Iiab 220

Saffronizing diplomacy:
the Indian Foreign Service under
Hindu nationalist rule

KIRA HUJU *
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ia/article/98/2/423/6522060 by guest on 03 November 2022

This article presents a first draft analysis of a moving target, still developing
its institutional shape: the saffronization of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS).
Saffronization—a process named after the colour saffron that adorns Hindu
nationalist symbols—involves imagining India as a Hindu nation, both by recon-
structing an imaginary past defined by Hindu unity and by refashioning political
institutions to reflect majoritarian ideals.1 Inside the Indian state bureaucracy,
saffronization began in 2014 with the election of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister
Narendra Modi, of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and has gathered pace since
his re-election in 2019. Institutional path dependencies and the capacity constraints
of a severely understaffed service mean that individual Indian diplomats have
unusual autonomy in respect of day-to-day diplomatic conduct.2 Yet very little
is known about how Indian career diplomats have made sense of the change in
political power in New Delhi. It is this gap that this article addresses.
The experience of Indian diplomats invites a broader question in the global
age of populism: how do contemporary diplomatic services adjust to a nationalist
regime coming into power? I suggest that the slow internalization of new political
norms and diplomatic practices is only partly a function of ideological misalign-
ment between an internationalist bureaucracy and a nationalist government. What
also matters is the extent to which the status of the social class represented by
the bureaucrats is undermined by the government’s political project. Old school
internationalist diplomats resist populist incursions into diplomacy partly because
these incursions threaten to conform to Pareto’s theory of elite circulation: radical
regime change does not occur when rulers are overthrown from below and an
elite-less future is born, but rather when one kind of elite replaces another.3
In India, career diplomats are caught in a double bind. Hindu nationalism repre-
sents a rejection of much of the foundational dogma and diplomatic tradition that
have defined the IFS since independence in 1947. Yet saffronization also promises
* The author would like to thank Andrew Hurrell, Kate Sullivan de Estrada, Camille White and the three
anonymous reviewers for their comments on various versions of the arguments presented in this article.
1
See e.g. Edward Anderson and Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Hindu nationalism and the “saffronisation of the public
sphere”: an interview with Christophe Jaffrelot’, Contemporary South Asia 26: 4, 2018, pp. 468–82.
2
Manjari Chatterjee Miller, ‘The un-argumentative Indian? Ideas about the rise of India and their interaction
with domestic structures’, India Review 13: 1, 2014, pp. 7–8.
3
Vilfredo Pareto, The mind and society: non-logical conduct, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), p. 1563.
International Affairs 98: 2 (2022) 423–441; doi: 10.1093/ia/iiab220

© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. This is
an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work
is properly cited.
INTA98_2_FullIssue.indb 423 24/02/2022 13:33

Kira Huju
its own kind of diplomatic elite circulation: the once dominant Anglophone class
of diplomats is to be replaced by a new Indian elite invested in Hinduism, the
Hindi language and a narrower sense of nationalistic pride. Many diplomats feel
personally excluded from this narrative of ‘authentic’ Indianness. In fact, the
traditional upper echelons of the IFS represent precisely the kind of cosmopolitan,
secular, westernized, upper-class India that Modi’s populist rhetoric has sought
to devalue in the eyes of the nation. Therefore, it is not only non-Hindus whose
status is threatened under Hindu nationalist rule, but also the traditional elites
who have long presided over the governance of postcolonial India.
The saffronization of the IFS matters for the larger quest to understand how

diplomatic bureaucracies respond to populist leadership, as well as for a grounded
understanding of rising India as a global player. First, a ‘nascent and burgeoning
scholarship on the nexus between populism and foreign policy’ is emerging at the
intersection of International Relations, comparative politics and sociology;4 but
little work exists on the role of career diplomats in it, especially in non-European
contexts.5 A study of Indian diplomats contributes to a globally relevant reading
of how diplomats operate under populist leadership. India’s case is particularly
fascinating, since its career diplomats have unusual autonomy—and, unlike in
US state bureaucracy, for example, there is no tradition of lateral recruitment
of specialists from outside government service which could be used to expedite
institutional change through political appointments.6
Second, interrogating the lived experience of diplomats makes for a more
socially attuned understanding of rising India. The IFS plays an outsized role
in Indian foreign policy-making. Therefore, if its character is changing, this is
likely to have consequences for the behaviour of a major rising power. Scholars of
Indian foreign policy such as Rajesh Basrur, Ian Hall, Manjari Chatterjee Miller
and Kate Sullivan de Estrada have persuasively argued in the pages of International
Affairs and elsewhere that Modi’s purportedly transformative approach to foreign
policy has failed to defy any basic tenets of India’s long-running foreign policy
doctrines.7
I suggest, however, that change is afoot elsewhere: among the elite diplomatic
cadre to whom it falls to conduct everyday diplomacy under Hindu nationalist
rule. While they may be incremental, one would expect changes in diplomatic
tone, professional priorities and personal conviction among diplomats to manifest
themselves in interactions with foreign counterparts, especially over politically
charged subjects such as Indo-Pakistan relations or the very question of India’s
4
Sandra Destradi, David Cadier and Johannes Plagemann, ‘Populism and foreign policy: a research agenda
(introduction to the special issue)’, Comparative European Politics, forthcoming, publ. online 14 Sept. 2021, p. 2.
5
A welcome exception is found in Michelle Morais de Sá e Silva, ‘Once upon a time, a human rights ally: the
state and its bureaucracy in right-wing populist Brazil’, Human Rights Quarterly 42: 3, 2020, pp. 646–66.
6
Devesh Kapur, ‘Why does the Indian state both fail and succeed?’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 34: 1, 2020,
p. 48.
7
Rajesh Basrur, ‘Modi’s foreign policy fundamentals: a trajectory unchanged’, International Affairs 93: 1, 2017,
pp. 7–26; Ian Hall, ‘Is a “Modi Doctrine” emerging in Indian foreign policy?’, Australian Journal of International
Affairs 69: 3, 2015, pp. 247–52; Manjari Chatterjee Miller and Kate Sullivan de Estrada, ‘Pragmatism in Indian
foreign policy: how ideas constrain Modi’, International Affairs 93: 1, 2017, pp. 27–49.
424
International Affairs 98: 2, 2022

Saffronizing diplomacy
role on the world stage. To gauge whether these changes will reflect Hindu
nationalist priorities or internal resistance to them, we must first understand how
diplomats perceive Hindu nationalism. The saffronization of a historically secular
and relatively liberal bureaucracy like the IFS raises questions of future impact
across the wider Indian state machinery, too—particularly about the degree to
which more politically exposed and domestically orientated bureaucracies like
the Indian Administrative Service or the Indian Police Service might come under
challenge. These changes may transform the very nature of India’s bureaucracy
precisely as the country’s global footprint is growing.
The article builds its arguments on the back of a larger research project on the

