The Nuclear Factor in India’s Foreign Policy

Abstract

Throughout the history of independent India, nuclear and foreign policy issues have been democratically debated in the country. The nuclear debate, particularly, may be seen in four phases. The debate soon after independence was marked by the country’s concerns for disarmament and nonalignment. After China’s attack on India in 1962, the debate centered around India’s concerns about nuclear proliferation, loopholes in the nonproliferation regime and the dilemma whether India should manufacture its own nuclear weapons. The third phase of the debate commenced in 1998, after India successfully tested its nuclear weapons at Pokhran. (The earlier test in 1974 was avowedly a Peaceful Nuclear Explosion.) The focus in the current phase of the nuclear debate (the fourth phase) is whether nuclear weaponization is a continuity or departure from India’s long-held policy of nuclear ambiguity. India’s engagement with the US in the post-Pokhran-II period and the recently concluded Indo-US civilian nuclear deal has brought the debate of “continuity or change” in India’s foreign policy to the fore. One school is of the view that the nuclear tests and post-Pokhran-II diplomacy have changed the way the Indian elite began to think about external relations; that nuclear diplomacy has inevitably brought maturity and self-assurance to India’s foreign policy. The other school, while viewing the policy of nuclear weaponization not as continuity but a “reactionary departure”, considers the burgeoning Indo-US strategic partnership as a euphemism for India’s joining the “US Empire” as a junior partner, unmindful of its long-term national interest. While India’s domestic nuclear debate is prominent in academic and media discourse, the intrinsic link between the country’s nuclear policy and its foreign policy and how nuclear policy has impinged upon the foreign policy discourse has not been enquired adequately. Indian diplomacy has always shouldered the responsibility of propagating the country’s beliefs, concerns, and agenda in the nuclear domain and allaying misapprehensions regarding its nuclear policy. In turn, the nuclear factor has sufficiently influenced the structure, nature and strategy of Indian diplomatic undertakings. This paper highlights the importance of the nuclear factor in India’s foreign policy discourse and how it has remained a major determinant in its diplomatic endeavor.