised privilege, and made them acutely conscious of (as well as vulnerable to attack because of) their distance from the concerns of the masses. In some cases, reflexive guilt drove them to mortgage themselves to the most visible self-proclaimed representative of the masses-Mrs. Gandhi. In other cases, support of the government's socialist goals appeared to elitist intellectuals as a low-risk gambit to salve their consciences on the cheap. Abject conformism followed, masquerading as "commitment" to a more progressive society-and foreign policy. Intellectual honesty was soon compromised in labels: those who did not join in the mindless attacks on the CIA and the multinational corporations were branded pro-West, while pro-Sovietism was portrayed as advocacy of self-reliance.

As a result the "elite public opinion" represented by Indian intellectuals was neither well-informed nor effective. Opinion bore little relation to analyses of reality, and even less to prospects for action. While opinion was expressed, it was usually without expectation that policy change would result from it. As a visiting Ambassador recalled:

I had been long in Delhi before I realized how urgent could be the discussion of economic planning, village development, schemes for health and educational betterment, development of village crafts and, of course, family planning, and how slight would be the consequence.[17]

Discussion was an "art form" in India, an egocentric ritual of simulated conviction or, at best, a second-hand expression of conscience. Its vitality was attenuated by its own irrelevance.

When leading public men emerged from retirement to speak on foreign policy, they tended to manifest the same failings. Thus JP Narayan confined himself to the advocacy of "truth" in international relations and the need to work towards world government, while Chagla restricted himself to commenting on specific issues or lamenting the decline of "India's image abroad."[18] The occasional self-appointed expert also published little-read exegeses under such titles as "International Intrigues and Indian Integrity," [by P.N. Sharma, Indore, 1968] which contributed little to public debate either in its depth of quality or breadth of circulation.

The only departure from this norm was when intellectuals turned to the daily newspapers, as Satish Kumar of Jawaharlal Nehru University did with a column on Pakistan in the Hindustan Times. But despite exceptions-Sisir Gupta of the same institution attracted enough attention with his writings to be appointed Ambassador to North Vietnam and later Portugal-these had at best a limited impact on both the public and the MEA. Outside the academic community and the press (which we shall discuss later in this chapter) there was little interest or competence in foreign policy analysis. A notable exception was Abdul Gafoor Noorani, a Muslim lawyer from Bombay of Swatantra leanings, who carried on an astonishingly prolific crusade for rationality in foreign policy through the columns of mass-circulation newspapers and intellectual journals. Though on one occasion he roused the ire of two Soviet academicians with his critical views on the Brezhnev Plan for collective security,[19] his impact is difficult to measure: certainly the government appears to have paid him as little attention as possible. Noorani, though well-read and very readable, also tended to repeat himself as the years wore on-perhaps because the same failings persisted.

This was also true of the final category of intellectuals who dealt with foreign policy, the retired diplomats. Badr ud-din Tyabji's attempts to draw public attention to the failings of the MEA after his resignation took on the air of a litany, though his perception was sound. Other diplomats evaded responsibility for conceptual soul-searching by devoting themselves to repetitive reminiscences, such as K.P.S. Menon's syndicated variations on the theme of Indo-Soviet friendship and, in a more enjoyable vein, the delightful anecdotage of P.L. Bhandari. But there was little attempt to put practical experience in the field, so lacking in other intellectuals, at the service of institutional re-examination.

There were also limitations on the intellectual that ran deep in the political ethos. The elevation of "socialism" to a consensual synonym for the national good made contending arguments verge on blasphemy; with every party pledged to it, there was little room for meaningful political dialogue. The paucity of sophisticated literature on foreign policy was underscored by the low priority for book-reading in Indian culture,[20] accentuated by world prices that placed books beyond the means of most middle-class Indians.

Further, the government's attitude to information, evolved from cultural norms that did not accord prominence to the "right to know"[21] and underscored rather than alleviated those norms in bureaucratic practice. Intellectual analysis was severely hampered by the lack of access to material from both governmental and foreign sources. On the one hand this was manifested in a decreasing attention within the MEA to the needs of an attentive "educated public". The Foreign Affairs Record, a dreary compendium of speeches and agreements, nominally filled this role but appeared only four months after its publication date, and was a poor substitute for the contextual documents and White Papers issued by the British or Australian Parliaments (and earlier by Nehru). As for the Annual Report of the MEA, a inscrutable collection of itineraries,

the only explanation for this consistently dull, drab and unilluminating document is the assumption at the political level that the conduct of foreign policy is an esoteric subject best known to its practitioners.[22]

