The Prime Minister’s personalised foreign policy approach fails to deliver.
AS PRIME MINISTER, NARENDRA MODI HAS patented his own style of diplomacy. He has gone on a record number of foreign visits in the past three years in his efforts to meet the strategic and defence goals the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has laid out for the country.
The External Affairs Minister, Sushma Swaraj, hardly accompanied him on the more than 50 state visits he has undertaken to foreign countries. Sushma Swaraj seemingly is treated with benign neglect by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). The only substantive press conference she has held was after she completed two years in office. She is mostly in the news for her tweets on Indians who find themselves in difficult circumstances being rescued by the Indian government. There have been barely any tweets from the External Affairs Minister on the fate of the 39 Indians who have been missing since the fall of Mosul in 2014. Sushma Swaraj is not even part of the Cabinet Appointments Committee and had no role in selecting the Foreign Secretary, S. Jaishankar, after his predecessor, Sujatha Singh, was unceremoniously shunted out by the Prime Minister.
Modi also prefers to talk directly to senior bureaucrats on key issues, frequently bypassing the External Affairs Minister. It is also not a secret that the Prime Minister gives a lot of weightage to the advice given by the National Security Adviser (NSA), Ajit Doval. The inputs of right-wing think tanks that have proliferated in the capital, many of them with close connections with the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), also play a role. Tibetan and Uighur activists were invited by a think tank run by the NSA’s son Shaurya Doval. Ram Madhav, BJP general secretary and RSS activist, is also known to be playing a key role in foreign policy matters on issues relating to the Indian subcontinent and China.
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