ABSTRACT
In this and the next chapter I explore the period in Indian foreign policy following the end of the Nehru era, during which the Congress Party’s dominance of Indian politics came under heightened challenge. This chapter examines two significant events during this period, India’s involvement in the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 and the exploding of a nuclear device in 1974. Both the intervention and the nuclear explosion were undertaken by the administration led by Indira Gandhi who dominated Indian politics unlike any other Prime Minister, except for her father, and is remembered by many as the leader that rid Indian foreign policy of its Nehruvian idealism (Dixit 2004, Mansingh 1984). Yet, the tendency to focus on the differences between foreign policy in the Nehru era and the Indira Gandhi era means that significant continuities are overlooked. Indira Gandhi employed much the same language of Nehruvian foreign policy and nonalignment, friendship, the rejection of balance of power politics, disarmament were all fixtures of her foreign policy discourse. I would argue that this was not a meaningless parroting of Nehru’s normative discourse. Rather, Nehru’s normative project continued to play a defining role in the construction of India’s postcolonial identity and, therefore, placed limits on the options available for state action and made certain courses of action possible. The first section of this chapter is concerned with India’s military and political involvement in the creation of Bangladesh. It begins by charting the rise of Indira Gandhi in Indian politics and examining the discursive continuities in the construction of state identity under her leadership. I then look at the lead-up to the war, which established Bangladesh, and the war itself focusing, in particular, on the mutual constitution of foreign policy discourse, identity and interests. I analyse how the conditions for intervening in Pakistan’s civil conflict were brought about and the limits that were placed on India’s actions. I focus specifically on India’s legitimating reasons for its intervention and its reiteration of discourses, which emerged in the Nehru era, on India’s ethical but fragile modernity, Pakistan’s flawed model of nation-building and South Asia as a space of kinship. Finally, I examine the aftermath of the war and the consequences of the military intervention for India’s state identity. The second section seeks to understand developments in India’s nuclear program and the manifestation of tensions, which also emerged in the Nehru era, between the desire to promote
international norms against nuclear weapons and to resist norms considered to be perpetuating a global hierarchy. To this end, I address India’s rejection of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1969 and its ‘Peaceful Nuclear Explosion’ in 1974.
