Indian Diplomacy Research Articles

GENDER DYNAMICS IN INDIAN DIPLOMACY: EXPLORING CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR WOMEN

In India, despite the reverence for female deities, patriarchy’s hold remains strong in various fields, including diplomacy. This research aims to explore the pivotal role of women within the sphere of Indian diplomacy, tracing the historical evolution. The study relies on the qualitative method of survey of literature and analysis to highlight the achievements of Indian women diplomats and persisting hurdles, including the intersectional challenges they face. The study posits that addressing and removing the gender bias in Indian diplomacy, by viewing it through a feminist lens will yield more equitable opportunities and inclusivity. It underscores the significance of Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP), introduced by Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallstrom in 2014, as a potential solution to dismantle the patriarchal bias in Indian diplomacy. Empowering women to transcend the constraints imposed by a patriarchal framework, can enhance their individual well-being and psychological fortitude, fostering an improved work culture that attracts more women to join the Indian diplomatic services. This study gives suggestive measures to improve the work-life balance and enrich the professional as well as personal lives of women in Indian diplomacy by adopting feminist ideals. The research will contribute to the broader scholarship on gender and diplomacy, which is a relatively nascent but rapidly growing research area.

MULTIPOLARITY AND GEOPOLITICAL DYNAMICS: A REFLECTIVE ANALYSIS OF INDIAS G20 PRESIDENCY

The article provides a reflective analysis of Indias G20 presidency, emphasizing the countrys diplomatic balancing act amidst complex geopolitical dynamics. It discusses the global challenges faced due to the Ukraine war, including its impact on global supply chains and commodity prices. The article highlights Indias successful G20 agenda, which aimed at fostering cooperation for a new globalization framework prioritizing collective welfare. It also examines the factors contributing to Indias rise as a leader, such as its democratic values, economic growth, and peaceful foreign policy. Challenges like domestic issues and geopolitical rivalries are acknowledged, along with the need for India to maintain its role as a balancer between major powers. The article concludes by recognizing 2023 as a significant year for Indian diplomacy, with Indias potential to contribute towards a stable multipolar world order.

Kautilya’s Ideas for Diplomacy and its reflection in India’s Foreign Policy

Kautilya (also known as Chanakya), was India’s political strategic thinker and philosopher of the 4th century B.C., during Chandragupta Maurya’s reign. While, Arthashastra received wider recognition across the world for his state-building theories, in terms of Kautilya’s contribution to the strategic thought in realpolitik, Kautilya’s work has long been neglected not only by Western scholars but even sometimes by the Indian intellectual community. India, for a long, was recognized as the land of spirituality with a lack of rationality, and the discovery of Arthashastra made those perceptions irrelevant. While, there are other factors such as technological developments with nuclear deterrence and factors of globalization in cross-border trade and commerce, India’s foreign policy outlook has considered the realm of international affairs based on Arthashastra, which will be deciphered in this paper. Stressing the notion of ‘state’ and a comparative analysis of Kautilya’s state with that of the Western scholars and the current interpretation of ‘state’, the article will delve deeper into the doctrine of elements of the state, and their role in dealing with foreign policy. Analyzing the concept of ‘Vijigishu’ or central kingdom propagates in Kautilya’s ‘Mandala theory, and what is ‘enemy’ in foreign relations, the article will try to understand how the classic scripture is still relevant in India’s foreign policy choices. Contextually, the article will put appropriate examples to establish the fact that Kautilya’s Arthashastra has significantly influenced the decision-making in Indian diplomacy.

Perceptions, Promotion and Pre-eminence: India’s Presidency of the G20

New Delhi’s taking on the G20 Presidency represents a highly important—if not watershed—moment for Indian diplomacy. For an India that is transitioning from being a developing to a developed economy and whose great power rise centres upon core goals relating to development, modernisation, status, leadership, importance, prestige and pride, assuming the G20 Presidency seems transformational. A central part of the G20’s remit also concerns constructing and maintaining global financial architectures and governance mechanisms, which India can now crucially influence as her own economic clout increases on the global stage. Moreover, New Delhi’s Presidency signifies a pivotal time for the legitimacy of the G20 and one which potentially heralds a more representative era for the grouping, which will only enhance India’s global pre-eminence.

