Theorizing Indian Foreign Policy

Mischa Hansel, Raphaëlle Khan, Mélissa Levaillant, Mischa Hansel, Raphaëlle Khan, Mélissa Levaillant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317010890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Examined from a non-Western lens, the standard International Relations (IR) and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) approaches are ill-adapted because of some Eurocentric and conceptual biases. These biases partly stem from: first, the dearth of analyses focusing on non-Western cases; second, the primacy of Western-born concepts and method in the two disciplines. That is what this book seeks to redress. Theorizing Indian Foreign Policy draws together the study of contemporary Indian foreign policy and the methods and theories used by FPA and IR, while simultaneously contributing to a growing reflection on how to theorise a non-Western case. Its chapters offer a refreshing perspective by combining different sets of theories, empirical analyses, historical perspectives and insights from area studies. Empirically, chapters deal with different issues as well as varied bilateral relations and institutional settings. Conceptually, however, they ask similar questions about what is unique about Indian foreign policy and how to study it. The chapters also compel us to reconsider the meaning and boundary conditions of concepts (e.g. coalition government, strategic culture and sovereignty) in a non-Western context. This book will appeal to both specialists and students of Indian foreign policy and International Relations Theory.

Part I

Disciplinary and Methodological Challenges

1	Historiography of South Asia’s International Relations Pallavi Raghavan

‘The further backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see …

’(Winston Churchill, House of Commons, March 1944)

‘We look into history from motives of two kinds: There is the curiosity about the past, what happened, who did what, and why; and there is the hope to understand the present, how to place and interpret our own times, experiences, and hopes for the future’.

(Jasper Griffin, New York Review of Books, 18 December 2013)

Introduction

Historians make a compelling case for the ownership of the study of India’s international relations. They point out that their works do not simply catalogue the circumstances of South Asia’s present security dilemmas, but rather highlight how contemporary dilemmas have frequently been rehearsed in the past, and show how their causes are inextricably linked with historical factors. They underline how solutions to the subcontinent’s security dilemmas are best understood with a rigorous grasp on the past. Therefore, this essay will engage with the following question: How does the discipline of history add to a more complex understanding of international relations and how does a historicised approach lead to differentiated conclusions about the international status of a nation state? Partly to illustrate these concerns, and partly due to a recent proliferation of writings in this area, this essay will focus on the historiography of Nehruvian foreign policy and then attempt to understand what this tells us about the nature of analysis of India’s international relations.

An overarching theme in many works relating to India’s foreign policy is the search for a unifying logic in its decision-making process, a systematised explanation which can shed light on the motivations that govern its international positioning. Sunil Khilnani, for instance, rightly asks that any rigorous analysis of India’s foreign policy should answer the critical question: ‘What is the story of India’s foreign policy the story of ’ (Khilnani 2015: 682). Yet, what several studies of Nehru’s foreign policy also make clear (Guruswamy and Singh 2009; Raghavan 2010; Abraham 2014), is that a pre-determined strategy, which governed all of India’s foreign policy decisions, was more absent than present. Several works on India’s initial relations with Pakistan, or China, for instance, demonstrate the demands of its foreign relations were never necessarily self-evident, on the basis of having a clearly defined set of principles about the interests of the nation state: the precise contours, responsibilities and its components of the nation state itself was far from self-evident. Given this unclear setting, the search for a unifying theme, an all-encompassing ‘Grand Strategy’ becomes an even more difficult task.

Kanti Bajpai, for instance, has pointed out that, over the 70-odd years since independence, India’s international relations displays the hallmarks of not just one all-encompassing ‘grand strategy’, but three (Bajpai 2002). In particular, Bajpai argues three dominant strands on strategic thinking in India are Nehruvian, neo-liberal and hyper-real. The Nehruvian approach would be to convince India’s neighbours of the benefits in allying more closely with its own interests. What all three schools of grand strategy would agree upon, however, is the ultimate objective of India’s foreign policy: India’s, as well as South Asia’s, prosperity, stability and international political prowess lies in a stabilised neighbourhood. They differ on the prescriptions of how threats to India’s security are to be addressed, as well as in their diagnosis of how these threats arose (Bajpai 2002).

