On loving and leaving foreign policy

After a  decade in foreign policy, I switched career tracks for a simple reason: it was just too hard to be a woman in this space. This may come across as “quitter talk”, but my life changed when I realised that there is a difference between a job being challenging, and being structurally attuned against you. 

For those of you unfamiliar with the think-tank space, this is where public intellectuals in the country are born and housed. India has over 600 think-tanks – the third highest in the world after the US and China. Think-tanks bring together the government, retired government officials including diplomats, and those who’ve served in the armed forces, academia, policy wonks, and more recently, companies that work in allied spaces. 

One of the problems with think-tank culture is that it reflects systemic issues within the foreign policy and national security ecosystem. These spaces are poorly paid, often elite and gate-kept by networks of people who went to university in and around Delhi NCR, abroad or have family contacts within the policy ecosystem. 

This environment left little space for authenticity, in the way you show up and the way you think. Because foreign affairs is on the Union List, think-tanks constitute a marketplace of ideas with a single customer: the Union Government.

If India continues to have a continental mindset with Delhi at the centre, it can only be attributed to elite capture of this space. Unlike other thinking spaces where there is a certain amount of plurality, you will find little to no conversation about gender, caste or any sort of intersectionality. Our borders are often spoken only in relation to Pakistan or China with lip service being paid to the lives of the people who live there. 

After a year surrounded by defense intellectuals at an American university, Carol Cohn wrote an essay about how easily immersive and dangerous the defense intellectualism was, stating:  “You can [also] impress your friends and colleagues with sickly humorous stories about the way things really happen on the inside. There is tremendous pleasure in it, especially for those of us who have been closed out, who have been told that it is really all beyond us and we should just leave it to the benevolently paternal men in charge. But as the pleasures deepen, so do the dangers. The activity of trying to out-reason defense intellectuals in their own games gets you thinking inside their rules, tacitly accepting all the unspoken assumptions of their paradigms. You become subject to the tyranny of concepts.” Cohn’s essay was situated at an American university, in 1987 but she might as well be talking about Indian think tanks in 2025. 

In a deeply hierarchical system that is run by retired servicemen, diplomats (of whom women represent one-third), and academics, the glass ceiling is quite transparent. Being a woman in foreign policy meant showing up frequently to hostile spaces. At my first job, when I pitched an idea about gender, I was gently counselled against it because for the rest of my career, I would be pigeonholed as a ‘woman writing about women’ rather than a ‘serious scholar.’ Unfortunately, the counsel was true. 

When I was younger, I looked at women in senior roles who were often labelled as “difficult to work with,” and wondered at the trend. Now, I can see that to show up genuinely and with kindness in such a masculine space is a feat. Till the 2020 COVID pandemic, and even after, all-male panels (dubbed “manels”) were the norm.

I had one senior colleague tell me that as a married man with a daughter, he does not “see” gender and would ensure that “pure merit” would dictate the organisation’s panel choices. In 2018, two scholars in the field crowdsourced a list of 377 scholars working on international relations and Indian foreign policy to dispute the notion that there weren’t enough women to call for conferences.

I have seen women break down in bathrooms, smile tersely on stage, nod through mansplaining and bite back retorts. Whisper networks buzzed with stories about creepy men who let their eyes graze a little too long, hold your hand a little too tightly and make tawdry jokes about marriage, or worse.  More than once, I have seen women dismissed for their ideas, which would then be claimed and reiterated by a pompous man in jargon – often to applause. 

As I write this, I realise I come across as making the foreign policy space sound like the worst career for women – it’s not. Being in the think-tank world was an intellectually rewarding career. I worked alongside some of the brightest people in the country on some of the knottiest problems facing the world. Only after I switched careers did I see the toll the think-tank space had taken on my confidence, my intellectual curiosity, and my authenticity. I’m grateful for all the skills, knowledge, experiences, and stories that the space has given me. 

But I will not be going back.

In 1948, CB Muthamma became the first woman to top the Indian civil services and the first woman to join the Indian Foreign Service. But by the late 1970s, she had to move the Supreme Court against systemic discrimination that denied her promotion to Grade I of the Foreign Service. When the government realised that she was serious, they hastily promoted her. The court, in fact, took notice of this in their judgement, remarking, “The petitioner has, after the institution of this proceeding, been promoted. Is it a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc? Where justice has been done, further probe is otiose. The Central Government states that although the petitioner was not found meritorious enough for promotion some months ago, she has been found to be good now, has been upgraded and appointed as Ambassador of India to the Hague, for what it is worth.”

On the bad days, I have often thought of CB Muthamma and what she endured to pave the way for the women who came after her. In her stories, and those of women who’ve shaped our nation’s history, are reminders of how far we’ve come. To younger women in hostile work spaces, I urge you to remember the women on whose shoulders we stand. Our ideas matter. Our voices matter. Taking up space matters. No one is going to give it to you. So seize it. 

(As told to Saranya Chakrapani.)