Dr Shashi Tharoor wears many hats. He was India’s official candidate for the succession to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2006, and came a close second out of seven contenders in the race. He is also the author of nine books, as well as hundreds of articles, op-eds and book reviews in a wide range of publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune, Time, Newsweek and The Times of India. He has served for two years as a Contributing Editor and occasional columnist for Newsweek International. Since April 2001 he has authored a fortnightly column in The Hindu and since January 2007 in The Times of India.
A recipient of several awards, including a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, he was conferred India’s highest honour for Overseas Indians, the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, in 2004. In Chennai for the 7th Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD), Tharoor, who, among other things, is now chairman of the Dubai based Afras Ventures, spoke to Ramananda Sengupta on the significance of the divas, as well as the futility of a war with Pakistan.
Excerpts:
What does the Pravasi Divas mean to you?
I think it is an extremely important opportunity to give the pravasis from all over the world an opportunity to come back to their homeland, to revive their contacts and their allegiance to their homeland, in a way that both gives them a sense of what the country can do for them as well as what they can do for their country. And the result of these last several/seven Pravasi Bharitiya Divas’ has been in my sense to solidify this sense of belonging and that to me is very important.
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Do you see this as an attempt to replicate what the Chinese have done with their diaspora?
The Chinese policy has always been very different. The Chinese believe that once a Chinese always a Chinese. Doesn’t matter what passport you have, where you live, how long ago or where you have gone, etc., and they have acted on that. Whereas India has traditionally had the opposite attitude towards the diaspora. The traditional attitude of the government, various governments, has been: ‘If you’ve made your bed to sleep outside it is not our problem.’ It is only in recent years that this has begun to change, and this change is what is being reflected in a new way of going forward. I believe that we don’t need to look for parallels with other countries, certainly the kind of organized, systematic way in which NRIs, PIOs and so on are being dealt with have no equivalent.
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So this might be an opportunity for NRIs to touch base with their country, but what does it get for the country itself, in tangible terms?
In tangible terms this is an opportunity to channel investments. It has provided a number of Indian states a major platform to attract the interests of people from around the world, a sort of one stop shop, and it has been able, in my view, to generate much greater awareness, as well as to use a buzz word, a lot more networking, both amongst themselves as well as with Indian officialdom as well as Indian businesses. The very fact that the PBD is linked to a trade fair or a trade exhibition confirms the relevance of this element.
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The Indian American community has been punching above its weight in terms of its clout as compared to its numbers. But does the Indian government have a moral or ethical right to leverage that for its own benefit?
You are referring, it seems to me, to the nuclear deal in part. That is certainly an example where a very very strong role was played by the diaspora. While you may not need a Pravasi Bharitiya Divas to do this, but to be able to create, as it were, a lobby for your country in a third country, is an extremely significant advantage of our NRI policy. In fact, again China has no equivalent to that. Indian Americans are fiercely loyal to Indian interests, in a way that lets say Italian Americans are not to Italy. So that is therefore something that India can legitimately leverage. But if you look at a different example, for instance Malaysia, where there has been controversy over the treatment of Indians, India is walking on much thinner ice there, because in many of these cases these are Malaysian citizens who are, in a sense, having problems with their own government. So legally, as well as practically, India has no locus standi in the matter. So we find that this is not a one size fits all approach. So if you have American citizens who are willing to help you in matter of Indian interests, great. The more difficult issue is to get Malaysian citizens to help you in a similar way, though in both cases you are talking about Indian ethnicities. So we have to look at each situation, look at the politics of it, look at the realities of the nature of that minority’s influence within its own society, The Malaysian Indians are a higher percentage of Malaysian society than Indian Americans are in America, but I would argue that the political clout of Indian Americans is greater, in absolute terms, than that of Malaysian Indians. And I said this even though I’ve met a couple of Malaysian members of parliament of Indian origin here this evening. And I mean no disrespect to them, but it is a collective effort. In the American system, Indian Americans lobbying collectively for something like the nuclear deal, is seen as much more acceptable than a similar attempt by Malaysian Indians would be in that context.