IFS, for which I conducted 85 candid semi-structured interviews between February
and June 2019 in New Delhi and Bangalore. Of the interviewees, 33 were career
diplomats who had personally served under Modi, 47 had retired by the time of
his swearing-in ceremony in May 2014, one was a BJP affiliate working for the
Ministry of External Affairs, and two were Indian foreign policy experts. I also
conducted interviews with some former ministers and current or former members
of the Rajya Sabha, India’s upper house of parliament. Additionally, the article
draws on archival research in the National Archives of India, and on papers and
oral histories found in the archives of the Nehru Memorial Library in New Delhi.
Interviewing Indian diplomats is a fraught endeavour. Scholars such as Manjari
Chatterjee Miller, Deep K. Datta-Ray and Swapna Kona Nayudu have conducted
such interviews on diplomats’ social attitudes and working practices.8 These have
not, however, addressed diplomats’ engagement with Hindu nationalism. Can
one learn anything of substance by engaging with individuals whose careers
are premised on smoothing out rough edges and persuading an interlocutor
of the truth of any matter, however implausible or unpopular? Is there not a
self-censorship that permeates conversation in an age of accelerating attacks on
academic and press freedom in India?9 There was often the hint of a taboo on
discussions of Hindu nationalism, both because diplomats worried that dissenters
would be vilified as out-of-touch elites and because the clash with the existing
institutional culture was striking enough to elicit strong views in both directions.
Yet the anonymity accorded to interviewees relaxed the boundaries of acceptable
speech beyond the standards that commonly govern commentary on Indian diplo-
macy in the age of Modi. Recently retired officers were most forthright in their
assessments, but serving diplomats often ventured their own commentary too,
even during interviews in which I raised no questions on the government myself.
Sometimes diplomats offered subtle gestures, which I discuss below, that allowed
them plausible deniability. Indeed, these interviews, conducted around the time
8
Manjari Chatterjee Miller, ‘India’s feeble foreign policy: a would-be great power resists its own rise’, Foreign
Affairs 92: 3, 2013, pp. 14–19; Deep K. Datta-Ray, The making of Indian diplomacy: a critique of Eurocentrism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Swapna Kona Nayudu, ‘“India looks at the world”: Nehru, the
Indian Foreign Service and world diplomacy’, Diplomatica 2: 1, 2020, pp. 100–17.
9
See e.g. Academic Freedom Monitoring Project, ‘Scholars at Risk Reports on Jawaharlal Nehru Univer-
sity’, Scholars at Risk, 2019, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2019-12-09-jawaharlal-nehru-university;
Reporters without Borders, ‘India: Modi tightens his grip on the media’, 2021, https://rsf.org/en/india.
(Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 6 Nov. 2021.)
425

Kira Huju
of Modi’s re-election for a second term, may have been considerably more uncen-
sored than comparable interviews in the future will be, as Hindu nationalism
cements itself as the dominant ideological idiom in New Delhi.
The article proceeds in three stages. First, it considers changes to diplomatic
discourse, protocol and training initiated under Modi. Second, it details how
diplomats have adjusted to or resisted the saffronization of their service, and how
they navigate their commitments to the international community under changing
domestic conditions. In the third section, I consider saffronization as emblematic
of the analytical need to understand populist challenges to conventional diplo-
macy not merely as ideological critiques of internationalism but as sociological

responses to the elites with whom these ideologies are associated. Conversely,
diplomatic resistance to populism also reflects a worry that nationalist leader-
ship will invalidate the social status of the kinds of cosmopolitan, elite-educated
individuals that diplomatic services often attract.
Trading solidarism for saffron: from Nehruvian internationalism to

Modi’s Hindutva
Change and continuity
Indian diplomatic tradition has stood in the shadow of its iconic first prime
minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (in office 1947–64) for much of its postcolonial exist-
ence.10 The core tenets of Nehru’s ‘idea of India’ went virtually unchallenged
inside India’s diplomatic circles after his passing in 1964.11 In his dual role as foreign
minister and prime minister, Nehru worked intimately with the small cadre of
diplomats around him, borrowing from the cultural grammar of the freedom
struggle a conception of diplomacy as global liberation. This was postcoloniality
in the making, and in India it was conceived as ‘Nehruvian’ in nature: secular, left-
leaning, internationalist, and fiercely invested in democratizing an international
order emerging from underneath the yoke of colonialism.12 For Nehruvians,
the domestic and the international were inextricably intertwined and therefore
required, in the words of Foreign Secretary T. N. Kaul (1968–72), ‘look[ing] upon
India in the world perspective and India’s struggle for independence as part of the
struggle of all colonial peoples and territories’.13 Nehru endowed the IFS with an
‘internationalist, globalist culture’, a proud Cambridge-educated former senior
10
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, ‘Still under Nehru’s shadow? The absence of foreign policy frameworks in India’, India
Review 8: 3, 2009, pp. 209–33.
11
For a long-running debate on ‘the idea of India’, see Sunil Khilnani, The idea of India (New Delhi: Penguin
Books India, 2004); Perry Anderson, The Indian ideology (London: Verso, 2013); Partha Chatterjee, Sudipta
Kaviraj and Nivedita Menon, The Indian ideology: three responses to Perry Anderson (New Delhi: Permanent Black,
2015). On the persistence of Nehru’s vision, see Ian Hall, ‘The persistence of Nehruvianism in India’s strate-
gic culture’, in Ashley J. Tellis, Alison Szalwinski and Michael Wills, eds, Strategic Asia 2016–17: understanding
strategic cultures in the Asia Pacific (Seattle and Washington DC: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2016), pp.
141–67.
12
Priya Chacko, Indian foreign policy: the politics of postcolonial identity from 1947 to 2004 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013).
13
T. N. Kaul, ‘Draft of an introduction to a manuscript of autobiographical nature’, n.d., p. 6. ‘Miscellaneous
articles by T. N. Kaul’, contained in ‘Speeches/writings by him’, serial no. 141, in T. N. Kaul papers, Nehru
Memorial Library.
426

official elucidated; it was ‘like fish swimming in water’ for old-school officers to
consider themselves part of a larger project of remaking the world in the image
of its former margins.14 Even the BJP Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee (1998–2004)
once called himself a Nehruvian—meaning, argued one retired diplomat, that the
founding principles of the IFS were not fundamentally challenged until 2014.15
The election of a Hindu nationalist government calls these commitments into
question, however. If Nehru was a towering figure in Indian diplomacy, Modi,
too, seeks to be one: while the individual influence of Indian career diplomats has
long ebbed and flowed in tandem with changing governments,16 the rapid concen-
tration of powers in the prime minister’s office under Modi has been notable.17

