Defending the diaspora

Many people involved in the massive evacuation of Indian expatriates from Kuwait in 1990 are disappointed at the mischaracterisation of the role of the politicians, diplomats and airline officials in Airlift, a new Hindi film based on that incident. While film-makers have dramatic licence to set fiction against facts, diplomats are rightly upset that the story of the biggest ever air evacuation in history, carried out by a resource-strapped government in the throes of political and economic crises, has deliberately painted foreign service officers in negative light.

K.P. Fabian, who headed the Gulf desk at the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) during that episode, is quoted in this newspaper as saying “young people who are watching this film are getting a wrong impression of their history”. Nirupama Rao, former Foreign Secretary, criticised the production of falling short on its research. Even the MEA’s official spokesperson stepped in to set the record straight. It is unfortunate that the producers felt the need to reinforce popular prejudices of uncaring bureaucrats in that one area where that prejudice could not be more wrong.

Whatever you might think of the Indian government, when it comes to expatriate citizens in conflict zones, our diplomats go to great extents to ensure their safety. The airlift from Kuwait is only the biggest and the most famous one — more recently Indian diplomats and armed forces coordinated mass evacuations from Lebanon (in 2006), Libya (2011) and Yemen (2015). This is a job our diplomats, armed forces and airline officials do well, and it is unfair and self-defeating to cast them in poor light.

The damage, however, is done. But the public interest arising from the movie and the debate over the accuracy of its portrayal of the government’s role is a good opportunity to focus on the issue of diaspora security.

Indians around the world
According to government figures, as of January 2015, there were 11 million Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) and 17 million Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs) around the world. The largest populations were in the Gulf, the United States, United Kingdom, Southeast Asia and Nepal. On the thin end, there were seven Indians in North Korea, two in Nauru and one in Micronesia.

Until the turn of the century, the government’s relationship with overseas Indians has been twofold. Indian citizens (NRIs) were treated differently from ethnic Indians holding other citizenships. While the government concerned itself with the former, the latter were encouraged to be loyal and upstanding citizens of their respective countries.

In the recently released Netaji Files, in 1960, Prithi Singh, India’s envoy to Malaya, reminds headquarters that “our own expressed policy has been to encourage persons of Indian origin, domiciled abroad, to absorb themselves into the life of these countries and I feel that any step which we might take which helps them to maintain rigidly their emotional and/or communal links with India, actually prevents them from giving their whole-hearted loyalty to the countries of their adoption”.

This policy has served India and overseas Indians well. If the Indian diaspora is highly successful and integrated into the societies around the world, it is in part due to the fact that the loyalties of persons of Indian origin are beyond doubt. They might retain Indian customs and faith, but they bat for the interests of the country they are citizens of.

Courting the diaspora
The longstanding policy began to shift in the 1990s, with India looking East and West initially due to economic adversity and subsequently due to opportunity. The Atal Bihari Vajpayee government put the courtship on a formal footing with a high-level committee recommending the long-term visas under a PIO Card Scheme, a grand conference and recognition in the form of awards. The United Progressive Alliance government constituted an entire ministry for overseas Indians which, wisely, the Narendra Modi government has recently decided to merge back into the MEA.

No Prime Minister has gone so far out to court overseas Indians as Narendra Modi. Reaching out to the humble construction worker, the middle-class professional and the wealthy elite has galvanised the emotional links NRIs have with their home country. Mr. Modi has reinforced the growing feeling among NRIs since the turn of the century that India is a great country to be from.

Mr. Modi’s highly publicised engagement of overseas Indians changes the tenor of the government’s old policy to downplay their emotional links to India. It is for the Prime Minister to decide what the new policy should be. What we should recognise is that change comes with risks that need to be managed.

First, to the extent that New Delhi is seen to engage NRIs and protect their interests in foreign countries, foreign governments will not consider it an intrusion in their politics. However, if New Delhi begins to speak out on behalf of ethnic Indians who are not Indian citizens, then the interventions are likely to encounter resistance. In 2007, Malaysian politicians reacted viciously when Indian politicians made comments critical of Kuala Lumpur’s strong-arm tactics against its Indian minorities.

The modern world is constructed on the Westphalia model, where sovereign states relinquished their right to intercede on behalf of their religious and ethnic kin in other sovereign states. To violate this norm risks inviting any number of foreign interventions into our own domestic affairs.

Second, the reputation that PIOs have cultivated over several decades for being loyal citizens of the countries they live in can come under a shadow. In many parts of the non-Western world, countries are still reconciling with their nationhood and identity.

