Gurugram: HarperCollins India, 2021. 211 pp. US$56.00, cloth. ISBN 9789354892035.
Ambassador Syed Akbaruddin’s book is a diplomatic pot boiler. In 211 pages, he narrates the story of a rare diplomatic achievement in the form of the election of an Indian judge to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2017. Prior to this, India had won only three elections to a full term at the ICJ in five attempts. In 2017, India’s task of getting Judge Dalveer Bhandari elected had been made difficult by an inherent delay in decision-making in New Delhi. The author, India’s Permanent Representative at the UN for four years, provides an insider view of this “diplomatic triumph.”
The book brings to the fore not only the intricacies of lobbying and canvassing for support for candidates by individual nations, but indirectly underscores some important lessons for India’s global diplomacy. What New Delhi considers as its rising profile in the international system needs to be structurally supported by a strong diplomatic corps. India has been an ardent proponent of reforms in the UN, seeking permanent membership on the UN Security Council (UNSC). However, it continues to fall short of even maintaining a sizeable number of foreign service officers.
Odds were indeed heavily against Judge Dalveer Bhandari. The Indian UN mission not only faced the onerous task of managing the victories of Indian candidates for three UN bodies (ITLOS, UNCLOS, and ICJ) in a single year, but had the handicap of joining in the race for the ICJ seat only at the end of May, barely six months before the November 2017 elections. On the other hand, candidates from other countries—Argentina, France, Lebanon, Somalia, and the UK—had begun preparations more than a year earlier, which provided them a significant advantage in terms of campaigning to and lobbying members in both the General Assembly as well as the Security Council. New Delhi’s late decision was probably a factor in Judge Bhandari winning the last of the five seats on offer, after a huge diplomatic edge-of-the-seat effort.
However, the victory came only after what the author describes as a “desperate attempt” by the UK to invoke the “legally permissible” and yet “anachronistic” Joint Conference option in the Security Council to try to ensure the victory of its candidate, Judge Christopher Greenwood (169). Article 12(1) of the ICJ statute provides for a “Joint Conference consisting of six members, three appointed by the General Assembly and three by the Security Council” (142) to select a winner if no candidate has secured the required number of votes after three rounds of voting. Although it is legally provisioned, India calculated that if invoked, it would pave the way for the defeat of Bhandari. India’s argument that the provision had never been invoked in the history of the ICJ prevailed and Greenwood withdrew from the race.
Akbaruddin acknowledges the political cooperation that poured in from many quarters, including from the Congress politician Sashi Tharoor, who unleashed a volley of tweets in support of the Indian candidate. This, in a way, underlines an unwritten rule in India that the ruling and opposition parties are nearly united in their desire to achieve the country’s foreign policy objectives. Akbaruddin also contacted the then US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, who instructed her staff to stay away from canvassing in favour of the UK candidate. Here again, India’s ability to build on its growing strategic relationship with the United States, especially during the Trump presidency, may have helped. Akbaruddin, however, opines that in international diplomacy, where the support of so-called friendly nations cannot be taken for granted, and where the P-5 and the Security Council hold decisive sway and do everything to protect the established order, India must guard against complacency to protect its national interests.
The book attempts to pay tribute to Indian diplomacy by providing an insider’s view of how the Indian foreign ministry—starting from the foreign minister, the foreign secretary, the UN mission and Indian diplomatic missions around the world—worked in perfect tandem. The author refers to the late external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj’s sharp interventions, ability to connect with diplomats and world leaders, and accessibility. However, Sushma Swaraj’s tenure also witnessed a phase in which much of the foreign policy-making apparatus was controlled directly by the Office of the Prime Minister and she came to be known as the “Twitter Minister.”
The book’s “Epilogue” highlights the limitations of India’s diplomatic outreach, as the country does not have diplomatic missions in some 50 UN member states. This underlines India’s need to expand its existing diplomatic corps, which is smaller than that of Brazil, China, Singapore, and even Hungary. India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in 2015–2016, briefly toyed with the idea of increasing the number of officers it takes from the pool of candidates who qualify via the country’s public service examination. However, subsequently it settled for a redefinition route, by classifying all officials who served in diplomatic missions as diplomats. Thus, while the number of Indian foreign service officers remained at around 600, the number of “diplomats” shot up to about 1300.
The effort to back Judge Bhandari had its origin in New Delhi’s wish to be represented in the ICJ when the case of alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadav, who was arrested and subsequently given the death sentence in Pakistan, came up for hearing. The ultimate withdrawal of the UK candidate, who had earlier been a Pakistani counsel in commercial arbitration cases, was “doubly delightful” (131), in the words of Akbaruddin. Diplomacy is not always about winning large wars, but also small battles. However, on a larger plane, this narrow motivation for fielding a candidate to the ICJ paints India as a rather self-limiting player in the global arena, where most of its ambitions at the UN can be viewed through the prism of its conflictual relations with Pakistan.
This book is a product of the collective memory of many, which the author graciously acknowledges throughout. The book makes three unique contributions to the broader scholarly literature on Indian foreign policy, which is largely focused on India’s biltareral relations with its neighbours and with global powers. Firstly, subtly marrying empiricism with analytical insight, it unravels, albeit through a narrow prism, the strengths and weaknesses of the Indian foreign policy decision-making process. Secondly, it provides a succinct Indian overview of the UN system, its workings, and the level of prevalent fairness. And lastly, it brings attention to some of the distinctly Indian ways of overcoming diplomatic hurdles in the UN system. Authored by a former diplomat, such revelations carry significant weight and lessons for students and practitioners of diplomacy and foreign policy.
Shanthie Mariet D’Souza
German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Berlin