In his address at the launch of INDIA’S WORLD — a magazine focused on India’s foreign policy — on December 15, external affairs minister S Jaishankar made an unconventional argument. He urged members of the strategic community assembled at the India International Centre to “listen to the street” when reflecting on and writing about India’s foreign policy.
The subtext of Jaishankar’s comments was that, despite major domestic transformations like economic reforms, the discussions and debates among India’s strategic elite fail to reflect the domestic political pulse and the sentiments of the general public. In his opinion, one important way to think about foreign policy is to observe how society in general thinks about the world around it and makes its own choices, which have implications for the country’s foreign policy. Put differently, he appeared to argue that there is a growing gulf between the core belief systems of the country’s strategic elite, primarily based in New Delhi, and how the public views India’s engagement with the world.
The conventional view about “listening to the street” on foreign policy matters is deeply conservative. The consensus among pundits is that thinking about foreign policy is an esoteric business confined to elite chambers of experts and former officials — also called the strategic community. At the level of practice, foreign policy becomes more exclusive, keeping out even the strategic community from the act of policymaking. Let us unpack this point a bit more.
It is useful to think about foreign policy at three levels. The first level, or Track One, as Jaishankar called it, operates primarily at the official level that is largely closed to outsiders and primarily functions as a bureaucratic exercise, with final decisions made by politicians elected to office. The second level is the strategic community, which contributes to foreign policy through research, debates, lessons from history, and long-term scenarios. The strategic community is expected to produce innovative solutions to foreign policy challenges and provide critical long-term analyses of the country’s foreign policy trajectory. This is, however, not often the case, or as Jaishankar argued, Track Two routinely lags Track One. Put differently, what use of a strategic community for the government that merely endorses official policies?
There are several reasons why Track Two lags Track One, two of which are key to the argument here. For one, a surprisingly large number of members of the strategic community often find themselves caught between the necessity of independent and creative thinking and the constraints of institutional legacy, as many of them are former officials. The second reason is that members of the Indian strategic community with little government experience — due to the limited interaction between serving officials and researchers in India — tend to fail in producing policy-relevant research and studies. The result is obvious: Foreign policy innovations or out-of-the-box solutions are hardly produced by the strategic community.
The third level of foreign policy thinking takes place at the level of the general public, or as Jaishankar described it, “the street”. Clearly, the public does not engage with foreign policy in a traditional sense, but their views may provide valuable insights to shape the broader directions of India’s foreign policy.
Consider the following examples. The general sentiments of the Indian society toward another country, such as towards European countries, Canada or the United States (US), can reveal important insights into societal preferences, and how the beliefs of the strategic community may differ from those of the general public. Remnants of anti-Americanism or India’s problems with Canada, for example, are not something that we would find reflected in the attitudes or choices of Indians at large. In fact, it is often the case that members of our strategic community hold conflicting strategic and personal beliefs.
Major business houses and even small-scale traders in the country, with little direct interest in foreign policy or strategic issues, may be pursuing activities — such as the fact that domestic private defence manufacturers primarily selling to the US or the growing interactions between Indian industries and the global tech services sector — which have foreign policy/strategic implications. Delhi’s strategic elite often overlooks such phenomena.
The significance of the street does not diminish the fact that foreign policy cannot be shaped solely by public sentiment or opinion surveys (remember the Brexit shocker in the United Kingdom?), as the general public is often not fully informed of the nuances involved in policymaking.
However, Jaishankar’s larger point that foreign policy cannot be formulated without considering societal preferences and trends is still valid. A society’s broader directions — such as technological developments, patterns of migration, and economic and cultural choices — will eventually influence foreign policy. Therefore, while governments may not base their policies solely on the changing mood of the street, this indeed serves as an important indicator of societal preferences that should be taken into account during policy deliberations.
Jaishankar’s argument offers important lessons for the country’s strategic elite, two of which, in my opinion, are particularly crucial.
First, the Indian strategic community cannot operate in a self-created epistemic vacuum, detached from both the government and the general public. That is a sure path to irrelevance.
Second, the definition of what constitutes foreign policy or strategic issues must be reconsidered. To be sure, these matters are no longer esoteric or to be treated as a special class of issues but should be continuously informed by insights from “the street”. The more elite our strategic community becomes, the more irrelevant it may become.
Happymon Jacob teaches India’s foreign policy at JNU, and is the editor of INDIA’S WORLD. The views expressed are personal
