India is grossly underinvested in studying its friends and foes

Context: For India’s Foreign Policy to succeed, there is a need to have an institutional approach in developing expertise on the countries we deal with.

Shortcomings in present Foreign policy approach: 

• Lack of institutional capacity to have clear understanding:  India has not invested enough institutional resources to understand the culture, history, interests and political worldviews of its friends, enemies and neighbours. 
• Ideological bias: We tend to have extremely leftist or rightist positions on our friends and foes.
• Inexpert foreign policy input: Inputs from few experts or retired foreign-service bureaucrats that do not have the ability to provide real inputs about foreign policy conduct.

Few Question to be addressed: 

• With China: How many in our China think tanks know Mandarin, Chinese history, its internal fault-lines and how that country became the factory to the world. 
• With Nepal: 

• How did India misread the situation (change in map) badly, despite close cultural links with Nepal? 
• Why were we not able to prevent this map revision through pre-emptive talks and a better understanding of the political situation in Nepal?

• Bangladesh: Did we try to offer options on how to mitigate problems arising from a possible National Register of Citizens? Could we not have suggested a Nepal-like deal?

Possible road map for a think tank culture: Need to invest more in studying the forces that are shaping world.

• Invest in developing expertise on the US, European Union, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. 
• We should have think tanks dedicated to studying Latin America/Africa and the remaining parts of Asia.

Conclusion: There is no substitute to long term institutional investment to have good diplomacy and healthy geopolitical outcomes.