The Civil Servants Who Shaped Indian Diplomacy

More than 75 years since India’s independence, the Indian Foreign Service remains a remarkably small and exclusive organization. Its total personnel strength is barely more than 1,000 people, with current plans expected to increase its staff by just 215 people over five years. Entry into the elite organization is based on a highly competitive examination that currently grants 30 to 35 individuals per year acceptance into the ranks. (The U.S. Foreign Service, by comparison, inducts as many as 900 officers each year.)

Kira Huju, Cosmopolitan Elites: Indian Diplomats and the Social Hierarchies of Global Order, Oxford University Press, 336 pp., February 2024.

Many of the first members of the Indian Foreign Service were part of the erstwhile colonial Indian Civil Service (ICS). The ICS was composed of highly educated, upper-class (and frequently upper-caste) men who wielded considerable administrative power under the British; they were known as the “steel frame” of Indian society at the time. India’s leadership saw no viable alternative to stand up a cadre of trained officials at the Foreign Ministry headquarters and staff its diplomatic missions abroad in the wake of independence.

There is plenty of scholarship on the evolution of India’s foreign policy. One of the most notable books remains that of Indian diplomat-turned-academic Jayantanuja Bandyopadhyaya, The Making of Indian Foreign Policy (1970), which provides a thorough account of the social forces and institutions that shaped New Delhi’s approach to diplomacy. More recently, British academic Chris Ogden’s Indian Foreign Policy (2014) devotes important segments to India’s foreign-policy decision-making, examining its dramatic successes and abject failures. However, few if any academics have examined the composition of the Indian foreign-policy establishment—and particularly the Indian Foreign Service.

A recent book by Kira Huju, a fellow in international relations at the London School of Economics, steps into this gap. Cosmopolitan Elites: Indian Diplomats and the Social Hierarchies of Global Order is a novel examination of the internal contradictions of the Indian Foreign Service in the immediate post-colonial era and beyond. Huju shows how the induction of former ICS officers meant that a group of men with an elitist outlook dominated the foreign service in its early years—an era in which India took on a role on the world stage challenging the colonial order. The institution’s foundations shaped Indian diplomacy in the decades to follow, with ripple effects for the Indian Foreign Service under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru clasps his hands in salute while sitting with his daughter, Indira Gandhi, in the back seat of a car in October 1961. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Once they matriculated to these prestigious institutions, most men destined for the colonial ICS discovered that equality with their British peers was all but impossible. They persisted with their academic endeavors despite prejudice, but their ability to excel in subjects such as English literature and even to best their British counterparts did not confer equal status. (Huju recalls examiners ridiculing an Indian student for his Gujarati-accented English when reciting Sir Walter Scott’s famous poem “Lochinvar” during an elocution exam.) Like other colonial subjects, Indians who opted for bureaucratic service could only rise so far in the ranks.

Still, few individuals opted not to join the ICS after their studies in the United Kingdom. One of them, whom Huju does not mention, was Aurobindo Ghose, who deliberately failed the entry exam due to his incipient nationalist sentiments. Upon his return home, he was employed by the maharaja of Baroda State in western India and became involved in nationalist politics, even resorting to radical agitation. He ultimately abandoned this pursuit for a life of mysticism. Ghose’s experience echoes an argument from political scientist Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: that many colonially trained men turned toward nationalism as they realized that their professional trajectories were circumscribed by colonial bureaucracy.

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Indeed, most of those who chose to stay on with the ICS had to cope with professional limits, keep any nationalist sentiments to themselves, and adopt the social mores of their colonial masters—including playing cricket and polo. K.P.S. Menon, who would serve as India’s first foreign secretary after independence, was not being treated according to his formal rank during his first ICS posting; he was not accorded the full privileges of his office because he was an Indian within the hierarchical British colonial order.

After independence, the members of the newly formed foreign service confronted a set of profound social and political contradictions. They could not simply abandon their elite status and prerogatives, but they were now tasked with carrying out the foreign-policy goals of an independent India. Under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, those aims included transforming the global order. Nehru, himself a Britain-trained barrister who studied at Cambridge, was an ardent nationalist. Despite India’s material weaknesses, he was convinced that the country’s civilizational heritage made it destined to play a major role on the world stage. Menon, who also came from an elite background, was seen as someone who could help execute Nehru’s vision.

These new expectations sometimes manifested themselves in curious ways, as Huju shows. For example, in the aftermath of independence, the new Indian Foreign Ministry issued an order that prohibited the consumption of alcohol at diplomatic functions as it was deemed not in keeping with Indian customs and traditions. This rule led to a formal protest from an Indian diplomat in Saigon, Vietnam, who complained that it hobbled negotiations with French counterparts.

This episode aside, there were more compelling issues at stake. India, especially under Nehru, was the standard-bearer of a new global order and ultimately a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement. So even as most of India’s diplomatic corps maintained its elite status, they were compelled to pursue an agenda that emphasized challenging the global hierarchy, with the quest for decolonization high on the agenda. These diplomats, most of whom were loyal civil servants under colonial rule, were expected to take up the cudgel of a newly independent country and push for a range of global reforms, from nuclear disarmament to challenging apartheid in South Africa.

The new Indian Foreign Service carried out these duties with honor, despite its members’ personal and professional backgrounds. As a result, New Delhi managed to punch above its weight on the world stage under Nehru’s tutelage. It was only after the first few decades of India’s independence that the demographic features of the foreign service started to change. India’s vast affirmative action programs enabled those from previously excluded parts of Indian society to enter the hallowed arena. From the 1990s on, the ranks of the Indian Foreign Service opened up—in part because upper-class Indians found more lucrative opportunities in the country’s private sector.

However, as the first foreign service generation passed from the scene, India’s role in international affairs also diminished, especially during the years of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s leadership. It was only after the Cold War’s end, with India adopting market-oriented reforms and embarking on a path of sustained economic growth, that Indian diplomacy managed to restore a degree of its former elan.

Then-Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh arrives to take charge at the Foreign Ministry in New Delhi on Aug. 1, 2013. Singh was an officer of the 1976 batch of the Indian Foreign Service. Ajay Aggarwal/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

Indian diplomacy finds itself at a pivotal moment. Owing to its current rates of economic growth, its military prowess, and its willingness to occasionally flex its muscles beyond its immediate neighborhood, India has captured the attention of great powers. It has certainly been helped along by Modi’s vision to make India another power to contend with in global affairs. Although the Indian Foreign Service may have lost some of its former cachet, at its core are still practitioners who are deft diplomats. As long as they are willing to implement the current government’s agenda, they will enjoy the privileges of the office.

Under Modi, India is again undergoing important changes; how his leadership will shape the contours of New Delhi’s foreign policy in the years ahead remains an open question. Relatedly, Huju’s book concludes on an interesting note: Under Modi’s government, the foreign service faces the challenge of conforming to the expectations of both resurgent Hindu nationalism and personal loyalty to the prime minister. For example, diplomats have been asked to extol certain aspects of traditional Indian culture abroad—including celebrating the International Day of Yoga introduced by Modi in 2014 and recognized by the United Nations. If the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party returns to power with a majority in national elections this spring—which looks likely—these trends are likely to become entrenched.

More concerningly, these developments could merge with another visible trend in Indian diplomacy, which Huju does not explicitly discuss: a growing willingness to use the country’s increased economic standing to pursue a parochial vision of its national interests without much regard for the global common weal. This approach to foreign policy is ultimately a far cry from the days of Nehru, when India inexorably supported a global movement for decolonization and steadfastly shunned regimes such as apartheid South Africa. Today, these idealistic commitments are mostly seen as relics of the past.