|
Literary Review
Pre-history of Indian foreign policy
THERE is a widespread, but not entirely accurate, perception within the Indian elite that the nation's foreign policy began with its independence in 1947. The ideas that Jawaharlal Nehru powerfully espoused and vigorously applied for newly independent India's engagement with the world have left an enduring framework of reference for the political class. The traumatic Partition and the unending conflict with Pakistan have strongly influenced the way India conducts its external relations. India's socialist orientation at home and third world radicalism abroad in the first decades of independence have been the other defining features of India's perspectives on the world.
Beyond these broad markers, there are a whole set of less popular, but germane to foreign policy making, ideas inherited by New Delhi from the Raj. Notions on relationships with smaller neighbours and special treaty arrangements with them, the nature of interaction with India's extended neighbourhood, and the imperatives of ensuring India's security both on its land and maritime frontiers were adopted from the Colonial past. There was always a school of thought in the foreign policy establishment that India was the legatee of the British role for peace and stability in the Indian Ocean, and many neighbours of India suspected that Delhi was determined to play the role of a hegemon in its neighbourhood. But these views were generally drowned out by the rhetoric on non-alignment and anti-imperialism in post Colonial India.
As the Republic charted its course in world affairs, much of the Indian elite found the notions drawn from British Colonial past somewhat disconcerting. But there was no way the new rulers of India could entirely dispense with the geopolitical burdens they had acquired from the British. Not all those imperial burdens could be sustained but neither could they all be discarded in the new age.
As India begins to emerge as a major power in Asia and the Indian Ocean region, it is compelled to shed many of the post-independence ideas on the conduct of foreign policy, and called upon to provide security to other states in its neighbourhood. Some of the old themes of British Indian foreign policy today demand far greater attention by policy makers and the political class as a whole. In responding effectively to the new diplomatic challenges, an understanding of the foreign policy of British India is the key. But scholarly studies on the pre-independence history of Indian diplomacy are too few. Sneh Mahajan's volume on the foreign policy of Great Britain at the turn of the 19th Century is a welcome exception. The book is about the weight of India in the diplomatic calculus of Imperial Britain.
Mahajan challenges the many shared assumptions among the mainstream British historians on the factors driving Imperial Britain's international relations. Mahajan argues that historians have tended to downplay the importance of British interests in India in exploring the dynamics of Britain's relations with European great powers and the Ottoman Empire. When "the centrality of the Indian factor in determining Britain's diplomatic and strategic priorities is taken note of", Mahajan argues, "it becomes easier not only to place Britain's relations with other European states in their proper perspective but also to understand how Britain's imperial designs came to be tacked on to the Near East, the Middle East, Africa and South East Asia" (p. 197).
Mahajan exposes the weaknesses of the attempts to explain British foreign policy in the age of high imperialism purely on the basis of the divergent perspectives of conservatives and liberals in British politics or the demands of balance of power in Europe. The absence of direct security threats from Europe in the second half of the 19th Century gave British politicians the luxury of debating the moral dimensions of foreign policy. But as Mahajan proves in a compelling manner, whenever its interests in India were threatened, the British establishment quickly closed ranks and acted decisively to defend them. Even those who argued about the "costs of empire" were quick to come up in the parliament with all the resources the imperial government needed shore up the defence of India. The fact that the Indian people had paid for most of it, of course, made it that much easier.
Despite the shining ideological principles of liberalism that dominated Britain in the late 19th Century, Mahajan proves, British foreign policy was as much guided by "realpolitik" as other powers in Europe. And at the core of this British "realpolitik" was the centrality of its imperial interests in India. Mahajan's work, solidly researched and easy to read, is an important contribution to the understanding of the pre-history of Indian foreign policy. Although India, per se, is not the focus of the volume, it brings out into bold relief the crucial importance of India in shaping British foreign policy in the 40 years before the First World War. Understanding the complex interplay between India and its neighbouring regions and the interests of the great powers, some historic dimensions of which are revealed by Mahajan, remains equally relevant to Indian diplomacy today. While the colonial power has departed, and the political context of the region over the last century has vastly changed, New Delhi's challenges in managing the turbulence around the Indian Ocean littoral have not in any way become less significant.
British Foreign Policy, 1874-1914: The Role of India, Sneh Mahajan, Routledge, 2002, p.264.
C. RAJA MOHAN
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
