The following is an excerpt from section titled ‘India-China Cooperation and Conflict’ from the author’s book, Beyond Binaries: The World of India and China (2008-2022).
In June 2011, a school in the compound of the Indian embassy in Beijing was closed down. It had been functioning for nearly three decades in the Chinese capital, catering to children from Kindergarten to Class 4.
Beyond Binaries:The World Of India And China (2008-2022), Shastri Ramachandran, Genuine Publications, 2024.
The “Indian Embassy School”, as it had come to be known, may have been small and limited to the primary level, but it was an institution of value beyond its formal function. It had the potential, and deserved, to be developed as a senior secondary school.
Instead, our mandarins in New Delhi’s South Block decided to shut down the popular school and, to justify the decision, belittle its importance as well as the diplomatic and other purposes it served. With a view to justifying the closure of the school, it was made out as if the school had been unworthy of being run, and that did not redound to the credit of the Indian diplomatic establishment.
India’s Ambassador to China, S. Jaishankar (who is now the Minister for External Affairs) said that the school had outlived its purpose as a facility needed at a time, in the years after the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), when schools for expats were few. Beijing has scores of international schools, but their fees were $1800 or more per month at the time, whereas the embassy school charged about $200, making it affordable for not only Indians but also other expats.
While the reason given by Jaishankar was unconvincing, in all probability, the decision to close the school might not have been his but that of a higher authority in the Ministry of External Affairs; and the decision taken, perhaps, for reasons which the GOI did not want to make public. The school could not have been closed without the nod of Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, who was Jaishankar’s predecessor in Beijing.
There was a clear case of the need for more transparency. More important though was that with the closing of this school, there was no Indian school in China. The school helped GOI save a tidy sum, as it did not have to pay the exorbitant fees of international schools for embassy employees’ children at least until Class 4.
Diplomats were not bothered because GOI picks up the tab, but this was a huge amount and few Indian expats could pay this out of their earnings. Given the growing number of Indian ventures and Indians in China, and their need for an affordable option between the high-end international schools and local Chinese schools – the opening of Indian schools would have helped expats, enabled huge savings of government funds and created a new Indian institutional space. There are Indian educational enterprises running global schools in many countries.
Beyond the opaque politics that led to the closure of the only Indian school in Beijing and the business opportunity the vacuum presented, there were personnel and diplomatic dimensions to the issue.
When news of the closure became public, it was put out that most of the teachers in the school were ‘wives’ of Indian diplomats, implying that they were not competent or qualified for anything other than ‘wifery’. This was patently unfair to the female teachers, especially when the foreign secretary is a woman. Not appointing regular teachers was a lapse on the part of the MEA and not something for which the wives who took on the teaching should have been blamed to justify the school’s closure.
The Indian school was favoured by diplomatic staff and expats from several countries for their children’s primary English-medium education. The loss of this diplomatic spin-off was underscored by the fact that the only comparable English medium educational option then available for the affected expat community in Beijing was the school run by the Pakistani Embassy.
As business between the two countries boomed, it was surprising that at a time when India needed to increase its visibility and presence in more and diverse ways in China, the Government of India appeared to be doing precisely the opposite. Better a school for scandal than the scandal of having no school at all.
Shastri Ramachandran is a senior journalist and commentator.