The means to achieve these aims, however, are, by all accounts, complicated, as well as contentious. Eswaran Sridharan (2001), for instance, points out that if the assumption of a similar set of values and similarity of interests are to be the governing principle behind alliance making, then South Asia is conspicuous in its failure to adhere to the pattern. The principles governing decision making about alliances in South Asia do not necessarily adhere to the reasoning behind the traditional Cold War alliances such as NATO. Sridharan argues that this is to do with the failure of these principles to take into account internal threats, ethnic, perhaps ideological, and even more problematically, when there may be a realistic threat of internal dangers allied to external actors.

[A] democracy which inherits territorial and ideological conflicts as initial conditions, as in South Asia after Independence and Partition in 1947, may not be conducive to the compromises necessary for peace-building as it gives free play to competitive patriotism and hard line parties.

The role of interests as opposed to merely threat ought to be given a greater prominence in South Asia (Sridharan 2011: 26).

Furthermore, many who study this question are also implicitly making a critique about the state of contemporary international relations theory, which, they point out, is insufficiently cognisant of South Asia’s approaches to inter-state relations. Analysis drawn from precedents established by the Westphalian method, they point out, are not wholly suited to the patterns of inter-state relations in South Asia. (Sridharan 2001; Bajpai 2002) These frameworks do not adequately consider the potency of the historical circumstances that accompanied the making of foreign policy decisions, or the specific dilemmas that recently post-colonial, anti-imperialist and ‘new’ entrants into the international system faced. The study of India’s international relations, therefore, necessitates ‘entirely rewriting the histories and geographies of states and people in international space’ (Abraham 2015). What many scholars engaged in this field are also calling for, therefore, is an alternative, but equally consistent set of overarching principles that can explain inter-state relations.

Yet, this also brings us back to exactly which interests are to be prioritised in the decision-making process in Indian foreign policy. An adequate contextualising of the circumstances around India’s independence, the compulsions these gave rise to with regard to actually defining what the nation state was to constitute, as well as the methods that were adopted to give shape to the policies devised out of such requirements, is therefore essential for understanding the evolution of Indian foreign policy. Itty Abraham argues that given India’s heterogeneous and diverse population, the necessity of the nation state needing to be unified around the ownership of its territory redoubled. This, he points out, gives the fact of uncertainties of the boundaries inherited between India and her neighbours, especially threatening implications. While boundary disputes between neighbours are certainly not an uncommon occurrence, for India, they represented the questioning of the heart of the nation-making process. This would necessitate the search for an alternative set of criterion than those that governed inter-state relations in post-war Europe which plausibly explain India’s international pursuits and the creation of a differentiated set of principles (Abraham 2014: 1–21).

Nehru, the leader of the Congress Party during the Second World War, as well as Prime Minister of India during the interim government, would have clearly grasped that opinion about India’s foreign policy was pulling in different directions. Yet, many of his decisions on foreign policy do present the following question: Were they dictated by an internally consistent and coherent set of beliefs or were they simply devised as a stop-gap solution to a knotty problem? Put differently, was foreign policy conducted on a plane that was separate to the petty calculations of different factions in his government or was it a result of these manoeuvres? Most historians concur that the factors that influence the making of foreign policy do not operate in a vacuum, and, more often than not, are, in fact, at the beating heart of the domestic politics of the nation state, deeply mired in its inherited prejudices, its own account of its history and the political contingencies accompanying the benefits of a particular decision at a certain time. This essay will attempt to illustrate these points.

Nehru’s foreign policy: Old or new?

Although Nehru undoubtedly left a strong impression on the shaping of foreign policy in modern India, historians of this project are also grappling with a deeper question: how much was Nehruvian foreign policy driven by Nehru or by the logic of a colonial inheritance, attempts to overthrow it and hemmed in by a sense of continuity of the forces already set in place in the decades that preceded the first prime minister. Put simply, was Nehru’s foreign policy just to do with Nehru or were there other ingredients that it encapsulated which might offer a more lasting explanation about India’s international behaviour? Was it based simply on instinct or can it be slotted into a verifiable theory about the state’s behaviours? Did the sum of India’s interactions of the world under Nehru represent the narrative of a newly post- colonial state seeking to throw off the priorities of the empire of the Raj? Was it one of a leader attempting to put in place structures that promoted world peace and a sense of egalitarianism? Or, as others have argued, did it represent the blundering, and mostly naïve, attempts at finding an international identity at all? All agree, however, that the trends exhibited in Nehru’s era are representative: the dilemmas they represented were not confined to that period; they recurred throughout the modern history of the subcontinent.

