From chanakya to modi evolution of india’s foreign policy

Party during the 1950s and ’60s.
Like Patel within Congress, the Swatantra Party believed in the
importance of having superpower backing and sought to align with the
West, not the Soviet bloc. The Western democracies were viewed as having
more resources and the Americans would be more likely to support India
against China, which the Swatantra Party saw as the main threat to India.
They turned out to be correct when in India’s conflict with China in 1962 it
was not the non-aligned countries but the West that came to India’s aid.

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When critiqued for being willing to ‘surrender their sovereignty’ by joining
military alliances, Swatantra Party leaders responded by saying, ‘If
economic assistance and PL 480 funds do not indenture a nation, there is
less reason why military aid should.’
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Further, the Swatantra Party viewed communism – especially Chinese –
not Western colonialism or racialism as the major threat to global peace.
Thus, it did not support the idea of a third front of developing countries
standing up to the two cold war blocs. For the Swatantra Party non-
alignment neither helped India achieve its national interests nor helped
India make friends. According to C. Rajagopalachari, ‘never have we been
more abandoned by friends and menaced by foes thanks to our airy foreign
policy’ and hence ‘it is time to discard non-alignment, for it not only does
not insure our national security but in fact imperils our domestic economy’.
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In Rajagopalachari’s view, Western colonialism was ‘a “dead horse”
which Swatantra declines to beat, and Angola, Rhodesia, et al. are far from
its concerns; communist colonialism, especially that of China, is the clear
and present danger; racialism is of little concern; non-alignment is held to
be both militarily and economically suicidal; the notions of a third force and
of mediation in the “cold war” fall to the ground once alignment is
accepted; and this receives further impetus from the conviction that the
truth lies with the Western democracies’. 
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The Swatantra Party died a slow death by 1974 because of lacklustre
leadership and an inability to generate a mass following. Its electoral
performance was far from impressive. However, another conservative
movement, rooting itself in Hindu (as opposed to Nehru’s secular Indian)
nationalism, has managed to survive through various incarnations all the
way to the present-day Bharatiya Janata Party (literally Indian Peoples