Revival of India’s North Korean mission reflects strategic shift
INDIA has decided to resume normal functioning of its embassy in Pyongyang, North Korea. The embassy was closed on July 2, 2021, when Ambassador Atul Malhari Gotsurve and the entire Indian staff at the mission packed up and left for New Delhi via Russia.
Like most things related to North Korea, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) never formally announced that it had shut its embassy there. However, without any Indian staff, let alone diplomats, no work was being done in the world’s most reclusive consular outpost. The MEA never named a replacement for Gotsurve in Pyongyang and he was sent, 14 months ago, as Ambassador to Mongolia.
A technical team and quasi-diplomatic personnel have reached Pyongyang and they are in the process of making the mission functional after a protracted period of disuse for almost three-and-a-half years, inter-agency sources in the government told me in New Delhi. Their first job is to extensively debug the building and clear it of security and spying hazards. North Korea is notorious for its dodgy intelligence methods against foreigners and bad faith in dealings with legations it has agreed to host. It may be months before an ambassador heads the mission, given Pyongyang’s notorious and opaque bureaucracy and delays in making even minor decisions on foreign policy, such as agreeing to receive a new envoy.
Meanwhile, South Korea has embarked on a journey of engaging India along a road which has not been traversed by any country since the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s. This year, in a bold departure from common practice worldwide, South Korea celebrated its National Day in the sprawling Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in New Delhi. Its embassy in India invited a few thousand Indians, mostly young people, to join in the mass celebration. Last year, it began its experiment of taking the message of the most important day on the South Korean diplomatic calendar to the multitudes of Delhi. The mission walked away from routine cocktail receptions in chandeliered halls, like most embassies in India do on their national days. Instead, thousands of young Delhiites swayed in the open to K-pop (Korean pop music) and other instruments of modern youth culture in Seoul, Busan, Incheon and other big cities.
Reaching out to the Indian masses was first tried in a bilateral engagement by Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin in 1955 in Kolkata (then Calcutta). A smaller version of that Soviet outreach was tried in Ahmedabad in 2020 when the Indian diplomacy tried to sweep then US President Donald Trump off his feet with crowds he could never muster in his own country. The attempt was a non-starter because Trump was defeated in his bid for re-election later that year. But similar efforts by India and the Soviet Union yielded rich dividends. Indo-Soviet relations were consolidated with popular endorsement.
South Korea is trying to replicate the Indo-Soviet successes, which flourished for several decades. Seoul has realised that the folkloric tale of Ayodhya’s Princess Suriratna travelling to Korea to marry King Kim Suro in 48 AD has captured the imagination of the Indian people. It now wants to cement India-South Korea relations through the people-to-people route. South Korea is looking at relations with India in the very long term. Like Singapore, with its policy of developing a second arm of its economy through emerging markets like India, a strategy the island nation has implemented since 1991. Seoul is ready to try unconventional methods to achieve this objective and hopes that the results will match its efforts.
After rapid strides in the last two decades, economic relations between India and South Korea have hit a plateau. This is partly because the South Korean economy has slowed down. Repeated political turmoil — the most serious was a failed attempt by President Yoon Suk Yeol to impose martial law and his subsequent impeachment — has impacted the country’s macro-economic activities, which depend heavily on government support.
India has been cold to calls for South Korea to be invited into Quad, the four-nation, amorphous group of Australia, India, Japan and the US. Where high-level visits took place frequently and with much fanfare, they are now irregular. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not visited Seoul since early 2019. The last visit to New Delhi by South Korea’s President was a year before Modi’s trip. Foreign ministers from both countries have met more often, but the frequency of their exchanges has lacked the regularity and dynamism of, say, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s engagement with his counterpart from the UAE or Singapore.
India decided, in principle, to reopen its valuable Pyongyang listening outpost in February. South Block, seat of the MEA, has been in touch with Germany and the UK, which had already sent teams to North Korea around that time to consider the resumption of their diplomatic activity, which had been interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, Indian diplomats have compared notes with their compeers in Sweden and Poland, which were the first to reopen their embassies in Pyongyang.
New Delhi’s initiative gained urgency in November after Trump won the US presidential election. In his first presidential term, Trump had said about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that “we fell in love”. They met three times, which was without precedent. It is likely that Trump would revive his summit diplomacy with Kim when he returns to the White House. Even if those summits do not yield concrete results, Trump relishes the worldwide media attention it gives him. It was partly diversionary when he was President. It deflected criticism from real problems in the US.
Developments in the Korean peninsula are of greater strategic importance to India today than they were four years ago. North Korea is a more emboldened military factor in East Asia now than it ever has been. New Delhi would want to ensure that Pyongyang’s new and bigger arsenal of hypersonic and short-range weapons does not have any place in Pakistan’s offensive military thinking.
India also wants to calibrate North Korea’s stepped-up ties with Russia against its own overall security paradigm. A listening post in Pyongyang with a competent ambassador would be a significant strategic asset for South Block.
