The prospects and perils of India’s new diplomacy

In February 1833, Agha Hasan Jan stood before the great Persian crown-prince Abbas Mirza’s court at Meshad, armed with nothing but words. Abbas Mirza had long been plotting to plant his flag over Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Kashmir; the young Kashmiri’s job was to somehow frighten him. Even the floors of the Maharaja’s tented camp, Agha Hasan claimed, were covered with fine Kashmiri shawls, and, “as for his army, if Sardar Hari Singh, his commander-in-chief, were to cross the Indus, his highness would soon be glad to make good his retreat”.

Kashmir, Abbas Mirza concluded, was not his to have. “How inscrutable are the decrees of providence,” he lamented, “which has conferred so much power on an infidel”. For Agha Hasan himself, the crown-price had nothing but praise: “Behold the effects of an English education”.

This week’s bewilderingly postmodern exchanges—involving pop-star Rihanna, teen Green icon Greta Thunberg, and a Ministry which would once have never designed to respond to something called a Tweet, especially if it wasn’t in triplicate—tell us important things about the changing contours of Indian diplomacy. The story of Agha Hasan and the Prince of Persia is a useful prism with which to introspect on the prospect—and perils—of this new course.

For centuries before scholars of international relations injected suicide-inducing earnestness into geopolitics, theatricality was critical element of diplomacy. Neither loud voices nor big sticks, though, were recommended. From late-medieval diplomatic handbooks, like Bernard du Rosier’s Ambaxiator Brevilogus and Ermolao Barbaro’s De Officio Legati, we know that formal negotiation and drafting treaties were marginal skills. The essential attribute sought of diplomats was, as scholar Susan Broomhall puts it, “effective performance of one’s own emotions in order to manipulate those of one’s interlocutors.”

Thus, Rosier counselled diplomats to “let outrage yield to friendliness, impetuosity to wisdom, rigidity to adaptability, and curtness to approachability”. “The appearance of envoys must remain distinguished and unmoved to those whose responses are less pleasant or negative”.

Looking good, the scholar Ellen Welch writes, was taken quite literally: In addition to being eloquent, the medieval diplomat was expected to be a competent singer, dancer and physically beautiful.

This week’s bewilderingly postmodern exchanges tell us important things about the changing contours of Indian diplomacy

Frankness and sincerity weren’t, of course, to be confused with naïveté. The magnificently-cynical Florentine jurist Francesco Guicciardini counselled diplomats that “a reputation for plain dealing” was useful because this “artifice will blind men more”. He cautioned ambassadors that even their own bosses would conceal their true intentions, only “imparting what they would have the foreign prince persuaded of, thinking they can hardly deceive him unless they first deceive their own ambassador who is the instrument and agent for treating him”.

The increasing complexity of international relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth century—driven by the emergence of nation-states—slowly killed off aristocratic preening. The Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, where the continent’s great powers reassembled the structure of power after the ravages of Napoléon Bonaparte’s wars, witnessed pageants, masquerades, and plays; Ludwig van Beethoven even composed a symphony for the occasion.

Yet, as Brian Vicks has astutely observed, the festivities were “presented with a rather self-conscious historicism, and at times a slightly post-modern staginess, as if everyone was in on the joke that, however grand and entertaining, this was not the real thing, or the past brought back to life”. The real business—the fate of Germany, Italy, and Poland; the slave trade; the relationship with the Ottoman Empire—was conducted off-stage.

The diplomats who shaped the Yalta Conference, the Sino-United States rapprochement or Cold War nuclear negotiations—the great diplomatic events which shaped the modern world—rarely left the darkness of the wings.

