The diplomats who built India’s foreign policy
Nehru’s First Recruits: The Diplomats Who Built Independent India’s Foreign Policy, is a reminder that India’s foreign policy did not take shape in the hands of the current external affairs ministry, but has been built on a long legacy of a storied foreign service founded in 1948 by India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. As the title suggests, Bhattacherjee’s book is about India’s very first diplomats, the men and women recruited to the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) in the first dozen years after independence who helped shaped an independent foreign policy for a country that had been a British colony for nearly two centuries.
Through their stories, the author—a journalist who has been reporting on India’s foreign policy for more than two decades—has woven a narrative of India’s early and expansive engagement with the world even as its leaders were preoccupied with steering a big ship—large, poor, diverse and democratic—through the choppy waters of communalism, sectarianism and wars with various neighbours. Bhattacherjee makes the many characters in the book, all of whom had important roles in the early days of the shaping of Indian diplomacy, leap out of the pages with their colourful back stories: a journalist working as foreign correspondent in Indonesia; Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s aide who watched horrified as the idea of Pakistan took shape in his boss’s mind and in his speeches and decided to quit; the ruler of a princely state who decided to give his own statement on the Vietnam war as the consul in south Vietnam; an executive of the Imperial Tobacco Company, whose family owned several sugar mills, and who died by suicide while posted in Vienna.
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