The Indian Foreign Policy Bureaucracy

Jeffrey Benner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000302417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política asiática

In this book, Jeffrey Benner traces the history of the Indian foreign policy bureaucracy from the British period to the present, focusing on the bureaucracy's role in shaping policy. Because the bureaucracy has become an active agent in the policy process, its implementation of policy has often differed significantly from the original policy formulated by top leadership. The book includes a description of the foreign service cadre and a systematic breakdown of the functional and administrative structure of the Ministry of External Affairs, as well as the larger bureaucracy.

I
Foreign Policy Bureaucratic Analysis

In the study of India's position in the world community we may look at a variety of objects to different benefit. Many such studies have been about the content of Indian foreign policy, or more precisely, of the position that the Indian government has taken on the many issues to have developed in post-World War II global politics. Of particular interest is the mechanical formulation of foreign policy. Equipped with such knowledge we may be able not only to better interpret Indian foreign policy but perhaps will be able to anticipate future shifts in policy, and to prescribe changes which may lead to improvements in the way policy is formed (once values are defined). Two possible approaches to the study of policy formulation lie in the study of policy flows or the chain of decision-making, and in the study of structures provided for policy formulation. The first is dynamic and the latter static, but together they would give us a very good idea of how policy is developed. The first dynamic approach would demand a specific, temporally-bounded (historically defined) inquiry into a foreign policy decision to lay bare its policy-making antecedents. Such studies, primarily of crisis decision-making, have been made of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis which transpired between the United States and the Soviet Union. Such studies have been conducted for India, but the area remains largely unexplored.¹

Also mostly unexplored is the static, structural context of Indian foreign policy formulation, the study of bureaucratic and central executive structures. This study is primarily one of the Indian foreign policy bureaucracy, not only of the Ministry of External Affairs but of the surrounding foreign policy "community." It is not primarily an administrative study, though I deal with some purely administrative topics in an effort to show areas in which the machinery works well and not so well. This study has a secondary purpose in outlining the relationship of the top leadership, the "central executive," to the lower career leadership. I also deal with the historical development of the bureaucracy and of the bureaucracy--central executive relationship.

This approach to the study of bureaucracy as a determinant in foreign policy has a privileged position within the larger science of international relations. International relations, the study of human society on the largest possible magnitude of organization, is generally subdivided into a number of smaller issue-areas for simplicity (as economics may be subdivided into micro- and macroeconomics). Different solutions to the "level of analysis problem" have been proposed on an ad hoc basis, subdividing international relations theory into two to five separate levels. I have moved from ad hoc typologies to the development of a jurisdictional methodology labeled "neo-reductionism" (see Appendix A). Within the context of neo-reductionism, bureaucratic influences are assumed to be dominant within certain classes of international relations behavior. Organizational studies are not new to social science, but the application of organizational research to foreign policy problems was initiated in the 1960s, roughly at the time of the Kennedy administration, to deal with the new Washington bureau labyrinth. As a neo-reductionist submethodology, the bureaucratic level-of-analysis was most junior and therefore methodologically least developed.

The importance of the bureaucratic level-of-analysis, though, is not disputed; it is just not known yet how important the bureaucratic level-of-analysis will be as part of the total analysis.² The initial observation behind the bureaucratic level-of-analysis is that policy does not emerge like the Platonic Idea from a void, but comes about through the operation of processes which may not be entirely concerned with the formulation of policy. A bureaucrat, for example, is not just a government official but a man or woman with family responsibilities, who may be concerned for the sake of his or her family that taking a certain policy stance might jeopardize his career goals. He may then not take the position, even if it makes for "good" policy. In the political decision-making process distortions of various types, for a variety of reasons, may occur. The scientist using this level-of-analysis thinks not only of what the "good" policy may be, but imagines himself inside the bureaucracy and asks: what type of policy is likely to emerge, given these formulative conditions? It is plausible even without looking into actual events that errors of different kinds might occur in a large organization's production and implementation of policy, but there are many documented cases of bureaucratic "interference" in policy. For example, during the October 1962 missile crisis President Kennedy ordered a blockade of Cuba in such a way as to minimize the chances of a reckless Soviet response, but the actual blockade was carried out according to very inappropriate standard blockade procedures, simply because that was the way that the Navy had always done things.³

