Nehru and Non-alignment
1. Nehru was the principal architect of India’s foreign policy after independence, and his
conception of the country’s interests and values, and the ways in which it ought to pursue
them and engage with the world all continue to exercise significant influence. He was able
to occupy this commanding position because he was one of the few politicians in New
Delhi who had any understanding of international relations, because of the sheer power of
his intellect, personal charisma and energy.
2. Nehru had established himself as perhaps ‘the only Foreign Minister’ in the world ‘whose
policy virtually no one opposes’. Given postcolonial India’s much diminished resources –
and given that Partition had drawn new borders – New Delhi could not adopt the British
approach to managing India’s relations with the rest of the world. Given the onset of the
Cold War, and the competition intensifying between the US and Soviet Union, there was
also a risk that another devastating conflict might break out, affecting India whether or not
it was directly involved.
3. The strategy that Nehru constructed – nonalignment – was intended to keep India from
becoming entangled in Cold War confrontations; give it as much of a free hand as possible
to negotiate for what it needed with the superpowers, as well as with other possible
partners; allow it to focus on addressing its domestic challenges, especially economic
development; and permit it to articulate a new way of conducting international relations. It
complemented his government’s attempt to modernize through central planning,
knowledge and technology transfer, and ambitious infrastructure projects, which aimed to
make India as economically independent as it could be.
Non-Alignment after Nehru
1. Nehru’s approach to China was one of the issues that was criticised, both within the
Congress Party and by their political opponents. Nehru was challenged within and outside
parliament, about this management of relations with Beijing, about the Panchsheel, the
recognition of China’s suzerainty over Tibet, and India’s support for the Dalai Lama and
his government.
2. India needed to change course and stop indulging China and advancing its interests, cut
diplomatic relations with Beijing. India’s leaders realised that, in times of emergency, the
UN system was unlikely to function as it was designed and that one or other superpower
was unlikely to come to the country’s aid, in the absence of a formal alliance or some other
kind of security guarantee. Moreover, it was widely recognised that India needed to invest
in building military power.
3. In the latter half of the 1960s and through the 1970s, India invested in its armed forces,
pursued a nuclear weapons programme – leading to a bomb test in 1974, but not to the
development of a deterrent – and forged a close economic and security partnership with
the Soviets, signing a Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation in 1971.
4. It also became more interventionist in its region, using its forces to split Pakistan in two
in 1971 and then, sometime later, to intercede in political crises and civil conflicts in the
Maldives and – fatefully – in Sri Lanka. In so doing, and by investing in its navy, in
particular, India sought to establish a kind of the Monroe Doctrine for South Asia and the
Indian Ocean.