Any suspicion, even at the margin, of PIOs having multiple loyalties can be detrimental to their interests. Notice how the Singapore government insisted that only NRIs attend Mr. Modi’s public event, demarcating the line between its own citizens of Indian ethnicity and expatriates with Indian citizenship.

Airlifts of the future
Finally, the airlifts and naval evacuations of the future might be more complex in a context where there is a conflation of NRIs, PIO card-holders and other ethnic Indians with foreign citizenship. During crises when time and resources are tight, who should Indian diplomats priorities? Will they have moral grounds to put non-citizens on a lower priority than citizens? If they do, what impact will it have on the Indian government’s reputation and the expectations it has created? New Delhi ought to review the political and security risks to its diaspora populations and create the capacity to act in their interests should the need arise.

It is unclear if India’s overstretched diplomatic corps has been tasked with paying greater attention to multilateral arrangements, institutions and agreements that pertain to diaspora-related interventions.

Similarly, the external intelligence establishment needs to be reoriented towards gathering and analysing information relating to the threats that diaspora populations might face. The conceptual move from defending the homeland to defending the diaspora needs a concomitant retooling of government machinery.

Diaspora security will require more naval ships, wider patrolling, foreign berthing and outposts. Military heavy lifting capacity apart, it will also require policy measures, like for instance, licence conditions in civil aviation requiring private airlines to put their aircraft and crew at the government’s disposal during emergencies.

The commitments that India makes require the state to have the capacity to redeem them. If we widen the scope of our commitments, we must invest in the capacity to carry out the airlifts of the future.

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U.S. considers re-merger of India, Pakistan desks

Seven years after the State Department was restructured to ‘de-hyphenate’ U.S. relations with India and with Pakistan, it is considering a reversal of the move.

De-hyphenating refers to a policy started by the U.S. government under President Bush, but sealed by the Obama administration, of dealing with India and Pakistan in different silos, without referring to their bilateral relations. It enabled the U.S. to build closer military and strategic ties with India without factoring in the reaction from Pakistan, and to continue its own strategy in Afghanistan with the help of the Pakistan military without referring back to India.

‘Active’ consideration

A proposal to re-merge the office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP) back with the Bureau of South and Central Asia (SCA) that handles India, the rest of the subcontinent and Central Asian republics is under “active” consideration, senior-level sources told The Hindu.

The re-merger proposal is ostensibly timed with the international troops pullout from Afghanistan.

Ministry of External Affairs officials would not confirm whether they had been informed of the move they described as an “internal” matter of the U.S. government. However, asked about the possible impact of bringing India and Pakistan under one bureau again, the former National Security Adviser, Shiv Shankar Menon, said: “It looks like a re-hyphenation of the India-Pakistan equation that is not in our interest. Our relationship has grown because it stood on its own, as it is important that bilateral relations with India won’t be overshadowed by its relations with the region.”

The de-hyphenation policy of the U.S. was crystallised when the SRAP was set up in 2009 soon after President Barack Obama had taken over, with the appointment of Richard Holbrooke.

At the time, Mr. Holbrooke had hoped to include India in his mandate, and even to discuss the resolution of Kashmir as a means to extract greater cooperation from Pakistan. India had strongly opposed the move.

According to a diplomatic cable published by the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks which was accessed by The Hindu, the then External Affairs Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, had objected to this when U.S. Ambassador David Mulford paid a farewell call on him.

“He expressed his deep concern about a special envoy with a broad regional mandate that could be interpreted to include Kashmir, and shared his hope that the U.S.-India relationship not be viewed through the lens of regional crises,” Mr. Mulford recorded of Mr. Mukherjee’s message. (http://bit.ly/1QAu279).

Subsequently, Mr. Holbrooke remained only engaged with NATO and Af-Pak affairs until his death some years later, and was followed by subsequent SRAPs. “Even when U.S. officials wanted to discuss the situation in Afghanistan or Pakistan with us, we would insist they didn’t travel to us via Islamabad,” a senior MEA official working on the Americas desk in those years told The Hindu.

Mr. Menon, who was Foreign Secretary at the time, had also repeated the message of de-hyphenating the ties in his talks with the then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, other cables from WikiLeaks record. “We didn’t want to be party to U.S. actions in Afghanistan at the time,” explained Mr. Menon.

“We don’t believe in talking to the Taliban, for example, so how would we manage that conversation.”

Third party

Other officials objected to U.S. involvement as a “third party” in talks with Pakistan, which would become the case if special representatives would travel between Delhi and Islamabad regularly.

“We also saw that many of the officials including Mr. Holbrooke saw regional solutions through the ‘Pakistan prism’, which is why our relations really improved only after the two desks were separated,” a former official said.

