The advent of the post Second World War international order – and the new equations that emerged with it – coincided with the early years of postcolonial India. Perhaps the clearest reflection of the significance that newly independent India placed in navigating external challenges and pursuing national interests, while engaging with the world, was the creation of the Indian Foreign Service.

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who also headed the external affairs ministry, believed in the need for a specialised cadre of diplomats. And so, with the assistance of Girija Shankar Bajpai, an old hand at the colonial-era Indian Civil Service, he put together the IFS. In its first decade from 1948 to 1958, it became a key agent of India’s worldview, mostly mirroring how Nehru looked at world affairs. In the process, except for some discordant notes, the first decade of the IFS was largely cast in Nehru’s image.

The historical register of these early IFS recruits is remarkable for how they formed the power elite of the day and the challenging times they navigated. More significantly, the IFS’s formative years came at a crucial juncture of modern state formation in post-independent India as well as the country’s efforts to find its feet in the comity of nations. 

Journalist and writer Kallol Bhattacherjee’s new book, Nehru’s First Recruits: The Diplomats Who Built Independent India’s Foreign Policy, published by Harper Collins, draws on the institutional memory of the service to trace the strands of its formation and evolution during the first 10 years of its working. He turns his gaze to young recruits to the IFS who went on to become key figures in crafting the foreign policy and diplomatic outlook of newly independent India.

Bhattacherjee’s account builds on assertions made early in the book. “The creation of the IFS was the single most important administrative innovation that the Indian state had to carry out soon after Independence for the pursuit of its foreign policy objectives,” he argues. 

The book pieces together the Nehru government’s initiative to carve out a separate foreign policy bureaucracy as distinct from the generalist administrative apparatus of the IAS. It also brings out the eclectic composition of the IFS in the early years; its officers were either direct recruits selected through a competitive examination conducted by the UPSC or were inducted by the ministry from backgrounds like military service, broadcasting, literature and academia. 

As the IFS was still young enough to produce officers of seniority, the top echelons of foreign policy decision-making were in the hands of ICS veterans like secretary-general GS Bajpai and foreign secretary Subimal Dutt. Within institutional norms, they brought their individual personalities, outlooks and style to the fledgling practice of India’s postcolonial diplomacy. 

At the same time, Bhattacherjee reminds readers that not everyone was happy about Nehru’s discretion being used to let a few enter the service without clearing a competitive examination. Foreign secretary Dutt is quoted as telling a young recruit that some of the new inductees who didn’t clear the exam are “trash”, while direct recruits like him who cleared the exam alone made a mark. In Dutt’s disapproval, one can see the distinction being made between direct and non-direct recruits.

In Bhattacherjee’s reconstruction of the period, it’s the young recruits who exude a point of departure in India’s foreign policy philosophy. They carried the imprint of Nehru’s external affairs ideas in their early years and in the decades to come. The long career arcs of these early entrants saw them in influential positions in foreign policymaking in the later decades of India’s journey as a young republic. 

The author identifies the triumvirate of K Natwar Singh, Brajesh Mishra and JN Dixit as diplomats of the 1950s whose longevity in influencing foreign policy can be gauged from the fact that they were actively holding sway even in the early years of the 21st century. Singh did so as foreign minister in the UPA-I government, Mishra became India’s first national security advisor under the Vajpayee government, and Dixit succeeded Mishra during UPA-I.

The book also recalls the journeys of diplomats like Dileep Shankarrao Kamtekar, Chandra Shekhar Jha and the esteemed protocol chief Mirza Ali Baig. CB Muthamma became the first female IFS officer as early as 1949. But Bhattacherjee’s retelling of the abrupt end of Mira Ishardas Malik’s career shows the absurdity of the ‘marriage barrier’ that female candidates faced while joining the service. In decades to come, this specific glass ceiling has been removed and married women are as much welcome to work in the IFS as married men. 

Notes of dissent

Nehru’s First Recruits dwells on how the IFS adopted the Nehruvian line of non-alignment with the two blocs during the Cold War as a matter of policy. It also adhered to the broader rubric of Afro-Asian third world solidarity. The Bandung Conference of 1955 was seen as a high point of this approach. 

But was there a consensus or unanimity about it in the IFS? Did non-alignment go unchallenged in the IFS stream of thinking, especially at a time when the realist school of diplomacy was alert to practical challenges of state behaviour in world politics and even had theorist Hans Morgenthau supporting it? Or was it a top-down line adopted when the views of dissenting young recruits didn’t matter? 

On this aspect, the book becomes sketchy, restricting itself to a few fleeting references to different points of view. It offers no ample space to some murmurs of dissent, if not voices of clear protest, within the IFS against the PMO’s dominant view. A few years after the first decade of the IFS, the dangers of losing sight of these realist concerns became painfully evident for India in the form of the India-China war of 1962. 

In his book India and Asian Geopolitics (published by Penguin Random House in 2021), diplomat and former national security advisor Shiv Shankar Menon, despite being an admirer of Nehru’s worldview, concedes its limits: “Nehru’s ideas, prioritising legitimacy over power, also led him to ignore real threats and ultimately to failures, as in his dealings with China.” 

In 2010, speaking at an event held by the Indian Council of World Affairs, political theorist Bhikhu Parekh slammed Nehru’s approach as preachy, “running moral commentary on affairs of the world”, and deluding Indians with an “exaggerated sense of self-importance”. 

This seems a glaring gap in the book’s remarkable retelling of a momentous epoch in the evolution of India’s state structure for the practice of contemporary diplomacy. Bhattacherjee does give hints of occasional realist resets in Nehruvian foreign policy in later years – perhaps as a counter to the practice of berating Nehru as a clueless romantic in the conduct of international relations. But such instances don’t fill the gap in the book; other streams of thought within the IFS are not easy to find in the account of those. Perhaps this is a casualty of the author’s obvious sympathy with the Nehruvian worldview and the limits of the archival material he used for the book.

That does not take away from the fact that the author dug well into the sources he meticulously pieced together. The book’s narrative relies on sources like the History of Service published in 1959, prolific writings of former diplomats, and conversations with family members, colleagues and acquaintances of the first recruits. The rewards of such eclectic methodology can be seen in how the book reconstructs the period of the early entrants to the IFS.

In revisiting this historical milieu and the imperatives of the formative years of the IFS, Nehru’s First Recruits is a significant account of the newly independent state’s early institutional response to the practice of diplomacy. Steeped in the ethos of a Nehruvian worldview, it recreates the birth of the IFS, the eventful years of some of its new recruits, and the emerging diplomatic landscape in a changing world order. This has meant the book’s inherent need to echo the Nehruvian zeitgeist of Indian diplomacy has left some discordant notes unregistered.

But this is a minor quibble about what otherwise is a significant work in tracing the roots of the country’s premier diplomatic services.

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