ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on India’s quest to find its place in the post-cold war world. It analyses the conceptions of world order and Indian identity in the Post-Nehruvian discourse and illuminates why it could emerge as the hegemonic foreign policy discourse after the end of the cold war. The discourse represents the forming world order as polycentric, with multiple power poles interlocked into interdependent relationships, and India as a multi-aligned international actor that maintains its independent agency by forming strategic partnerships with all major powers and joining various informal policy-networks to advance its interests. In doing so, the discourse uses foreign policy and world order as sites for the re-production of a particular representation of Indian identity as an actor that can accommodate differences. The chapter discusses not only the main pillars of the Post-Nehruvian world order model but also how this discourse constitutes meanings and identities by placing the Indian Self in relation to a series of international Others and invoking the mythical narrative of Indian Exceptionalism.
