Within days of his return from the G-8/G-5 meeting in Italy, the Indian Prime Minister was on his way to the Non-Aligned Movement conference in Egypt this week. It has been widely reported in the media that Dr Manmohan Singh has an excellent rapport with many heads of state, including US President Obama, British Prime Minister Brown and French President Sarkozy.
Add India’s historical ties with Russia, and we have four of the five permanent representatives of the UN Security Council with us. Therefore, India’s claim to a permanent seat at the global decision-making body seems to be almost secured.
Thus, India’s ambitions to be treated like a global leader of world governance at this juncture can be realised, as it is being respected as a global emerging economy and the largest democracy in the world. It is being seen as part of the new economic wall of BRIC (Brasil, Russia, India and China), and an emerging southern voice called IBSA (India, Brasil, South Africa).
Many developing countries in the world are looking towards India to provide them with support (technical, professional, material) in their trajectories of development.
This preference is more readily reflected in their deep appreciation of indigenous models and practices of development and progress that India is credited to have evolved so successfully.
The challenge before the Indian government, its political leadership and its people today is to practically demonstrate ways in which its ‘soft’ power could be made accessible to many of these developing countries around the world. But, in some very practical ways, India has been lagging behind other BRIC and IBSA members for the past two-three decades. Let us start with various international conferences of the United Nations system.
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South Africa has hosted three large ones (environment, xenophobia and human rights) since it came out of apartheid in 1994, a mere fifteen years ago. Brasil is the current favourite ‘host’ nation under President Lula (after the Rio conference in 1992, it has been hosting conferences on environment, child rights, education, peace, etc). The Beijing conference on women in 1995 is still remembered as a milestone.
India has not hosted any Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting (CHOGM) for more than 25 years; it has not played host to any major inter-governmental initiative that can be seen to be globally path-breaking. Why?
Likewise, no major international scholarly conference has been held in India in recent years (once again, China, Brasil, South Africa are favourite locations). No major civil society conference (CIVICUS World Assembly or women’s networks or democracy/governance coalitions, for examples) has been held in India over the past two-three decades. No major global sports events are hosted (China has done Olympics, South Africa is doing soccer next year, and Brasil has done it many times), and the forthcoming Commonwealth Games are raising further doubts about this nation’s capabilities to do so in an open and welcoming manner.
China is now having an International Center on Poverty, supported by UNDP, DFID and others, where professionals from developing countries get trained.
At the core of this set of issues is the manner in which India’s foreign relations machinery has remained unchanged over the past sixty years. Our foreign service has excellent individuals who know very little about ‘domestic’ developments. Our embassies and high commissions are seen as highly bureaucratic in granting visas to attend conferences and seminars or to become interns in Indian organisations.
Other global players regularly take scholars and civil society leaders from their own country in official government delegations to international meetings; this approach is viewed as holistic partnership in global interactions and an important vehicle for ‘track II’ diplomacy. Brasil, South Africa and many other developing countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, Philippines (in addition to the OECD countries) do so regularly.
Likewise, embassies and high commissions of many other countries regularly host receptions for non-official delegates to any conference or meeting abroad; we only host ministers and bureaucrats visiting abroad. Many of us have attended more receptions hosted by other friendly countries on such visits abroad than our own.
Many Indian academics and civil society activists and scholars are highly respected in international arenas, and have excellent communications and partnerships with their counterparts in those countries. Our official machinery neither recognises such global networks, nor mobilises them to have the strong influence in global governance through this ‘soft’ power.
Over the past ten years, the Indian government has begun to make claims of being a donor for the development of other countries; it is variously said that India’s official development assistance is nearly one billion dollars annually. But, there is no transparency on this; there is no single official donor agency of Indian government whose programmes and budgets are debated in the Parliament.
Indian embassies, apparently, spend huge resources in several development programmes in other developing countries, but there is no attempt to involve Indian civil society or development professionals to design or manage such programmes. In contrast, nearly a quarter of all official development assistance from OECD countries is channelised through their domestic NGOs and academic institutions.
I am raising these issues at this juncture because I feel we now have a national leadership team which understands these dynamics.
The Hon’ble Prime Minister has interacted in various international events and committees with civil society professionals and academics from many developing countries; our Minister for External Relations, Shri S M Krishna, has demonstrated inclusive leadership in making Bangalore a global ‘brand’ where foreign students, experts, professionals, artists and musicians have felt welcomed, and where citizens at large have felt a sense of belonging; Minister of State Shashi Tharoor ji has decades of experience as a senior official of the UN system, and must have witnessed these global dynamics from close quarters; and, the newly appointed Foreign Secretary Ms Nirupama Rao is credited with transforming many ways of doing ‘global’ relations in the new era.
India’s ‘soft’ power is enormous, and official leadership can acknowledge and mobilise it to make India a truly global leader.