ABSTRACT
The end of the Congress Party’s dominance of Indian politics in the 1990s ushered in a period of unstable coalition governments. The Hindu nationalist BJP, whose electoral fortunes had been on the rise since the 1980s, came to power as the leading member of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) which formed government in 1998 and stayed in power until 2004 when it was defeated by the United Progressive Alliance led by the Congress. Scholarly opinion has been divided on the role of Hindu nationalist ideology on the BJP-led coalition’s foreign policy and the extent to which the NDA brought about a change in direction in Indian foreign policy. Some scholars have argued that despite the BJP’s pre-election promises to bring about sweeping change in India’s strategic culture, pre-1998 norms constrained its ability to impart its ideological beliefs on foreign policy, though, why this is the case is not made entirely clear in these accounts (Chaulia 2002; Ogden 2010; Chiriyankandath and Wyatt 2005: 211). A few authors have suggested that the BJP was prepared to defy the international community and add a militaristic, aggressive tone to India’s global ambitions in a way that other political parties were not and, thus, succeeded in ‘communalizing national security’ by framing events in Hindu nationalist rhetoric (Ruparelia 2006: 325-7; Vanaik 2002: 324-5, 8-9; Kapur 2006: 206-9). Others view the NDA period as one of significant change, but argue that the NDA was simply developing the policies of previous Congress governments and responding to structural changes associated with the end of the Cold War (Mohan 2003: 260-3; Sridharan 2006: 87). I argue in this chapter that a discursive analysis of the BJP’s foreign policy indicates that a distinctive ethico-political framework did underpin the BJP’s attempt to redefine India’s identity and foreign policy. This framework was the result of a particular response to colonial modernity and colonial narratives of India’s backwardness and aspects of it are shared by sections of the Indian ‘strategic elite’. At the same time, the BJP was not unconstrained in its push to remedy what one prominent BJP leader, Jaswant Singh (1999: 13), described as the ‘emasculation of state power’ for, like previous governments, it had to grapple with the ethico-political project of postcolonial identity initially articulated by Nehru. Indeed, far from ridding India of its postcolonial ambivalence, the BJP’s foreign policy discourse reveals an ambivalence of its own, which
rests not on a wariness of Western modernity, but on a desire to appropriate Western modernity and at the same time retain a distinctive identity for India which is shaped in opposition to Islam and Muslims, in particular. For this reason, one facet of India’s postcolonial difference – its restraint and responsibility – was a key part of the construction of state identity in the BJP’s foreign policy discourse, even though this undermined the aggressive and militaristic aspects of Hindu nationalist ideology. The chapter begins by outlining the rise of the BJP in Indian politics and the views of key figures associated with Hindu nationalism on issues related to foreign policy and international relations. The second part of the chapter focuses on the NDA’s decision to carry out nuclear tests in 1998 and the third part analyses its approach to South Asia focusing, in particular, on relations with Pakistan and Bangladesh and the BJP leadership’s appropriation of the concept of ‘soft power’ in its foreign policy discourse.
