Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: Hyper nationalism prevents our foreign policy from asking tough questions

Indian Express

17-07-2025

Indian foreign policy is in a deep morass that is often difficult to see. Our hyper-nationalism prevents us asking tough questions. The daily news cycle is caught in tactical matters or image management for the government. Behind our failures lies a refusal of true realism, or a genuine confrontation with our predicament.
This refusal of realism is manifest in our diplomacy. The former foreign secretary, Jagat Mehta, often used to say at the Centre for Policy Research that the first exercise in approaching the world in any given situation should be to abstract out proper names, including that of your country, so that you are more ruthlessly objective about your task. Try and imagine how you appear to your toughest adversaries on the outside.
India is rightly concerned, and is somewhat shocked, that it lost the diplomatic high ground after Operation Sindoor. We got boilerplate costless condemnations of terrorism, but also felt that no one stands with us. It was fascinating to contrast the breathless self-proclaimed triumphs of the parliamentary delegations and our government with what other countries from the Global North and South were actually saying, behind our backs, as it were. We can blame other countries' self-interest and their anti-India disposition for the failure to politically capitalise on Operation Sindoor. But we were so besotted with our sense of our case that we did not honestly confront how the case might appear to others.
The rest of the world may be mistaken. These days, no country has much of a moral leg to stand on. But it is worth asking why the moral distinction between India and Pakistan was diplomatically much harder to convey than we thought. There are four reasons. I have no idea what we might actually be doing in Balochistan. But there is little doubt that our security establishment brags, sotto voce, about using the Balochistan crisis against Pakistan. In doing so, we ourselves muddy the waters about the use of proxies, and targeting on the basis of religion.
The violence in Balochistan and Kashmir, for the rest of the world, gets connected, in a chain of associations. In the backdrop of the fact that we have a government that does not exactly have a stellar reputation on moral condemnation of targeting people on account of their religion, it makes it easy for the world to say that these horrendous killings are, as one diplomat once put it, 'one of those periodic South Asian things'. This is condescending, but we invited it.
Second, we are missing the point on anxieties on the nuclear front. Both sides may be right in thinking that, in principle, they can control an escalatory ladder. But focus on rational control of escalatory ladders does not address genuine worries about accidents. In the minds of India and Pakistan, this may be a controlled operation. But any confrontation between nuclear powers is risky. When Donald Trump brags about preventing nuclear war, listen to the underlying concern, not the surface drama or his put-down of Narendra Modi. He is in effect saying that even the smallest step to war makes India and Pakistan a problem for the rest of the world. Pakistan has no diplomatic high ground to lose. But war will always make India lose its moral high ground. War makes India a problem for the world.
Third, wasn't it a matter of pride among our diplomats to say to Europe and the rest of the world that Ukraine was their problem? If the gobbling up of a whole sovereign nation is 'their problem', not a matter of principle, guess what? Terrorism is also not 'their' problem. What is their problem is the risk of nuclear accidents. And finally, India's absolute loss of credibility in the Global South. A country that cannot so much as morally squeak on what is now almost universally acknowledged as an ongoing genocide in Gaza, obsessing over terrorism adds narcissism to the charge of moral abdication. Add to this the fact that we botched our credibility as a state on meaningless operations allegedly targeting useless Khalistan activists in Canada and the US. Further add to this the fact that not allowing an open domestic discussion even on the bare facts of the war furthers our credibility crisis. Even our truths become less credible.
One ought to feel sorry for the able diplomats of the MEA. Their political and national security masters have made their job more difficult even before they have begun. So, India's moral claims now invite a long 'meh' at worst. And since our foreign policy establishment is easily satiated with the meaningless communique that makes the evening headline, that is at best what we get.
The other disposition impeding clear thinking is our approach to realism. The current dispensation's interpretation of realism is not actual realism about the state of the world: It is a simple inversion of some perceived past of Indian foreign policy. This supposed realism, with its fantasies of transcending India's South Asian context, has led to such a spectacular misreading of the neighbourhood that we have lost much of the neighbourhood. This is a realism that thought that the excessive courting of America was a sign of machismo. America is important to India. India's political economy might yet save India from selling the entire store to the US. But one of the deepest ironies in the recent excessive craving for validation from the US is that the pro-America lobby has never had confidence about building India's own strengths.
It portrayed domestic defeatism as a form of strength. It is not unwise to try and cut workable deals with the Trump administration. But to think these deals will be our salvation, or that they will miraculously be a catalyst for domestic reform, make us secure against China, enhance our global moral standing, allow us to sort out our problems in the neighbourhood, is sheer fantasy. And it prevents us from seeing what the American project is: A project of global dominance. Resisting it will require a different tool kit.
A senior Chinese communist once said that regimes sometimes have to lie to the people, sometimes control information and produce propaganda. But then he added: 'While it might be necessary for leaders to sometimes lie to the people, it is important they do not lie to themselves.' Our lack of realism comes from the fact that our establishment has come to believe the lies it is trying to tell the people.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express