Several historians of Nehru’s foreign policy have argued that the continuities before and after the transfer of power must be properly factored into any discussion of the new prime minister’s decision making on this issue (Mohan 2013; Thakur 2014; Brobst 2005; Ray 2007). This is a particularly engaging field of study, as its fruits tell us as much about the ideology and temperament of the Nehruvian state, and about the foundations of the strategic assumptions of India’s international relations. In part, they are made possible by an increase in the available archival material around this period,¹ but also out of a recognition that many aspects of India’s foreign relations have striking parallels with the questions grappled with in the past. Patterns for India’s relations with the rest of the world emerged, not just after the transfer of power, or with the arrival of a particular leadership in modern India, but rather in the century that preceded these events. Through these studies, we get a better appreciation of the contours of the government of India’s present day foreign policy dilemmas, as well as clearer understanding of the different options which can be used to confront them.

That the shaping of Nehru’s foreign policy must be firmly contextualised against the legacies of two world wars (in which the government of India played a critical, and only recently appreciated part), the calculations of the British Raj on how best to defend the Indian subcontinent and the rapid reconfiguration of power in the international system in the aftermath of the Second World War is axiomatic. In this essay, however, I will also attempt to highlight how trends set in motion during this period are still in play today, and must be adequately accounted for in any analysis of India’s contemporary foreign policy. Furthermore, I will show how the attempt to bridge the divide between the analysis of ‘domestic’ political concerns and the making of decisions with regard to foreign policy is increasingly being carried out in a great deal of the literature on the Nehruvian period. I will argue that these arguments present the beginnings of the attempt to find a distinctive reasoning behind the making of India’s foreign policy, and that their implications require a radical rethinking of many presentist assumptions in the writing of India’s international relations and foreign policy. The circularity of these trends, moreover, are in evidence most particularly when considering India’s relations with countries in its immediate neighbourhood: China and Pakistan; its dealings with the two power blocs during the Cold War, as well as with the unequal hierarchies of the international system eventually manifested in the United Nations.

The frontier policy formed a critical set of precedents in the shaping of both India’s and Pakistan’s foreign policy, which, in the decades that followed the transfer of power, exhibited several strong patterns of continuity in the thinking on the conduct of its external relations. But, the more this is studied, the more it becomes evident that there was not, in fact, an ‘Indian’ foreign policy, that was fashioned at the turn of the midnight hour. Patterns of continuity from the external relations of the subcontinent in the centuries prior to the transfer of power hold the key to understanding much of the foreign policy of South Asia. Both India and Pakistan adopted the assumptions of the Great Game in Afghanistan as continuation of a Frontier Policy which had been defined, honed and adapted over many decades across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, the mindset of the Great Game, honed and developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is a palpable presence in the foreign policy establishments of both India and Pakistan (Guruswamy and Singh 2009; Mehra 2007).

Very broadly, the pursuit of the Great Game demanded a mutual understanding between the Russian, Chinese and Indian empires that a ‘buffer zone’ territory lay between their formal empires that no empire could penetrate. The subcontinent’s best defence was thought to lie in a looser style of administration on territories along its perimeter, which would deliberately lay out of the formal control of either rival imperial power. Thus, areas lying along the edges of the Indian subcontinent – stretching from Tibet to the North West Frontier Province were conceptualised primarily in terms of being bleak, inhospitable and inaccessible climes that would not be penetrated by a rival empire. The rules of the delicate balancing game, moreover, were largely adhered to by all concerned parties in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the strategic defence of the subcontinent was carried out with these assumptions in place.

One side of the debate, in the nineteenth century, was embodied in the arguments of Lord Curzon, who was one of the foremost proponents of the making of a strong frontier policy. In a lecture series to the Oxford Romanus Society in 1907, Curzon described this as ‘the razors edge on which hand the modern issues of war and peace, of life or death, of nations’. Curzon, along with many other officials in Whitehall, as well as in the government of India, argued that the best approach to the frontier w...