Michael Brecher: Pioneering scholar of Indian foreign policy

As a young PhD student studying the Kashmir conflict at Yale University in the early 1950s, Michael Brecher had no idea that he would end up as a pioneering scholar of Indian foreign policy and its emerging position in the international system. Leaders of the Indian elite, including Jawaharlal Nehru, V K Krishna Menon, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Sheikh Abdullah, would confide in him, even though he wrote sympathetic yet somewhat critical essays about India’s policies on controversial topics like Kashmir and nonalignment.

Brecher, who retired as a distinguished professor at McGill University’s political science department last year after a nearly seven-decade-long stellar career, passed away at the age of 96 on January 16. He had made enormous scholarly contributions on topics such as Indian and Israeli foreign policies, Asia’s new states and, later, large-scale studies on crises in world politics. In his long career, he wrote more than 30 books, scores of articles, and book chapters.

From his early days as a scholar, Brecher developed a striking skill for interviewing top political leaders and bureaucrats. In his unpublished autobiography, he narrates how he was successful in conducting candid interviews with key figures associated with India’s independence and Partition. Louis Mountbatten, Clement Atlee, and other key figures spent several hours with him in the waning days of the Raj. Mountbatten’s introduction to Nehru opened a door to this young doctoral student and soon-to-be assistant professor from Canada. Born to Jewish parents, Brecher had seen discrimination in his early days in the academy and in Canadian society and developed a sympathy and understanding for India and its struggles. Nehru was so impressed by him that he took him along during his gruelling electoral campaigns and offered him several hours of his time for comprehensive questioning. Nehru: A Political Biography (1959) was the end-product. It portrays not only Nehru’s politics, but also his personality and the extraordinary rapport he had with the masses.

Brecher’s dissertation-turned book, The Struggle for Kashmir (1953), is one of the first scholarly analyses of the conflict and its intractability. A series of books on India followed, including Nehru’s Mantle: Political Succession in India (1966) and India and World Politics: Krishna Menon’s View of the World (1968). These opened up scholarship on India to the West and the larger world. His works received much acclaim for being rigorous yet accessible to a wide array of readers. India’s elite found in him a committed scholar who would bring much-needed international attention to the young republic’s foreign and domestic policies.

Brecher was instrumental in the creation of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute in 1966, which is still in operation, with joint headquarters in Calgary and New Delhi. It enables hundreds of Indians and Canadians to visit each country for scholarship and academic exchanges. This initiative occurred to him during a visit to India in 1965 and when he proposed it to the then Finance Minister T T Krishnamachari, it was immediately embraced. The Indian External Affairs Ministry and Canadian foreign ministries as well as former Prime Minister Lester Pearson were very much in support and the institute was announced during Prime Minister Shastri’s visit to McGill in June 1965 by Shastri himself. The institute was named after Shastri following his untimely death in 1966 and began operations in 1968. It is a rare success story of ongoing inter-state academic exchanges.

In the late 1960s, Brecher moved on to studying Israel’s foreign policy after developing strong bonds with leaders such as Ben Gurion. From 1975, Brecher and a University of Maryland colleague, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, initiated the International Crisis Behaviour project, studying various forms of crises and their progression toward war, using a large dataset and quantitative and qualitative analyses.

As his colleague for the past three decades, I have witnessed Brecher’s immense productivity and feel fortunate that his family shared excerpts from his unpublished autobiography. His passing away occurs after the death last year of another pioneering scholar of South Asia, Baldev Raj Nayar, whom Brecher brought to McGill. Nayar and Brecher were great role models for scholars of India and South Asia globally. Both exhibited thoroughness in scholarship and were willing to face challenges in field research and personal lives. Their ability to approach and gain the trust of leading political figures of the day was unparalleled. Notable was the academic freedom that the founders of the Indian republic cherished and allowed, a far cry from today’s controlled environment and lack of access.

The writer is James McGill Professor of International Relations at McGill University, Montreal, Canada