Turkey’s recent election was interesting for a number of reasons – including what it says about politics in India.
Turkey’s centre-right AKP regime, headed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, appears to have consolidated its position, with its third triumph on the trot. This is a remarkable achievement, and Erdogan is eyeing a larger role for Turkey within the Middle East. Political bickering in Iran, meanwhile, has only increased the possibility, and plausibility, of Turkey stepping up in the region.
Interestingly, Erdogan’s erudite professor come foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, also ran for office. It was an unusual move, made all the more interesting by the fact that as part of his campaign he distributed classic books such as Great Expectations, in addition to copies of his own works on foreign policy. It’s a move that raises some pertinent questions about India’s overall approach to politics and foreign policy.
First, Davutoglu showed that it was possible to blend his image as a technocrat with a little populism. By distributing his own books, meanwhile, he has been able to share his worldview and vision for the role Turkey can play on the world stage.
In contrast, when was the last time any Indian politician distributed a book in an election campaign? It’s common for politicians here to distribute pamphlets with derogatory remarks about opponents, or else bicycles, TV sets and consumer goods aimed at buying voter loyalty. But not books.
Some might argue that Davutoglu’s approach wouldn’t work in India. But no one seems brave enough to even try. Even the youth brigade, led by Rahul Gandhi, has failed to provide refreshing alternatives to the usual hackneyed ways of campaigning.
But there’s another interesting comparison to be made. Davutoglu was handpicked to be Turkey’s foreign minister in large part because of his specialist foreign policy knowledge. Yet despite India being a rising global power, the role of foreign minister isn’t seen as a particularly desirable one in politics here. And sadly, its importance appears to be diminishing.
The fact is that in India, the office of the foreign minister doesn’t command nearly the sort of authority it should, or indeed did in the past. Ongoing turf wars with the Prime Minister’s office and the Ministry of Home Affairs only complicate things further. While foreign policy in other countries is certainly influenced by domestic politics, in India it’s being completely overshadowed by intra-party and intra-government feuds.
Unfortunately, the experiment of having former UN Under Secretary General for Communications and Public InformationShashi Tharoor as foreign minister, an appointment many hoped would bring a breath of fresh air to India’s lethargic and chaotic foreign policy making, lasted less than a year.
If technocrats aren’t acceptable to the Indian system, then it’s important to ensure that the most promising of politicians are put to work in the foreign policy cell of political parties. Yet neither the ruling Congress Party nor the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party can claim to have any outstanding individuals manning foreign policy. This is an unhealthy trend, and will hamper progressive thinking on India’s position in the world.
The result of such stagnation is that India’s perspective on foreign policy is restricted to the country’s relationships with China, Pakistan and the United States. But this is based purely on short-term political calculations, rather than the long-term interests of India. The approach towards these three countries is reactionary, mostly based on media reports, and so there’s no clear roadmap for future ties. While there are certainly advisors (most of whom are retired diplomats) very few have the audacity to provide bold input.
India can’t become a superpower merely through growing its economy. Rising economic strength needs to be complemented by a pro-active foreign policy that can only come from individuals who can balance national interests with international realities. For India’s sake, let’s hope that the Ministry of External Affairs can find the talent and the vision to create a foreign policy that takes note of domestic politics, but isn’t subservient to it.
Tridivesh Singh Maini is an Associate Fellow with The Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. The views expressed are his own.
Reddit
Digg
StumbleUpon
Delicious
Technorati
Yahoo
Google
Plurk
Amruta Karambelkar
Interesting article. Indian politicians can indeed take lessons from Turkish episode to make politics informative and attractive. politics is no longer pure social service but it is emerging as a profession, and if so, the stakeholders need to be adequately trained in every process, from campaigning to execution. How much of expert or professional advice to policy makers in India seek? Do we have a flourishing think tank culture.. these are some issues that article stimulates.
SamirK
This article has two holes big enough to fly a dozen C17 transports through. Firstly, it assumes that politicians and not the bureaucrats wield supreme executive power as it were, in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). That ‘turf war’, is of far more significance and is often misunderstood by those trained in the American political/educational system, as the writer of this article no doubt was.
To understand how the MEA functions in India one needs to understand the nature of the bureaucracy that holds it together; whichever politician is appointed Minister to oversee it is mostly irrelevant. The writer has reached the wrong conclusions with the right information, it is precisely BECAUSE the bureaucracy, in tandem with the current ruling hierarchy, don’t want a popular, charismatic politician as Minister, like Shashi Tharoor (who, incidentally, was not Foreign Minister but Foreign Minister OF STATE, a far more junior position in the Indian system) to be in charge that the post of Foreign Minister is given to a seeming incompetent who understand their role perfectly well; it is to be the fall-guy in case blunders in foreign policy occur. Examples abound – Natwar Singh, Yashwant Sinha, N.D. Tiwari (all of whom were allowed to release books after their tenure as a reward) and the current incumbent S.M Krishna. Otherwise, they remain relative unknowns, like Dinesh Singh, B.R. Bhagat, Sikander Bhakt and many others. The only time Foreign Ministers have been significant is when they simultaneously held the post of Prime Minister, which has mostly been the case when the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty has been in power. A simple glance at the Wikipedia article will confirm that. Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi all held the post simultaneously, as did Gujral and Vajpayee, for a time.
The other fundamental misunderstanding of Indian politics here is the complete exclusion of the role, and even the existence, of Sonia Gandhi. Women are significantly in power in India, when you consider that the President, the Foreign Secretary (the most powerful bureaucrat in the MEA), and the Speaker of Parliament are all women, as is, of course, the ruler who appointed them, as she did the Prime Minister. The writer perhaps might want to pay some attention to that instead of examining the Indian political system in a hopelessly misunderstood way through the lens of what is clearly obsolete patriarchal political training.