Several like examples can be drawn from recent Indian history. We begin with an issue in military planning, the purchase of Gnat aircraft. In the early 1950s India's need for a good fighter jet was acute. By way of finding a solution the British statesman Mountbatten recommended the purchase of the low-altitude Gnat fighter from Follands Company of Great Britain. Nehru and defence minister Vellodi both liked the Gnat's capability rating and recommended its deployment, as it was a much less expensive plane than anything else of its calibre on the market.⁴ The Air Force, however, preferred the French Ouregon, due to the Ouregon's greater technical sophistication, and stalled for over a year and a half before Nehru finally was able to pressure the air force to accept the purchase.⁵

A second example of Indian bureaucratic politics lies in the clash between the External Publicity Division in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and the related services of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Immediately after 1947 a long quarrel had begun over who should represent Indian information abroad. Foreign service and information service officers would frequently not speak with each other in Indian missions abroad, and there was much duplication of efforts between the two bodies. A 1948 Cabinet decision on the quarrel was not carried out by either External Publicity Division or the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (the Cabinet recommended bimonthly coordination meetings between the Secretaries of MEA and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Contrary to this advice only two meetings were held 1948-58⁶). This is a picture not of a perfectly rational implementation of policy, but of a community with strong internal conflicts of interest; in short, a political bureaucracy. Bureaucratic politics can also be seen in the April 1965 decision by Shastri to create a Committee of Secretaries "for the coordination of political, economic, cultural, and other activities abroad." It was speculated that Shastri had created the Committee in an attempt to bypass the left-of-center MEA in formulating certain pro-Western policies, and this is certainly plausible, if not the only possibility. Obviously, the Indian bureaucracy does have an element of internal conflict, making a political approach necessary.

Possible evidence that the study of diplomatic and foreign policy organization may allow the prediction of international behavior may be found in the interest shown by some government bodies. O'Leary and Coplin report that of uses of political quantitative data by the Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INK), "[n]umber of diplomats or diplomatic missions" is mentioned more than any other political data but "[t]roop and arms strength."⁷ Though this is probably due in part to the familiarity of such data to State Department analysts rather than because of the usefulness of the information, strength of diplomatic representation has considerable conditional utility as an index of international relationships. It is a corollary of this observation that the secretariat of those embassies and representations abroad, the foreign policy bureaucracy, would be regarded by these analysts as an important source of information about the international relationship. If, for example, information from a particular nation or region is regarded as especially valuable, we would expect special care to be taken to ensure proper handling and analysis of the information. Perhaps we would find a larger proportion of senior analysts in the section of the bureaucracy in communication with the diplomatic representation of that region. We might thereby discover the value of an international relation to an elite through the study of the bureaucracy.

The organizational response to the international environment will differ by nation and by period. United States leadership has at different times vested confidence in the use of staffs, a special Assistant to the President, and in the Secretary of State in attempting to manage the bureaucracy. In Great Britain, leadership has handled the problem by the use of unofficial agents, by relying heavily on the Cabinet Office and through the frequent mergers of departments. In India, with its powerful Prime Ministership, its responsibilities and constraints as a developing nation and the strong legitimizing influence of foreign affairs for Indian leadership, we can expect a significantly different organization to develop, despite the British organizational precedent in South Asia.

How does it develop? It is a common myth held by administrators and students of administration that development occurs when the administrator grasps through a problem-solving process that a problem exists, and sets up a new or modifies an existing division to handle the problem. Then, the officers of the new division come in at ten, do their jobs, and go home at five. This myth treats any type of administration as a machine in which one feeds a certain input, and receives a measured output (political scientists of the structuralist school may be said to treat national political life in a similar fashion). The national leadership needs only to crank the lever, and the government will faithfully do its duty. It is an organic view, treating the bureaucracy as an organism in which the various "cells" of the body work together in harmony by their very nature. Organizational malaise (dissent, inefficiency, corruption) is a rare aberration which can be quickly corrected by proper administration. It is not usually granted that organizational equilibria may be dysfunctional relative to leadership. The only internally completely cooperative subset of any social system, however, is the unit subset of the human being (and even here it is doubtful that internal tradeoffs resulting from internal conflict do not occur). Above the level of the individual, political, conflictual behavior to some extent determines outcomes rather than mechanistic, formally determinate systems. We need, therefore, to transcend the perspective that informal, political behavior is somehow countersystemic and illegitimate. Such behavior may in some cases not serve the interests of leadership, but this should not arrest research within such a nonnormative framework as the author assumes. It is equally true, though, that bureaucratic politics is frequently played out to the advantage of national political leadership.

