Legecy of indian foregion policy and freedom struggle in india
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India’s foreign policy: Nehru’s enduring legacy
Any discussion or study on India’s foreign policy must inevitably come to terms with the extraordinary legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru. Even more demanding is the challenge of disentangling Nehru’s contributions from the unending current political contestations as India’s first prime minister.
Nehru’s countless admirers and critics, however, seem to agree on one thing: that Nehru was an ‘idealist’ in the conduct of India’s international relations. Breaking this consensus probably holds the key to a better appreciation of Nehru’s contributions to India’s international engagement. Andrew B. Kennedy, in his contribution to the Oxford Handbook on Indian Foreign Policy , argues that realism and idealism were joined at the hip in Nehru’s worldview.
Jawaharlal Nehru in 1947. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons .
As the Congress Party’s most influential voice on foreign affairs in the run up to independence and its chief diplomat for the first 17 years of the republic, Nehru said and did things that do not fall neatly into one box. Nehru’s understanding of the world went through multiple phases and his eclectic mind struggled to reconcile competing ideas. No assessment of the policies of a statesman, who deals with so many real world challenges over an extended period, can be reduced into a single category of thought.
To be sure, idealism was a strong component of Nehru’s world view. That could be said of many leaders in the colonial world who came of age in the period between the two world wars. Nehru was critical of power politics and called for transcending them through collective security arrangements and strong international institutions. For Nehru, “One World” was an important national goal for India.
At the same time Nehru also embraced the idea of Indian primacy in the Subcontinent. He mused about an Indian “Monroe Doctrine” for Asia and the Indian Ocean. If his use of force to liberate Goa from Portuguese colonial rule drew much criticism from the West, his approach to the border dispute with China is seen in Beijing as the source of unending trouble in Sino-Indian relations.
We must see Nehru as a legatee of two very different streams of thought in the middle of 20 century. One was inherited from the extended Indian national movement, where the ‘idealist’ currents and ‘moralpolitik’ were rampant. The other was the diplomatic legacy of the British Raj, which was rooted in India’s geopolitical imperatives. While the Raj was not an independent actor on the world stage, it had considerable autonomy in devising India’s policies especially in dealing with the neighborhood in Asia and the Indian Ocean.
As the successor state to the Raj, Nehru incorporated many elements of its regional policy into that of India. Consider, for example, the first three bilateral treaties that Nehru signed—with Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal during 1949-50. All three reiterated the essence of the treaties that the Raj had signed with the three Himalayan kingdoms—that Calcutta (and Delhi) would protect them from external threats in return for a say on their foreign policy.
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Any discussion or study on India’s foreign policy must inevitably come to terms with the extraordinary legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru. Even more demanding is the challenge of disentangling Nehru’s contributions from the unending current political contestations as India’s first prime minister.
Nehru’s countless admirers and critics, however, seem to agree on one thing: that Nehru was an ‘idealist’ in the conduct of India’s international relations. Breaking this consensus probably holds the key to a better appreciation of Nehru’s contributions to India’s international engagement. Andrew B. Kennedy, in his contribution to the Oxford Handbook on Indian Foreign Policy , argues that realism and idealism were joined at the hip in Nehru’s worldview.
Jawaharlal Nehru in 1947. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons .
As the Congress Party’s most influential voice on foreign affairs in the run up to independence and its chief diplomat for the first 17 years of the republic, Nehru said and did things that do not fall neatly into one box. Nehru’s understanding of the world went through multiple phases and his eclectic mind struggled to reconcile competing ideas. No assessment of the policies of a statesman, who deals with so many real world challenges over an extended period, can be reduced into a single category of thought.
To be sure, idealism was a strong component of Nehru’s world view. That could be said of many leaders in the colonial world who came of age in the period between the two world wars. Nehru was critical of power politics and called for transcending them through collective security arrangements and strong international institutions. For Nehru, “One World” was an important national goal for India.
At the same time Nehru also embraced the idea of Indian primacy in the Subcontinent. He mused about an Indian “Monroe Doctrine” for Asia and the Indian Ocean. If his use of force to liberate Goa from Portuguese colonial rule drew much criticism from the West, his approach to the border dispute with China is seen in Beijing as the source of unending trouble in Sino-Indian relations.
We must see Nehru as a legatee of two very different streams of thought in the middle of 20 century. One was inherited from the extended Indian national movement, where the ‘idealist’ currents and ‘moralpolitik’ were rampant. The other was the diplomatic legacy of the British Raj, which was rooted in India’s geopolitical imperatives. While the Raj was not an independent actor on the world stage, it had considerable autonomy in devising India’s policies especially in dealing with the neighborhood in Asia and the Indian Ocean.
As the successor state to the Raj, Nehru incorporated many elements of its regional policy into that of India. Consider, for example, the first three bilateral treaties that Nehru signed—with Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal during 1949-50. All three reiterated the essence of the treaties that the Raj had signed with the three Himalayan kingdoms—that Calcutta (and Delhi) would protect them from external threats in return for a say on their foreign policy.
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