Indian Foreign Policy

The Politics of Postcolonial Identity from 1947 to 2004

Priya Chacko

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136511363
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The rise of India as a major power has generated new interest in understanding the drivers of its foreign policy. This book argues that analysing India's foreign and security policies as representational practices which produce India's identity as a postcolonial nation-state helps to illuminate the conditions of possibility in which foreign policy is made.

Spanning the period between 1947 and 2004, the book focuses on key moments of crisis, such as the India-China war in 1962 and the nuclear tests of 1972 and 1998, and the approach to international affairs of significant leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru. The analysis sheds new light on these key events and figures and develops a strong analytical narrative around India's foreign policy behaviour, based on an understanding of its postcolonial identity.

It is argued that a prominent facet of India's identity is a perception that it is a civilizational-state which brings to international affairs a tradition of morality and ethical conduct derived from its civilizational heritage and the experience of its anti-colonial struggle. This notion of 'civilizational exceptionalism', as well as other narratives of India's civilizational past, such as its vulnerability to invasion and conquest, have shaped the foreign policies of governments of various political hues and continue to influence a rising India.

1 Introduction

‘Emerging’, ‘rising’, ‘surging’, ‘blossoming’ – these are just a few of the epithets that have become commonplace in discussions about contemporary India (Cohen 2001, 2006c, Di Lodovico et al. 2001, Walker 2006). In particular, there has been a preoccupation with the question of whether it will be – to borrow the title of the 2006 Hindustan Times Leadership Summit, an annual gathering of India's political and business elite – ‘The Next Global Superpower?’. At this conference, Sonia Gandhi, the President of the Congress Party, which led India to its independence from Britain in 1947 and has been a prominent force in Indian politics ever since, said that she approved of the question mark affixed to the title because she was ‘somewhat uneasy with the very word “Superpower” ’:

For too many of us, it evokes images of hegemony, of aggression, of power politics, of military might, of division and conflict. But that is not what India has been all about through the centuries and it certainly is not what I would like to see India become. During long periods of our past, India exercised a profound influence on the course of world history, and it did so without exercising any kind of overt power. Consider, for instance, how Gandhiji, mocked as ‘a half-naked fakir’ by the British, took on the Superpower of the day through the mere force of his values and ideas. We Indians have always known our place in the world even when the world was treating us lightly . . . Why should we think of ourselves as a ‘Global Superpower’? Why not instead work towards becoming a global force for Peace, Progress and Prosperity?

(Gandhi 2006)

This account of India's exceptionalism – its ability to exercise influence without coercive power – is a narrative that has underpinned India's foreign policy discourse for the last six decades. Many recent discussions of Indian foreign policy, however, either ignore or dismiss this normative element of Indian foreign policy discourse. Indeed, a common assertion in recent studies of Indian foreign policy is that the shift in India's economic and political power is being accompanied by a shift from a foreign policy driven in part by ‘idealism’ to a foreign policy more narrowly anchored in ‘realism’. Few of these studies, however, provide a considered theorization of Indian foreign policy, which would entail an examination of what ‘idealism’ and ‘realism’ mean in an Indian context or assess the relevance of these models of foreign policy analysis. Raja Mohan (2003: xix), for instance, argues that until the 1990s India viewed international and regional security issues through ‘the prism of the Third World and anti-imperialism’. The end of the Cold War, however, forced it to ‘not remain just a protesting leader of the Third World trade union’ but to take an interest in managing the international system (Mohan 2003: xx–xxi). Underlying Mohan's analysis is the assumption that self-interested power politics is the natural and normal mode of behaviour for states. He writes of India's nuclear tests in 1998:

For good or bad, and whether the world liked it or not, India decided to cross the nuclear Rubicon. Fifty years after Independence, India now wanted to become a normal nation – placing considerations of Realpolitik and national security above its recently dominant focus on liberal internationalism, morality and normative approaches to international politics.

