India's foreign relations

This chapter describes India had nothing that could properly be called a policy with regard to foreign relations. A critical study of the history of India’s foreign relations, especially up to 1991, negates both of these sayings. First, during his time in office, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, made several huge mistakes, for example in the way he conducted relations with Britain, Pakistan and China, as well as his failure to strengthen the Indian economy, which only served to reinforce the failures in India’s foreign relations. Second, the economic strength of a country is evidently the bedrock of its potential for success in foreign relations. The chapter describes the valiant attempt by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao to assert India’s independence in the area of the defence-foreign relations overlap. In 1947-48, when non-alignment originated, independence was emphatically not a feature of Indian foreign relations: Indian leaders virtually abdicated sovereignty to the British on account of the issues of foreign relations.