Attempted Revival of the Khalistan Movement Abroad: Challenges to Indian Diplomacy

The paper looks at the Khalistan movement, amidst the recent hunt and arrest of radical preacher Amritpal Singh. It studies how the movement has changed since the campaign for a sovereign Sikh state went global in the 1970s; and what the demand for Khalistan entails today. It studies the role the Sikh diaspora in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the United States has played; and how recent events, particularly, protests at Indian High Commissions in these countries reflects the ambivalence of India’s ‘allies’ towards the separatists. The paper argues that while the nature of the threat posed by Khalistani separatists is much milder today than it was decades ago, the challenge for the Indian government will be the influence of the Sikh diaspora on foreign politicians and New Delhi’s ability to discredit the movement abroad.

Casting and Casteing Indian Diplomacy

Abstract In this essay, I look at a curious intersection – the emergence of Indian diplomacy in the interwar era and the end of indentured labor. A genealogical reading suggests that Indian diplomacy takes “birth” primarily to articulate the political and civic rights of the new, seemingly upper caste Indian, in contrast to the lower caste “coolie” of the past. Diplomacy here becomes a practice through which this difference between the upper caste Indian migrant as a rights-bearing individual, and the lower caste Indian migrant as a non-rights bearing individual is enacted. This interrogation of Indian diplomatic practice is primarily an effort to reveal the ways in which caste, rarely explored as a factor in Indian diplomacy, is indeed central to its making.

Changes and Features of Indian Diplomacy in the Context of the US Indo-Pacific Strategy

During the Trump administration (January 2017 to December 2020), the United States formulated the “Indo-Pacific Strategy” and officially established a strategic competition with China throughout the government. The strategy aimed to woo allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region and accelerate the construction and promotion of the “Quadrilateral Security Dialogue”. India, as the “world's largest democracy”, has unresolved border issues with China, making it a key target for the United States to woo, and thus forcing India to change its foreign policy. On February 11, 2022, the Biden administration introduced a new version of the “Indo-Pacific Strategy”, which further clarified the overall framework of strategic competition with China, continued to deepen the strategic setting with the prominent features of wooing allies and confronting China, emphasized the core role of the Quad and the central position of ASEAN countries, highlighted the military deterrence of the US-UKAustralia alliance, and created an “anti-China circle” in multiple fields such as biosecurity, science and technology, economic finance, and climate change. Although India is the founding country of the Non-Aligned Movement and has long relied on “independent and autonomous” foreign policy, the current new geopolitical environment where Sino-Indian relations are at a low point due to the border issue, Russia-Ukraine conflicts continue due to NATO's eastward expansion, and the rapid development of the Quad, signifies the power balance in the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean regions. This also indirectly reflects the progress of India's own “Indo-Pacific Strategy” and the implementation of the US “Indo-Pacific Strategy”, thus providing a dimension for predicting the development trend of the strategic competition between China and the US.

Navigating “maximum pressure”: the India-Iran-US relationship under the Trump presidency

ABSTRACT The article highlights the convergence and divergence between US and India regarding Iran during the Trump administration and makes the following arguments. First, as Trump’s hard line on Iran was viewed negatively by India, New Delhi took measures to assert its longheld tradition of “strategic autonomy” in foreign policy which could not be ignored by the U.S. establishment despite Trump’s personal choices. Second, as Iran responded to the Trump’s hardening policies by gravitating toward China, the Trump administration became slightly more sensitive toward the complexities of IranChina bonhomie for Indian diplomacy. Third, although India was forced to cut back on importing Iranian oil due to sanctions in mid-2019, American officials began to view India-Iran-Afghanistan collaboration on the Chabahar port project as an opportunity to boost the Afghan economy, and exempted the project from sanctions. The article concludes that despite strong divergences on Iran, the Trump administration came to pursue a combination of pressure and engagement with India to reduce divergence on Iran.

The privilege of the Indian passport (1947–1967): Caste, class, and the afterlives of indenture in Indian diplomacy

AbstractThis article examines the postcolonial Indian state's 20-year-long discretionary passports policy until 1967, often in collaboration with the British government in its efforts to limit growing numbers of Indian immigrants. While a vast scholarship has shown the racialized limits to mobility perpetuated by the passport and visa system against ‘coloured immigrants’, this article considers the Indian state's own restrictions over the emigration of a particular category of its ‘undesirable’ citizens. This passport regime was based on Indian diplomatic notions of the ‘international’ realm as one shaped by the journeys of migrants and imbued with discourses of indenture qua caste. The Indian state sought to prevent the mobility of ‘lower’ caste and class migrants who were deemed to be legatees of the dreaded ‘coolie’ and therefore unworthy of travelling abroad as representatives of India. Such a reading of the postcolonial Indian passport as a document of caste and class privilege goes beyond the existing literature which largely focuses on its use in the context of partition. In so doing, this article posits the histories and afterlives of indenture as a constitutive element in the making of Indian diplomacy, demonstrating that a focus on indenture facilitates a much-needed recovery of the narratives and euphemisms of caste in Indian diplomacy.

