Advancing an Indian Feminist Foreign Policy with Aditi Mukund

I met with Aditi Mukund to discuss her work at the Kubernein Initiative, and the opportunities for India to develop a more inclusive foreign policy

Although I have been drawn away from India in recent years, the country remains one of my great loves. I love being in India, and with my fondness for public transport, I love cramming myself into buses and trains to travel through cities and around the country – and due to this I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time tracking down songs from 80s Tamil films that bus drivers in southern India love to blast out to their passengers. Despite some fraught recent trends, Indian domestic politics is fascinatingly complex, with a vast array of moving parts that defies any neat characterisation. Indian food in all its regional varieties is clearly the world’s superior cuisine, and Indians themselves are warm, hospitable, interesting, informative and funny. 

So when a message popped up in my inbox from Aditi Mukund informing me she was in Melbourne and asking whether I’d have time for a coffee (or tea in my case), I, of course, said yes. Aditi had been in Melbourne to participate in the Quadmin Emerging Leaders Dialogue organised by Latrobe University. The dialogue was designed to bring together some of the best young talent from Australia, India, Japan and the United States to build connections and exchange ideas as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad) starts to take a more formal shape and establishes greater habits of cooperation.

Aditi had been identified as one of India’s emerging leaders due to her role as a Program Associate at the Kubernein Initiative, a Mumbai-based, female-led, think tank that works on issues of India’s engagement with the world, with a focus on climate and water security and Aditi’s own specialty, feminist foreign policy. She was the project lead on report issued by Kubernein earlier this year titled Opportunities for a more Inclusive Indian Foreign Policy, which sought to assess where India’s Ministry of External Affairs and its diplomatic corps currently are with female representation – and also project ideas about feminist foreign policy from an Indian perspective, and within the unique conditions of India and its neighbourhood. 

Aditi and I initially met at a café attached to the State Library of Victoria. While the old walls of the building echoed everyone’s conversations into a knotty din, we still managed to have a lovely couple of hours discussing India’s current place in the world, its foreign policy objectives, the complexity of its domestic politics, the emergence of Australia’s increasingly influential Indian diaspora, and her work on feminist foreign policy – an area of interest of mine as well, although I would claim no great personal expertise. But with far more to discuss we organised to catch up again via Zoom when she was back in Mumbai. 

Gender affects almost all aspects of human relations, from the personal to the political and, as we are increasingly becoming aware, international relations. It has been known for some time that a country’s development is heavily reliant on the advancement of women, but we are also now coming to understand that the psychology of violence is similar whether on a personal or state-based level. Authoritarianism – regardless of its strain – frequently has control of women as a central pillar, and women often disproportionately suffer the consequences of war and instability.

The success of movements against authoritarianism rely not just on female participation, but on women being the active drivers of change. This reality is currently being demonstrated in Iran with both the treatment of women being the trigger for the resistance movement, and women’s organised response being the dominant challenge to Iran’s theocratic government. 

Over the past decade the protest movements of the Arab Spring had some limited successes, but they also remain on-going concerns that can’t be dismissed due to a lack of immediate results. For Aditi’s Masters’ dissertation she focused on the narratives that emerged from the desire for change in Egypt and Tunisia, and how women were central actors in these movements. It was through this work that she decided gender in international relations would be where she wanted direct her skills and expertise. 

Upon realising that her dissertation had less than 30 percent citations from female authors, Aditi established the Women In International Relations Network to promote female scholars with expertise in various issues of foreign affairs. She created this partially as a way of promoting the work of women working in international relations who should be more influential, but also to centre India as a critical access point for foreign policy scholarship and analysis. 

Joining a female-founded and led organisation in the Kubernein Initiative has allowed Aditi to pilot the development of what an Indian perspective on feminist foreign policy would be. As a concept initially devised by Sweden, and having aspects subsequently adopted by mostly Western states (with some notable exceptions), there was a need for these ideas to be given a non-Western perspective. Aditi’s objective was to find how there can be practical implementation of feminist foreign policy within India’s current foreign policy. 

