‘Caste in Indian Diplomacy and International Relations’: How India’s Elite Have Used Secularism to Hide Caste Privilege

When Mani Shankar Aiyar stood before a packed auditorium in Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu, delivering a speech on secularism, he likely expected the usual polite questions about religious tolerance and pluralism. Instead, a young woman in the standard black uniform of the Dravidar Kazhagam political party rose to challenge him with a question that cut to the heart of Indian elite hypocrisy.

“How dare you speak on secularism,” she demanded, “when your caste is emblazoned in your surname?”

The exchange, recounted in Aiyar’s 2023 memoir, reveals what scholar Sankaran Krishna calls the “schizoid character” of India’s diplomatic class—a elite that preaches egalitarianism while perpetuating the very hierarchies it claims to oppose. In a devastating new analysis published in The Hague Journal of Diplomacy’s September 2025 special issue titled, “Caste in Indian Diplomacy and International Relations,” Krishna, associate professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies, uses Aiyar’s career to expose how Indian secularism has functioned not as a force for equality, but as an elaborate smokescreen obscuring caste privilege at the highest levels of government.

The Secular Smokescreen

“Secularism-as-diversion,” Krishna terms it—a mechanism that deflects attention from caste hierarchies by focusing exclusively on Hindu-Muslim religious pluralism. This “anaemic secularism” has enabled what he calls “vacuous diversity,” allowing upper-caste elites to masquerade as progressive leaders while systematically excluding Dalit voices from diplomatic circles.

The pattern, Krishna demonstrates, stretches back to India’s colonial period and persists today. From V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, India’s “first diplomat” who had to perform “Brahminism” while representing indentured laborers abroad, to contemporary passport policies that favored “the right sort” of Indians for international travel, the machinery of Indian diplomacy has consistently reproduced caste hierarchies on a global stage.

Krishna’s analysis, titled “Vacuous Diversity: Caste and Secularism in Indian Diplomacy,” forms the centerpiece of a groundbreaking special issue that challenges fundamental assumptions about how we understand Indian foreign policy. The collection, edited by Vineet Thakur (Leiden University), Pavan Kumar (Ambedkar University), and Kalathmika Natarajan (University of Exeter), represents what may be the first systematic examination of caste’s role in shaping India’s international relations.

The Aiyar Paradigm

Aiyar’s biography reads like a masterclass in elite privilege. Born in 1941 to a Tamil Brahmin family, he attended the most prestigious educational institutions from kindergarten through Cambridge University before joining the Indian Foreign Service in 1963. For a quarter-century, he exemplified what Krishna calls the performance of secular cosmopolitanism—fluent in English, at ease with international elites, a walking advertisement for India’s progressive credentials.

But Krishna’s forensic analysis of Aiyar’s memoir and public statements reveals the contradictions beneath this polished surface. When Aiyar fondly recalls founding a satirical journal with “a Muslim, a Christian and a Sikh,” he notes that “if you’ve spotted that they were a Muslim, a Christian and a Sikh, you are no Stephanian”—meaning a true alumnus of St. Stephen’s College wouldn’t notice such religious diversity because pluralism was so natural to them.

Krishna sees through this performance: “It is precisely by drawing attention to that which should not be noticed that Aiyar is able to produce and reproduce hierarchy and distinction within the Indian social.” Notably absent from these celebrations of diversity? Any mention of Dalits, who remain invisible in Aiyar’s world of secular sophistication.

“Fealty to secularism was always in the domain of the public, the abstract, the universal, and invariably communicated in English, while the performance of caste was not merely confined to the private, but this was also the domain of the particular, the culturally specific, the provincial.”

Language as Weapon

The most revealing episode Krishna analyzes occurred in 2017, when Aiyar called Prime Minister Narendra Modi a “neech kism ka aadmi”—literally “a vile/low person” but widely interpreted as a casteist slur. Despite Aiyar’s claims that his poor Hindi caused him to inadvertently use casteist language, Krishna demolishes this defense by documenting Aiyar’s extensive background in Hindi and Urdu literature, his decades living in northern India, and his marriage to a Punjabi Sikh.

The controversy, Krishna argues, represents “the return of the repressed”—elite anger at having their natural order challenged by someone like Modi, who rose from humble origins as a tea vendor. “The choice of the word ‘neech,'” Krishna writes, “was not so much a slip of the tongue or a matter of linguistic mistranslation… It is the comment of a person who anchored his sense of self in an enduring hierarchy in which only few were destined to rule while others were meant to serve them tea.”

Krishna’s biographical excavation serves a larger theoretical purpose. He shows how what scholar Vivek Dhareshwar identified as a crucial fracture in Indian elite identity: “fealty to secularism was always in the domain of the public, the abstract, the universal, and invariably communicated in English, while the performance of caste was not merely confined to the private, but this was also the domain of the particular, the culturally specific, the provincial.”