Stirring Africa towards India: Apa Pant and the Making of Post-Colonial Diplomacy, 1948–54

This article investigates the making of independent India as an international actor through Apa Pant, a diplomat posted to East Africa in 1948—a time when India’s interests there were fuzzy and potentially contradictory. Appointed while adrift professionally and desperate financially, Pant struggled to make sense of his role as a diplomat, to elaborate an “African policy” for India in the absence of firm guidance, and to juggle between professional, private and public life. He poured out these feelings in hundreds of frequent, unguarded, and often moving letters to his wife and family. Unusually for diplomats, who tend to leave behind carefully scripted and redacted writings, these letters form an emotional and experiential archive of diplomacy. Pant’s experiences reveal what it meant to be a diplomat serving a newly independent nation trying to assert itself in the international order. Beyond the recent focus on ideas and institutions in India’s international history, this article reveals Indian diplomacy as an embodied practice and effort of imagination, whose contours were negotiated not just in Delhi but in fledging missions by diplomats whose individual efforts to learn and adjust “the rules of the game” mirrored, and sometimes clashed, with those of the nation they represented.

The Middle East in India’s Quest for Status

The temptation to explain India’s foreign policy behaviour in the Middle East through the lens of power alone has obscured a rich history of Indian diplomacy in the region that escapes power-centric explanations. India’s relentless advocacy for Palestinian statehood, its diplomatic support for the weaker Arab states against Israel and Western powers and its role in UN mediation and peacekeeping missions in the region are difficult to explain using a structural realist framework that privileges power alone. Challenging the dominant historiographies, this article introduces the concept of status into the study of India’s behaviour in the Middle East. Based on a re-reading of secondary sources, it argues that status and power have been articulated in various ways in India’s behaviour in the Middle East. Under prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, India pursued status without power, following a primarily normative strategy of status-seeking in the region that afforded India considerable deference at the United Nations and the Non-Aligned Movement. Following India’s nuclear tests of 1998 and a decade of economic growth, however, power and status converged in India’s behaviour in the Middle East through further alignment with US interests in the region and greater use of naval power projection. By shedding light on the various possible ways in which status and power articulate, this article attempts to step away from the artificial opposition between morals and self-interest as guiding principles of foreign policy. The inquiry into status challenges the prevalent historiographies and analytical frameworks that have dominated the discussion on India’s foreign policy in the Middle East, generating productive openings for reconceptualising and reimagining the field.

India and Nuclear Disarmament: A Quest Rooted in National Security Considerations

India has been a long-time supporter of nuclear disarmament. Much before other countries supported these measures, India had proposed universal nuclear disarmament, a nuclear test ban treaty as well as a freeze on the production of fissile material. Opinion is however divided on India’s approach and rationale behind pursuing disarmament. Some call it utopian while others describe it as a pragmatic approach that suited India’s national security needs at that time. India has always had a peculiar relationship with the nuclear non-proliferation regimes. India stressed disarmament as a solution for nuclear proliferation and has viewed nuclear disarmament as enhancing its security interests. This article divides India’s advocacy of global nuclear disarmament into six phases beginning from India’s independence in 1947 to the current period when two parallel tracks have emerged in India’s nuclear diplomacy—one track has continued with its traditional advocacy of universal nuclear disarmament, while the second track where it has engaged with the prevailing non-proliferation regime. India’s nuclear disarmament diplomacy has moved away from moral and ethical considerations to highlighting national security considerations. It is no longer anchored on the ‘disarmament or no disarmament’ question as the traditional disarmament advocacy of India often posed. Instead, the current Indian diplomacy is focused on the emerging rules and frameworks of governance in international security matters and how India can be part of it—multilaterally or through coalition of like-minded partners.

