From chanakya to modi evolution of india’s foreign policy

party faced divisions in the absence of a towering figure or a scion of the
Nehru-Gandhi family and domestic politics was unstable as new regional
parties emerged as power brokers. Rao also had to contend with far-
reaching changes in the global order marked by the end of the cold war, the
coming down of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

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Added to all this were India’s economic troubles that reached a climax
around the time that Rao took charge. The disintegration of the Soviet
Union meant that India’s main supplier of military equipment – Soviet
Union – was in too much disarray to be able to help. The end of the cold
war marked the unipolar moment with the United States as the world’s sole
superpower. After decades of criticizing the West and invoking non-
alignment to seek benefits from two contending blocs, India now had to
find a way to rebuild ties with Western nations, especially the United States.
In some ways, Rao had an opportunity similar to Nehru’s, to define
India’s direction for years to come. He initiated policies that continued
under his successors, irrespective of their political affiliations. According to
Dixit, Rao provided ‘the required equilibrium’ that India’s foreign policy
needed in the post-cold- war era.
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Economic reforms constituted a key
component of Rao’s strategy. Realizing the importance of economic
reforms, Rao provided the political support for his finance minister,
Manmohan Singh, to implement a series of market-friendly restructurings
that helped India move away from its mixed socialistic economy towards a
liberal free market.
As early as 1947 Nehru had stated that talk of security was futile without
economic strength. However, his successors focused more on the non-
economic levers of hard power. With a massive population, India could
have attracted foreign direct investment with the promise of access to its
large domestic market. It could have become globally influential as the
destination and source of investment, as a trading nation and as an
innovator in various fields of technology. Instead, India chose to be the
voice of the world’s poor while seeking economic self-sufficiency and a
government-led economy. The reforms of 1991 finally forced Indian leaders
to understand that unless they changed their economic model and focused
on building India’s economic prowess, India faced being marginalized and
sidelined by global transformations.

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One of the major foreign policy initiatives of the Rao government was its
‘Look East’ policy, an acknowledgement of the economic success of Japan,
Korea and other East Asian countries. Rao professed that India needed to
look not just towards the developed countries of the West but also needed to
learn from its eastern neighbours while deepening economic and security
ties with them. Until then India’s relations with East Asia had been largely
political, based on Nehru’s vision of Asian brotherhood and shared history.
Even after East Asia’s economic boom in the 1980s, there had been no
real attempt to bolster those ties with a different emphasis. India had even
turned down an offer of membership in ASEAN at the time it was formed, a
mistake in view of the grouping’s later success. Rao understood that there
was little he could achieve with India’s immediate neighbours, especially
Pakistan, which had stepped up support for Islamist militants in Jammu and
Kashmir. Sri Lanka was in turmoil with its escalating civil war while Nepal
and Bangladesh faced internal crises. In such an environment, Rao decided
to build a legacy by expanding India’s ties with South-East Asia while
adjusting to the new American-led world order in which Russia had a
diminished presence compared to the one in past.
In addition to enhancing relations with bourgeoning economic powers of
East Asia, Rao’s government also boosted India’s ties with the Arab
countries of the Gulf that had been annoyed by the V.P. Singh government’s
attitude during the war over Kuwait. India’s existing cultural and economic
ties with the Gulf and the presence of a large Indian diaspora worked to
India’s advantage. Rao sought to secure energy supplies from the Gulf
region, given the increasing energy needs of India’s growing economy. He
also sought to ensure that the Arab Gulf countries would continue to be an
avenue for employment for India’s large working-age population. Rao’s big
idea in India’s external relations was to weave in economic needs into
foreign policy priorities.

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When Rao sought re-election in 1996, the Indian electorate rebuffed him
and the Congress party. The right-of-centre Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),
led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, emerged as a major force but did not secure a
majority in parliament and failed to find coalition partners. India went
through two elections and a succession of coalition governments in three
years, with Haradanahalli Doddegowda Devegowda (June 1996–April
1997) and Inder Kumar Gujral (April 1997–March 1998) serving as prime
ministers before Vajpayee could form a coalition government for thirteen
months (March 1998–October 1999). In late 1999 Vajpayee won a full five-
year term as prime minister at the head of the National Democratic Alliance
(NDA), an alliance of political parties led by the BJP. India’s foreign policy
drifted under the unstable coalitions before Vajpayee restored order to the
conduct of external relations.
Vajpayee had been external affairs minister in the 1977–79 Janata Party
government. His world view had been shaped by the Hindu revivalist
movement Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) of which he had been a
lifelong member. Vajpayee had been a parliamentarian for the Bharatiya
Jana Sangh before the party evolved into the BJP. He was considered a
moderate within the Hindu nationalist movement, having avoided
association with some of the most hard-line stances and actions of his own
allies, such as attacks on India’s religious minorities. The BJP’s foreign
policy accepted some strands of Nehruvianism, especially the belief that
India is a great civilization and that it has a role to play in the global arena
as well as belief in economic independence. It differed from Nehruvianism
in emphasizing pursuit of economic and military power, not just invoking
India’s moral or civilizational greatness.
Vajpayee came to power expressing a desire to rebuild ties with India’s
neighbours, improve ties with the United States, build on India’s Look East
policy and push for building India’s military and economic resources. His
critics point out, however, that Vajpayee left decisions to a small group of

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advisers and lacked support of his own party (and the wider Hindu
nationalist movement) on key policies. Former officials who worked with
Vajpayee, including some of his confidants, say that his principal secretary
and national security adviser, Brajesh Mishra, was virtually his main
adviser and executor of foreign policy.
The task of articulating the BJP’s foreign policy views to the world fell to
Jaswant Singh, who served as Vajpayee’s external affairs minister. In his
book