Although spectacle remained a part of diplomacy—First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s India visit in 1962 was packaged like a The Heat and the Dust episode, complete with elephants and polo matches—the actual business of India-United States relations was confined to diplomatic cables and smoke-filled rooms.
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Little imagination is needed to see how profoundly the character of Indian diplomacy has changed under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Prime Minister’s unprecedented endorsement of former President Donald Trump, or External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar’s very public spat with United States legislators over Kashmir, show a new willingness to enmesh Indian ideological concerns with political fights in other countries. New Delhi now routinely responds to invective emerging form Islamabad and Beijing, breaking with a tradition of magisterial disdain.

Not Just A New Delhi Idea

This kind of new performative diplomacy—intended to signal India’s red lines to adversaries overseas, and at once reassure nationalist concerns at home—is far from unique to New Delhi.

China’s so-called Wolf Warrior diplomats have earned an international reputation for aggressive—sometimes abusive—advocacy of their country’s interests. Zhao Lijian, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, earned international notoriety after using Twitter to spread Covid19 conspiracy theories; Beijing’s Ambassador to Brazil described the president’s family as “poison”. Iran, Pakistan and Israel, among others, now often use language unfamiliar to old-school diplomats.

It is possible, as the eminent Singapore diplomat Bilahari Kausikan has argued, this kind of language simply mirrors the anxieties of a new generation which “feels obliged to have a public quarrel to prove their patriotism”. The rise of social media, moreover, has diminished the cultural value once accorded to putting space between emotional impulse and speech.

For advocates of performative diplomacy, though, there are things more substantial than nationalist posturing at play. Even though the language of the new diplomacy might appear intemperate, they argue, it serves to signal countries cannot be pushed around—no unimportant thing when asymmetries of wealth or power make that easy for adversaries and allies to forget. In addition, public signalling of a position makes clear that some issues are core interests, not subjects of negotiation.

There is, of course, an unstated benefit, too: Performative diplomacy gives foreign offices a heft in domestic politics that they have not traditionally enjoyed.

The Risks Of Muscular Diplomacy

Like the old, effete diplomacy, however, the new muscular one comes with real risks. New Delhi’s gamble on Trump, for example, served to alienate the Left-wing of the United States’ Democratic Party, which has considerable heft in President Joe Biden’s administration. Although the United States’ global interests might well contain the damage, politics involves endless accommodation; there’s just no telling when Indian trade or military interests might run into new-found enemies.

Education has been rudely handed out to some practitioners of performative diplomacy, too. China, for example, undermined its potential gains from Covid19 aid to Europe by seeking to crudely influence politics in the region. Europe’s chief diplomat, Josep Borrell warned that Beijing’s “politics of generosity” concealed “a geo-political component”.

India is learning the same lessons. In 2019, Jaishankar dismissed American critics, arguing that his reputation was not “decided by a newspaper in New York”, and chided “liberal fundamentalism”. Two years on, his ministry has been obliged to mobilise against what it describes as a “campaign to mobilise international support against India”—led by those very forces he decried, now empowered by changed political circumstances.

The fundamental question confronting Indian diplomacy isn’t if it should fight to protect Indian interests, but who should do the fighting, and how. From Elizabethan England confronting Spanish Catholicism, to ideologically-driven States like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, to the Cold War: All nations have in all times used propaganda, economic might and military force to achieve their ends.

Fights are sometimes necessary—but the ends they seek must be clearly defined, and the costs of losing them clearly understood. The task of the diplomat has been to quietly secure what can be had without running the risks involved in unleashing these great instruments of national power. That necessarily involves calm conversation, even through doors that have violently been slammed shut.

In 1877, Agha Hasan Jan—some knew him as Mirza Quli Kashmiri, others by his real name, Mohan Lal Zutshi— was buried in his garden, Lal Bagh, at Azadpur on what was then the highway from Delhi to Panipat. Haidari Begum, one of his seventeen spouses and many mistresses, was buried along with him. His tomb is forgotten now, covered-over by the urban sprawl around New Delhi’s main fruit market.

Even though Zutshi never fired a shot, nor spoke an angry word, the great Prince of Persia never did cross the Indus.