Despite protestations to the contrary from diplomats themselves, politicization
is not an inherently novel phenomenon for the IFS. Nehru’s intimate involvement
tied the executive branch to the service from its very beginnings. The Emergency,
a period from 1975 to 1977 during which Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended
the normal functioning of India’s democratic apparatus, introduced the concept
of ‘committed bureaucracy’ to the institutional lexicon of the IFS, and diplo-
mats have often strategically aligned themselves with the Congress Party or more
recently the BJP, sometimes even leaving the IFS to assume ministerial positions.18
Indeed, if Modi represents a deviation from a democratic norm, the Emergency
may offer a parallel. In interviews, diplomats who witnessed it rationalized their
decision to stay within a compromised state machinery by emphasizing their belief
that the suspension of a democratic, broadly tolerant governing ideal would prove
a temporary aberration, and that the outward-facing IFS would be better insulated
against political pressures than domestic branches of the state bureaucracy.19
What does stand out by historical comparison is the break with official
secularism, which has not faced a systemic challenge inside the IFS before. To
combat exoticized western impressions of India as inherently Hindu in the 1970s,
diplomats even took to correcting the convention in Spanish-speaking countries
of referring to Indian nationals as ‘Hindu’: for example, Indian Ambassador to
Argentina B. K. Sanyal requested in 1971 that the Ministry of External Affairs
instruct all foreign offices in countries where India had missions to limit the term’s
use to instances describing religion, not nationality, having already written to
the Spanish Royal Academy of Letters about the term’s description in Spanish
dictionaries.20 Similarly, officers entertaining religious figures at embassies have
traditionally received a reprimand from their superiors.21 In other words, Indian
14
Interview 23, April 2019.
15
16
J. N. Dixit, Indian Foreign Service: history and challenge(Delhi: Konark, 2005), pp. 199, 241, 252.
17
Sumit Ganguly, ‘Has Modi truly changed India’s foreign policy?’, Washington Quarterly 40: 2, 2017, p. 142;
James Manor, ‘A precarious enterprise? Multiple antagonisms during year one of the Modi government’, South
Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38: 4, 2015, p. 737.
18
Interview 45, April 2019; Dixit, Indian Foreign Service, pp. 177, 241.
19
Interview 4, March 2019; interview 22, Apr. 2019; interview 24, April 2019.
20
B. K. Sanyal (Ambassador to Argentina), ‘Letter to the MEA’, 3 March 1971, ‘Use of the word “Hindu”
in Argentina when referring to Indian nationals’. File W(II) 307/3/71, Ministry of External Affairs section,
National Archives of India.
21
Interview 7, March 2019; interview 45, April 2019; interview 85, May 2019.
427

Kira Huju
diplomats have in the past consciously countered any foreign impressions of India
as a Hindu rashtra, or Hindu nation.
Hindutva as everyday diplomatic practice

With its intellectual roots in the writings of authors such as V. D. Savarkar, M.
S. Golwalkar and Deendayal Upadhyaya, Hindutva—the predominant expres-
sion of Hindu nationalism in India—emphasizes the spiritual superiority of
Hinduism, believes in a conservative imperative of natural authority under unified
Hindu domination, and proffers a narrative of Hindu victimization at the hands

of Muslims as an internal other.22 In its diplomatic garb, Hindutva challenges the
project of representing a diverse, secular India. What it offers instead is a political
investment in civilizational greatness, hyper-masculine conceptions of interna-
tional security, and anti-western ideologies of Hindu revivalism.23 Slowly, the
blurry edges of ambiguous Indian identity, traditionally more civic than ethnic or
religious in nature among India’s ruling elites, are being drawn in sharper strokes:
a once almost ethereal conversation about ‘Indian culture’ is, one Muslim officer
argued, becoming a conversation about ‘blood and soil’.24 Hindutva therefore
revises India’s diplomatic identity: away from a Nehruvian postcolonial Indian-
ness premised on transnational solidarity across the global South and towards a
saffronization of the Indian self, insistent on uniform civilizational and religious
identity.
The Hindutva accents on everyday diplomatic life involve, in the words of
one senior ambassador who served under the first Modi government, ‘going back
to more quote–unquote “Indian” aspects’ of diplomacy: a reassertion of India’s
‘civilizational’ identity and Hinduism, expressed in annual diplomatic practices
such as the celebration of Kumbh Mela, a major religious festival.25 There has
been a proliferation of Hindu events held at or sponsored by Indian embassies,
including those organized by the paramilitary Hindutva organization Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)26—followed by an ‘immediate backlash’ from the
service’s religious minorities and secular-minded Hindus, one officer noted.27 The
levels of outside interference by RSS or BJP functionaries are difficult to verify.
The BBC foreign affairs correspondent Ashis Ray suggests that after 2014, ‘senior
diplomats began to look over their shoulders, RSS activists were planted at Embas-
sies and High Commissions and local loyalists of Modi started bossing over pliant
or petrified Heads of Mission’.28 While the details of institutional intervention are
22
Thomas Blom Hansen, The saffron wave: democracy and Hindu nationalism in modern India (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999).
23
Ian Hall, Modi and the reinvention of
Indian foreign policy (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2019), p. 41.
24
Interview 7, March 2019.
25
26
The RSS (‘National Volunteer Organization’) has intimate ties to the BJP. See e.g. Walter Andersen and
Shridhar D. Damle, Messengers of Hindu nationalism: how the RSS reshaped India (London: Hurst, 2018).
27
Interview 52, May 2019.
28
Ashis Ray, ‘Has the “Foreign Service” declined?’, National Herald, 14 July 2020, https://www.nationalher-
aldindia.com/opinion/has-the-foreign-service-declined.
428

disputed, its effects are evident: one officer, who had once been lectured on the
importance of a secular IFS by Nehru himself, considered it ‘almost demolished’.29
The soft end of saffronization overlaps with a seemingly innocuous celebra-
tion of Indian culture. For example, Modi insists on visits to Hindu and Buddhist
temples as part of his itinerary on foreign trips, and chooses Hindu artefacts like
the religious tract the Bhagavad Gita as gifts to political counterparts.30 Rajesh
Basrur questions the diplomatic novelty and relevance of cultural–religious inflec-
tions such as yoga and Ayurveda, especially since the Indian Council of Cultural
Relations has been promoting such forms of ‘soft power’ since its founding in
1950.31 It is certainly possible to overstate the cultural cache of diplomatic practices

of this kind. And yet the tenor in which Indian culture is propagated is significant,
since the very possibility of fronting ‘soft’ features is what allows Hindutva to
find international respectability. The ‘soft power’ emphasis on yoga—at India’s
initiative, the UN has observed International Yoga Day since 2014—portrays India
as a ‘benign and beneficial cultural force in global affairs’, while also employing
a globally popular phenomenon to normalize tenets of cultural–nationalist
discourse.32 Moreover, even ‘soft’ Hindutva marks a departure from a time when
ambassadors would negotiate with Spanish dictionary-makers to combat impres-
sions of India as a Hindu rashtra.
With the Modi administration has also come an aggressive push to marginalize
English in diplomatic communications, in favour of Hindi. This may be framed
to foreign audiences as a delayed ‘decolonization of the mind’, as India sheds the
language of its former colonizer. However, it also serves the domestically contro-
versial end of cementing Hindi, most prevalent in northern India’s ‘Hindi belt’,
as the country’s one ‘authentic’ language in a diverse country whose constitu-
tion recognizes 22 regional languages.33 At the time of the interviews in 2019,
the very first Hindi-language book for the Indian Council of World Affairs was
close to publication, the first Hindi-language foreign policy conference was being
planned, and the prime minister’s conference for heads of mission had been held in
Hindi, with even ambassadors struggling with Hindi made to speak in it.34 This is
part of a wider bureaucratic pattern, with heads of various government ministries
called in front of official language committees to testify on how Hindi is being
brought into ministerial work. Should these efforts be deemed insufficient, you
‘get quite a scolding’, one mid-level joint secretary warned.35
This cultural aversion to English will have diplomatic consequences, for English
has long presented the IFS with an inherited diplomatic advantage. Deprived of
29
30
S. D. Muni, ‘Modi’s “neighbourhood first” initiative’, in Sinderpal Singh, ed., Modi and the world: reconstructing
Indian foreign policy (Singapore: World Scientific, 2017), p. 126.
31
Rajesh Basrur, ‘Modi, Hindutva, and foreign policy’, International Studies Perspectives 20: 1, 2018, p. 10.
32
Aavriti Gautam and Julian Droogan, ‘Yoga soft power: how flexible is the posture?’, Journal of International
Communication 24: 1, 2017, p. 18.
33
On the complex language politics of English versus vernacular languages in India, see e.g. D. L. Sheth, ‘The
great language debate: politics of metropolitan versus vernacular India’, in D. L. Sheth and Peter Ronald
deSouza, eds, At home with democracy: a theory of Indian politics (Singapore: Springer, 2018), pp. 169–95.
34
35
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Kira Huju
hard power as a currency of diplomatic persuasion, English established itself early
on as one of the sharpest assets of eloquent Indian diplomats, known abroad for
marshalling their arguments in expressive turns of phrase—a gift which diplo-
mats believe stood them in good stead in negotiations.36 English made India a
‘natural’ choice for committee work and drafting at the UN on issues ranging
from conflict mediation to international development,37 granting the country
significantly more diplomatic sway than its rank in the world’s material distribu-
tion of power would have suggested38—as an Anglophile diplomat strategized,
‘the person who presents the first draft has the advantage’.39 For all the talk of
Modi as the quintessential pragmatist,40 his disapproval of officials using their

