Introduction
There is a considerable body of literature on independent India and its interactions with the rest of the world. It includes diplomatic and political histories, polemical works, personal memoirs, explanatory texts, edited volumes, and intellectual and cultural studies. Until recently, India’s international interactions were defined – particularly by non-Indian scholars – by an absence of strategic culture, thought, or action (Tanham 1992, Cohen and Dasgupta 2010). Additionally, while modern India was traditionally considered peripheral to global developments, particularly during the Cold War, more recent historical scholarship disputes or complicates this notion (Madan 2020, Westad 2017, Engerman 2018). Indeed, a recent wave of rich historical studies – grounded in archival research and first-hand interviews – describe changes in Indian international behaviour that include facets of both realism and idealism (Raghavan 2010, Perkovich 2002, Daulet Singh 2019). Particularly enriching to the collective understanding of India’s international engagements has been the focus on specific events or bilateral relationships (Raghavan 2017, Paliwal 2017, Chaudhuri 2014, Bass 2013, Blarel 2015). Some recent books by practitioners offer first-hand viewpoints to larger shifts in thinking and behaviour (Saran 2017, Menon 2016). Others have focused on issues of narrative and status or have focused more on Indian engagement with norms and institutions (Malone 2011, Schaffer and Schaffer 2016, Nachiappan 2019, Basrur and Sullivan de Estrada 2017). Finally, some works opted to shine a positive or critical lens on specific leaders or governments (Basu 2020, Sitapati 2016, Hall 2019).
A frequent shortcoming of many large-scale studies is that the context – whether India’s independence, perennial resource constraints, limited viable choices, and changing international circumstances – is often lost, although these factors are more readily apparent in specific case studies, memoirs, and historical works. There are significant exceptions (Mohan 2003, Pande 2017, Ayres 2018). Nonetheless, the dramatic changes in and around 1991 related to India’s economy, its security environment, its domestic politics, and the broader international context find – with few exceptions – only passing mentions. For reasons that include the lingering importance of political legacies and only partially available documentation for the post-1991 period, anachronistic frames of reference from the Cold War have spilled over into the post-Cold War era. The reality is that contemporary India confronts radically different challenges, has significantly greater means, responds to different political impulses, and also has more opportunities than it has often enjoyed in the past. It is only natural that contemporary Indian foreign policy should be analysed in terms of the present, rather than the past.
Nonetheless, it is to the past that one must turn to understand the present. The purpose of this chapter is to offer an empirical introduction to contemporary Indian foreign policy. It provides a brief historical overview of the key developments in India’s Cold-War-era foreign policy. It examines the transformative changes to India’s economy, security, politics, and international environment that occurred in and around 1991, as well as the subsequent trajectory marked by – among other things – the exercise of the nuclear option, a growing partnership with the United States, and continued rivalry with China and Pakistan. Finally, it argues that contemporary India faces five major challenges today, partly as a consequence of those changes: accelerating domestic development, connecting the near neighbourhood, preserving a balance of power in the Indo-Pacific, managing instability to its West, and advancing Indian objectives at global institutions. While India’s broader objectives are consistent with those it faced after independence in 1947, the means and ways to address them are naturally different. Of particular importance is that the single biggest challenge to India achieving its grand strategic objectives is the rise and behaviour of the People’s Republic of China.
Indian Foreign Policy during the Cold War
It is helpful to consider independent India’s foreign policy in distinct phases punctuated by important turning points. Considered in this manner, the Cold War era consisted of two distinct periods for India’s international engagement. The first phase – from independence in 1947 to the India–China border war of 1962 – was defined by the use of force in state-building, non-alignment to maximise engagement with both superpowers, and attempts at establishing leadership in the decolonised world. The second period – from the Bangladesh War of 1971 to the end of the Cold War in 1991 – featured a closer Indian alignment with the Soviet Union, interventionism in a more constrained sphere of influence, and the fitful pursuit of the nuclear weapon option. The period in between, from 1962 to 1971, could be seen in hindsight as one of political, economic, and security transitions.
The original tenets of Indian foreign policy took shape before Independence itself. They were articulated primarily by the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, but many other leaders played important roles in formulating, implementing, critiquing, and deliberating these ideas, including members of the Cabinet, the Constituent Assembly, and the Parliament. The three pillars were democratic governance, a mixed-economy, and non-alignment. Democracy was a bold experiment in what was then an impoverished post-colonial state (Shani 2018). A mixed economy adhered to many of the economic orthodoxies at the time, including policies promoted by the wartime and Labour governments in the UK and under the New Deal in the United States. Non-alignment was conceived as a way of making the most of the bipolar post-war order, and while Nehru made the case for it after 1946, he also understood it to be flexible (Nehru 1949).