(Mohan 2003: 7)

Likewise, for Sumit Ganguly (2003/2004: 47), in the post-Cold War era, Indian foreign policy is ‘growing up’, shedding ‘its ideological burden’ of nonalignment and Third Worldism, and adopting ‘more pragmatic policies at home and abroad’ while for Ashok Kapur (2006: 5), since 1998, ‘Indian statecraft was pursued on the basis of practical geopolitical considerations rather than the idealism of Nehru's peace policy’. Similarly, Jacques Hymans (2009) argues that while Nehruvian India sought to use ‘soft idealism’ to change the dynamics of international politics, this vision has been decisively abandoned. Yet even a cursory glance at speeches and statements by Indian leaders indicates that the vocabulary and practice of Indian foreign policy has not been dramatically altered. As Harsh Pant (2009) has noted, Indian leaders still express doubts about dominant conceptions of power, they still discuss the merits of the concept of non-alignment and promote the value of nuclear disarmament (see Gandhi 2006; Nath 2008). Moreover, as Amrita Narlikar (2006) points out, India continues to participate in anti-hegemonic coalitions in international organizations such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Pant's (2009: 254) primary purpose is not to explain these continuities but to condemn them as ‘irresponsible and dangerous’ for, according to him, India is not behaving as rising powers should, by seeking ‘to enhance their security by increasing their capabilities and their control over the external environment’. Narlikar's explanation for India's behaviour, on the other hand, is suggestive of another common approach to explaining India's foreign policy, which is to argue that it contains a combination of both ‘idealism’ and ‘realism’. She suggests that a domestic political culture influenced by its colonial experience, and its mistrust of international regimes and great powers are the primary cause of its continued defensiveness (Narlikar 2006: 73). Stephen Cohen (2001: 308) likewise argues that India's foreign policy tradition combines elements of both idealism and realism and suggests that the gap between the two trends must be bridged in order to make Indian foreign policy more credible and predictable. Similarly, Kanti Bajpai (1998) claims that India's decision-makers adhere to a policy of ‘modified structuralism’ which, following Steven Krasner, he defines as the desire to maximize interests and power in a world of similarly-minded states, but also to transcend individual calculations of interest under certain conditions. India's modified structuralism, argues Bajpai (1998: 195), is driven by expediency and conviction – the former because of India's material weakness and the latter due to the ‘Gandhian norms and principles of nonviolence’ imbued during the nationalist struggle (See also Nayar and Paul 2004).

While these accounts go further in explaining the continuities in Indian foreign policy and its consistent use of language that defies the vocabulary of power politics, they theorize Indian thinking on international relations at a highly general level which, beyond a certain point, fails to be analytically illuminating. Bajpai for instance, does not detail what an ‘idealism’ shaped by ‘Gandhian norms’ entails at an epistemological or ontological level and nor does he offer an explanation as to why it has proven so resilient. Cohen (2001: 40) finds the source of India's ‘idealism’ in the political thought of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, who he labels a liberal internationalist without examining whether Nehru's thought can, in fact, be captured by this term. The circumstances, under which the ‘realist’ or ‘idealist’ strands of thinking come into play, moreover, are not made clear in these accounts.

This book seeks to move past an idealist/realist framework for understanding Indian foreign policy by reconceptualizing foreign policy as postcoloniality, which I define as a self-reflexive ethico-political project of identity construction that emerged in reaction to the colonial encounter. Specifically, I argue that in the post-independence period, under the government of Jawaharlal Nehru, foreign policy was established as a key site for the construction of an Indian postcolonial identity which is deeply ambivalent toward modernity because it at once embraces modernity, as the cure for the condition of backwardness that led to colonial subjugation, and repudiates modernity for its creation of an exploitative and violent colonial relationship in the first place. This ambivalence, however, gave rise to an ethico-political project based on the notion of India's ‘civilizational exceptionalism’ – the idea that India is equipped with unique moral qualities that will allow for the creation of an ethical modernity. While not all successive governments have subscribed to this ethico-political project in its entirety, I suggest that they have all grappled with aspects of it. Taking as points of departure key foreign policy events, issues and policies such as nuclear disarmament, non-alignment, intervention and conflicts with China and Pakistan during the period between 1947 and 2004, I trace the way in which narratives of India's civilizational past, inform the representations produced in India's foreign policy discourse and how they, in turn, enact a postcolonial identity for India.