expressive English to maximal diplomatic effect is driven by a cultural–linguistic
preference for Hindi as the ‘authentically’ Indian idiom over English as a tainted
language of the foreigner.
Diplomatic pedagogies, too, are acquiring hues of saffron. Many changes to
diplomatic training, which successful IFS applicants undertake before assuming
their first post, are ‘an offshoot of this government’, as one diplomat sympa-
thetic to the administration phrased it.41 They follow the mandate of the
‘Ayush’ ministry, established in 2014, which, among other indigenous modalities,
promotes Ayurveda and homoeopathy; yoga is accorded a particular centrality,
with academic and physical classes to prepare future diplomats to promote yoga
abroad.42 While ‘protocol attachments’ usually involve diplomatic probationers
joining international summits or conferences, in 2019 they were dispatched to the
Kumbh Mela religious festival in the recently renamed city of Prayagraj (a Sanskrit
word replacing the Mughal name, Allahabad).43 In February 2020, what had been
known as the Foreign Service Institute since its founding as a training centre
for diplomats in 1986 became the Sushma Swaraj Institute of Foreign Service,
in honour of the late BJP minister of external affairs (2014–19).44 Many diplo-
mats once known for decrying the mimicry of western diplomatic practice in
IFS training now wondered how to advocate for more Indian culture without
sanctioning a pedagogy of ‘aggressive superiority’ which exalts a parochial Indian-
ness while rejecting all things ‘foreign’ as culturally corrupt.45
36
Interview 12, March 2019; interview 17, March 2019; interview 25, April 2019; interview 43, April 2019.
37
Interview 4, March 2019; interview 20, April 2019; interview 26, April 2019; interview 28, April 2019; inter-
view 29, April 2019.
38
See e.g. Shyam Saran, ‘India and multilateralism: a practitioner’s perspective’, in Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu,
Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Bruce D. Jones, eds, Shaping the emerging world: India and the multilateral order (Wash-
ington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013), p. 43.
39
40
See e.g. Harsh V. Pant and Yogesh Joshi, ‘Indo-US relations under Modi: the strategic logic underlying the
embrace’, International Affairs 93: 1, 2017, pp. 133–46; Surupa Gupta, Rani D. Mullen, Rajesh Basrur, Ian Hall,
Nicolas Blarel, Manjeet S. Pardesi and Sumit Ganguly, eds, ‘Indian foreign policy under Modi: a new brand
or just repackaging?’, International Studies Perspectives 20: 1, 2019, pp. 1–45.
41
42
43
44
‘Home—Sushma Swaraj Institute of Foreign Service’, https://ssifs.mea.gov.in/.
45
430

(Inter)nationalism reconsidered
There is a paradox at the heart of Modi’s quest for global recognition. Although he
is socially invested in personal rapport with world leaders,46 and his increasingly
authoritarian moves at home are widely interpreted as damaging India’s stature,47
Modi rejects the importance of cross-cultural communicability in diplomacy.
During an address to diplomatic probationers in the presence of media repre-
sentatives on 12 June 2014, the newly elected prime minister compared foreign
nations to a haughty aunt, never as deserving of diplomats’ loyalty as Bharat Mata
(Mother India): ‘Apni ma phate purane kapdon mein bhi toh bhi ma hoti hain,

aur mausi agar ache kapdon mein ho toh bhi mausi hi rehti hain’ (‘Your mother
is still your mother even in old and torn clothes, whereas your aunt, even in her
best finery, is still an aunt’).48 The worldly diplomat, conversant in diplomatic
etiquette, was no longer an ideal to be imbibed: ‘Chammach kahan rahkna hain
... in sab baton se hatke kaam karo’ (‘Where your spoon has to be laid ... ignore
that kind of issue and do your work’). For the UN veteran and former Congress
minister of state for external affairs, Shashi Tharoor, the taunt was emblematic
of ‘the Modi notion of stoutly resisting the siren call of foreign countries while
haranguing others about the strengths of your own’.49
Indeed, Hindutva diplomacy does not allow for the compatibility of inter-
nationalist commitments and nationalist preoccupations. In this negation, it
stands at odds with IFS tradition. For diplomats who emerged under Congress
rule, cosmopolitanism meant that ‘global citizenship’ and national loyalties were
never mutually exclusive—what Ulrich Beck calls the ‘both/and’ logic of cosmo-
politanism, juxtaposed to the ‘either/or’ logic of nationalism.50 One retired
multilateralist recalled his civil service entry interview in the late 1960s, when
the interviewer representing the Indian Police Service told him that the correct
answer to a question about a diplomat’s most important quality would have been
‘patriotism’: for effective diplomacy, ‘it’s the opposite that is true; you need to
attenuate your pursuit of the national interest’ in favour of a conciliatory cosmo-
politanism.51 In this Nehruvian reading of the national interest, Beck’s ‘both/and’
logic was at play: cosmopolitanism became a sophisticated version of an attenu-
ated ‘patriotism through a different lens’.52
Since 2014, patriotism through a different lens is giving way to diplomacy as
nationalism by other means. As one former foreign secretary noted, ‘a strong
assertion of national identity’ is now expected in the discharge of diplomatic
46
Hall, Modi and the reinvention of Indian foreign policy, p. 150.
47
Manjari Chatterjee Miller, ‘India’s authoritarian streak: what Modi risks with his divisive populism’, Foreign
Affairs, 30 May 2018, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/india/2018-05-30/indias-authoritarian-streak;
Kate Sullivan de Estrada, ‘In the world’s eyes, the Indian state may be declining but its citizenry is rising’, The
Wire, 25 Dec. 2019, https://thewire.in/rights/india-citizenship-protests-narendra-modi.
48
Shashi Tharoor, India shastra: reflections on the nation in our time (New Delhi: Aleph, 2014), p. 59.
49
Tharoor, India shastra, p. 59.
50
Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan vision (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2006), p. 57.
51
52
431

Kira Huju
duties.53 A BJP-affiliated contract employee of the Ministry of External Affairs
declared that the old-fashioned regard for cosmopolitan niceties had only ever tied
India’s hands as it fended for itself abroad.54 Much as Nehru’s postcolonial nation-
alism was the basis of his Third Worldist and multilateralist world-view, so too
Modi’s Hindu nationalism is intimately tied to India’s diplomatic existence. Or,
in the phrasing of a devoted multilateralist who served under Modi’s first term:
‘If India looks narrowly at itself, it will look narrowly at the world.’55 Diplomats
are expected to adjust their ideals and habits accordingly.

