Shashi Tharoor: Today, the country with the better story will prevail

Shashi Tharoor is known for his career in the United Nations, his foray into Indian politics, his analyses of international relations - and his writing. Speaking with Shobhan Saxena, Tharoor discussed why the world's fascination with India will continue, how our soft power is a hard asset during rough economic times - and why Indian cooperation with China is imminently possible:
Your new book Pax Indica comes when India is being downgraded by global ratings agencies and criticised by world leaders for insufficient reforms - isn't the world's love affair with India over?
No.I don’t think the comments made by the US president or the Singapore prime minister are out of order. They are both very legitimate expressions by countries that are friendly to us, just like we are capable of conveying very publicly our own wishes. We have said we want more H-1b visas for Indians in America and we want them to do more outsourcing to us. They are perfectly entitled to say they like us to do more. So I don’t think there is anything negative, and as to a headline in a magazine – the same magazine had done far worse to Prime Minister Vajpayee and the BJP didn’t stop saying that India was shining. We shouldn’t worry too much about these as they are minor blips on the screen and the larger picture is still very positive. We in India tend to err a little too much on both sides. Earlier, over optimism about where we were was exaggerated, and today’s pessimism how badly we are doing is over blown. I genuinely believe that the reality even then – as today – lies somewhere in between. We have strengths. We have limitations and weaknesses.
Ceratinly our system of coalition government does deprive us of rapid decision making and certainly prevents us from moving as fast on reforms etc as we would like to. On the other hand, we have managed to be very wise in resisting in the infection of financial crisis from the western world. So our somehow conservative ways have also served as well. And in the longer term we have the advantage of tremendous youth dynamics population and a great record of innovation. If you go to google and look for frugal innovation, you get all Indian inventions and products. In Toronto, last year, I was asked to open the India Innovation Institute at the University of Toronto, and the buzzword these days in ‘Indovation’. So, all of this is giving us certain energy that doesn’t go away whether a government policy may or may or may not satisfy some critics.
But economic growth is slowing down - can we balance the loss of financial clout with India's soft power?
Well, soft power we’ve always had. It seems soft power so far has been despite the government and not because of the government. We have the soft power of Bollywood, Indian cuisine, fashion, yoga and the Indian brain that has done so well with science and computers and so on. Those can be leveraged to as conscious assets. That is something we have to seriously think through because there is no question that in today’s world it’s not the country with the larger army but the country with the better story that will prevail, and we have to be able to tell the better story. Organising a festival of India or two is not enough; that’s important but it seems to me the traction of our culture and also to promote ourselves as a decent society that’s doing well for its own people and it has interesting stories to tell by itself.
But Indian softpower has limitations. Our languages like Hindi are not international…
It’s not necessary to learn Hindi. A friend of mine from Senegal in New York told me how his illiterate mother in a village an hour away from Dakar, the capital, would take a bus to the capital every month just to see a Hindi movie. Of course, she couldn’t understand the language spoken; she was illiterate so she couldn’t read the subtitles but these movies are made to be understood despite such handicaps. She enjoyed the song and dance and the action and came back with stars in her eyes about India.
In Afghanistan, for example, without people learning Hindi, they would watch our Bollywood soap operas in Dari and it becomes a big hit there. So I am not sure if we need to worry so much about Hindi. In any case, most foreigners when they come to India get by quite adequately in English anyway. So learning Hindi is not a yardstick.
What could be a yardstick is taking Indian culture and cuisine and fashion abroad. When people come here for the first time, some only notice the dirt, the disrepair, the despair, suffering, which is also there, we can’t wish it away; we have to tackle it. As long as we are making progress in tackling these problems, then the better story will continue being told.
Of late, there has been some debate about the quality of Indian diplomats. Do you think the current crop of IFS officers are able to handle the intricacies of a fast-changing world?
We have some very able diplomats but the system needs some serious rethinking and relooking. I feel we need more people, need to fill a lot gaps urgently and not wait to get additional recruits over the next 10 years through the method being followed right now because it will take them 10 years to be trained and to have experience and skills to be useful. But in the meanwhile we will have these 10 years – not being able to fill these gaps. So, I feel, we need if necessary to go out and do some mid-career recruitment. We also need to completely rethink the idea of hiring our diplomats from the civil services exams because we need diplomats and not bureaucrats and we need people different from those who would make good customs officers or good policemen or good collectors in districts. We need people with curiosity about the world, with interest in international relations, with a talent for languages, with an aptitude to deal with other countries. All of this we are not looking for because we have one standard exam and somebody aims for the IAS, doesn’t get it and settles for this; it’s very sad story.
But change may not be easy. There will be resistance from different lobbies…
I think one has to keep pushing. The IFS lobby may not be an obstacle on the exam front because they realize most of the seniors today belong to the era when you had to be in top 10 of the IAS exam to get into the IFS. The reversal only happened when foreign travel became much easier – when this principal prerequisite of the diplomatic life was not seen so attractive; when the opportunities for financial gains in other services were seen to be higher. Because of all these the IFS dropped in prestige and value but it was not the case earlier. We must be open to the methods that would make the IFS once again specialized and prestigious. There are a lot of bright people, including among the NRI community, who will make first-class diplomats but wouldn’t do well in the IAS exam.