Understanding India's postcolonial identity

‘Indian civilization’ and the colonial encounter

As the discussion above indicates, a number of scholars have touched on the role of India's colonial past in Indian foreign policy. However, most do not attempt to rigorously theorize it.¹ Some scholars (Banerjee 1994; Cohen 2001) have also noted the influence of the idea of an Indian civilization on India's foreign policy but, again, do not do so in a rigorous manner. Stephen Cohen (2001) for instance, argues that Indian nationalists came to define India as morally and spiritually superior which ‘constructed (often in collaboration with Western scholars) a distinctive view of India's past that helped shape their vision of India's future’ (Cohen 2001: 26). Thus ‘Indian officials believe they are representing not just a state but a civilization’ and ‘contemporary Indian leaders also see India as playing a global, albeit benign, role’ that is keeping with its intrinsic civilizational qualities (Cohen 2001: 52). While at some points Cohen (2001: 26) seems to suggest that the idea of an Indian civilization is socially constructed, in other places he appears to imply the prior existence of civilizational traditions which were simply revived during the nationalist struggle (Cohen 2001: 51).

Following Cohen, I argue in this book that a notion of India as a civilization constitutes a key aspect of India's postcolonial identity. Departing from Cohen, however, I explicitly treat this idea as a social construction. In particular, I analyse ‘Indian civilization’ as what Jean Francois Lyotard (1989: xxiii) calls a metanarrative or metadiscourse. Michel Foucault (1984b, 1984a) understood discourses as knowledge-power formations constituted by a system of rules that allow a bounded space in which some statements are made more meaningful than others. The system of rules that Foucault refers to is not a formalized, rigid structure but is a set of constraints, norms or conditions and these rules are enacted by discursive practices. A metanarrative or metadiscourse is a ‘grand narrative’ which gives rise to smaller narratives and provides them with cultural meaning, purpose and legitimacy. The metadiscourse of Indian civilization emerged as an outcome of the need to negotiate intercultural difference during the colonial encounter. This process of negotiation took place within a framework of Eurocentrism which was a key feature of the emergence of European modernity.² Central to this framework was the hierarchization of societies, according to which peoples were placed on a scale of development, beginning with ‘savages’ in a ‘state of nature’, proceeding to the ‘barbarian’ stage and then the ‘civilized’ stage, which was the pinnacle of social, political and economic development represented by Europe. The metadiscourse of Indian civilization was built into the edifice of this hierarchy of cultures, which became the basis of a theory of unequal political relations between societies.³

Most colonial writings granted India the right to call itself a civilization – that is, Indian society was thought to have experienced significant development since its emergence from the state of nature. However, it was a degraded and stagnant civilization that was far from the lofty heights of Western civilization. For ‘Orientalist’⁴ scholars such as Henry Colebrooke and William Jones, who established the first Indological institution, the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, under the patronage of Warren Hastings, the English East India Company's first appointee to the position of Governor General of Bengal, India was a Hindu/Sanskritic civilization dominated by the caste system which had been in constant decline since its ‘golden age’ of the ‘Vedic era’ from the third to the seventh centuries AD (Jones 1788b: 421). Jones situated India within a European master narrative as a lost wing of European culture and Sanskrit literature, especially the Vedas, were depicted as documentary evidence of humans in their ‘primitive’ state (Trautmann 1997: 193; Jones 1788b: 425–6; Brimnes 2002: 252–3; Ali 1998: 99). While these scholars found India's current state to be ‘degenerate’, and used this assessment to justify colonial rule, they valorized its ancient past as being ‘splendid in arts and arms, happy in government, wise in legislation and eminent in various knowledge’ (Jones 1970: 712–13; Jones 1788b: 421).