Adaptation and resistance: diplomats under Hindutva
It has been speculated that Modi derives backing for his religiously tinted diplo-
macy not from the IFS officers who staff the Ministry of External Affairs but
from his BJP party.56 This seems to be broadly true of the service’s historically
dominant Anglophile elites, socialized as they are into Nehruvian world-views.
At the same time, responses to Modi’s reign often reflect a sociological dividing
line, pitting traditional elites against a more demographically representative officer
intake in recent years. Former and current diplomats debate the essence of majori-
tarianism, the diplomatic purchase of Hindutva and the foreign policy overtures
under Modi on an ongoing basis in a closed Google group of about a thousand
members.57
Modi’s reign is too current for there to exist publicly available archival
material recording diplomats’ attitudes towards his Hindutva regime. The Nehru
Memorial Library does, however, hold exchanges between some of the service’s
earliest officers responding to the infamous Hindu nationalist violence unleashed
at the illegal demolition of the Babri Masjid, a contested mosque, in the northern
city of Ayodhya in 1992. In letters from December 1992 and February 1993, the
retired Indian ambassador Arthur Lall writes to his former colleague B. K. Nehru
denouncing the ‘stupid lack of civilized restraint displayed first at Ayodhya and
subsequently in many parts of the country’,58 and wondering whether the BJP
has ‘taken into account the regional and international consequences of its actions,
not just its actions, but the interpretation that Ms [sic] around the world will give
to them?’, following political statements which, to Lall, were ‘so prehistorical as
to make one despair’.59 Beyond dispersed archival finds, it is in confidential inter-
views that diplomats can articulate their positions.
53
54
Interview 2, Feb. 2019.
55
56
Ian Hall, ‘Narendra Modi’s new religious diplomacy’, International Studies Perspectives 20: 1,
2019, p. 13.
57
Interview 1, Feb. 2019; interview 10, March 2019; interview 15, March 2019; interview 35, April 2019.
58
Arthur S. Lall, ‘Letter from Arthur Lall to B. K. Nehru’, 8 Dec. 1992, ‘Individual correspondence’ between B.
K. Nehru and Arthur Lall, in B. K. Nehru papers, Nehru Memorial Library.
59
Arthur S. Lall, ‘Letter to B. K. Nehru’, 3 Feb. 1993, ‘Individual correspondence’ between B. K. Nehru and
Arthur Lall, in B. K. Nehru papers, Nehru Memorial Library.
432

Riding the saffron surge

Responses to Hindu nationalist rule over the IFS take many forms. There are
officers who have professionally benefited from it: Modi has surrounded himself
with retired and seconded diplomats, appointing former foreign secretary
Subrahmanyam Jaishankar as his minister of external affairs in 2019 and filling
senior positions in the prime minister’s office with trusted IFS appointees.60 At
the same time, many of those who aligned themselves with aspects of Modi’s
reign sought hard to distinguish between a ‘modernizing’ Modi and the regres-
sive expressions of Hindutva in whose name he governs. They spoke not of

Hindutva but business, lauding the right-wing BJP’s emphasis on economic diplo-
macy, exemplified by the ‘Make in India’ branding campaign which diplomats are
expected to champion abroad.61 In many conversations, too, there was a sense that
the sheer fact of Modi’s accentuated interest in foreign affairs elevated the status of
the IFS, offering opportunities for officers to prove themselves—even if this focus
has been accompanied by a devolution of foreign policy-making into the orbit of
the prime minister’s office.62
In daily diplomatic practice, one senior diplomat who served under the first
Modi administration explained, the IFS had been ‘quick to readjust to his style’,
modulating its Nehruvian rhetoric and adopting a ‘modern-world approach to
things’.63 However, a more visibly concerned retired officer was convinced that
the service’s growing number of RSS sympathizers signified a cultural project of
re-education, which could not be adequately described through the modernizing
language of business but only captured in the nationalist argot in which Hindutva
is traditionally articulated.64 Indeed, the BJP affiliate working as a contractor
for the Ministry of External Affairs expressed confidence in the slow churn of
promotion patterns, estimating that it would take about one-and-a-half decades
for attitudinal change to take root, with Nehruvian diplomats retiring and more
nationalistically minded colleagues assuming their place.65
There was some disagreement among officers on the sincerity with which
colleagues embraced saffronization. One retired Muslim diplomat suggested that
certain colleagues would ‘wear their culture on their sleeve’ only to win favour
60
Sreemoy Talukdar, ‘S Jaishankar’s appointment as foreign minister reveals Narendra Modi’s mindset on trust,
acumen and leadership’, Firstpost, 31 May 2019, https://www.firstpost.com/politics/s-jaishankars-appoint-
ment-as-foreign-minister-reveals-narendra-modis-mindset-on-trust-acumen-and-leadership-6737001.html;
Press Trust of India, ‘Sanjeev Kumar Singla appointed private secretary to PM Narendra Modi’, Livemint,
20 July 2014, https://www.livemint.com/Politics/xHmdQIS03l9bDHFmD10rxJ/Sanjeev-Kumar-Singla-
appointed-private-secretary-to-PM-Naren.html; Press Trust of India, ‘IFS officer Vivek Kumar appointed
private secretary to PM Narendra Modi’, Business Standard India, 19 July 2019, https://www.business-standard.
com/article/pti-stories/ifs-officer-vivek-kumar-appointed-private-secretary-to-pm-modi-119071900678_1.
html.
61
Interview 2, Feb. 2019; interview 3, March 2019; interview 32, April 2019; interview 39, April 2019; interview
45, April 2019.
62
Interview 1, Feb. 2019; interview 2, Feb. 2019; interview 3, March 2019; interview 4, March 2019; interview
5, March 2019.
63
64
65
433

