BS-Seema Nazareth Award: Future of diplomacy will be people-led, says Rao

In a world where each country exists in its own silos, where “more and more diplomatic openings are mostly shut today… people in ordinary walks of life, out there in the trenches, can break down diplomatic baggage,” said former foreign secretary Nirupama Rao. Rao was speaking at a function organised to confer the 23rd Business Standard-Seema Nazareth Award for Excellence in Journalism 2021.

Through her speech, titled “Reaching out across borders: How citizen diplomacy can work”, Rao made a strong case for “the role that non-state actors can play in mitigating differences and deep-rooted conflicts”. “Diplomacy,” she said, “is people-centred, and at the level of ordinary citizens, there is scope for each of us to be citizen-diplomats”.

Dipping into the history of the region and drawing from the writings of 19th century traveller Thomas Stevens and novelists Rudyard Kipling and Geetanjali Shree, Rao said, “South Asia was meant to be an integer. The Grand Trunk Road, the Uttarapatha, the Silk Route of India, once connected Kabul all the way through undivided India to the borders of Burma.” However, “South Asia today is the least integrated region in the world, barring Antarctica perhaps,” she said. “The Grand Trunk Road has been swallowed up by the bylanes and small galis of narrow nationalisms and the failure to think big enough to go regional.”

“In our region, unlike in Europe, borders are not regularly crossed as a routine, they have not thinned out, rather they have thickened,” she added. The casualty is connectivity.

“…. the art of statecraft is to cooperate and compete — in one behavioural set — with all countries,” she said, adding, “Instead, divisions multiply, and great power rivalries have splintered the world…. The post-pandemic world is nasty and brutish, inward-looking and non-inclusive.”

This is where citizen-driven diplomacy comes in. “Many votaries argue that the future of diplomacy will be people-led. Our basic reflex as human beings is to create common ground even if it means for many never crossing the threshold of foreign ministries,” Rao said.

“You can do so within the media, an NGO, in schools and universities, to counter online hate and division, for instance,” she said. Or it can be achieved through the arts, say, music.

This is just what Rao has done along with her husband since she retired – created a South Asian Symphony Orchestra to bring people together through music.

Nirupama Rao | Illustration: Ajay Mohanty

“We created this experiment in citizen diplomacy, originating in India, because music speaks the language of peace,” she said. They put together a database of musicians from the region and the Indian/South Asian diaspora who could form this orchestra. The musicians come from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka and from the larger global community of South Asians drawn from the United States, Europe, Singapore and Australasia. Some are as young as 13. One of the orchestra’s young Afghan members, she said, lists his aim in life as “to overcome the sound of war with the sound of music”. “One of the pieces played at our first concert was Hamsafar – A Musical Journey through South Asia, commissioned for the occasion by the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (before the country fell to the Taliban),” Rao said.

The orchestra, she said, has become “a microcosm of the region, a living portrait that speaks of what we, as South Asians, can do if we practice the habit of cooperation.” Rao added that “the aspiration is to demonstrate that we as citizens can build channels of communication and exercise citizen diplomacy”.

Earlier in the evening, the Business Standard-Seema Nazareth Award for Excellence in Journalism 2021 was presented to Senior Sub-Editor Nitin Kumar. The award, given every year to a journalist under 30 years, carries a prize of Rs 50,000, a silver pen and a citation. Kumar, who is based in New Delhi, is the 23rd recipient of the award, instituted by Business Standard and the Nazareth family in memory of Seema Nazareth, a young Business Standard journalist who died in March 1999.

Commending his work, the jury recognised Kumar’s “command over a wide range of subjects – from pure politics to social-economic issues related to Covid-19 and farmers’ agitation”.

This year, a Special Mention award was conferred on New Delhi-based Feature Writer Akshara Srivastava, who joined Business Standard in September 2021. The award carries a citation and a prize of Rs 10,000. Acknowledging her work, the jury noted that Srivastava’s “descriptive feature-writing style has added colour and spark to several serious themes otherwise reserved for die-hard beat reporters. Her writings reflect sensitivity and rigour.”

As he gave the vote of thanks at the poignant award ceremony, held virtually because of the pandemic, Seema Nazareth’s father, P A Nazareth, recalled how the first award was conferred at Rashtrapati Bhavan on his daughter’s birthday that falls on February 21. He also said that the family hopes to release a collection of Seema Nazareth’s poems in September this year.