By Vijitha Yapa

Academics becoming embroiled with their governments and foraying into international politics isn’t a new phenomenon in the West. But Indian professors engaging in global issues is a more recent trend – and it is of some interest.

In India, academics openly participate in delegations comprising politicians, public officials and sometimes even national intelligence agencies.

Prof. S. D. Muni of the Jawaharlal Nehru University is one such person. His book is interestingly titled ‘Dabbling in Diplomacy, Authorised & Otherwise: Recollection of a Non-Career Diplomat.’

Muni found himself involved in many sensitive aspects of domestic politics in neighbouring countries as well as in the international relations of those nation states.

“In his onetime formal assignment as ambassador and special envoy for the tended neighbourhood countries in Southeast Asia, the author learned about the intricacies of practical diplomacy and the dynamics of India’s foreign policy,” says the publisher of the book.

Muni was a teacher, and he also conducted and supervised research in international relations and South Asian studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, National University of Singapore, Banaras Hindu University and University of Rajasthan.

He was nominated to the first National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) of India and became a founding executive member of the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies in Colombo. In 2005, Muni was conferred the Sri Lanka Rathna honour for exceptional and outstanding services rendered to our nation.

Muni worked as a non-career diplomat during the tenure of prime ministers Inder Kumar Gujral, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Dr. Manmohan Singh.

Discussing those whom he met and worked with, particularly in Nepal and Sri Lanka, he says it taught him that government and politics aren’t always what they seem.

Muni wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth and family finances didn’t allow him to enrol in an engineering college. Even as a schoolboy, he did extra work; and during the summer vacations, he worked as a casual labourer, and earned about 150 paise a day by digging and assisting technicians to lay electrical cables for the Divisional Railway Hospital in Jodhpur.

Muni read for his master’s in political science without attending classes, and studied only publications he could access in school and college libraries. He devotes much of his book to activities in Nepal but this review doesn’t cover that.

Even as Sri Lanka moves closer to India under President Ranil Wickremesinghe however, our leaders should study the role that India played in Nepal’s political developments – inclu­ding the blockade of goods to Nepal from India and vice versa. Indian influence in that coun­try’s recent history needs to be viewed in that context.

Muni admits: “We in India were broadly sympathetic to the Tamil rights.” Following the July 1983 riots, leaders of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) visited India to advocate for its direct inter­vention and creation of ‘Tamil Eelam.’ This was similar to what India did in East Pakistan to create Bangladesh.

But it wasn’t India’s policy to have a separate state in such close proximity to Tamil Nadu, which saw violence erupt in the 1950s when New Delhi attemp­ted to impose Hindi as the national language.

Muni doesn’t analyse the activities of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) and the disastrous effects of that forced intervention.

As for the agreement by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to lay down arms, its supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran backed out of signing it, arguing that Mahatma Gandhi never signed any agreement with the British.

Senior Indian Foreign Service official Hardeep Singh Puri was involved in previous discussions with the LTTE and also accom­panied Prabhakaran to New Delhi in 1987, to meet Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Muni says the LTTE leader was so nervous about meeting the Indian premier that his shirt was soaked in sweat.

And Muni notes that a closer look at India’s long-term approach to its smaller neighbours suggests it’s not free of periodic inconsistencies, contradictions, knee-jerk reflexes and serious policy reversals.

He adds that the ground reality of political dynamics and diplomatic relations is critically different from what one learns in textbooks and classrooms. Muni says that foreign policy decisions have three layers: the things thought, the things said and the things done.

It is the last of these layers that is crucial to understanding how nations perceive and react, and the major repercussions of those actions on relations between them.