Kira Huju
with the current government.66 In the words of a staunchly secular-minded Hindu
colleague, nationalism ‘plays well now’.67 Many, a former foreign secretary noted,
had joined the BJP before the 2014 and 2019 elections—a pattern that matched an
older practice of officers aligning themselves with the Congress Party.68 Others
speculated that the change in government would continue to reveal ‘closet RSS’
diplomats,69 and those newly emboldened to ‘be proud of being Hindu’.70
And yet, although diplomats were keen to speculate on colleagues’ politics, few
were personally willing to be counted among Hindutva advocates. Partly, this was
perhaps because of the stigma attached to diverging from the service’s traditional
outlook, or because of the self-perpetuating sociology of interview ‘snowballing’,

whereby like-minded officers would recommend each other as interviewees. By
and large, in the most senior circles, sincerely held Hindutva allegiances seemed
to be considered a fringe occupation of some ‘less bright’ colleagues.71 ‘I slept
through the rise of the Hindutva movement,’ a retired Muslim diplomat frowned,
because to diplomats it had always seemed like ‘something that happened on the
side’, not inside their service.72 This inertia in the face of deviations from estab-
lished service culture underlines the stickiness of old path dependencies, ideolog-
ical arrangements and the social sanctions for violating them.
Most of the critique was courteously cryptic—even when the demeanour, tone
or context may have betrayed more conviction than the utterance itself. ‘Loyalty
or patriotism is not the monopoly of any religion,’ one retired Hindu diplomat
noted;73 and a veteran of the first Modi government mentioned, as though in
passing, ‘you can’t make it a fetish to be Indian’.74 One young officer, seemingly à
propos of nothing, suggested that ‘there is a broad consensus’ among his colleagues
‘that we want to represent a modern, rising, progressive India’, and that, since
‘broadly the ethos remains intact’, ‘we will survive as it is’.75 Others agreed
cautiously that most of their colleagues have been ‘compelled to compromise’ on
their values.76 Many spoke in a seemingly theoretical register, but with knowing
eyes and raised eyebrows, of the importance of distinguishing between a brand of
enlightened patriotism and narrower forms of religious nationalism.77 The intel-
lectual historian Quentin Skinner is insistent that ‘anyone issuing a serious utter-
ance will always be doing something as well as saying something’.78 The pointed
talk among officers of a more inclusive patriotism, or indeed the sheer frequency
66
67
68
69
70
71
Interview 3, March 2019; interview 43, April 2019.
72
73
74
75
76
77
Interview 1, Feb. 2019; interview 3, March 2019; interview 42, April 2019; interview 45, April 2019; interview
48, May 2019; interview 52, May 2019.
78
Quentin Skinner, Visions of politics, vol. 1: Regarding method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.
106.
434

of unsolicited commentary on the sacrosanctity of India’s diversity, seemed to be
doing something: inviting a parallel with Hindutva between the lines.
Sometimes, dissent need not be vocalized. One junior diplomat spoke to me
across his office’s coffee table, which featured nothing but our cups of chai and a
copy of the most recent issue of The Caravan—an investigative Indian magazine
known for its distinctly anti-government disposition. Even as I forewent inter-
rogating him on anything that would compromise the status and security of a
serving officer, I could not help but wonder whether the magazine had been
placed between us as a kind of signal—an emblem of his silent rebellion, which
certainly would not have been unthinkingly displayed upon the table for a visit

by a superior.
Since their capacity for free speech is wider than that of serving colleagues,
retired officers were often less guarded: one incensed diplomat who had retired
by 2014 confided that it would have required considerable ‘self-discipline’ on
his part to ‘represent this wretched country even now’.79 ‘The current regime
represents a completely contradictory value system’ to the one into which older
generations had been socialized, a Congress-affiliated prominent former diplomat
argued, claiming that even those who did not speak up had had ‘their world-views
challenged’.80 An elderly Sikh officer broke into tears describing a battle to uphold
the values of diversity and secularism he had spent his career defending.81
Hinduism versus Hindutva

Hindutva’s reception inside the IFS is not a mere matter of approving Hindu diplo-
mats pitted against critical officers of different religious affiliations.82 In testimony
to the strength of existing institutional culture, the service’s scepticism extends
to many devout Hindus who had previously objected to what they perceived as
a suppression of Indian culture within their Anglophile service. Indeed, Indian
secularism was never about divorcing religion from politics outright, in the style
of French laïcité. Instead of shrinking the space for the sacred in public life, it
is about ‘the recognition and acceptance of difference’, so that ‘the question of
secularism has been posed as a question of pluralism, or of tolerance between
diverse religious and cultural communities’.83 Hence, it is entirely possible to
identify as a ‘secular Hindu’ by espousing a politics of secular toleration while
79
80
81
82
There are no official data on religious representation inside the Foreign Service, but it is safe to assume that
Hindus, who constitute over 80% of India’s population, form an overwhelming majority of diplomats. While
Sikh and Christian minorities tend to be slightly overrepresented in Indian bureaucracy, a non-governmental
2006 Sachar Committee report found that, while Muslims constituted around 13% of India’s population, they
made up only 1.8% of the Foreign Service. See e.g. Sanya Dhingra, ‘5% Muslims among new civil services
recruits, only one in top 100’, The Print, 4 Aug. 2020, https://theprint.in/india/governance/5-muslims-
among-new-civil-services-recruits-only-one-in-top-100/474488/.
83
Gyanendra Pandey, ‘The secular state and the limits of dialogue’, in Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, eds, The crisis of secularism in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p.
157.
435

Kira Huju
personally practising religion. One former foreign secretary critical of his interna-
tionalist colleagues’ lack of interest in Indian tradition considered the ‘endless talk’
about India’s ‘5000-year-old civilization’ overblown—‘you don’t challenge China
by doing yoga’.84 A BJP-supporting former foreign secretary thought that the
rejection of foreign influences could be exaggerated, decrying the ‘fake resistance’
to the ‘savoir-faire’ of western diplomatic custom.85 Similarly, a diplomat who
had publicly spoken of the importance of engaging with Hinduism in diplomatic
representation insisted that he had—perhaps falsely—imagined that this was
possible ‘without jingoism’.86 We must, therefore, distinguish between Hinduism
and Hindutva—the former theoretically compatible with secularism and interna-

tionalism, the latter rejecting them altogether.
Hindutva emerged against the secular consensus, as Faisal Devji argued two
decades before Modi’s rise to national leadership, ‘as the only credible, organized
form of alternative politics in a country where the ruling elite has appropriated
secular nationalism so completely as to allow no room for dispute in its terms’.87
When official expressions of religiosity are taboo, even a majoritarian push for a
singular religion can dress itself up as emancipation, whereby the ‘real’ India is
released to express its ‘authentic’ self. ‘Secularism is not born out of denial’ was
the retort of a conservative-leaning millennial officer for whom India’s ‘composite
culture’ owed its pluralistic nature to Hinduism’s universalism, making it entirely
appropriate for state institutions to propagate ‘a Hindu perspective’ which his
urban elite educated superiors derided.88 In his binary answers, world-views
always linked back to the kinds of people who held them: either ‘real’ Indians
joining the service from the country’s rural heartlands and vernacular schools or
the out-of-touch elites who regarded them with disdain. This view points towards
a wider pattern: internationalism is resisted partly because of a social resentment
against the internationalists themselves. Conversely, the internationalists read a
nationalist challenge as a personal affront to their status.
Ideological departures, sociological fault-lines: the cosmopolitan elite as