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For the first few PBDs, Indian American delegates by far outnumbered the others, but I am told that last year and this year, Malaysians delegates have at least caught up with, if not surpassed the American contingent in terms of numbers…what inferences could one draw from that?
If true, the inference I would draw from that is that there is much more awareness about the opportunities. Malaysian Indians have also become far more active politically in Malaysia, so perhaps this is an international counterpart of that, but I am still not sure about this, I would double check the numbers. Nevertheless, the government is likely to believe that it can get a lot more out of the Indian American community, whether in terms of political benefits or in terms of investments, than it can from the Malaysian Indian community. Which again shows there are multiple objectives. With the Malaysian Indians we are looking at goodwill building, reinforcement of allegiances, networking and all of that, and much less of the other things we are looking for from the Indian Americans.
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On a totally different note, what options do you see before the Indian government when it comes to Pakistan?
I feel very strongly that this is the most important foreign policy challenge facing the country today. In fact, it is not just a foreign policy challenge, it is a challenge which infringes upon the security and well being of India and Indians. We are facing a neighbour that is fundamentally dysfunctional, that at very many important and influential levels is malicious towards our country, and which has been directly implicated in a large number of criminal actions on our soil that have taken Indian lives. At the same time, we should know and we do know that war or a military solution is not the answer. It is not the answer because that is not going to deliver results. Any comparison to Israel, as some are rather facilely drawing today, is completely mistaken because the parallels simply do not apply. Any action by India on Pakistani territory would invite an immediate retaliation, which could quickly escalate into a war that neither side could win. So we are not looking a situation where there is such an option available, and what is even more important, if we were to try and take such an action, we would play into the hands of the terrorists. Because what they want is for us to attack Pakistan so that everybody in Pakistan would have to rally beneath the flag, thereby making common cause with the Islamists, and the Pakistani army would then be emboldened or justified to abandon the unpopular fight against the Al Qaeda and the Taliban on the western frontier, and move to a familiar enemy on the east, namely us. And we have no reason to oblige them by taking those steps. So what we need therefore is a solution that does not do that, and at the same time protects our security. And if you look at it in that context, the government’s current actions seem to me to be extremely well thought out, which is using diplomatic pressure to increasingly up the ante on Pakistan, isolate it diplomatically, and at the same time make it vulnerable to demands from its biggest friends, allies and sponsors that it behave if it wants to continue getting these benefits. That is what we are doing.
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Do you believe that this will actually deliver results?
Will? That remains to be seen. Could? Yes, that is definitely the case, but certainly, at this stage I don’t see very many options. I think there are many more steps we could take, along the same lines to achieve the same results. The presentation of the dossier is a first step, but that could be followed by other possible steps, both at the bilateral level with key countries, and with multilateral agencies, including the UN. There are many other steps we could take without sort of going into the war mode. The war mode would be folly, and it would really damage our attempts to accomplish what we trying to right now.
'Go for Pakistan’s jugular now'
So you don’t subscribe to the Clash of Civilisations theory?
That I never have. First of all I thought that poor Mr (Samuel) Huntington, who so recently passed away, was fundamentally wrong in the way he defined these civilizations, he was fundamentally wrong in the assumption that civilisations could be analogous, they are not. Because every civilisation has immense variety within itself. If you take, for instance, the Islamic civilisation, you will find that on very specific issues of policy there are widespread disagreements. When the Taliban was in power in Afghanistan, there was a huge difference in the policies of say Pakistan on the one hand and Iran on the other. Or Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which recognised the Taliban, and 40 other countries that did not. So to reduce them all into one shapeless, undifferentiated lump, was careless to say the least.
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Author, CEO, contender for the UN secretary-general’s post, philanthropist, journalist, husband, father…where do you find the time for all this and more?
You only need to find time if you have lost it in the first place. I try not to lose time, I try to do as much as I can in the time that I have. But I also hope that I would not be defined by any of these titles. A human being has a number of responses to the world. The world I see around me, the world I engage with. Some of those responses are manifested in my writings, some in my speaking, some through my work with the UN, some through other charitable activities I am involved in… and all of these activities come from the same human being, the same pair of eyes that are looking on the world. I hope there will still be other things that I might do, to see if I can somehow make an impact on the issues that I care about.
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