Kubernein began the project that became the Opportunities for a more Inclusive Indian Foreign Policy report by conducting workshops, discussions and interviews about these ideas with other Indian foreign policy think tanks, staff within the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), former ambassadors, academics and journalists to try and get a sense of how gender was understood within Indian foreign policy, what ideas were already present within the system, and where are the current opportunities to advance these ideas. 

A key feature of this process was to put experts in different fields in the same room – whether this be experts in foreign policy, trade relations or climate, as well as gender – people who might not usually interact professionally with one another, in order to break down silos that may not initially consider gender in their work, but also as a way of seeding feminist – or more broadly inclusive – ideas into India’s foreign policy ecosystem, from where they can influence the MEA. Aditi notes that in India it has been India’s think tanks that initially provided female scholars with a voice in foreign and security policy and decision-making. 

This influence looks to be producing results. What caught my eye while reading the report – and something that Aditi also wanted to highlight in our discussion – was a statement from last year by India’s External Affairs Minister, Dr. S. Jaishankar. The quote is slightly truncated in the report, but I tracked down the whole statement as I think it is worth quoting in full: 

“I agree that we need to look at the world from the perspective of women, we need a gender-balanced foreign policy. We need to look at three things here: Getting more women to engage with foreign policy issues, reflect women’s interest in foreign policy, and bring in a feminist perspective to foreign policy.”

Despite Australia’s current and previous two foreign ministers being female – and admittedly championing many positive gender-focused advancements in Australia’s foreign policy – it would be extraordinary for any of them to make such a clear and direct statement. Maybe Dr Jaishankar has the advantage of being a man and this shields him from the negative knee-jerk reactions that female politicians have to deal with, but it also indicates that these ideas are being taken seriously at the highest level in India, and that Dr Jaishankar sees India’s interests as being aligned with a greater understanding of gender. 

With Dr Jaishankar’s attention, Aditi feels that there are some immediate areas where a gender lens could be integrated into India’s foreign policy. This includes how climate change affects women and other marginalised groups and how India can cooperate with its neighbours on adaptation and mitigation; understanding the benefits and implications of Indian trade and future trade agreements for women; and issues of non-traditional security through India’s overseas aid and development assistance programs, with a particular focus on health. 

Like in the West, in India there is a difficulty for some men to stomach the term “feminist” – leading to an unfortunate and counter-productive backlash – so there’s a preference for the term “inclusive” in Aditi and Kubernein’s work as a substitute. However, this is also due to the complexity of India itself and of its region, and how this should inform India’s approach to foreign policy. So “inclusive” can be seen as a broader concept than just a focus on women, expanding to be an awareness of how policy affects those who may not be a region’s dominant or enfranchised group. Particularly taking into account the complexity of India’s land borders, which often include strong cross-border cultural connections that political boundaries may inhibit. 

Of course, institutionalising this perspective on inclusivity requires a significant social and cultural transformation in India, with large scale education and sophisticated awareness campaigns. India remains a patriarchal and casteist society, and one that is still struggling to acknowledge and provide rights for same sex attracted people and those who do not fall neatly into a gender binary. Aditi highlighted that only 9 percent of women in India are part of the formal workforce, an extraordinary statistic that not only limits female agency, but prevents upward pressure on the state to act in their interests and understand their perspectives. Gender equality at home is essential to promote gender equality abroad. This is true for Australia as well as India.

As we concluded our chat, Aditi left me with a clear series of considerations as she continues to advance the idea of a feminist foreign policy for India. Although feminist foreign policy may have certain outcomes in mind, it is primarily a lens that policy is created through. This requires buy-in from a larger group of stakeholders, as the MEA has to operate with a degree of social legitimacy, and these ideas require allies within India’s broader foreign policy ecosystem. There needs to be a recognition from proponents of feminist foreign policy that pushback is natural, and that not all pushback is negative and driven by a suspicion of women. And to be successful Aditi and her colleagues need to build a coalition of allies, a web of resources, and a solid bank of knowledge – and to do so methodically and thoroughly, “so there are fewer holes to poke when you actually announce a feminist foreign policy.”