For all this, we need not consider the bureaucracy a Hobbesian wonderland, but simply acknowledge its indeterminacy or superdeterminacy. In the United States examples of the operation of bureaucratic politics can easily be found. During the Johnson administration, biological weapons were increasingly seen as a political liability, being of little use to American defense efforts, and attempts were made to abandon the weaponry. However, because the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were in disagreement on many other issues, the Secretary decided to support the biological weapons program in return for the army chief of staff's support on other issues.⁸

This study will define bureaucracy rather broadly. We consider those entities the bureaucracy which full-fill the following three conditions:⁹

1. They are involved in the formulation of foreign policy, or in implementation of the generated policy. Most groupings considered under this subdefinition would be involved in both formulation and implementation. Indira Gandhi's primary role is of a policy formulator, but when she represents India at international conferences she is acting as implementor. The MEA implements policy, but, as we shall see, it also plays a very important part in the formulation of policy. In this study, that group with the most comprehensive veto in the formulation of policy will be referred to as the central executive, while those individuals most responsible for the implementation will be termed operational.
2. They may be either individuals, small groups such as committees, or large organizations. This is perhaps not a standard administrative definition, but foreign affairs administration is not a standard case. The foreign policy process does not take place within a single ministry predominately, as does domestic security policy (which is left to the Home Ministry), or as in the regulation of Indian banking, which is conducted by the Ministry of Finance. Foreign policy and operations are probably potentially more identifiable with certain individuals, small groups and committees than other areas of government activity. Some entities which we may consider under this definition may not be easily classified in terms of the individual, group or organization. When the foreign minister speaks on some matter, does he speak as a powerful individual, at his own behest, or as a representative of the MEA? Or is he instead voicing the general sentiments of the cabinet?
3. They are either government or government-affiliated individuals or bodies. This will not be a study of the effect of public opinion or of lobby groups on foreign policy formulation (the domestic level-of-analysis' jurisdiction), though these may play a role in the policy process. With this last subdefinition, we have widened our understanding of the bureaucracy as something beyond the MEA, but remaining within the constraints of the Indian government community.

¹ For studies of the missile crisis, see Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971) or Elie Abel, The Missile Crisis (New York; Bantam, 1966). Two case studies of Indian decision-making are Ashok Kapur's India's Nuclear Option: Atomic Diplomacy and Decision Making (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976), and Arun Kumar Banerji's "Role of the Diplomat in the Decision-Making Process: Some Case Studies," India Quarterly, April-June 1979, pp. 207-22. The author suggests that a good subject for a future study would be one of the decision-making that led to the Indian policy stance on the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union.

² For a critical view, read Robert J. Art, "Bureaucratic Politics and American Foreign Policy: A Critique," Policy Sciences 4 (1973), pp. 467-90.

³ Abel, pp. 169-71.

⁴ "Defence," of course, is King's English rather than the American spelling.

⁵ B.N. Mullik, My Years With Nehru: -16 (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1972), pp. 125-31. According to Mullik, Gnats were used very successfully in the October 1965 war with Pakistan, as well as in the 1971 Bangladeshi Indian air operations. In the 1971 war they beat the performance of the Soviet MiG-25s utilized by the Pakistanis.

⁶ Werner Levi, "Foreign Policy: The Shastri Era," in K.P. Misra, ed., Studies in Indian Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Vikas, 1969), p. 194.

⁷ Of all uses of quantitative data by the INR in the given sample, political, economic or social, "[n]umber of diplomats or diplomatic missions" ranked only fourth among twenty-two categories. Michael K. O'Leary, William D. Coplin, Quantitative Technique...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• About the Book and Author
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Chapter I: FOREIGN POLICY BUREAUCRATIC ANALYSIS
• Chapter II: THE BRITISH INDIAN FOREIGN POLICY BUREAUCRACY
• Chapter III: THE INDIAN FOREIGN SERVICE
• Chapter IV: THE PROCEDURAL HIERARCHY
• Chapter V: BASIC ADMINISTRATION
• Chapter VI: RESEARCH, INTELLIGENCE AND THE FOREIGN POLICY BUREAUCRACY
• Chapter VII: ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL-MILITARY POLICIES
• Chapter VIII: PARTICIPATION IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
• Chapter IX: INTERNATIONAL AND DOMESTIC SERVICES
• Chapter X: MODERN LEADERSHIP AND THE BUREAUCRACY
• Appendix A: NEO-REDUCTIONISM
• List of Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index