The image of India as a stagnant civilization lost in time and in need of rescuing from cruel despots was particularly prominent in the writings of the Utilitarian thinkers of the nineteenth century. James Mill, an employee of the East India Company, who wrote a textbook on Indian history that remained hegemonic throughout the nineteenth century, saw no value in Indian culture, ancient or otherwise because it lacked rationalism and individualism, the qualities possessed by ‘civilized’ societies. Mill (1848a: 153) was unimpressed by the Orientalist valorization of ancient Indian culture, arguing that the state of India's arts, sciences, laws and institutions indicated ‘but a few of the earliest steps in the progress to civilization’. Indeed, Indians were in a ‘state of weak and profligate barbarism’ with ‘moral habits left in their minds by superstition and despotism’ (Mill 1848a: 492; Mill 1848b: 576). Orientalist assumptions about the centrality of Hinduism and caste to Indian society were accepted by Mill who also argued that caste had disabled India's progress from the lower to higher stages of civilization.

Utilitarian discourses on Indian were dependent on the constant articulation of India's difference or radical Otherness, a preoccupation they shared with Romantic scholars like Friedrich von Schlegel. Romantics – through the interpretation of selected Sanskrit literature – established India as a land of mysticism, a fundamentally non-rational civilization. Concerned about an excessive focus on discipline and rationality due to the rapid industrialization of their societies, the Romantics constructed Asia, in general, and India, in particular, as a site of hope and fantasy – the source of an Oriental Renaissance, which would liberate Western scientific man from its obsession with rationalism (Schlegel 1889: 519–20). While the Romantics commended India's ‘spirituality’ as opposed to Europe's ‘materialism’ this did not entail full-fledged approval of what they saw as Indian values. Schlegel argued that if Western culture had gone to the one extreme of valuing rationalism over all else, then Indian culture was weighed down in superstition (Schlegel 1889: 471). Moreover, India's religious and cultural diversity bred disunity and it was particularly prone to foreign conquest (Schlegel 1889: 509, 10).

As this brief overview of Orientalist, Utilitarian and Romantic eighteenth and nineteenth century writings on India shows, the colonial encounter gave rise to a particular construction of Indian civilization with some consistent themes. While writers disagreed about the worth of Indian civilization, in general, they agreed that India was a Hindu civilization, dominated by religion and caste and riven by discord and, because of this, its current state was one of degeneracy. Rendering India a Hindu civilization, moreover, meant that India's Muslims were portrayed as belonging not just to a separate civilization, but to an invading and conquering civilization. This is a narrative which has been a trope in discourses of Indian civilization from the earliest published British accounts of Indian history (Metcalf 1994: 8–9, 138–9). As Thomas Blom Hansen (1999: 65) has argued, however, the ‘Hindu religion’, ‘Hindu culture’ and ‘Hindu’ as a distinct cultural category are all largely the result of the interventions by European scholars, missionaries and administrators since the eighteenth century. Prior to this, argues Romila Thapar (1989: 222), the notion of a uniform religious community which could be identified as Hindu was largely absent. Rather, in India's early history there existed multiple communities based around locality, language, caste, occupation and sect. The construction of India as a Hindu civilization was, however, indispensable in making it ‘possible to identify the difference of the East from the West within a single conceptual grammar of civilizational order and hierarchy’ (Hansen 1999: 66). Thus, the multitude of syncretistic religious practices found in India were given a previously unknown coherence and invented as a monolithic religion based around Sanskrit texts and a ‘classical’ Vedic high civilization.