In your book you argue that foreign policy should be making a difference to people’s lives. How can that happen?
Foreign policy has many facets to it but the foreign policy must serve the national purpose and that is in my view the domestic transition of India and in particular the need to ensure the security and well-being of the Indian people through good relations with outside world that help create an external environment that is conducive to our own growth, our own objectives. To do that we need good relations with the countries that are sources of investment, that are our trading partners, that are sources of our energy security, and increasingly as our consumption goes up, we will need countries that are sources of our food security. All of this is going to be necessary in the years to come. That we must do. But equally we have to attend to our immediate neighbourhood.
We can’t avoid that. And of course we have to play a responsible role on the global stage which is something I do talk about – stewardship of the global commons, involvement with other countries in sort of offering the expertise we can have. All of this requires a professional foreign service and it requires also a clear vision as to what they are doing and why they are doing it.
India has become an important player in the BRICS, which some look at with great promise and others sceptically? Do you this alliance can be a game-changer in global affairs?
I think game-changer is too early to say but certainly I think the BRICS has a future; it has a positive future because the five countries want to incarnate an alternative view of the world from the prevailing one and that is its strength. There have been some ambitious talk at the BRICS summit here in Delhi about a development bank and all that stuff; we will have to wait and see if those institutions come about. If they do, then it certainly could be a game changer, and even if they don’t the existence of such a forum coming together with their own thoughts and ideas is actually not a bad thing. However, we are not confined to one grouping. We are with BRICS, we have IBSA without China and Russia, we have RIC without the Brazilian and South Africans, and then we have the Chinese and Russians out in the BASIC. So, I argue in my book, we are in the era of multi-alignment – different configurations for different purposes. BRICS has its own purpose. It represents a sort of a non-western view of geo-politics and geo-economics. That is valuable in itself and if goes on to change the way non-BRICS members behave that remains to be seen.
One of the most important phenomena of our times has been the rise of China. For India, it’s a curse or an opportunity?
Well, it’s certainly an opportunity and a potential danger because if China rises and we don’t we could feel very vulnerable to them specially since they show no urgency in settling the border dispute with us, even though they have settled all their land border dispute with other countries. One can interpret this as the desire on their part to keep us off balance, having an issue they can periodically stoke up whenever they want to. So, we have to be well prepared; we need to have effective defences and security measures. But, having said that, we should not be acting as if a conflict with China is inevitable. It does not need to be. Our trade with China, which has just crossed $70 billion, is an important proof of the fact that trade can be a driver for peace because increasingly, and I make the same argument with Pakistan, trade can help create a constituency for peace in Pakistan with us because the business people who have got a huge market in India would not look kindly on some ISI fellow trying a military adventure or a terrorist adventure that can jeopardize their business. Similarly with China, if somebody one day wants to inculcate a military adventure in Tawang, there are a lot of people who are going to say it’s going to cost us $70 billion worth of trade at the time when the western markets are shrinking. So trade is an important driver in all this. Also, we should not write the Chinese completely off in terms of potential cooperation in areas where currently people are seeing threats. For example, in the Indian Ocean, there is a great fear of encirclement by the Chinese. I say look why don’t we make a common cause with the Chinese. We both need to keep the sea lanes open in the Indian Ocean. Our goods and energy all comes from the Arab world and Africa – east to our country – but China too needs the same routes to be opened to bring good to China. So why can’t we say let’s not compete, let’s cooperate.
But with issue of Tibet and the Dalai Lama still not resolved, can we really cooperate with China?
On Tibet, we have accepted their position that they are sovereign in Tibet. We have not given any encouragement to Tibetan secessionism or anything. What we have done is a humanitarian thing in keeping the Dalai Lama and Tibetans here, but the Tibetans have a rough time whenever the Chinese come visiting and they want to protest. We are actually very tough on the Tibetan protesters. We don’t behave as we are trying to use the Tibetans just to needle the Chinese. When the Tibetan protest in many western countries, they don’t crack down on them as we do here.
But there are some issues such climate change and IMF reforms we agree with the Chinese…
That’s true with every country. If you look at our relationship with the US, we don’t agree with them on everything. We agree on something and we disagree on others. In all relationships, there are no set in stone paradigms. We are in that sense not aligned with anyone. You may call it non-aligned or not allied. We do take independent positions on the basis of merits of individual issues.
In the 50s, India was poor country but we had a powerful voice at the international level. Now, we are emerging economy but don’t enjoy the same clout. What’s gone wrong?
First of all, the 50s were very unusual period -– the era of decolonization. We were the first country to be decolonized and we were able to take advantage of that. But by the 60s that had begun to fade because of war with China, our own economic problems, poverty, famine and our need for foreign assistance, and our prestige suddenly plummeted. The 71 war gave it a boost but again it went down. I would say today it’s even better than the 50s. India’s stature in the world, because of our economic growth, means that every world leader is coming to our door. We are overflowing with governmental visitors from other countries. Our prime minister is voted in a poll as the most respected global leader. He is consulted by the other leaders on G-20 quite regularly when he is there. We have a fair amount of prestige.