Such an attitude was, of course, useful in evading public accountability on such issues as collective security, where nothing was revealed, or Rabat, where publicity pamphlets took the place of White Papers. But it was, further augmented by an increasing resort to direct censorship of such material as was available. Publications from Taiwan, for instance, "which contain statements on political issues relating to international affairs which are likely to prejudicially affect friendly relations [with China!]" were forbidden.[23] Paradoxically, the Indian Council of World Affairs was once obliged to withdraw a book from the press because it contained banned Chinese editorials[24]. As the Statesman protested:

[Censorship] action under the Sea Customs Act is merely frustrating to the occasional scholar, who wants to know what attitudes others are taking, without affording any significant protection to the public. Many foreign books on Indo-Pakistan relations, for instance, now have the maps removed before export. ...This helps nobody here while foreigners continue to see erroneous matter which Indians cannot prevent them from reading and are, by deprivation, less well-equipped to refute[25].

Such restrictions on unpopular foreign opinions also impinged on the Indian citizen's right to hold the same views. But, even that right was abridged by far-reaching legislation under Mrs. Gandhi. Freedom of expression under Article 19 of the Indian Constitution, already modified to include "reasonable restrictions" to protect national security, was amended further to proscribe material that impinged on "national sovereignty." In 1967 an Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act was passed to penalize any action by an individual or Association
"(i) which is intended, or supports any claim, to bring about on any ground whatsoever, the cession of a part of the territory of India from the Union or which incites any individual or group of individuals to bring about such cession or secession;
(ii) which disclaims, questions, disrupts or is intended to disrupt the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India."[26]

As the then Home Minister Chavan explained to Parliament, "If someone says that Government should settle the dispute with China or Pakistan peacefully, it would be a legitimate thing. But if it is said that India should give away territory to China or Pakistan to purchase peace it would certainly become unlawful.[27] Apart from rendering one part of the Swatantra party's foreign policy platform illegal, the act in effect denied the public the right to advocate what has since become India's de facto position, freezing the status quo on the northern borders. Finally, Western scholars found it increasingly difficult to obtain entry visas for India, a pro-establishment writer explaining that "India was victimised by sloppy and even malicious American scholarship.[28] Intellectual quests for objective enquiry, it appeared, were not valued at the expense of the national "image."

Political Participation and Public Opinion

With the non-governmental intellectual unable to make any substantive impact on foreign policy, it becomes necessary to look beyond the power of reason and argument to that of numbers, to the broader majority of India's "Public." While we have already indicated the limits on this public's interest in foreign policy-its preoccupation with sheer survival and related concerns that left it, in the words of an Indian student, "no time, scope or incentive to know the country's foreign policy"[29] it is important to note that it possessed the ultimate power, that of the ballot box. Indeed, it used this power somewhat more frequently than the intellectuals of the "elite public": beyond a certain point, any increase in the characteristics of modernization-rise in the level of education, exposure to mass media and other modernizing influences, and geographical mobility-actually produced not an increase but a decline in voter turnout.[30] The government's dependence on the votes of the broader public provided the clue to its power.

Nevertheless, the public was crippled by its own lack of interest in national, let alone world, affairs: in 1966, 48.2 per cent expressed "no interest" in national politics, 18.3 per cent claimed to be "somewhat interested," and only 22.9 per cent said they were "very interested."[31] As late as 1975 only 41 per cent of a predominantly rural sample was "very interested" in the public affairs of its own village, and only 30 per cent in that of its district (the basic administrative unit).[32] Foreign policy was, therefore, a remote concern.

Almond and Powell have identified three modes of political participation: the parochial (concerned with local issues of immediate relevance), the subject (concerned with all issues but submissive to authority) and the participant (concerned with all issues with "full membership" in the polity).[33] While vast sections of the Indian electorate might not fare well in any of the three categories, Bashiruddin Ahmed has evolved a new approach to the "stratification" of the Indian voting public. In 1967, he found from a sample of 2000 that 22.8 per cent were "apathetics" ("those who are not involved psychologically in politics"), 20 per cent were "peripherals" (who have "either some knowledge or some information" but are not involved in politics except for voting), 29.8 per cent "spectators" ("who only vote and have some interest and information, along with a few who with moderate levels of motivation, vote and engage in one other activity"), 17.6 per cent "auxiliaries" (who "vote and engage in" one or two other activities with medium levels of interest and information") and 11.8 per cent "politists" (the decisive actors).[34]