Comment: Pre-independence origins of India’s foreign policy. (2004, 20 Marks)
India had a foreign policy before it had a state. As Bimal Prasad showed in The Origins of Indian Foreign Policy (1960), the Indian National Congress took positions on world affairs from 1885, though it had no power to act on them. This was a government-in-waiting rehearsing its worldview, which is why independent India’s diplomacy began with a ready-made philosophy rather than a blank slate.
Phases of evolution
- Liberal critique (1885–1905): the first Congress session (1885) protested the annexation of Upper Burma, and early nationalists objected to Indian revenues and troops being spent on imperial campaigns. Dadabhai Naoroji’s drain theory tied imperial expansion to Indian poverty.
- Mass politics (1919–29): the Khilafat agitation took up Turkey’s cause. A 1921 resolution declared that Indians had no quarrel with neighbouring states and that the colonial government did not speak for them. Jawaharlal Nehru’s attendance at the League against Imperialism in Brussels (1927) linked India’s struggle to colonial struggles everywhere, and the Madras session that year warned against India being drawn into Britain’s wars.
- Anti-fascist internationalism (1930s): the Congress backed Abyssinia against Italy, Republican Spain (Nehru visited in 1938) and China against Japan, sending a medical mission in 1938 that included Dwarkanath Kotnis. It condemned Munich, opposed the partition of Palestine, and from 1936 ran a Foreign Department with Ram Manohar Lohia as secretary.
- War and transition (1939–47): Congress ministries resigned in 1939 after India was declared a belligerent without consultation. The Quit India resolution (8 August 1942) called India’s freedom the symbol of and prelude to the freedom of Asia’s colonised nations and pledged that a free India would join a world federation of free nations. In a broadcast of 7 September 1946, Nehru, as de facto head of the Interim Government, announced that India would keep away from the power politics of groups. India took racial discrimination in South Africa to the UN in 1946 and convened the Asian Relations Conference in March 1947.
What the movement bequeathed
| Pre-1947 position | Post-1947 policy |
|---|---|
| Distrust of imperial alliances and wars | Non-alignment, later strategic autonomy |
| Solidarity with the colonised | Championing decolonisation at the UN (Indonesia, Algeria, Namibia) |
| Anti-racism | Early sanctions and campaigning against apartheid |
| Asian solidarity | Bandung (1955), Panchsheel |
| Gandhian non-violence | Disarmament advocacy and peaceful settlement |
A. Appadorai identified this two-fold imprint of anti-colonialism and anti-racism; Richard M. Fontera saw anti-colonialism as the organising principle through which India sorted world problems.
A critical view
- A plural, not single, origin: Subhas Chandra Bose sought Axis help to defeat Britain, a realist strand Nehru’s idealism set aside; Vallabhbhai Patel warned about China in 1950.
- The Raj as the other origin: frontiers (the McMahon and Radcliffe lines), Himalayan buffer treaties and a Gulf presence were imperial legacies inherited intact. The disputes India fights today came from the Raj, not the movement.
- Idealism without capability: realists, and later George K. Tanham, argued that a movement which never managed armies underrated power; 1962 exposed the cost.
- Its ideals were also selectively applied after 1947: Goa (1961), Bangladesh (1971) and the 1998 tests were acts of statecraft, not of movement ethics.
Continuing relevance
The inheritance endures in an altered idiom. S. Jaishankar calls non-alignment a term of a particular era (2020), yet strategic autonomy keeps its core, and the Voice of the Global South summits since 2023 echo the 1930s resolutions.
Conclusion
India’s foreign policy was born in the freedom struggle as a moral worldview of autonomy, anti-colonialism and Asian solidarity. The Raj supplied its territorial agenda. Independent India’s diplomacy has been an attempt to reconcile the two: principles inherited from the movement, problems inherited from the empire.