How India became territorial: foreign policy, diaspora, geopolitics. By Itty Abraham

Abstract

Itty Abraham's represents a departure from the hackneyed approach towards foreign policy, it is an absolute must-read not just for academics, but for anyone with an interest in Indian foreign policy, history and politics. As the author makes clear in the preface, while his thrust is on Indian foreign policy, he has not relied excessively on conventional approaches adopted towards the study of foreign policy; in fact, he has sought to question them. ‘This is not a conventional study of Indian foreign policy. This study does not try to establish realist, idealist or constructivist frames with which to understand international relations and the state … Nevertheless this book is centrally concerned with questions basic to the study of foreign policy, while at the same time questioning the conventional parameters of the field’ (p. 14). Some of the significant departures from the traditional approach to foreign policy are: first, the author has not looked at foreign policy only post-1947, but delved deep into the key features and rationale behind British strategic thought in the late nineteenth century. This had the clear imprint of the then Viceroy in India, Lord Curzon, and was dubbed as ‘Curzonian foreign policy’. One major benefit of this time-frame is that it gives Abraham an opportunity to make a serious comparison between colonial and post-colonial foreign policy. Abraham argues that ‘imperial thinking is central to understanding the form and practice of postcolonial Indian strategic planning and action’ (p. 114). One of the key characteristics of Curzonian foreign policy, according to Abraham, was that ‘Curzon's geopolitics was the most formal and explicit vision of a land defined territory of India that saw its primary points of strategic vulnerability lying beyond its northern mountainous frontiers’ (p. 114). In a later chapter on geopolitics, Abraham also discusses some important debates within various strands of Indian politics. He focuses on the differing world-views of Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru. For example, the author brings to the fore an important point, which is that Patel's views of China were largely influenced by his anti-communist leanings while one of the major criticisms of Nehruvian foreign policy was the Prime Minister's idealism and absolute neglect of ‘geopolitics’ (p. 119).