Still Under Nehru's Shadow? The Absence of Foreign Policy Frameworks in India

Abstract

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Stephen Rosen, Sunil Khilnani, Marshall Bouton, Devesh Kapur, E. Sridharan and Harsh Pant for comments on the original talk on which this essay is based. Thanks are also due to two anonymous referees for India Review. I regret that I have not been able to respond to all their legitimate concerns; but the essay is hopefully improved because of their labors.

Notes

1. George Tanham, Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay (Santa Monica, California: Rand Corporation, 1992).

2. See most recently, Harsh Pant, ed., Indian Foreign Policy in a Unipolar World (New Delhi: Routledge, 2009); C. Raja Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India's Foreign Policy (London: Penguin, 2005).

3. Most recently see Radha Kumar, “India as A Foreign Policy Actor,” CEPS Working Paper, 2008.

4. Kanti Bajpai, “India” in Muhaiah Alagappa, ed., Asian Security Practice: Material and Ideational Influences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

5. C. Raja Mohan, “India and the Balance of Power,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006.

6. Bharat Karnard, Future Imperiled: India's Security in the 1990's and Beyond (Delhi: Penguin, 2004).

7. As a popular Hindi couplet of Nehru's time characterized his foreign policy: “Nahin ikrar ka alam, nahin inkar ka pehlu; mujhko tera andaz, Nehru ka bayan maloom hota hai.” On this view Nehru could say neither no; nor could he say yes. Perhaps an unfair assessment of Nehru, but many feel that way about Indian foreign policy.

8. The prime examples of ideologically driven foreign policies are of course, the Soviet Union, during the Cold war; the US (though exactly how far this is extendable backwards in time is debatable), and arguably Iran.

9. These quotations are most easily accessed through Bimla Prasad, The Origins of Indian Foreign Policy, (Delhi: Bookland, 1957), p. 70.

10. Prasad, The Origins, p. 70.

11. Jawaharlal Nehru, “A Foreign Policy for India,” AICC File No 8. Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi.

12. Sisir Gupta, India and The International System ( New Delhi Vikas Books, 1981), p. 47.

13. Aristotle, Politics trans. E. Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) 1308a: 24–30.

14. Tanham, Indian Strategic Thought.

15. John Stuart Mill, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention” in Gertrude Himmelfarb, ed., John Stuart Mill: Essays on Politics and Culture (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books), pp. 368–84.

16. Kanti Bajpai and Siddharth Mallavarapu, Theorising International Relations: The Region and the Nation (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006).

17. For an acute and comprehensive survey of “balance of power,” see Richard Little, The Balance of Power in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

18. For this quotation and a general discussion of theme, see Oliver O'Donovan, Just War Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 56.

19. Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (New York: Anchor, 1973), p. 280.

20. G.S. Bajpai, “India and the Balance of Power,” in The Indian Year Book of International Affairs (Madras: The University of Madras Press, 1952) pp. 1–6.

21. K. T. Varkey, V. K. Krishna Menon and India's Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Indian Publishers Distributors, 2002), p. 161.

22. Gupta, India and The International System.

23. Srinath Raghavan, “Civil Military Relations in India: The China Crisis and After,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Volume 32, No 1, February 2009, 149–75.

24. Tellis, Ashley,“India as a New Global Power: An Action Agenda for the US,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005.