Foreign policy affects every aspect of daily life: Tharoor

The guest on this week's edition of Beautiful People on CNBC-TV18 is a politician, prolific writer and commentator. His twelfth book, released recently, seeks to take the discussion on India's foreign policy into the drawing room. His book Pax Indica calls for a multi-aligned India in a multi-polar world.

Welcome Shashi Tharoor, former UN under-secretary general for communications and public information, former minister of state for external affairs and current member of Parliament representing Thiruvananthapuram. Below is an edited transcript of the interview on CNBC-TV18. Q: Why do you think it is important for the layman to know and engage with foreign policy?
A: It is important because it affects the daily life of Indians. People think of foreign policy as something that concerns diplomats in pinstripe suits sitting in foreign embassies.
The truth is that events that happen elsewhere in the world affect Indians on a daily basis- whether you are a person working for a call centre or a fisherwoman in Thiruvananthapuram worried about the price of kerosene or worried about being shot at by foreign trawlers in your waters.
Foreign policy impinges upon people in all walks of life and at all levels of society. So we can’t afford to be indifferent of foreign policy in this increasing globalized world. Young Indians are growing up in an India which simply cannot be disconnected from the rest of the world. Q: Ever since the process of the economic liberalisation which started in 1991, economics and the Indian economy became a very large part of India's image globally. It has also impacted foreign policy. How much did the ministry of external affairs have to change to accommodate this role that economics started playing?
A: It has changed significantly. When I first became aware of the ministry in the late '70s when I was doing my doctoral thesis on Indian foreign policy, most of the Indian ambassadors would sneer at having to have anything to do with business relations or trade relations. They saw themselves as being essentially involved in geopolitics and the impending political aspects of the relationship of the country they were accredited to, was what mattered to them.
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Today every Indian ambassador is conscious and is made to feel conscious that he is also a salesman for Brand India. An ambassador abroad has to facilitate foreigners coming and investing and trading with India and Indian companies trying to trade with other countries.
This is become an indispensable part now of the foreign-service officer's profile. And the percentage of time that an Indian ambassador or any official in his embassy spends on economic and trade issues, has increased exponentially in the last three decades. Q: And yet the commerce ministry leads a lot of initiatives on foreign policy?
A: Correct. But that is because the commerce ministry usually doesn’t have any representative of its own in the embassies. So the commerce ministry leads the policy-level discussions and trade negotiations. But the implementation is done the foreign-service officers from the MEA who are posted in these embassies. So there is a synergy. Q: How much of a challenge does the waning of India's economic growth pose for foreign policy which places economic interest at its core?
A: It is a challenge, but that's what diplomats are there for. They should rise to the challenge. My argument is that it is precisely when we have so much negativism about the Indian economy that our diplomats should really earn their salary and go out and tell the world that this exaggerated pessimism about India is not well-founded.
Frankly, the optimism about India was also overblown at one time. But the truth has always been somewhere in between and right now there are a number of positive factors in India that justify that 5.9% growth in the second largest economy. Nobody else is growing faster and we should be able to say that we have enough positives to keep investors coming. Q: If the India's economic growth slows down, will it affect the way foreign policy has been conducted in the last 20 years?
A: It will affect the way we are perceived. There was a time when practically every head of state and government in the world was beating a path to our door. Our protocol staff was ridiculously overstretched. But the sheer volume of people who wanted to come to visit India was enormous. We actually had a waiting list of heads of state and governments.