Enriching the quality of India’s scholarly community
The tiny community of scholars that follows Indian foreign policy has been watching aghast as a particular expert based in Washington DC has been dropping arbitrary and ill-informed takes since the war in Ukraine began. While this particular imposter has been exceptionally egregious, the quality of foreign policy analysis that comes out on India has often been well below par. As a result, the scholarly community is gradually making itself irrelevant to both the policymakers as well as the general audience. If we want to change this sad state of affairs, we will have to understand the causes behind it. In this article, I will restrict myself to four very important sources of mediocrity.
First, there is a lack of methodological training among almost all journalists, many think-tankers, and even some academics. Very often we see that writers do not define the concepts they use. They talk about changes happening in the world but do not make explicitly clear how they are measuring those changes. It is common to read opinion pages in India talking about a “flux” in international order without anybody knowing what that means. Some analysts authoritatively advise India to “do more” with other countries, let’s say Singapore. Again, we are not told what it means to “do more.” We don’t know if “doing more” will mean “doing less” somewhere else and if the trade-off is truly worth it.
Second, many — not all — foreign-based analysts do not understand any Indian language. Some of them take up language training at some point but do not complete it. The media landscape of India also contributes to this. Just because the Indian media produces so much content in English, foreign experts end up relying on them without making the effort to gain proficiency in Indian languages. In as much as foreign policy is a product of domestic politics, societal beliefs, and cultural norms, a command over language is not just mandatory but the bare minimum. Apart from learning the language, regional expertise requires a greater engagement with the country’s history, arts, literature, and society beyond elites. What we see, however, is a near-total reliance on select English language media outlets and English-speaking friends in Delhi.
Third, too many experts on Indian foreign policy are overwhelmingly drawn towards history in order to analyse current events. While this is a big topic in itself, I will mention here three reasons why an overreliance on history can lead to misleading inferences in absence of certain precautions. One, experts tend to look at current events and try to make inferences by going back to similar events in history. This creates a problem similar to what is called selection bias. The selection of historical cases itself drives the conclusions they reach.
For example, based on a reading of the negotiations preceding the Treaty of Versailles, Indira Gandhi’s (removed top) adviser PN Haksar concluded that India should not impose harsh terms on Pakistan following the victory in the 1971 war. However, if we read Geoffrey Blainey, a historian who did not fall prey to such selection bias, we will reach the opposite conclusions. Based on an examination of all international wars between 1700 and 1871, Blainey concluded that harsh peace treaties are the result of decisive victories and such decisive victories tend to promote peace. Needless to say, historians such as Blainey are rare and we get more of the Haksar kind. Two, given the process of inductive inference historians indulge in, they can overweigh the importance of too many variables. Observing patterns in real world events involves focusing on a few key variables and dropping the rest. Experts overwhelmed with the clutter of historical events might hesitate to drop a large number of variables.
As a result, such experts reach trivial conclusions. For example, an otherwise great book on the history of India-US-China relations concluded that India and the US pursue aligned policies on China only when they agree on all three — the nature of threat from China, the urgency of that threat, and the means of addressing the threat. This is like me saying that I tend to eat my next meal only when all three conditions are satisfied — I am hungry, I find some food to eat, and I don’t hate the food I find. Three, scholars who invest a lot of effort and time in going through archives tend to oversell whatever they find there. So, a relatively minor discovery is catapulted to be the most significant episode of the Cold War. When scholars do not find anything new, they tend to spin old discoveries into new, sometimes completely contrived, frameworks. It is not a surprise that after consulting broadly the same sources, some conclude that Jawaharlal Nehru was a model internationalist while others find him to be a pragmatic nationalist.
Finally, the small size of the community is a big problem in itself. All India-watchers know each other well and do not wish to vitiate the friendly bond between them. They review each other’s papers, invite each other to conferences and talks, and seek to write chapters in each other’s edited volumes. As a result, they tend not to call out each other on flawed arguments. In contrast, China watchers in the US, comprising a much larger community, consists of scholars who disagree with each other a lot. Their policy recommendations range from extremely hawkish to extremely dovish. The small size of the scholarly community disincentivises the kind of debates and disagreements that are necessary for advancing knowledge.