There are indications, however, that even as the U.S. is planning to bring the desks back together, India may not object as strenuously as it did in 2009.

To begin with, India has dropped its objections to talks with the Taliban in the past few months, instead asking to be “kept in the loop” on developments in the U.S. talks on Af-Pak.

In a major shift in December, India decided to supply 4 Mi35 attack helicopters to Afghan security forces, the first such transfer of lethal military hardware, and a move that would have required U.S. approval.

Indian officials also point out that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government are being consulted more often by the U.S. government on matters relating to Afghanistan, and 2015 saw the first visits by two U.S. Generals in combat to India, as well as a visit by Cameron Munter to Delhi, shortly after he demitted office as U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan.

In December 2015, the visit of SRAP Richard Olson to Delhi, just before his visit to Islamabad was another key indicator of the shift in New Delhi’s position on the ‘re-hyphenation’ of U.S. visits to India and Pakistan. Asked about the State Department’s possible move to bring together the officials and desks handling both, a senior official told The Hindu: “It would be good for us,” adding that the merger “would introduce a balance between the two” when it came to advocating India’s point of view.

When contacted by The Hindu, the U.S. embassy in Delhi, and the State Department refused to comment on the possible move, calling the reports “rumours” at present.

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'Airlift' spreads misinformation

I saw the film Airlift on Thursday evening, but despite the entertaining narrative, the film left me slightly bewildered because the director says in the beginning that Ranjit Katyal [played by Akshay Kumar] is a fictional character but the movie is based on a real event. The problem is that the only two real events referred to in the film are the invasion of Iraq and the airlifting of Indians from Kuwait and Iraq.

What intrigued me is that Katyal, the protagonist, telephones a Joint Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs, who introduces himself right in the beginning of the telephone call that he was not dealing with the Gulf issues and he would help Katyal speak to the relevant Joint Secretary. Yet, throughout the film, Katyal keeps on interacting with the same person. If Katyal was a quick-witted crisis-solver, then why was he not in touch with the correct Joint Secretary dealing with the Gulf-India ties?

Obviously, the director did it deliberately to portray the MEA in a poor light. I agree that, the director had the freedom to portray Katyal, but the diplomats in the MEA were not fictional characters. They were real people who did an incredible job. I think fictionalisation of characters of the MEA, and deny them the right of credit for their work, is unethical.

A lot of the viewers of the film were born after the incident in Kuwait. They need to be educated on their genuine inheritance and history from the First Gulf War. For example, the Ambassador of India in Kuwait, Kamal Bakshi, was portrayed in a very poor light. In reality, Ambassador Bakshi accommodated hundreds of Indians in the embassy and in several other available buildings. The film trivialises the issues. This appears like a deliberate attempt to spread misinformation.

In a sequence, the film shows Air India pilots also in a demeaning manner. The Air India did a great job during the war. Appears like the filmmaker deliberately dealt with Air India dismissively.

Excellent coordination

In fact, the evacuation was organised by a Cabinet Subcommittee which was chaired by then External Affairs Minister I.K. Gujral. There was excellent coordination among the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the Ministry of External Affairs and Air India. We were careful about the developments and we did not condemn Iraq as we had 1,76,000 Indians in Kuwait and Iraq and Kuwait was under Saddam Hussein. We were under American pressure, but we resisted them and avoided condemning the Iraqi action. Mr. Gujral met James Baker Jr, his American counterpart, and conveyed our point of view. In the middle of that crisis, a major issue erupted when during our trip to the region, I.K. Gujral “hugged” Saddam Hussein. The fact is that Gujral did not hug Saddam, instead it was Saddam who hugged Gujral. We were of course reaching out to all sides to get out our people from a very dangerous conflict zone.

We also activated the Non-aligned network involving Yugoslavia, Algeria and other friends of India. Americans were treating Saddam Hussein contemptuously and there was no chance of a compromise between the Americans and the Iraqis.

We organised the evacuation in as best a way as possible. We contacted the associations of various Indian communities in Kuwait so that every community could be represented even at the stage of evacuation. The film portrays Mr. Gujral as extremely reluctant. The director made the film without any idea of how the Ministry of External Affairs works.

During Mr. Gujral’s trip to Kuwait, he was informed by the Indian diplomats that he should not step out as there was a big crowd of 3,000 people. But Mr. Gujral got on the bonnet of the car and delivered a speech to the same agitated crowd and within four minutes the crowd started saying “Bharat Mata Ki Jai”. Young people who are watching this film are getting a wrong impression of their history.

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