Although these ideas took time to settle and be resolved – as the occasionally heated debates in Parliament made evident – India’s leadership confronted several challenges upon Independence. The first and most immediate involved resolving the disorder left by partition, including the resolution of considerable territorial uncertainty. Through both force and peaceful means, India incorporated the princely states of Junagadh (1947) and Hyderabad (1948); the former penal colony of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (1950); the French colonies of Chandernagore and Pondicherry (1954); and the Portuguese colonies of Dadra and Nagar Haveli (1954) and Goa, Daman, and Diu (1961). The accession of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947, in response to the invasion by militias backed by the Pakistani government, resulted in open conflict with Pakistan and a continuing territorial dispute (Raghavan 2010).
The second challenge after independence related to India’s development and modernisation. Initially, India turned to the West for development and defence assistance, including the United States and Western Europe. After 1955, it also successfully received economic and technical assistance from the Soviet Union, and by 1959–1961, it turned to the USSR and its Eastern bloc allies for military equipment. Until the economic consequences of India’s Second Five-Year Plan in the latter half of the 1950s and the failure of the 1962 war with China became apparent, India was successful in leveraging its relations with both Cold War superpowers and their allies to accelerate its economic and military development. For periods of time, it was both the single largest recipient of American foreign assistance and the primary recipient of Soviet assistance outside the avowedly Communist world (Engerman 2018).
A third objective was assuming a leadership mantle in the post-colonial world. This included playing a diplomatic role in Korea and Indochina, militarily intervening under a United Nations flag in Congo, and providing security assistance to Indonesia and Ghana, among other places. The high point was the 1955 Asian-African Conference, better known as the Bandung Conference held in Indonesia. India’s leadership ambitions in the post-colonial world suffered a severe setback with the loss of the 1962 border war with China.
The period after 1962 was one of transition. Not only was India’s standing dented by the disastrous outcome of the China border war, but also the death of Nehru and the short-lived tenure of Lal Bahadur Shastri added to domestic political uncertainty. While India came close to resolving many of its differences with Pakistan in 1960, the notion of India as a “defeated nation” encouraged Pakistani military adventurism in the Rann of Kutch and Kashmir, resulting in the 1965 war (Raghavan 2017). Despite the humiliation of 1962, Indian forces fought back more successfully against China in Sikkim in bloody skirmishes in 1967. Economically, the success of the Green Revolution after 1965 helped to make India agriculturally self-sufficient. This was also a period, after China’s tests in 1964, that the issue of attaining a nuclear weapon capability assumed greater importance in the minds of Indian leaders (Perkovich 2002).
The year 1971 marked the beginning of a second phase of Indian Cold War foreign policy, one that in practice bore little semblance to the first, even if the broader objectives and rhetoric remained similar. The Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, concluded just before the Bangladesh War, resulted in much closer alignment between India and the Soviet Union. The USSR developed a growing share in the Indian defence sector, in terms of both arms exports and license production. India’s economy remained mixed at a time when other Asian economies were liberalising. But the 1970s and 1980s also saw a more interventionist India, although one limited to a more constrained South Asian context. After the intervention in Bangladesh in 1971 resulting in the bifurcation of Pakistan, India conducted a peaceful nuclear explosion in 1974, annexed Sikkim in 1975, engaged in gunboat diplomacy in the Seychelles in 1986, dispatched a military expedition to Sri Lanka in 1987–1990, reversed a coup in the Maldives in 1988, and imposed a blockade on Nepal in 1989 (Brewster and Rai 2011, Singh 2017, Jha 2015). Military stand-offs and crises with Pakistan persisted, including India’s takeover of the Siachen heights in 1984 and tensions over Exercise Brasstacks in 1985 and the Kashmir insurgency after 1989 (Chari et al. 2007). Despite a return to normal diplomatic relations with China, military tensions continued following India’s granting statehood to Arunachal Pradesh and the stand-off at Sumdorong-chu (1986–1987). India also provided some assistance to the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan, then facing Mujahideen backed by Pakistan, the United States, and Saudi Arabia (Paliwal 2017, Coll 2004).
At the same time, belated and unsuccessful efforts were made in at least three critical areas of importance. During the 1980s, the Indira Gandhi and especially Rajiv Gandhi governments did make an effort to rebalance relations with the United States, particularly after 1985. However, other factors, including the continuing logic of the Cold War and the Afghan conflict, conspired to ensure that the reset was not fully realised. Efforts were also made to open up the economy, although in the assessments of several prominent economists these resulted in more pro-business policies rather than true economic liberalisation (Rodrik and Subramanian 2004). Finally, despite promoting disarmament, India continued the slow path to developing a nuclear weapons capability, particularly after it became evident that Pakistan had accelerated its programme.
By 1991, several questions could be asked about India’s foreign policy during the Cold War. What were the causes of the mismanagement of relations with China in the lead up to the 1962 war, and were the right lessons learned? Did India miss opportunities – as in 1960 or 1972 – to resolve major differences with Pakistan once and for all? Did it delay the exercise of the nuclear weapon option, or were the political, economic, and technical obstacles too great to overcome in such a short time frame? Could India have adopted a different approach to its near neighbourhood? Perhaps most importantly, did New Delhi engage in belated economic liberalisation and at what cost? While these questions and counterfactuals can be debated, the consequences of these outstanding problems led to a series of breaking points in and around 1991.