the internal other
The Hindutva challenge involves a twin rejection: of both internationalist, liberal
principles and the elites who claim to hold them. Hindutva ideologically rejects
Nehruvian principles, yet saffronization also threatens the very status of India’s
traditional elites themselves.
Therefore, it matters not only what Indian diplomats think but who they
are. Historically, the IFS has been an exclusive club chosen through an exacting
civil service exam,89 and dominated by upper-caste, upper-class men from select
84
85
86
87
Faisal Devji, ‘Hindu/Muslim/Indian’, Public Culture 5: 1, 1992, p. 5.
88
89
Miller, ‘India’s feeble foreign policy’, p. 13.
436

families, with elite degrees from places like Oxbridge or Delhi’s prestigious St
Stephen’s College.90 Its social hierarchies have cohered around valorizing the ‘IFS
type’: ‘elite, English-speaking, Anglicised and urbane’.91 By contrast, only about
5–10 per cent of Indians speak English—a figure that faithfully reflects class, caste
and educational inequalities.92 As one former foreign secretary summarized, in a
country of striking diversity the service has traditionally been ‘pretty feudal’.93
According to two Oxford graduates who joined the service in the early 1960s, ‘you
couldn’t tell the difference’ between IFS officers and veterans of the British Raj’s
Indian Civil Service, many of whom held top posts at the Ministry of External
Affairs until as late as the 1970s,94 and who ‘had almost similar backgrounds’ to

post-independence diplomats.95
Ideas are not free-floating entities without social moorings. For example, the
linguistic preference for English, however diplomatically advantageous, is socially
suspect in the eyes of diplomats from less privileged backgrounds. Officers whose
English does not match exacting standards of diplomatic poeticism,96 or whose
accents are deemed ‘too Indian’,97 felt that English functions as a social sieve that
privileges the service’s old Anglophile elite. Both Hindutva advocates and less
privileged diplomats thus contest the idea that the choice of professional language
is merely an instrumental one. Similarly, it is no surprise, as a former foreign
secretary noted of older secular generations, that ‘people felt a sense of comfort,
because the social background of the diplomats was not religious themselves
[sic]’.98 ‘The idea of India that “Lutyens Liberals” have is that India is a secular
country,’ an officer who left the service mid-career argued, juxtaposing popular
sentiment against the elite progressivism that supposedly confined itself to Delhi’s
governing quarters, designed by the colonial architect Edwin Lutyens.99 Even the
most committed secularists often felt that there was a tinge of condescension in
the service’s stigmatization of religion, and few were surprised to see Hindu pride
emerge among new cohorts, whose rural roots and provincial education were
interpreted as signalling a more conservative, religious predisposition.100
Indeed, changing demographics may yet make the IFS more receptive to its
own saffronization. Much has been made of the speed and significance of a gradual
‘democratization’ of the civil services of India.101 A significant shift began with
the increase in applicants from lower-middle-class backgrounds in the wake of
90
Dixit, Indian Foreign Service, p. 90.
91
Kate Sullivan de Estrada, ‘Exceptionalism in Indian diplomacy: the origins of India’s moral leadership aspira-
tions’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 37: 4, 2014, p. 646.
92
S. Rukmini, ‘In India, who speaks in English, and where?’, Livemint, 14 May 2019, https://www.livemint.com/
news/india/in-india-who-speaks-in-english-and-where-1557814101428.html.
93
94
95
96
Interview 49, May 2019; also interview 58, May 2019; interview 73, May 2019; interview 77, May 2019.
97
98
99
100
Interview 10, March 2019; interview 16, March 2019; interview 45, April 2019; interview 65, May 2019.
101
See e.g. Kishan S. Rana, Inside diplomacy (New Delhi: Manas, 2000), p. 37; R. K. Barik, ‘Social background of
civil service: some depressing trends’, Economic and Political Weekly 39: 7, 2004, pp. 625–8.
437

Kira Huju
the liberalization of the Indian economy in the early 1990s, and a concomitant
expansion of India’s long-running constitutionally mandated affirmative action
programme which, after the so-called ‘Mandal reforms’, now reserves 50 per cent
of bureaucratic positions for members of designated lower castes and indigenous
communities.102 The diversification of cadre intake means that the IFS is gradu-
ally becoming more reflective of India at large—and thus more likely to reflect
the popular support for a Hindutva platform. ‘Rural India, small towns have
started exerting themselves and their values’ in the service, one recently retired
Delhiite Nehruvian noted,103 although the shift has as much to do with class and
caste as with geography. In the words of a veteran of the first Modi government,

new diplomatic generations are showing ‘more consciousness of who they are’,
religiously and culturally.104
This is not to say that only socio-cultural elites can hold internationalist
views—indeed, it seems to be part of the social schism inside a changing IFS that
many unfounded cultural anxieties are projected by the traditional Anglophone
elite onto diplomats from less privileged backgrounds. And yet it is precisely these
social forms of mutual distrust that may push some towards Hindutva. Despite
a nominal ‘democratization’ in cadre intake, IFS culture and top posts are still
dominated by an old upper-caste elite.105 This discrepancy was felt widely across
interviews and breeds its own resentments. Many old hands of the service seemed
to consider respect for diversity a clarion call of the elites against a broader popula-
tion of Indians, who were deemed culturally incapable of appreciating it. In the
exclusionary rendition of one St Stephen’s College and Oxford-educated retired
officer: ‘You can’t be a semi-literate person and be expected to understand the
beauty and richness of our country.’106 That two Dalit officers—the ‘untoucha-
bles’ outside India’s caste system—distinguished themselves as particularly artic-
ulate supporters of the current regime and its purported anti-elitism might jar
against a political logic which assumes that marginalized castes will feel most at
ease in secular, liberal circles. Yet it made sense given the officers’ lived experience
of social condescension at the hands of upper-caste liberal colleagues.107
The personal, then, is political. The contrast between an English-educated
Kashmiri Pandit like Nehru and a ‘man of the masses’ like Modi, who in the
political mythology of the BJP rose from a lower-caste tea-selling chaiwallah to
become prime minister, symbolizes a praiseworthy ‘de-elitification’ to his sympa-
102
Leela Fernandes, ‘Restructuring the new middle class in liberalizing India’, Comparative Studies of South Asia,
Africa and the Middle East 20: 1, 2000, pp. 88–104.
103
104
105
‘Top IFS posts still out of bounds for SCs, STs’, The Hindu, 5 Dec. 2015, https://www.thehindu.com/news/
national/top-ifs-posts-still-out-of-bounds-for-scs-sts/article7950262.ece.
106
107
Interview 38, April 2019; interview 67, May 2019. There is a lively debate on caste politics and mobilization
in Modi’s India. See e.g. Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Class and caste in the 2019 Indian election: why have so many
poor started voting for Modi?’, Studies in Indian Politics 7: 2, 2019, pp. 149–60; Sukhadeo Thorat, ‘Dalits in
post-2014 India: between promise and action’, in Angana P. Chatterji, Thomas Blom Hansen and Christophe
Jaffrelot, eds, Majoritarian state: how Hindu nationalism is changing India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019),
pp. 217–36.
438

