2 - India's New Foreign Policy: The Journey from Moral Non-Alignment to the Nuclear Deal

Summary

Introduction

For 20 years no one called me. I had to make all the calls. Since we started talking about a nuclear deal, I have not had to make any calls. Everyone wants to speak to us because Bush wants to do a deal. India has become important. (Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), India, official speaking about his postings abroad, anonymous interview, New Delhi, 4 August 2007.)

India is showing a new image of itself to the world and the world is recognizing that today, India is indeed a country to be reckoned with. Sixty years on, Jawaharlal Nehru's dream of India being recognized as a global power has never been closer. India has always aspired to global recognition; however for almost half a century, India was seen as overpopulated, poor, and irrelevant. Although it is the hegemon in the South Asian region and a leader within the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), this hardly mattered on the wider world stage. India's foreign policy in the first forty-five years after independence was very flexible and reactive in nature. The global vision engendered by Nehru was based on moral supremacy and leadership of the developing world, as well as economic self-sufficiency at home. These moral principles focused largely on issues of superpower domination and anti-imperialism and were passed on from government to government till the late 1980s. However as the world around India changed, these principles slowly became obsolete.

India's foreign policy formulation changed, first under the United Front Governments in the mid-1990s, and then more radically, under the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (BJP-led NDA) in 1998. The backdrop to the changes was the economic reforms which had been started in 1991. India was opening up to the world and economic growth rather than self-sufficiency became the major driver for international relations.

The realisation that foreign relations, energy policy, and economic growth are linked has let to a new foreign policy formulation.