ABSTRACT
India’s foreign policy today emerges as a global umbrella of the Hindu nationalist rhetoric juxtaposed on racial subtexts, both at home and abroad, that develops into a rivalry structure in the state-to-state relations. Such a structured and hegemonic discourse of foreign policy institutes a process of linking discourses of national development and national security with a discourse of political superiority at the international level. A genealogy of such a ‘supremacist intentionality’ is purely instrumental as it appeases the home-grown sectarian forces and projects a notion of ‘national interest’ in security and economic terms, which is serviced from below by India’s domestic cultural pluralism, civilizational linkages and electoral multi-party politics. The instrumentality of foreign policy lies in subsuming overtly racist, anti-minority and anti-marginalized nationalist rhetoric of exclusion by projecting common national ideals and staking claims on universal covenants of human rights, justice and fairness. This shows a disjunction between ideological nationalism and proclaimed compliance of Indian nation-states to international normative order. This chapter aims to analyse this disjunction in terms of how the minority discourses are excluded by nationalist rhetoric and how such a nationalist rhetoric is utilized to eliminate concerns of minority groups in India’s foreign policy. How India’s discourse of economic and security supremacy in foreign policy eschews the vulnerable and marginalized groups both within domestic and foreign policy discourses and apparatuses is discussed from a normative-evaluative standpoint.