Saffronizing diplomacy: the Indian Foreign Service under Hindu nationalist rule

Abstract Very little is known about how Indian diplomats have made sense of the change in political power in New Delhi since 2014, when the election of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi signalled a radical break from the internationalist credo of the Nehruvian Congress establishment. Attending to this gap in knowledge, this article engages with the ongoing debate about the influence of Hindu nationalism on Indian diplomacy, but departs from the conventional emphasis on foreign-policy analysis or Modi's persona. Instead, it centres on the lived experience of career diplomats in the Indian Foreign Service to whom it falls to conduct everyday diplomacy under Hindu nationalist rule. This focus invites a broader question in the global age of populism: how do contemporary diplomatic services adjust to the arrival of nationalist governments? I suggest that the delays in internalization of nationalist norms and diplomatic practices are only partly a function of ideological misalignment between an internationalist bureaucracy and a nationalist government. What matters is also the extent to which the status of the social class represented by the bureaucrats is invalidated by the government's political project. Building its arguments on the back of 85 elite interviews and archival research in India, the article considers changes to diplomatic discourse, protocol, priorities and training, and details how Indian diplomats have adjusted to and resisted Hindu nationalism. It suggests that we study nationalist critiques of ‘cosmopolitan elites’ both as an ideological denunciation of internationalist commitments and as a social rejection of the elites who hold them.

Science Diplomacy and Indian Freedom Movement: A Retrospective View of Events during the 1870s-1940s

Science diplomacy has been a recent phenomenon that has captured the attention of policymakers. However, science and science diplomacy had been at the forefront of international relations as early as the 1850s. In this paper, a retrospective view of the role of science diplomacy during Colonial rule and its role in strengthening the Indian Swadeshi struggle is elucidated. The case study method is adopted to study three cases within the following framework: diplomacy in science; science for diplomacy; and science & diplomacy. The first case, ‘diplomacy in science’, illustrates from Indian scientists’ perspective the role of science in Indian diplomacy. Despite the challenges and extraneous prejudices, they were able to perform academically, create a connection with the international scientists, during their stay in a foreign land, and on their return home were successfully able to establish institutions of eminence. These institutions became the founding pillars of Indian science. The second case highlights ‘science for diplomacy’. It is related to the international politics on health diplomacy that forced the British to consider scientific interventions in India, particularly during the spread of Cholera. The third case, science with diplomacy illustrates the collaboration between Indian and British scientists. The study is an attempt to unravel the role of science, science diplomacy and Indian scientists during the Independence movement.

Debating the Relevance of Non-alignment in Indian Diplomacy

Zorawar Daulat Singh, Power & Diplomacy: India’s Foreign Policies During the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2019). pp. 398, ₹950. ISBN 978-0199489640. Sudhanshu Tripathi, India’s Foreign Policy: Dilemma Over Nonalignment 2.0 (SAGE Publications, 2020). pp. 203, ₹895. ISBN 978-9353286422.

Atlantic ’45: Gaels, Indians and the Origins of Imperial Reform in the British Atlantic

Abstract This article offers a new explanation of the origins of imperial reform in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. It does so by arguing that the efforts of Gaelic Jacobites in Ireland and Scotland, along with those of Native diplomats in North America, should be viewed as similar attempts to reshape the British empire by recourse to the French—and that in the period 1745–8 these attempts bore fruit. By comparing the efforts of imperial officials to cope with the Jacobite rising of 1745 and their failures in Indian diplomacy during the same period, the article posits the existence of an ‘Atlantic ’45’, a shared crisis of diversity that prompted calls for imperial reform and shaped the way it played out in Scotland, North America and Ireland. As they struggled to repress the rebellion and win over Indian allies, imperial officials found that they could not gain control of Gaelic and Indian peoples without also gaining more control over their provincial subjects, an insight that lay at the heart of reform thinking for the rest of the century and put the empire on a collision course with provincial subjects’ sense of what it meant to be British. By acknowledging the centrality of diversity and the important contributions of Gaelic and Indian peoples, the article offers a new way of understanding imperial reform and revolution, one that includes a richer and more complex cast and gives more purchase on the different trajectories of Ireland, Scotland, and North America both within and outside empire.