This analysis connects to broader patterns documented by other contributors to the special issue. Kalathmika Natarajan’s research reveals how the Indian government collaborated with British authorities after independence to ensure that only “upper caste, educated and wealthy” Indians could travel to Britain, while those from the “coolie class” were systematically excluded. The passport became “an insignia of caste, class and pedigree” rather than a democratic right.

Vineet Thakur’s genealogical analysis suggests that “Indian diplomacy takes ‘birth’ primarily to articulate the political and civic rights of seemingly new categories of citizens”—namely, upper-caste Indians seeking to distinguish themselves from lower-caste indentured laborers. Even Pavan Kumar’s contemporary research on digital diaspora communities shows how traditional hierarchies persist in new technological spaces.

Historical Patterns

The special issue traces how these dynamics emerged from colonial contradictions that never fully resolved. As Krishna explains, colonial diplomats faced an impossible task: they had to distinguish themselves as the “right sort” of Indians to gain respect from Western powers while simultaneously claiming to represent the masses. This created what he calls “unrepresentative representation”—a pattern that persisted well into the postcolonial era.

The 1971 war with Pakistan provides a telling example. When diplomat-turned-politician Shashi Tharoor celebrates how India’s military leadership included “a Muslim,” “a Parsi,” “a Sikh,” and “a Jewish” general, he notably omits Defense Minister Jagjivan Ram—the sole Dalit member of the Cabinet. Similarly, when India opposed including caste discrimination in the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, the government’s “dream team” was celebrated for its religious diversity while the absence of Dalit voices went unnoticed.

Krishna positions Aiyar’s declining political fortunes within broader shifts in Indian politics. The “secular Nehruvian imaginary” that enabled upper-caste dominance through claims to progressive leadership has given way to Hindu majoritarian politics. But this shift, Krishna argues, doesn’t end upper-caste privilege—it simply reconfigures it through “outright scapegoating of Muslims” while “selectively incorporating OBCs, Dalits and tribals into the fold of Hindutva while still retaining the idea of caste hierarchy.”

This transformation helps explain why Aiyar’s particular brand of elite performance—once celebrated as cosmopolitan sophistication—now appears increasingly tone-deaf in contemporary India. His repeated scandals reflect not just personal failings but the exhaustion of a particular form of secular nationalism that used religious diversity to obscure caste hierarchy.

Academic Revolution

The broader significance of this special issue extends beyond Indian diplomatic studies. By demonstrating how domestic social structures fundamentally shape international relations, these scholars challenge core assumptions of international relations theory. They show that categories like race, caste, and class are not simply domestic concerns but “constitutive features of the international system itself.”

This approach offers insights relevant to understanding other postcolonial states and how their international relations have been shaped by domestic hierarchies and colonial legacies. It contributes to growing scholarship on decolonizing international relations by revealing how supposedly progressive concepts like secularism can function to obscure rather than eliminate hierarchies.

The Reckoning

Krishna’s analysis ultimately calls for a more honest confrontation with how social hierarchies shape international relations. As he notes in his conclusion, “secularism is anchored on the idea of the fundamental equality of all citizens in the eyes of the state and the law.” In a society where caste permeates every religion, “it is impossible to see how one can claim to be secular without enfolding the issue of caste equality within its ambit.”

That young woman in Kumbakonam who challenged Aiyar understood something that India’s secular elite have spent decades avoiding: true secularism cannot coexist with caste privilege. Her question, dismissed by Aiyar with clever wordplay about regional identity and academic merit, pointed toward the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Indian diplomatic practice.

As India continues to assert itself as a global power, these questions become increasingly urgent. Can a diplomatic establishment built on exclusion and hierarchy genuinely represent a diverse democracy on the world stage? Krishna’s analysis suggests that until India confronts the “vacuous diversity” of its secular nationalism, its diplomatic practice will continue to reproduce the very inequalities it claims to oppose.

The special issue represents more than academic critique—it offers tools for imagining more inclusive approaches to international engagement. As Krishna writes, “secularism was seen as part of a desired modernity and invariably articulated in English” while “caste was cast into the domain of the vernacular and the provincial.” Breaking down these artificial distinctions may be essential for creating genuinely representative diplomatic institutions.

For scholars and practitioners alike, this collection marks a watershed moment in understanding how domestic hierarchies shape international relations. The insights extend far beyond India, offering frameworks for examining how other societies’ internal divisions play out on the global stage. In an era when questions of representation and inclusion dominate political discourse worldwide, these analyses provide essential tools for understanding how power really operates across the domestic-international divide.

This story was aggregated by AI from the special issue of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy and edited by American Kahani’s News Desk.