India’s MPs and the lost art of global outreach

MPs were an integral part of India’s international diplomacy until Somnath Chatterjee stopped it. The Modi government largely continued the trend. After the Pahalgam attack, there seems to be a rethink.

For longer than most people can remember, international outreach by members of both Houses of Parliament has been integral to India's diplomacy.

A crippling blow to this high-yielding exercise was dealt by Somnath Chatterjee after he became Lok Sabha speaker in 2004. He stopped legislators from going abroad on outreach teams as MPs and asked them to join such delegations in their individual capacity if they wished to. Those were the years when India’s Communists were repeatedly committing “historic blunders” such as denying their own leader Jyoti Basu the nation's prime ministership.

This proverbial goose embodying MPs, which laid golden eggs for decades, was scuppered within months of Narendra Modi becoming prime minister in 2014. The long-standing practice of MPs going as delegates to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and its key committees annually was stopped abruptly that year. Till then, among the most important Lok Sabha members who participated in the UNGA proceedings and UN committee deliberations was L K Advani in 2012, sent by then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Much before Atal Bihari Vajpayee became prime minister, successive Congress governments sent Vajpayee as part of MPs’ delegations to the UN year after year.

When the Modi government stopped this practice, the MPs from all parties were naturally upset. Not only because the charms of New York beckoned them. Participating in the UNGA and UN committees gave these legislators the most wide-ranging and rewarding diplomatic experiences in their entire career, in many instances. So, they approached then External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who prevailed, and MPs were not only back at the UN, but all over the United States in various forms of outreach during a two-to-three-month UNGA window from October 2015. The stay by an individual MP in New York was, however, was capped at two weeks.

As Swaraj's influence within the Cabinet waned, the MPs were dropped from the Indian team to the UNGA the following year. Since then, inclusion of MPs in India's UNGA delegations has been erratic. They go during some years, but they don't in other years, as if the whims of some powers-that-be prevailed on each occasion.

The cumulative result of such an ad-hoc approach has been the demolition of an institution, which had come to be respected in Turtle Bay, the seat of the UN. Few people now remember that Rahul Gandhi cut his diplomatic teeth at the UN as a delegate-MP to the UNGA. That was his first break in international affairs as a member of the Lok Sabha.

Since this author began covering the UNGA regularly from 1995, many MPs have left their mark on the global diplomatic scene in ways big and small. The Samajwadi Party’s Lok Sabha member Dharmendra Yadav, nephew of Mulayam Singh Yadav, spoke in Hindi in 2012 at the UN’s Third and Sixth Committees. Vajpayee may have been the first tall Indian leaders to speak in Hindi in the UNGA, but delegate-MPs have carried that torch forward on the ground. 

Two dozen members of Modi’s Cabinet, since 2014, have been abroad on teams of MPs organised by the Governance and Public Policy Initiative of the Centre for Policy Research before they became ministers. Many more stalwarts forged relations with their counterpart legislative organisations across the world through well-run Indian Parliamentary Forums before Chatterjee killed that initiative.

It takes decades to build institutions and relationships, but unthinking leaders can extinguish them with one stroke of a pen. Now, after the Pahalgam terror attack, India is struggling to start from scratch what several parliamentary platforms for overseas outreach did with aplomb when they flourished.

The US has the most institutionalised global legislative outreach for any country. Their bi-partisan Congressional Delegations (CODEL) are high profile and have routinely included Senators and members of the House of Representatives, who have gone on to become US presidents and important members of the Cabinet.

India has been a beneficiary of CODELs. One example will suffice. In February 2008, John Kerry, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, arrived in New Delhi along with Joe Biden, later US president, and Chuck Hagel, who subsequently became defence secretary. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had virtually given up on the India-US nuclear deal because of domestic opposition.

Kerry and the two other Senators urged Singh not to give up hope. They said that if Singh overcame scepticism about the deal within India and completed necessary actions on his side within six months, they would make sure that the US Congress approves the deal in time for President George W Bush to sign. They also warned that if Democrats won the presidency and both chambers of Congress later that year, the deal would be dead. The Democratic Party has a strong non-proliferation lobby. Kerry, who later became US secretary of state, told Indian journalists in Washington that it was that visit by three key Senators to New Delhi which culminated in the completion of the nuclear deal.

India must once again realise that MPs have uses beyond merely voting in Parliament when the government brings forward Bills.

(K P Nayar has extensively covered West Asia and reported from Washington as a foreign correspondent for 15 years.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.