Indian Foreign Policy: Its Basic Framework and Its Role in a Changing World Scenario

Essay: Indian Foreign Policy: Its Basic Framework and Its Role in a Changing World Scenario

Introduction:

Every country must have a foreign policy for a fuller and systematic involvement in the international relations. A state without foreign policy is like a ship without a rudder and will drift aimlessly without any direction buffeted by every storm and sweep of events.

A foreign policy creates a sense of purpose as well as the confidence to achieve that purpose.

Development of Thought:

India's foreign policy has some distinctive character of its own. It is unique in the sense that after achieving independence in 1947, it chose to follow an independent foreign policy and to maintain its separate identity in a world surcharged with cold war alignments.

Non-alignment has become the conceptual frame work of India's foreign policy. Indeed. India was the first nation to guide the Third World countries on the path of non-alignment.

Nehru, the chief architect of India's foreign policy has succeeded in evolving a policy which has gave India diplomatic space in which it was able to retain autonomy of decision. Once again the country faces a new world with its own risks and opportunities, and we must resolve the situation afresh.

The changed context is at four levels: international (US, CIS, Germany and Japan): extra-regional (West-Asia/Gulf) regional (South Asia), and internal (Indian Politics).

Although successive Indian governments since 1983-84 have gradually increased their tilt towards the capitalist west and built on the Materialism, moralism and conservatism of America and India.

The differences between the cold war and the post cold war worlds and the Congressite and post-Congressite Indian political worlds are sharp and they merit a complete reassessment of Indian diplomatic interests and diplomatic strategy in the "mediate and Foreseeable future.

The Indian debate on foreign affairs needs sharpened, the contentious issues must be...