Examine the Indian National Movement and geographical location of India as determinants of India’s foreign policy. (2017, 10 Marks)
History and geography are the most durable determinants of foreign policy. For India, the national movement supplied the founding worldview, while location fixes the neighbours, frontiers and sea lanes. The first shaped the policy’s ends; the second sets its permanent costs.
The national movement
- A foreign policy before a state: Congress resolutions opposed Indian troops in imperial wars and backed Abyssinia, Republican Spain and China. Jawaharlal Nehru at the Brussels League against Imperialism (1927) linked India’s freedom to that of all colonised peoples, and the Quit India resolution (1942) called India’s freedom the symbol of and prelude to Asia’s.
- A. Appadorai traced a two-fold imprint: support for dependent peoples (Indonesia, Algeria, Namibia) and opposition to racial discrimination, as when India raised South Africa’s treatment of Indians at the UN in 1946, the year it also cut trade with South Africa. Richard M. Fontera (“Anti-Colonialism as a Basic Indian Foreign Policy”, 1960) saw anti-colonialism as the organising principle.
- Suspicion of alliances as tools of great-power control produced non-alignment, leadership of the newly independent South and criticism of the US war in Vietnam.
- Continuity today: strategic autonomy and the Voice of the Global South summits since 2023.
Geographical location
- Continental frontier: two nuclear-armed neighbours who are each other’s closest partners, boundaries the McMahon and Radcliffe lines left contested, and no overland route to Central Asia; hence Chabahar, the INSTC and Quad balancing.
- Maritime centrality: an 11,098-km coastline (re-assessed in 2025) astride the Gulf-to-Malacca sea lanes. K. M. Panikkar (India and the Indian Ocean, 1945) warned that India’s future would be decided at sea. This underpins SAGAR (2015), extended as MAHASAGAR (2025), IORA and the Indo-Pacific.
- Asymmetry with every neighbour breeds a trust deficit, answered by non-reciprocity (Gujral Doctrine, Neighbourhood First).
- Resources: crude-import dependence of about 88.7% (2025-26) ties India to West Asia, and the 2026 Hormuz disruption (about 45% of its crude had passed through the strait) exposed the cost. Shared rivers make water a lever, as with the Indus Waters Treaty held in abeyance since April 2025.
Limits of both
- History constrains but does not dictate: India drew close to the US after 2005 despite anti-colonial suspicion.
- Geography is read through ideas: the Himalaya was a shield until 1962 and a liability after.
- Leadership, the economy and the global environment decide how far either prevails.
Conclusion
The national movement gave Indian foreign policy its values of autonomy, anti-colonialism and peace; geography gives an unavoidable agenda of a two-front frontier and the Indian Ocean. Together they explain continuity of objectives; other factors explain changes of instrument.