4 min readNew DelhiMay 3, 2026 01:04 PM IST
There are two schools of diplomacy in the Indian Foreign Service. In the first category are those who look upon their assignments through narrow Indian perspectives, believing that their prioritisation must be the promotion of Indian views on issues of the moment with little regard for the setting in which they preach.
The second category of diplomat comprises those who immerse themselves in the local scene, wanting first to empathetically understand the country of their assignment, its interests, its constraints, its history, its language(s) and its culture(s). The plural is important for countries like Indonesia whose infinite diversity matches ours in terms of ethnic diversity, linguistic pluralism, cultural manifestations and, above all, religious orientation. In my view — a view that our many transactional diplomats might not share — it is the second category that contributes the most to the subtle promotion of Indian interests, particularly in difficult assignments, for it interprets these Indian interests through the prism of the host country, without didactically lecturing the resident citizens about the imperatives of the Indian view.
Unfortunately, those who do take an interest in their countries of assignment are in a pitiful minority. The majority of our diplomats are born pontificators with scarcely hidden contempt for their interlocutors. This accounts for our growing failures of diplomacy, particularly the satisfying notion that we are a kind of vishwaguru who know better than others what is good for them and for the world.
Ambassador Aftab Seth belongs to the eclectic second category. Indeed, I would rate him the exemplar for the second category, especially as he has an unusual ear for languages and manages before his term ends to master Bhasa Indonesia with the ease with which he speaks passable Vietnamese and outdoes many a Japanese in his enunciation of their language, so very different to ours. I particularly cherish his succeeding me at one remove as consul-general in Karachi where we both made innumerable friends and were absorbed into all echelons of a different but eerily similar ethos to our own.
His lavishly illustrated book on Indonesia is a tribute as much to ‘the beautiful archipelago’ that is Indonesia as it is proof of what can be achieved by prioritising understanding of the host country over pompously propagating the ‘Indian’ view — the preferred mode of diplomacy of most of my former colleagues. It is this self-identification with the scenic and man-made wonders of the Indonesian archipelago that accounts for the loving detail in which the archipelago’s natural bounties and human-engineered miracles are both described and illustrated.
For, the photographs and drawings bring Indonesia alive for those like me who have not had much of an opportunity of visiting the vast and spread-out islands that it is made up of. Before you put the book down, Aftab acquaints you with its history from ancient times to the present, its civilisational challenges and responses, the manner in which this 90 per cent Muslim nation (the most populous Islamic nation in the world) has celebrated communal harmony, the oneness of humankind, the lessons each can learn from the other, and the mosaic that celebrates, and does not denigrate, the infinite variety of spiritual belief.
Of course, there is the downside of death and destruction but that has more to do with forced regime change than with cultural and civic attitudes to religious harmony. As Aftab leads you by the finger, as it were, from a gay, sophisticated, fun-loving people to grave dungeons of death by massacre but never missing a beat in being at one with the people of his diplomatic remit, many of whom constitute the political, literary and cultural elite but most of whom are ordinary folk, always ready with a smile and heartwarming hospitality in the bosom of one of nature’s wonders, Aftab exemplifies what a dedicated diplomat can do, without prejudice to his official duties as an envoy of his country, to project Indian interests as similar, if not the same, as those of his host country.
The writer is a former Union minister.