thizers.108 The BJP’s recent general secretary Ram Madhav, whose omnipresence
on the Delhi think tank scene reflects his increasing engagement with foreign
affairs, in 2017 mapped Nehru and Modi onto opposing sides of a transnational
class divide: while the Harrow- and Cambridge-educated Nehru espoused ideas
that ‘were transmitted by the colonisers of the West’, the ‘mob, humble people of
the country are behind Modi’, being ‘finally at ease with a government that looks
and sounds familiar’.109 One former foreign secretary believed that Modi’s personal
brand ‘is giving a message: you must not be cosmopolitan by upbringing’ to join
the Indian elite; nor must you be ‘apologetic’ about not meeting classical elite
markers.110 Commenting on the tide of opinion against the liberal intelligentsia

sweeping Delhi, the essayist Pankaj Mishra has put it more sharply, arguing that
a ‘cleansing of rootless cosmopolitans is crucial to realizing Modi’s vision’.111 The
service has felt this, too—one retired Muslim officer offered the comment that
‘five years ago all of us were cosmopolitan’, but that ‘in today’s polarized environ-
ment, narrower assertions of identity have come to the surface’.112 ‘Not once’
having had to justify his cosmopolitanism or Indianness in his almost 40 years of
service, ‘now I own ten books on the topic of culture and identity’, he exclaimed.
Moments of change have a tendency to shatter the self-evident nature of received
institutional wisdom. They also reconfigure who gets to belong among the elite.
In the Hindutva constructions of self and other, traditional IFS elites are
counted among ‘a powerful foreign Other within India in the form of a pseudo-
secular, neocolonial, and illegitimately powerful establishment that colludes with
dangerous minorities who, in turn, have links to India’s external enemies’.113 Old
diplomatic elites are imagined as belonging to the same class of Indians as members
of Nehru’s Congress Party, who are depicted as a comprador class, maintaining a
‘neo-colonialist mindset’ and using the language of the colonizer to engage in
cultural gatekeeping against the Indian masses who do not speak it.114 Fluid identi-
ties are antithetical to the Hindutva construction of self and other. Because of the
outward-facing nature of diplomacy, the service’s traditional Anglophone elites
are a particularly suitable target for othering, blurring as they do by profession the
lines between the domestic and the foreign. In fact, as Thorsten Wojczewski writes
in his analysis of Hindutva discourse, there is a purposeful conflation of western-
ized Indian elites and foreign others, both of whom pose a ‘collaborative threat to
“the people”’ and stand in the way of ‘the realization of a strong and monolithic
Hindu identity’.115 Thus, the saffronization of the IFS is not presented as an anti-
108
Interview 1, Feb. 2019; interview 3, March 2019.
109
Ram Madhav, ‘Coming full circle at 70’, Indian Express, 15 Aug. 2017, https://indianexpress.com/article/opin-
ion/columns/independence-day-coming-full-circle-at-70-atal-bihari-vajpayee-hamid-ansari-muslims-india-
insecure-modi-nehru-4796919/.
110
111
Pankaj Mishra, Age of anger: a history of the present (London: Macmillan, 2017), p. 162.
112
113
Thorsten Wojczewski, ‘Populism, Hindu nationalism, and foreign policy in India: the politics of representing
“the people”’, International Studies Review 22: 3, 2020, p. 415.
114
Taruna Vijaya, Saffron surge: India’s re-emergence on the global scene and Hindu ethos (New Delhi: Har Anand, 2008),
p. 32.
115
Wojczewski, ‘Populism, Hindu nationalism, and foreign policy in India’, p. 406.
439

Kira Huju
pluralist move, in the traditional populist fashion,116 but rather as an anti-elite
move which seeks to champion true pluralism. What ensues is, as I have argued, a
double rejection: both of an internationalism whose sense of self is purposefully
ambivalent, and of the Indian elites who readily indulge in this ambivalence.
Conclusion
After seven decades of aspiring to represent a diverse, secular India, the IFS has
been dealt a very different set of diplomatic instructions since the Hindu nation-
alist prime minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014. The gradual saffroniza-

tion of the IFS fundamentally calls into question what kind of India its diplomats
are expected to represent. The traditionally amorphous meaning of Indianness,
purposefully broad in its definition, is giving way to a narrower assertiveness
which sees Indian diplomats representing not a postcolonial coalition or a secular
state but a Hindu rashtra. This change expresses itself in the diplomatic discourse,
priorities, protocol and training of career diplomats, whose responses to Hindutva
reflect not only an ideological but a sociological rift with the ruling establishment.
As the political legacy of an internationalist India is fracturing, so too are the
social ideals which once legitimated the dominance of an elite-educated, Anglo-
phone class of Indians as its diplomatic representatives. The backlash against
cosmopolitan elites in India must be thought of in a sociological vein: not only
in terms of the ideologies of internationalism under challenge but in terms of the
elites who are committed to them. This is also why the saffronization of the IFS
cannot be read as a simple Manichaean story of an internationalist cadre of liberal
diplomats confronted by an exclusionary Hindu nationalist agenda. Hindutva
advocates portray saffronization as a democratization of a once exclusive club—a
delayed postcolonial liberation which strives to replace an unrepresentative,
colonially tainted interpreter class with a more ‘authentic’ diplomatic elite. What
complicates any effective contestation of such reasoning is the fact that IFS culture
and hierarchies arguably do reflect the ideals of a small Anglophile elite.
This article has asked how career diplomats socialized into an internationalist
mindset make sense of a nationalist change in government. The case of the IFS is
emblematic of a broader emerging pattern of diplomatic accommodation in the
global age of populism, as self-ascribed cosmopolitans are forced to reconsider
their role as diplomatic representatives of nations turning inwards. I suggest that
what inhibits organizational change and the internalization of nationalist norms
is not solely ideological disagreement between internationalist diplomats and a
nationalist government. What matters is also the government’s perceived invalida-
tion of the diplomats’ social status in society. Comparative work across a broader
spectrum of diplomatic services could tease out common patterns in organiza-
tional response, ideological resilience and diplomatic self-perception. In India’s
case, more ethnographic work among diplomats—perhaps by scholars with better
116
Johannes Plagemann and Sandra Destradi, ‘Populism and foreign policy: the case of India’, Foreign Policy
Analysis 15: 2, 2019, p. 283.
440

elite access and political connections than the present author—could expand on
the impact of Hindutva on diplomatic decision-making processes. Institutional
path dependencies mean that saffronization cannot occur overnight. However, if
Hindu nationalists rule India long enough for new generations of diplomats to
be socialized into Hindutva ideology right from their entry into the IFS, we may
experience a tipping point in organizational change and bureaucratic compliance.
For now, what can be offered is an evaluation of changes in the making, still
to unfold in full. And yet the changes already speak to something: not only to
possible future trajectories but, just as crucially, to the underlying social tensions
of the past which are only now coming to the surface. They reveal cracks in the

compromises historically forged in the making of postcolonial India. In so doing,
they prise open some of the ostensible consensus around cosmopolitan elites and
diplomatic representation that has governed India’s engagement with the world
since decolonization.
441

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Saffronizing diplomacy:

the Indian Foreign Service under

Hindu nationalist rule

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International Affairs 98: 2 (2022) 423–441; doi: 10.1093/ia/iiab220

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Trading solidarism for saffron: from Nehruvian internationalism to

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Hindutva as everyday diplomatic practice

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Riding the saffron surge

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Hinduism versus Hindutva

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Ideological departures, sociological fault-lines: the cosmopolitan elite as

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