Similarly, caste was never simply a static religious system that dominated the social and political order, as scholars such as Susan Bayly (1999), Nicholas Dirks (1987) and Niels Brimnes (2002) have shown. Rather, it was a highly politicized institution in which the positions of groups were changeable and varied according to the nature of local conditions (Bayly 1999: Ch.1). As Bayly (1999: Ch. 5), Dirks (1987: 9) and Brimnes (2002: 250) all point out, it was not until the nineteenth century displacement of indigenous political authorities that what we now call the caste system became a reified, Brahmin-centred hierarchy.

The colonial encounter, and the discourses of Indian civilization that it produced, led to a series of debates amongst the elite about why India was colonized, how it should become independent and the nature of the public good for a postcolonial India.⁵

The choice of Calcutta as the capital of British India gave rise, in the first half of the nineteenth century, to a movement championing reason and modernity in opposition to superstition and tradition and described ‘with a profound imperialist irony’ as the ‘Bengali Renaissance’ (Spivak 2001: 58). At the instigation of Bengal's land-owning and business elite, civic institutions such as the Hindu School, the Landholders Society and the British India Association were established and close collaboration with East India Company officials was encouraged, especially after the Asiatic Society of Bengal began accepting Indian members in 1829. Ram Mohan Roy and other members of the Bengali elite who were at the forefront of the ‘Bengali Renaissance’ were in agreement with the Orientalists that Indian civilization was essentially a Hindu one (Roosa 1995: 148). Their negotiation of an Indian identity was based on the Orientalist notion of a glorious but degraded Hindu civilization which was now inferior to Western civilization and therefore deserving of British rule. This conviviality however, did not survive. As Britain's economic exploitation of India increased and its colonial racism became entrenched, disillusionment with Western civilization replaced the previous sense of admiration (Roosa 1995: 148–9). Using the tools provided by European Romantic nationalism, early Indian nationalists set out to recover the ‘authentic’ cultural nation which, more often than not, involved a resort to the idea of Hindu superiority and exclusivity (Bhatt 2000: 23). In this view, while it was seen to be important to learn from the West, Indian/Hindu civilization remained vastly superior because it had reached a far more advanced level of philosophical and religious learning before its current state of degradation.

‘Indian civilization’ and the ambivalence of postcolonial modernity

These early debates laid the groundwork for later forms of anti-colonial nationalism, such as that of V.D. Savarkar who played a leading role in the anti-colonial, violent revolutionary nationalism which became influential in the wake of the first partition of Bengal in 1905, before Gandhian nationalism established its dominance in the 1920s. He was of the view that the ancient Hindus had laid the basis for a ‘great and enduring civilization’ long before the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians (Savarkar 1938: 7). Savarkar drew on the Orientalist conception of a Vedic, Sanskrit-based civilization built and maintained by upper-caste, North Indian Hindus (Savarkar 1938: 115). He argued that a sense of nationalism had been present in the subcontinent for more than 5,000 years in the ‘Vedic nation’ and that a cultural self-consciousness had developed through geographical interconnectedness (Savarkar 1938: 101–2). For Savarkar (1938: 54–6), India's current state of degeneracy was the result of the expansion of Buddhism, the subsequent decline of its military prowess and repeated invasions by Muslims.

He was particularly influenced by Herbert Spen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Permission Acknowledgement
• 1 Introduction
• Part I India as a ‘moral power’ 1947–1964
• 2 Nuclear technology, disarmament and the ambivalence of postcolonial identity
• 3 Rejecting the ‘fear complex’ Constructing an international politics of friendship
• 4 From friendship to ‘betrayal’ The India–China war
• Part II Grappling with postcoloniality 1964–2004
• 5 Interventions and explosions Whither an ethical modernity?
• 6 India in South Asia Danger, desire, friendship and fraternity
• 7 Foreign policy, identity and the BJP Correcting the ‘emasculation of state power’?
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index