From chanakya to modi evolution of india’s foreign policy

participation would tear the fragile nation apart, India’s leaders sought to
stay away from military alliances and adopted what they insisted was a non-
aligned path. Non-alignment was different from neutrality as it did not
imply a refusal to take positions in global conflicts. It was simply a refusal

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to join any bloc, giving India the option of seeking assistance from both the
US and the Soviet Union while being able to speak against either on
specific issues. India saw non-alignment as a way of keeping the cold war
out of South Asia and of protecting itself against the perils of being drawn
into clashes it sought to avoid. This would ensure a peaceful and stable
environment for building the country, especially its economic and military
capabilities.
Championing non-alignment helped India build ties with countries in
Asia and Africa emerging from colonial rule, before whom India projected
herself as a potential model and leader of former fellow colonies. Lacking
in economic and military capability, India adopted the high moral ground in
the hope of playing a greater role in world affairs and to punch above its
weight.
India benefited from non-alignment but things did not always pan out as
expected. While India remained non-aligned, Pakistan joined the Western
camp. The cold war was never far from India’s borders: communist China
(initially aligned with the Soviet Union) shared India’s frontier; Iran and
Pakistan joined the US-led Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and
provided listening posts to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); the
Soviets looked upon Afghanistan as a crucial neighbour even before
sending in their forces there in 1979. American and Soviet navies both
operated in the Indian Ocean, occasionally seeking the right to visit Indian
ports.
While India was able to obtain some military and economic aid from
both cold war blocs, it was never able to achieve the absolute autonomy in
decision making it sought. It had to turn to the US after the war with China
in 1962 and to the Soviet Union during the Bangladesh crisis of 1971.
Domestic, regional and international circumstances circumscribed India’s
options, a lesson in the limits of a poor, developing country being able to

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act as a global leader based on the size of its population or historical and
moral claims.
During two centuries of British rule, Indians had no control over
economic, foreign or military policies. Even during the two world wars,
when thousands of Indian soldiers fought as part of the British army around
the world, Indians served as cannon fodder rather than as decision makers.
That experience has led to an Indian reluctance to send its troops abroad
under multinational command. United Nations peacekeeping missions have
been an exception to this rule. Peacekeeping under the aegis of the United
Nations has a moral dimension and fulfils India’s desire to play a global
role in addition to demonstrating India’s credentials in helping less
fortunate countries. India refused to send troops for the wars in Korea
(1950–53) or Vietnam (1955–75) or for the Gulf War in 1991.
Many people were surprised when during the US-led war in Iraq in 2003,
the Indian parliament and cabinet actually debated an American request for
the participation of Indian troops. India did not join the war in the end but
that India debated such an issue was for many a first and showed the
changes in how Indians, and others, view India’s global role.
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India’s reluctance to send troops outside its borders does not, however,
extend to its immediate neighbourhood. India sent troops to Sri Lanka in
1987–90 to enforce a ceasefire between the government and Tamil rebel
guerillas, and to Maldives in 1988 against a coup attempt. India has also
fought four wars with Pakistan, including the 1971 war that resulted in the
creation of Bangladesh. In the Indian view, the immediate neighbourhood is
still part of the subcontinent and so is India’s arena for maintaining security.
In the economic realm, India has desired self-sufficiency and autarky
since Independence. Some of India’s founding leaders hoped to create self-
sufficient villages as envisaged in Gandhi’s slogan of ‘Ram Rajya’ (literally
‘Ram’s Rule’, meaning an ideal state). On the other hand, Nehru, a Fabian
socialist, believed that the commanding heights of the economy should

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remain in the hands of the state. Most leaders of the Indian National
Congress, which led India to independence and ruled at the Centre
uninterrupted until 1977, shared a mistrust of the intentions and desires of
the corporate sector.
India emerged with a mixed economy, with dominant public sector
enterprises eclipsing the private sector until economic reforms in 1991.
Economic reforms during the 1990s boosted India’s private sector but even
now public sector enterprises remain significant. India’s pursuit of autarky
has sometimes conflicted with its desire for efficiency in military capability.
India maintains a vast array of state and public sector enterprises in defence
manufacturing but is also one of the world’s top importers of defence
equipment.
If Gandhi is the father of modern Indian identity, Jawaharlal Nehru is
indisputably the man who shaped India’s foreign policy after Independence.
The ideals and ambitions of India’s first prime minister and foreign minister
are referred to as ‘Nehruvianism’ and have left an indelible mark on India’s
world view, shaped under Nehru’s stewardship from 1947 to 1964.
Nehru’s personality was the product of paradoxes. He was an aristocrat
by birth but his political views were those of a thorough democrat. He was
born an Indian but was an internationalist in outlook. He opened eyes in a
Hindu home but grew up to be a diehard secularist bordering on atheism.
Nehru’s views were framed both by his British education as well as by
the nationalist struggle. Unlike his contemporaries he had travelled the
world and so viewed the world and India’s role in it from an international
lens. As a lover of history he could see that while India was weak today,
one day it would be a powerful country. As an internationalist and an
idealist, he championed multilateralism and strong international institutions.