Travels in Diplomacy: V.S. Srinivasa Sastri and G.S. Bajpai in 1921–1922

In April 1921, V.S. Srinivasa Sastri was appointed as India’s representative to the Imperial Conference in London. His secretary was a young Indian Civil Service officer, G.S. Bajpai. Over the course of the next two years, the two Indians travelled together as India’s diplomatic representatives to London, Geneva, Washington, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The young Bajpai and his ‘chief’ developed a loving bond that was to remain strong for the rest of their lives. These travels, as I will show, were very crucial to the making of India’s pre-eminent diplomat in the interwar years, Sastri, and the country’s foremost foreign policy bureaucrat at independence, Bajpai. But the afterlives of these journeys were also to manifest beyond their personal/political lives. These two years were formative to the making of Indian diplomacy in general and to India’s response on the questions of race and the commonwealth in particular. This essay will follow Sastri and Bajpai as they travel together as ‘diplomats’ and map the ways in which they came to ‘learn’ the conduct, expectations and execution of diplomacy.

Scholarship diplomacy and India’s Neighbourhood First strategy

ABSTRACT ‘Scholarship diplomacy’ refers to a country’s diplomatic strategy of offering scholarships to and sponsoring the studies of overseas students to improve bilateral relations, promote academic exchange, or support the educational and academic development of the target country. Compared with traditional diplomacy, scholarship diplomacy is more effective in engaging foreign publics and is less confrontational. It is part of the trend of global education and is receiving increasing attention from academics and policymakers. Scholarship diplomacy aimed at neighbouring countries (Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, etc.) is an important component of contemporary India’s cultural diplomacy. The region-focused feature of Indian scholarship diplomacy is notable and deserves in-depth analysis. This paper regards India’s scholarship diplomacy as a strategy to counter China’s growing influence in South Asia and points out that this practice serves India’s ‘Neighbourhood First’ strategy by 1) exporting its cultural values; 2) attracting foreign citizens and promoting people-to-people cultural exchange; 3) and strengthening geographical ties with South Asian countries. Ultimately, all of these activities serve India’s interests. This paper also discusses the practical and theoretical underpinnings of Indian scholarship diplomacy and lays a foundation for future research on the country’s cultural diplomacy.

Diplomacy Beyond History: Analytic-Violence, Producer-Centred Research, India

The history of Indian diplomacy conceptualises diplomacy racially—as invented by the West—and restrictively—to offence. This is ‘analytic-violence’ and it explains the berating of Indians for mimicking diplomacy incorrectly or unthinkingly, and the deleting, dismissing, or denigrating, of diplomatic practices contradicting history’s conception. To relieve history from these offences, a new method is presented, ‘Producer-Centred Research’ (PCR). Initiating with abduction, an insight into a problem—in this case Indian diplomacy’s compromised historicisation—PCR solves it by converting history’s racist rationality into ‘rationalities’. The plurality renders rationality one of many, permitting PCR’s searching for rationalities not as a function of rationality but robust practices explicable in producer’s terms. Doing so is exegesis. It reveals India’s nuclear diplomacy as unique, for being organised by defence, not offence. Moreover, offence’s premise of security as exceeding opponent’s hostility renders it chimerical for such a security is, paradoxically, reliant on expanding arsenals. Additionally, doing so is a response to opponents. This fragments sovereignty and abdicates control for one is dependent on opponent’s choices. Defence, however, does not instigate opponents and so really delivers security by minimising arsenals since offence is eschewed. Doing so is not a response to opponents and so maintains sovereignty and retains control by denying others the right to offense. The cost of defence is courage, for instance, choosing to live in the shadow of nuclear annihilation. Exegesis discloses Balakot as a shift from defence to offence, so to relieve the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) leadership of having to be courageous. The intensity of the intention to discard courage is apparent in the price the BJP paid. This included equating India with Pakistan, permitting it to escalate the conflict, and so imperiling all humanity in a manner beyond history.

The Changes and Implications of Indian Maritime Diplomacy Policy during Modi Administration

During Modi administration, India has attached more importance on maritime diplomacy. With Act East policy, India starts to focus more on Indo-Pacific area and tries to build closer relation with Southeast Asian states. Also, India pays more attention on small island states in South Asia, such as Sri Lanka and Maldives. In this research, I will base on the previous studies about maritime diplomacy and conclude the changes of Indian maritime diplomacy during Modi administration. Economic interdependence makes it difficult to ignore neighbouring states’ impact on energy transportation and regional cooperation. Also, non-traditional maritime security problems are increasing, and it is extremely important for littoral states to cooperate to fight against piracy and maritime terrorism. Modi chooses to adopt co-operative maritime diplomacy policy which is beneficial for regional development and the stability of regional order.