Foreign policy think tanks: Good or bad?

By Anuj Raina

On Nov 25, the Observer Research Foundation held a panel discussion on Stuti Bhatnagar’s book India’s Pakistan Policy: How Think Tanks are Shaping Foreign Relations. Bhatnagar, an academic and Executive Officer at the South Asian Studies Association of Australia, uses a comparative framework to explore the research discourse of prominent Indian think tanks, particularly on the India–Pakistan dispute, in order to draw attention to the policy discourse of think tanks during the Composite Dialogue peace process between India and Pakistan and the subsequent support from the government which further expanded their role.

In the case of the Kashmir conflict, peace building think tanks were encouraged by the government to engage in crossborder activities that would build constituencies for peace with Pakistan and promote economic cooperation as an incentive for peace. While the government aimed to depoliticise the conflict, these think tanks used this opportunity to draw attention to marginalised perspectives and issues. Indian think tanks can most certainly play a vital role in helping to resolve India’s most volatile foreign policy issues - its relationship with Pakistan and the conflict over the disputed territory of Kashmir. It could be argued that the Composite Dialogue process, which was initiated in 2004, provided avenues for policy change in India’s relations with Pakistan and encouraged active civil society engagement, giving think tanks the opportunity to influence policy making. Peace building think tanks nonetheless faced significant challenges in shaping the peace process because of structural constraints regarding access to resources and lack of autonomy to further their agendas. This reflected resistance within the state to depoliticising a conflict that has long been India’s central national security issue.

Think tanks and Indian foreign policy

Foreign policy making in India is typically viewed as highly centralised and dominated by the Prime Minister’s Office and South Block bureaucracy. Yet in 2004, the Congress-Party-led United Progressive Alliance government launched a Composite Dialogue with Pakistan which included a place for Indian think tanks in the Kashmir dispute.

Under Narendra Modi, foreignpolicy making has undergone an important evolution, adding to longer-term trends. Seemingly paradoxically, India has seen both a greater centralisation of foreign policy decision-making and the simultaneous rise of new foreign policy think tanks. While traditionally marginalised, India’s foreign policy think tank sector has gained in visibility and vibrancy due to new demand and India’s expanding international stakes. The raison d’être for most think tanks is to serve as important catalysts for ideas and action. In a world facing many pressing problems that include extreme poverty, inequality, climate change, rapid urbanization, the spread of infectious disease, armed conflict, international terrorism, organized crime, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, good ideas that can be acted upon are essential. At their best, think tanks possess the ability to capture the political imagination by brokering ideas, stimulating public debate, and offering creative yet practical solutions to tackle the world’s most pressing problems. Think tanks are at their worst when they are narrowly ideological and consistently generate predictable findings on any question despite evidence to the contrary. Think tanks that demonstrate such behaviour should be discounted. However, experts and policymakers can be susceptible to actively avoiding and ignoring information that contradicts their beliefs. To put it bluntly, policymakers are struggling to develop effective responses to many of the key issues that will be debated in these policy processes and think tanks can play a constructive role by bringing practical and feasible options that tackle these issues to the negotiating table. To succeed, think tanks need at least four elements. They need good ideas, a coalition of actors to support those ideas, the institutional capacity to nurture and shepherd those ideas in a dynamic context, and the ability to seize the moment when the timing is right.

A word of caution

Think tanks’ orientation and sources of funding are key criteria of differentiation. Despite their oft-professed public purpose orientation, think tanks are organisations that are guided by interests and depend on particular sources of funding. Understanding the evolution and diversity of Indian foreign policy think tanks today can help us to assess trends in Indian foreign policy and to identify emerging political dynamics in New Delhi.

The institutionalisation and patronage to government think tanks such as Institute for Defence Stu