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As a realist, while he sought peace he understood the importance of
economic and military power.
Nehru was profoundly influenced by his mentor, Gandhi, and like him
sought to change India and the world. After Gandhi’s assassination within a
year of Independence, Nehru saw himself as the father of his people and
attempted to lay down the structure for modern India. He was fondly
referred to as Chacha (Uncle) Nehru, a description he liked and tried to live
up to by attempting to do many things and being many people at the same
time. He wanted India to be economically self-sufficient, to raise its people
from poverty and to emerge as a developed nation.
Nehru recognized India’s diversity both as an opportunity and a threat.
He feared fissiparous tendencies, primarily religious, and sought to keep
India territorially unified and independent. He was a secularist who
believed India would survive only if it embraced secularism and pluralism.
Nehru believed wholeheartedly that a diverse and complex nation like India
could best be kept together through voluntary union of ethnicities, religions,
and racial and linguistic groups. For him, democracy was the way forward
for India, and Nehru saw his role as that of educating both India’s elite and
masses on the merits of democracy.
Nehru also did not want India to become absorbed with itself to the point
of becoming isolated from the world. Among his concerns was the prospect
of a third world war resulting from contending military alliances, armed
with nuclear weapons. He hoped to prevent a future war by preaching to the
world’s powers to move away from warmongering. Granville Austin has
called Nehru ‘an impatient democrat’ and ‘national nanny’ and while both
titles suit Nehru, the title ‘international nanny’ would be equally apt.
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Nehru saw himself as a guide, a mentor not only to his own people but also
to the rest of the world.
Nehru saw himself as a guide for India’s new leadership and bureaucracy,
many of whom had less global exposure than him. During the seventeen

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years that he was prime minister, he wrote letters every fortnight to the
chief ministers of each of India’s states. In each letter, he described in detail
not only his key domestic policy decisions but also explained the context of
those decisions. The letters also provided details about every foreign visit
by the prime minister, visits by foreign dignitaries to India and included
details of what was discussed.
Through these letters, Nehru hoped to educate his chief ministers about
domestic as well as world affairs. Thus, his letters explained developments
like the merger between Egypt and Syria resulting in the creation of the
United Arab Republic or Indonesia’s domestic troubles of March 1958.
13
‘We in India cannot cut ourselves off from this world situation and have to
play our part in it whenever occasion demands it,’ 
14
 he wrote in another. In
his view, India had ‘built up some kind of a reputation the world over and
we are respected even by those who do not agree with us’.
15
For him, the fortnightly letters were part of his effort to build the new
state, offering and seeking advice with the second tier of Indian leaders. The
tradition began and ended with Nehru as his successors had neither the
interest nor the patience to act as teachers for other politicians. His interest
in the minutest of details is reflected in one of the letters he wrote to his
chief ministers in which he talks about the need to change the height of the
broom used to sweep floors to improve both its efficiency as well as to
ensure that the person using it did not face any health problems.
16
Critics read into Nehru’s letters, speeches and writings a reflection of his
personal loneliness and his desire to find company and solace in the people
of India who were under his care.
17
 But Nehru sought to lead India into the
world beyond the subcontinent through his books, letters and speeches. He
was perhaps more concerned about India’s historical tendency to insulate
itself from the world beyond than to ease personal loneliness by connecting
to Indians at the grass roots. His letters and speeches reflect his anguish at
international conflict, his fervent desire that others see the world and India

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as he did and to promote changes he knew would help the world. They
voice his helplessness when things did not turn out as he had hoped they
would, alongside his irritation and frustration, as well as his dream for the
future.
Nehru is the only Indian prime minister to date who discussed foreign
policy issues in speeches across the country. He explained, sometimes to an
audience of illiterate peasants, why India had signed a treaty or refused to
sign one or why non-alignment was the best course for India. India’s
literacy rate at the time was abysmally low, standing at around 12 per cent
in 1947.
18
 When asked why he discussed foreign policy in remote villages,
Nehru responded by arguing that the masses would understand complex
decisions only if they were explained to them.
Nehru sought to lead by personal example, sometimes even at the cost of
concentrating too much work in his office. As prime minister he often
replied personally to diplomatic cables from various Indian missions rather
than wait for his officials to do so. During his seventeen years in power,
Nehru made it a point to attend every session of parliament held while he
was in Delhi, to emphasize the importance of parliamentary responsibility.
He answered almost every question directed at the government, whether
related to foreign policy or economics. As one of Nehru’s foreign
secretaries noted, ‘The heaviest burden during the Parliament session was
his practice of briefing himself in the minutest detail on every question that
was to be answered, not only the questions relating to the Ministry of
External Affairs but on all the questions of all the ministries in the
government.’
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This centralization was not always appreciated by cabinet
ministers or civil servants, who saw it as a recipe for slowing down the
wheels of government.
Nonetheless, Nehru’s policies helped India achieve a certain stature on
the global stage. Nehru’s successors retained the policies and institutions he
crafted, making only cosmetic changes to the Nehruvian framework. Nehru

