The Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, summed up in October 1962 India’s approach to international affairs since its independence from British rule in 1947: ‘We were living in a world of illusion . . . we were getting out of touch with reality in the modern world and we were living in an artificial world of our own creation. We have been shocked out of it.’ He spoke at the end of the Sino-Indian war, when, to his surprise, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), after having rejected all of India’s overtures of friendship over the last fifteen years, had invaded Indian territory and routed the Indian Army. The central question that this article addresses is: what was this ‘world of illusion’, this ‘artificial world’ that Nehru was referring to? It contends that Nehru’s ‘illusory’ world was one grounded in the category of justice in opposition to the ‘real’ world of power politics. India’s foreign policy under Nehru, who was Foreign Minister as well as Prime Minister, was based on a juridical discursive framework that assumed that any dispute between two nations would be resolved by a neutral and impartial third party, the United Nations’ Security Council, thus conceptually excluding the possibility of war. This approach to foreign relations, shattered in the wake of the war with the PRC, was not grounded in the principle of Gandhian nonviolence. It was a legacy of empire. Contemporary Indian diplomats and politicians look back to the period after independence as a ‘golden age’ when India played a prominent role on the world stage, particularly at the United Nations, as the spokesman for non-violence and peace and as the leader of the non-aligned movement. Independent India made its first bid for leadership at the Asian Relations conference held in New Delhi in March 1947, followed, at Bandung in 1955, by working with President of EgyptGamelAbdul Nasser, President of Indonesia Sukarno, and Premier of China Chou En Lai to lay the foundations for African and Asian co-operation. In 1956, Nehru met with President of Yugoslavia Josip Tito and Nasser at Brione to plan the non-aligned movement formally launched at Belgrade in 1961. Paradoxically, despite India’s role at the United Nations in helping to arrange the armistice in Korea, chairing international commissions on Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and promoting nuclear disarmament, the war with the PRC broke out within a year of the formal launching of the non-aligned movement. The non-aligned movement as the pivot of India’s foreign policy is attributed to the dynamism and brilliance of Nehru as a person whose commitment to both

Indian Foreign Policy: The Nehru Years

‘A World of Illusion’: The Legacy of Empire in India's Foreign Relations, 1947–62

background

/pdf/india-us-relations-assessing-india-s-soft-power-3qpdu7cl9b.pdf

Indian Foreign Policy: The Nehru Years

Citations

‘A World of Illusion’: The Legacy of Empire in India's Foreign Relations, 1947–62

India-Us relations : assessing India’s soft power

References

‘A World of Illusion’: The Legacy of Empire in India's Foreign Relations, 1947–62

India-Us relations : assessing India’s soft power

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