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forged broad consensus on various aspects of India’s foreign policy, and
succeeding governments seemed reluctant to carve new paths in external
engagement. The first major change in Indian foreign policy, away from
Nehruvianism, occurred only after the end of the cold war and the collapse
of the Soviet Union.
From the 1990s onward, India started building closer ties with Western
powers, especially the United States. Economics has now become a major
factor in Indian foreign policy though India’s ‘Look East’ policy also
invokes historical and cultural ties with East and South-East Asia. Still,
Indians do not want to appear to have abandoned non-alignment, which
remains part of India’s foreign policy rhetoric.
It is almost as if new beliefs are being explained as an extension of the
old religion. For example, in 2012, a group of leading Indian analysts
published a policy brief titled ‘Non-Alignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic
Policy for India in the 20th Century’, outlining the need for India to
maintain its strategic autonomy, remain an example to the world and build
its economy. The report insisted on describing India’s new post-cold-war
paradigm as a continuum of non-alignment during the cold war. No wonder
then that India’s emerging commonality of strategic interests with the
United States coincides with its leaders still religiously attending annual
sessions of the virtually defunct Non-Aligned Movement.
If major strands in India’s contemporary foreign policy are to be classified
along the lines of Walter Russell Mead’s classification of schools in US
foreign policy thinking, at least four trends can be readily identified:
Imperial, Messianic Idealism, Realism and Isolationism.
The ‘Imperial’ school of thought draws primarily from the most recent
pre-Independence experience of decision making known to India, the period
of the British Raj. For this outlook, India is the centre and Delhi knows

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best. India’s post-Independence policy towards its immediate South Asian
neighbours exemplifies this policy best. Delhi, whether under the British or
after, has always believed that India’s Central government is best suited to
make security decisions. Just like British officers during the Raj, the
advocates of an imperial foreign policy for independent India insist that its
South Asian neighbours should agree and accept that India’s security needs
are theirs as well. Even the idealist Nehru reflected a Curzonian mindset
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when it came to the subcontinent and India’s adjacent states. His daughter,
Indira Gandhi, proclaimed what came to be called the Indira doctrine,
similar to the American Monroe doctrine, reserving primacy for India in
making security decisions for its neighbourhood.
‘Messianic Idealism,’ reflecting the mantra of global peace, justice and
prosperity has served as the strong moral component of India’s foreign
policy, inspired by the moral legacy of ancient Indian thought reiterated
during the national struggle under Mahatma Gandhi. Proponents of this
perspective believe that India is an example for the world and that India has
the duty to proclaim that example for other nations. This element of Indian
exceptionalism often forms part of India’s view of itself and of the world.
Every Indian leader, whether Gandhi or Vivekananda, whether Nehru or
Modi, has demanded that the rest of the world accord India stature
commensurate with its civilizational contribution.
It is a function of India’s messianic idealism that Indians, whether the lay
public or their leaders, have always believed in India’s heritage as a great
civilization and have anticipated the future as a great power. It is almost as
if all India has to do is to wait for the world to accept its greatness. India
has often claimed the moral high ground in international relations and
believed that it has the right to preach to other nations about what policies
to adopt. During the cold war, India used multilateral venues, like the
annual United Nations gatherings and the NAM and G-77 groupings for
philosophical elocutions on right and wrong that others saw as sermonizing.

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At the same time, Indians have had no qualms in anchoring external
relations in ‘Realism’. From ancient times, realist and idealist philosophies
have coexisted in India and the post-Independence era is no exception.
Indians reflect a cultural ability to entertain seemingly contradictory
thoughts parallel to each other. Belief in moral principles did not turn Indian
leaders into pacifists. Notwithstanding messianic idealism, New Delhi has
always recognized the importance of hard power. Indian foreign policy has
woven into its thread the ideas of ancient Indian thinker Kautilya (also
known as Chanakya), who is sometimes referred to as India’s Machiavelli.
Kautilya argued that a state should be willing to use any of the following
four means to achieve its goals: