Not Just ‘Somewhere South of Sovereignty and East of Equality’: Indian Strategizing in the Age of Transnational Solidarities

Abstract

South Asia witnessed a number of transnational solidarities, some of which it was home to, others that drew the region into their ambit. Articulations of national identity, evident in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, marked shifting definitions of the politico-cultural community in South Asia. Concurrently, there was a congealing of ideological connections that straddled continents such as the leftist solidarity Afro-Asianism epitomized. How did social imaginaries such as these, variously imbued with nationalist and internationalist ethos, influence India’s self-image? What role did sub-diplomatic solidarities forged by non-state actors such as activists and intellectuals play? In what ways had subnational activism contributed to some of these contested fraternities? Such questions were moot to India’s assessment of its own state capacity in the 1980s and beyond. The article takes as its focus two critical sites of postcolonial India’s international relations: transnational solidarity networks and domestic politics. In doing so, it attempts to offer a granular analysis of the ‘imagined collectivities’ India espoused and the multiplicity of agendas these stood for and which it helped shape.

Keywords

Transnational networks Afro-Asian solidarities Third World internationalism Cold War domestic politics and Indian foreign policy

Introduction

It is not uncommon to find foreign policy analyses of postcolonial states refracted through the lens of high politics, particularly of the formative years of state building. This scholarly tilt towards security and stability is, to some extent, expected given that the leaders themselves had couched their vision for the future in such terms. Exerting to nudge the global discourse away from great power competition and towards restructuring the international political and economic order, these states marshalled the resources and networks at their disposal at the domestic, regional and global levels. Hence, while there is no denying the significance of summitry, it is equally important to acknowledge its many intersections with solidarities congealing across different domains. The 1980s makes for an interesting period of analysis given the flux it witnessed. Many of the groupings and institutions that had emerged in the earlier decades had begun to reflect the competing pressures of the Cold War. While ideological movements continued to have purchase internationally, ethnic social imaginaries had gradually gained prominence. In South Asia, nationalist articulations in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh marked shifting definitions of the politico-cultural community, both of which had drawn in the Indian state.

The aim of this article is to approach Indian foreign policy in the 1980s from two critical vantage points: transnational solidarity networks (formal and informal) and domestic politics. Both factors were moot to India’s assessment of its own state capacity and why certain ‘imagined collectivities’ were intrinsic to its place in the world. While formal networks feature in standard accounts of the Third World, informal solidarities do not as much. The article examines how diplomatic and sub-diplomatic encounters blurred the staple divide between the formal and the informal, and the complex ways in which the Indian political elite was involved in the evolution of these dynamic networks. It extends the ambit of analysis to include the atypical agents that populated these unlikely but vibrant sites of (inter)national politics. This dynamism is inadequately captured in staple analyses of the Cold War, which is why Vik Kanwar’s pithy observation that for much of the Western world, the Third World lay ‘somewhere south of sovereignty and east of equality’, becomes a provocative reference point for this piece (Kanwar, 2017, p. 148).

The article is divided into three segments. The first section approaches the international from the familiar vantage point of diplomatic solidarities and how India positioned itself within these. Third Worldism, non-alignment and Afro-Asianism, often assumed to have been synergistic, pursued competing agendas at certain points of time; undercurrents that merit close attention. The second section turns to examine the sub-diplomatic solidarities that were concurrently being forged by non-state actors such as activists and intellectuals. It focuses on international peace movements as a critical arena of Cold War politics. The third section explores the impact of domestic politics on Indian foreign policy in the 1980s. In dwelling on subnational activism, it shines a light on how federal politics, transnational solidarities (primarily forged over ethnic identities) and bilateral relations intersected.

Diplomatic Transnational Solidarities

If we are to appreciate the trajectory Indian foreign policy took in the 1980s, it is imperative to situate it farther back in both temporal and discursive terms. The preceding decades were a period of political and intellectual ferment that impacted states and societies in the Third World in complex ways. Postcolonial states seeking to bolster their newly won sovereign status forged solidarities that were to become an intrinsic part of the Cold War political landscape. As Prasenjit Duara puts it, ‘[n]ationalism and racism were not the only sources of identity in the twentieth century’ (Duara, 2001, p. 99). This associational life, which included the Third World, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Afro-Asian movement, was a constitutive identity of postcolonial India as well; it is impossible to disentangle India’s view of the world from its espousal of these collective causes. Which is why understanding this brand of internationalism is integral to tracing the evolution of India’s foreign policy.

Third Worldism

The idea of the Third World is critiqued by some scholars for legitimizing a hierarchical notion of the international system, and for this reason, the less loaded term Global South has gained currency (Tickner, 2003, p. 296). The notions, often used interchangeably, were aimed at challenging structural inequalities (Ayoob, 1991; Prashad, 2007). The Third World solidarities in the 1950s and 1960s drew on the shared history of colonialism and a perception of continued marginalization from world politics even upon gaining independence. It engendered an abiding wariness of universalism that was regarded as a Trojan horse for western intervention in the domestic affairs of developing states, a form of ‘recycled imperialism’, as Acharya puts it (Acharya, 1997, p. 313). The effective way to counter institutionalized hegemony, they believed, was by restructuring the global order, a crucial pivot around which Third World institutionalism in general, and the foreign policies of the Third World states in particular, including India’s, turned. Their calls at different forums in the 1970s (at NAM summits and UN General Assembly sessions, for instance) sought to radically reform the global economic architecture, the high point being the passing of the Declaration on the New International Economic Order (NIEO) at the UNGA in 1974.

Which meant that the notion of the Third World as a geo-spatial category had limited purchase. The simplistic interpretation of the Global South as situated in the Southern hemisphere was questioned by scholars who asserted that ‘[t]he Third World was not a place [but]…a project’ (Prashad, 2007, p. xv). As Kanwar observes, Bandung, and by extension, the Third World, signified ‘a series of creative choices rather than an outcome of political contingencies’ (Kanwar, 2017, p. 142). No longer handcuffed to a strictly geographical reading, the Third World became a potent symbol of the depoliticizing effects of intersecting economic, gender and racial hierarchies (Mahler 2018; Trefzer et al., 2014). Postcolonial theorists saw in it an opportunity to take a critical relook at history itself. For instance, the late eighteenth-century Haitian Revolution’s black Empire is regarded as a transnational vision that aimed to transcend slavery and colonialism by offering sanctuary to those seeking to escape such subjugation.² Adom Getachew points to the universalism that undergirded the world’s only successful revolution against colonial slavery (Getachew, 2016, p. 821). The Haitian revolutionaries’ radically inclusive rendition of black citizenship was open to everyone who sought to flee from slavery and colonial domination. An estimated 6,000 to 13,000 African Americans benefitted from the asylum offered by Haiti which had redefined blackness in trans-territorial terms (Getachew, 2016, p. 836). Haiti’s transformative politics illustrates how the South can be envisaged as an evolving project that was expansively articulated to include groups pushed to the margins by imperialism, and subsequently, neo-imperialism (read: globalization). The ‘incompleteness’ in nation-building that came with being postcolonial made the internal an organic part of the international (Rao, 2010, p. 28).

India’s vociferous advocacy of Third Worldism and resistance to anti-imperialism during the early decades is well known. Its own independence was regarded as ushering in decolonization worldwide.³ Its resolution against the racial discrimination of Indians in South Africa gained significant support in the UNGA, making it India’s first diplomatic achievement at the UN in 1946 (Thakur, 2018, p.4). India’s wariness towards deep institutionalism, be it in the form of collective security or international intervention, stemmed from its belief that these furthered neo-imperial interests and hence, signified troubling continuities with the past. This guarded approach, of course, was not unique to India alone. Newly independent states were uneasy with what pan-regional solidarities would entail for their hard-won sovereignty. For instance, there were serious reservations within Southeast Asia towards the idea of a formal Asian Union. This collective sense of wariness was reflected in the Burmese delegate’s remark at the Asian Relations Conference in 1947, ‘It was terrible to be ruled by a Western power, but it was even more so to be ruled by an Asian power’ (cited in Levi, 1952, p. 38). Such existential concerns implied that coalition-building within the Global South did not challenge sovereignty as the ordering principle of the international system. The developing countries ‘seized upon those rules of international society that seemed most conducive to bolstering their fragile autonomy’ (Rao, 2010, p. 73).

However, non-Western states, while ostensibly appropriating ‘Western’ modes of doing politics, appeared to effectively subvert and resist the West (Bilgin, 2008; Ling, 2002). ‘Self-Orientalism’ (Iwabuchi, 1994) was an instance of such ‘mimicry’. Greater India, a trans-local social imaginary that held sway in the first half of the twentieth century, emerged in defiance of colonial insinuations but glorified the colonized (read: India) as the colonizer of Southeast Asia (Vivekanandan, 2018). Within the remits of a sovereign international system, India envisaged itself as playing a prominent role, stemming from its belief in its own exceptionalism. It evoked ancient networks that tied Southeast Asian societies to India’s cultural core even as it sought to reinvent the idea to address the contemporary concern of nation building. It spawned a spectrum of social imaginaries, from the chauvinistic to the civilizational and the militaristic, that jousted over the antiquity of the nation and whether it ought to be regarded as essentially a political or a cultural entity.

New nations such as India leaned on civilization’s universal and moral appeal for authentication, in quite the same manner as the Western nations had, thereby ‘mirroring’ the older conceptualization of civilization (Duara, 2001, p. 107). Such practices of ‘mimicry’ that at once defied and embraced the colonial discourse, continued to inform India’s intellectual preoccupation with its self-image well after its independence in 1947. During the Cold War, as has been well documented, these pacifist leanings were evident in India’s efforts to broker peace in Korea resulting in the 1953 ceasefire, its non-aligned stance, and its support for South–South solidarity and global disarmament. Taken together, these articulations of India’s self-image as civilizationally benign reflect the anxieties and ambitions of a postcolonial state.

Non-Alignment and Afro-Asianism

It is important at this point to acknowledge the underlying tensions that marked non-alignment and Afro-Asianism, which was to impact Indian foreign policy. Although the Bandung Conference (also known as the Asian–African Conference) in 1955 had sowed the seeds for NAM, which in turn had upheld the Bandung principles at its inaugural meet in 1961, the agendas of the two movements diverged subsequently. Several countries that had participated in the Bandung Conference were part of military alliances including Pakistan and China. As Lorenz Lüthi states, ‘By the early 1960s, the often conflated siblings had become vicious rivals for allegiance in the emerging global south’ (Lüthi, 2016, p. 202). China’s attempts to capture the Afro-Asian platform in its mobilization against India, the Soviet Union and the US in the 1960s created a rift between the two groupings and led India to abandon the Afro-Asian movement in favour of NAM. This state of flux saw competing claims over the Global South including the rather unusual assertion by the Soviet Union in 1964 that it was an Afro-Asian country (Lüthi, 2016, p. 212). The split between the Soviets and the Chinese coupled with the Sino-Indian war in 1962 dealt a body blow to non-alignment, a project Jawaharlal Nehru had conceived of and espoused.

The reluctance to trade away strategic autonomy in return for security guarantees that characterized India’s non-aligned stance was not restricted to Nehru alone. In the post-Nehruvian era, we witness an elite consensus emerge on maintaining a guarded approach towards the international community while demanding international recognition of India’s pre-eminence, irrespective of its material capabilities. Indira Gandhi had found the nonchalance of the West irksome, wanting ‘to be noticed and valued. India should neither be ignored nor equated to lesser powers’ (Tharoor, 1982, p. 71). Her brand of exceptionalism, which Stephen Cohen aptly terms as ‘militant Nehruvian’, was marked by assertiveness that validated the use of force, if need be (Cohen, 2001, p. 41). Fairly evident in Indira Gandhi’s policy pronouncements particularly over American interventionism was the primacy attributed to autonomy, even at the risk of isolation. This was upheld by the new regime under the Janata Party as well. The then Foreign Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee had declared in 1977 that ‘after freeing itself from the clutches of imperialism, a great country like India could not possibly become a camp follower of some great power’ (Vajpayee, 1977, p. 38). The 1980s did not see any major departure from this worldview as Rajiv Gandhi’s foreign policy aimed at achieving military self-reliance through the indigenization of nuclear weapons technology and missile development. There is a high degree of norm convergence—around India’s sovereign integrity, prestige and its self-image as an internationally responsible power—in the positions political parties have taken when in power during the post-Cold War period (Narang & Staniland, 2012).

Sub-diplomatic Transnational Solidarities

While India’s strategic behaviour has displayed a marked wariness towards the international community—an aspect that scholarship has dwelt on at length—a relatively less focused dimension is the sub-diplomatic transnational solidarities that India was part of. Social imaginaries ranged from the ideological (socialist networks) to the regional (Asianism) and the religious (pan-Islamism). Many of these communalities were forged below the formal diplomatic level, and perhaps for this reason, have often been written out of accounts of Indian foreign policy. Bandung proved to be one such ‘moment’ that spawned institutions and collectivities, some of which continue till date including the Asian–African Legal Consultative Organization (AALCO), which was set up in 1956 (AALCO, 1956). AALCO, of which India was an original member state, is ‘considered to be a tangible outcome of the historic Bandung Conference’ (https://www.aalco.int/about). Likewise, the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), which attempted to ‘write a new world into being’, is considered as traceable to Bandung, given its early anticolonial orientation from the 1950s (Kanwar, 2017, p. 155). Some like the 1966 Tricontinental Conference⁴ were associated with Bandung ‘by solidarity’ while others such as the World Social Forum, ‘by analogy’ (Kanwar, 2017, p. 142). Another notable offshoot that represented Third Worldism was the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) founded in 1957, which spawned its own set of partner institutions. These included the Ceylon-based Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau set up in 1959 and the Jakarta-based Afro-Asian Journalists’ Association established in 1963 (McGregor & Hearman, 2017, p. 172).

Stepping into the laser grid of these networks is vital to understand how India positioned itself on international issues prior to, and during, the 1980s. Among them, and one of the earliest, was the Asia-Pacific Peace Conference (APC) in October 1952 in Beijing. International peace movements in the 1950s held under the aegis of the Soviet-backed World Peace Council (WPC) were not uncommon given the fragile post-Second World War climate. By no means obscure, the conference drew 470 activists and observers from around 50 states, with South Asia and Southeast Asia sending the biggest Asian delegations (Leow, 2019, p. 24). It offers an important corrective to staple accounts of Third World internationalism for it had also brought together delegates from Latin America.⁵ More significantly, these ‘sub-diplomatic encounters’ during the Cold War suggest unlikely mobilities (trade unionists and women’s rights activists from Eastern and Western blocs, for example) that reflected the disparate agendas these sites had accommodated. Focus on summitry and high politics has tended to overlook the role peace movements played in advocating different rights discourses, including on self-determination, which was how Asian societies had conceptualized peace. As a platform that ‘featured no Zhou Enlais, Nehrus or Sukarnos’ but historians, lawyers, educators and economists—whom Leow calls ‘subaltern internationalists’—the APC was successful in rallying support for non-alignment and peaceful coexistence in the developing countries (Leow, 2019, p. 26, 30). In the subsequent years, more such conferences representing popular internationalism followed in Vienna, Berlin, Delhi and Beijing, to name a few.

Third World internationalism saw significant Indian participation that contributed to the international peace movement during the Cold War. Romesh Chandra, whose long association with the WPC culminated in his presidency in 1977, had addressed the UN General Assembly on several occasions. Another anti-imperialist, also a women’s rights activist, Rameshwari Nehru was actively involved in instituting the Asian Solidarity Committee following the widely attended Conference on the Relaxation of International Tension (CRIT) in New Delhi in 1955. She was a prominent presence at the Afro-Asian Women’s Conference that convened in Cairo in 1961, as also in the Asian Relations Conference in 1947. The Delhi conference, itself the outcome of Rameshwari Nehru’s endeavours, had preceded the official Conference of Asian–African countries at Bandung by days. Because it was an unofficial gathering, it drew thousands of participants, unlike the closed-door Bandung event.

The ‘People’s Bandung’, as Carolien Stolte calls it, was successful enough to set off a series of initiatives including the AAPSO (Stolte, 2019, p. 126). In contrast to the Bandung conference in which India was diplomatically involved, CRIT was neither convened nor backed by the Indian government. Yet, its effective and popular mobilization in favour of disarmament and anti-colonialism cast an influence on Nehru’s foreign policy and also on the Bandung conference. As many as 43 Indian parliamentarians were members of the conference’s preparatory committee (Stolte, 2019, p. 127). Indian political figures like V. K. Krishna Menon were long associated with the WPC. When it met in 1958 in New Delhi, Nehru not only welcomed the delegates but also joined in its deliberations (Stolte, 2019, p. 146). Further, the Indian delegates at the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference in 1957 in Cairo included parliamentarians who were involved in organizing CRIT.

Encounters such as these necessitate nuancing the simplistic binary between the formal and informal, and between elite and popular articulations of internationalism and how the study of Indian foreign policy would be impoverished if it excludes these organic linkages between the two. Gatherings like the one in Delhi are equally instructive in highlighting why transnational solidarities were appealing enough for peace activists to pole-vault the national when the accent was on nation-building in newly independent countries. Indian peace activism plugged into international networks that defied the all-too-familiar Cold War bloc politics. The prominent Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand (who was involved in writing the WPC manifesto), epitomized these cross-cutting constituencies of peace in his friendships with fellow WPC members such as Pablo Picasso (Stolte, 2019, p. 134).

The three-worlds typology sat uneasily with other internationalisms as well. The nation state, which was central to the ideological mapping of the world, was not always the point of reference for internationalists. As discussed already, solidarity movements were seeking to widen their support base beyond the nation state. For instance, Islamic internationalism sought to transcend the national, albeit for religious rather than ideological reasons. Islamic intellectuals writing in the 1980s emphasized on the umma as defining world order. Within this schema, expressions of solidarity by Islamic countries towards non-Islamic (Third World) states appeared unnatural, diverting them from the goal of realizing Muslim unity. These scholars did not envisage themselves as aligning with ‘a consistent theory of history’ (Nunan, 2020, p. 58). Once again, we encounter competing visions of the international, which in this case bring out fissures within the Islamic world. This is most apparent in the tussle between Iraqi and Iranian Islamists in seeking to take control of NAM in light of the movement designating Iraq as the next host of its summit (Nunan, 2020, pp. 59–61). The Iran–Iraq war in 1980, between two non-aligned states, led to the seventh NAM conference being hosted by India instead, in 1983.

The 1983 summit was an opportunity for the then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to position herself as the legitimate representative of the Third World. The crisis within the 101 member-strong NAM brought on by the war proved serendipitous. India was priming for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting that it was hosting in 1983 when Fidel Castro asked if it would convene the NAM summit as well. Furthermore, the Soviet invasion of yet another non-aligned country, Afghanistan, in 1979 that brought the Cold War into India’s neighbourhood was an added imperative. India walked a thin line in the superpower contest and leveraged the summit to project a neutral position of both its foreign policy and NAM’s. Indira Gandhi was keen that the conference focus on issues on which consensus could be arrived at like denuclearization, support for self-determination and NIEO while contentious issues such as the Soviet invasion are sidestepped. While it enabled her to present an image of a cohesive group, it also ensured that the positions the movement took were aligned with her foreign policy goals. Her pronouncements about wanting ‘India to be self-reliant and to strengthen its independence so that it cannot be pressurized by anybody’ were strikingly similar to her father, Jawaharlal Nehru’s, in their tone and tenor (cited in Sawkar, 2022, p. 362).

Assertiveness translated into an urge for greater visibility and display of power on the international stage for which global events such as the NAM summit and the 1982 Asian Games in New Delhi were well suited. This made for highly choreographed public appearances that Indira Gandhi ensured were well covered in national and international press, be it print or electronic media, turning high profile events into veritable spectacles. Her keenness to garner public support, domestically and internationally, was not new. In her earlier stint as PM, Indira Gandhi had embarked on a diplomatic and public relations campaign to lobby for assistance to East Pakistan on humanitarian grounds (Mansingh, 2015, p. 344). For Gandhi, the optics of the NAM conference were as important as the summit itself. For the 1,700-odd Indian and foreign journalists who converged in New Delhi, press kits that included material documenting India’s achievements and its adherence to non-alignment, disarmament and peace were readied. The media-savvy government complemented the showcasing of India’s active role in world politics to the press with an exhibition on the history of Third World summitry, from the Asian Relations Conference to the one at Bandung (Sawkar, 2022, p. 369).

Domestic Politics and Indian Foreign Policy

Which brings us to the organic links that bind domestic politics and foreign policy, without which the study of India’s foreign policy would be incomplete. Although domestic politics has played a determining role in moulding elite articulations of India’s self-image, ‘[d]emocratic electoral incentives are not the lodestar of foreign policy decision-making’ (Narang & Staniland, 2012, p. 76). Party leaderships while addressing domestic audiences frequently securitize issues related to defence, terrorism and transboundary water, to name a few.⁶ Yet, as Devesh Kapur demonstrates, foreign policy has less traction with the electorate in comparison to, say, corruption or caste politics (Kapur, 2009). A notable exception was Indira Gandhi’s decision to challenge the Janata government’s stance on Israel in her electoral campaign, with a survey pointing out that ‘[n]ever before had India’s foreign policy become an electoral issue in the battles of the ballot except in the 1980 election’ (cited in Sawkar, 2022, p. 361). Her stance stemmed from an enduring suspicion of the subversive policies of Western countries particularly the US. When read together, it becomes evident that Gandhi’s pursuit of autonomy in foreign policy matters was in conjunction with her domestic policy of self-reliance. Indira Gandhi’s assertion that ‘I do not think that…borrowed strength can be real strength’ made it evident that she believed in augmenting India’s material capabilities (Gandhi, 1975, p. 136).

Projecting a strong image meant that media-saturated events such as the Asiad and the NAM summit were intended for public consumption, domestically and internationally. Usefully, the literature on public diplomacy points to how media-savvy and image-conscious governments engaging in optics are mindful of these interlinkages. The Indira Gandhi government was active in instituting public outreach programmes including the state-sponsored ‘Festivals of India’ in various cities across the world. For the spectating public in India, the wide media coverage of the Asian Games was made possible with the setting up of a dedicated Asian Games Cell within the state-owned broadcasting unit Doordarshan along with the market entry of colour televisions (Sawkar, 2022, p. 366). Beyond the optics, her regime was associated with hard-nosed decisions including to go to war with Pakistan in 1971 and to impose Emergency in 1975. Indira Gandhi’s son, Rajiv Gandhi assumed office as the PM after she was assassinated in 1984. As mentioned already, his tenure did not mark a substantive shift in foreign policy priorities, remaining wary as those before him of great power intervention in South Asia which drove the revival of India’s nuclear programme in the 1980s.

From nationalization to import substitution, the centralized nature of foreign policy making also underlined its continuities with domestic politics. Notwithstanding the centripetal forces, federal politics had steadily begun to impinge on inter-state relations from the 1970s onwards. The Tripura Chief Minister, Sachindra Lal Singha, had lobbied with the Centre for the liberation movement in East Pakistan, introducing a resolution in the Legislative Assembly that read,

This House extends its full support to the freedom-loving people of Bangladesh in their struggle to establish democratic rights and requests that the Government of India recognise the newly formed Government of Bangladesh headed by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and extend to the people of Bangladesh all kinds of help in their struggle for freedom. (Bhowmik, 2017)

Indira Gandhi viewed his proactive role as interference in foreign affairs. The growth of regional parties from the late 1980s at the expense of Congress and the liberalization of the Indian economy from the 1990s onwards recalibrated Centre–state relations. These structural changes marked a shift in priorities from a geopolitical to a geoeconomic orientation.

It also shone a light on the widened scope for subnational politics whereby states respond to policy decisions taken at the national level in ways that adapt, subvert or reinforce these. On occasions where federal politics intersected with transnational solidarities and bilateral relations, it was primarily over ethnic identities (Jaganathan, 2019, p. 1522). In the 1980s, one such instance was the Sri Lankan Civil War. Starting in 1983, it saw Tamil Nadu express solidarity with the Tamil minority that was facing persecution from the Sinhala-dominated state. The decade witnessed governments at both levels getting pulled into the Sri Lankan conflict that culminated in the deployment of the Indian Peace Keeping Force after the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement was signed in 1987 by Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lankan President J. R. Jayewardene. Indian involvement in the counter-insurgency war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) in the following years proved disastrous for India with the LTTE assassinating Gandhi in 1991. The issue ricocheted to affect Centre–state ties as the central government was anxious of Tamil Nadu’s involvement fanning separatist tendencies. The literature on policymaking in India has engaged with federal divergences over the Sri Lankan conflict, and more broadly, with the linkages between domestic politics and its foreign policy (Basrur, 2023; Dixit, 2001; Menon, 2018).

Other major intersections between ethno-national solidarities and federal politics in India in the 1980s were the Punjab and Kashmir insurgencies, and the knock-on effect these had on India–Pakistan relations. The roots of Punjab’s ethno-religious movement lay in the 1947 Partition and the steady erosion of the federal structure, particularly during Indira Gandhi’s regime. While the radicalization of the Sikh identity was caused, in no small measure, by domestic factors, Pakistan’s role in extending logistical support to the insurgents exacerbated the security concern for India (Ganguly & Mukherji, 2011, pp. 30–31). Many considered the 1987 Brasstacks crisis, which saw the Indian Army undertake a full-fledged military exercise along the border, a reaction to Pakistani involvement in fuelling the insurgency (Ganguly & Mukherji, 2011, p. 32; Wallace, 1994). In Jammu and Kashmir as well, the indigenous insurgency pursued an ethno-religious agenda, which in 1989, culminated in a sweeping spiral of violence that rocked the Valley. The state’s disputed status further compounded the issue. Pakistan’s support to the separatist movement (Byman, 2005) and India’s strong response—that included the possibility of targeting training camps across the border as part of its counter-insurgency operations—testify to the complex interfaces of ethno-national politics and foreign policy.

That subnational units are playing a more prominent role in international politics is becoming increasingly apparent. Conventional foreign policy analyses approached the state as a monolith and foreign policy as its sole redoubt. The growing trend of coalition governments and spread of liberalization have widened the scope for subnational interventions in foreign policy matters, particularly by border states. In the Indian federal system, this manifested itself in advocacy on economic and ethnic issues. As discussed above, the emergence of ethnic solidarities marked a subtle but distinct shift in the nature of communalities that the Indian political elite espoused and how it impinged on India’s foreign policy.

In Lieu of a Conclusion

India’s encounters with the world, especially with the Global South, have discernibly shifted in the last few decades. Third World solidarities were on the wane by the 1980s, owing to the debt crisis and growing liberalization. The demands for NIEO, of which the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was the fulcrum, gave way to a more conciliatory approach. The emergence of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and later the World Trade Organization, effectively sidelined UNCTAD and blunted the Third World resistance it represented. It spawned new Southern coalitions, this time led by certain growing economies like China and India that are redefining global production processes and trade flows.

There is much debate about what the rise of these key players bodes for the Global South. While there are some who regard it as reinforcing the structural inequalities of global capitalism rather than challenging it, others view it as a vindication of the Global South’s capacity to shift the global balance in its favour (Mahbubani, 2018; Vanaik, 2013). Groupings such as the India–Brazil–South Africa (IBSA) Dialogue Forum, and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) make a pitch for a socially just world order but also pursue a neoliberal agenda. The inaugural Voice of Global South Summit hosted by India in January 2023 saw 125 Global South countries participate. Among other issues, it aimed at ‘ensuring equitable access to global markets’ (Ministry of External Affairs, 2023). The ambiguity reflected in the agendas of these initiatives points to the changing character of Third World solidarity. Further, developing countries have raised questions about whether groupings tend to further the national interests of particular states more than the collective interests of the Global South. Other undercurrents run beneath the rhetoric of South–South cooperation. For instance, BRICS countries have been ambivalent about supporting the candidature for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council of its own members, including China on India’s (Gray & Gills, 2016, p. 561).

Although India does not vociferously champion the cause of the Third World as it used to earlier, it is redefining its role as an avid advocate of South–South cooperation today. Its development priorities were evident in the communalities India chose to be part of. It has aligned itself with these new, cross-cutting solidarities including the G20, IBSA and BRICS, as it seeks to diversify its engagement. India’s hosting of the BRICS summit in 2021 and the G20 summit in 2023 reflect how keen it is to step into a leadership role within the Global South. A barometer of its shifting priorities vis-à-vis the Global South is its economic diplomacy, more specifically, its development assistance. This is part of a larger trend where key Global South states have emerged as major bilateral donors in their own right, to the extent that ‘it is no longer possible to understand the international aid architecture simply in terms of North–South dynamics’ (Gray & Gills, 2016, pp. 562–63). In India’s case, its own development partnerships with the Global South countries are not new; its flagship initiative, the Indian Technical Economic Cooperation Programme was set up in 1964. However, India has drastically scaled up its development cooperation in recent decades, which quadrupled from 2003–2004 to 2013–2014 (Samuel & George, 2016, p. 1). The bulk of India’s USD 7 billion-development assistance since 2011 has gone to South Asian states followed by African countries (Kurian, 2017, p. 1). Among the Global South states, India has grown to become the second largest aid donor after China (Kurian, 2017, p. 1). India’s change in status, from being an aid recipient to an aid donor, points to how it has calibrated its equation with Southern solidarities.

Third World activism in the twenty-first century is more evident at the grassroots level than in state-led groupings. Current practices of global capitalism, and South–South cooperation by emerging powers in particular, have led to concerns about how these impact developmental needs. Social movements in the Global South have seen wide participation of workers, peasants, indigenous communities and NGOs, at times in collaboration with actors in the Global North. In this regard, the overarching solidarities are strikingly similar to the Cold War networks discussed in the article. These resistance movements draw attention to the social, economic and environmental repercussions of resource mobilization by big capital and state power. Popular mobilization over resource rights, a significant manifestation of contemporary Global South politics, merits close attention. It would be interesting to observe whether ‘subaltern internationalists’, to borrow Lüthi’s phrase, can present credible alternatives to the existing system (Gray & Gills, 2016, p. 563).

The everyday international relations that these contestations typify serve as crucial correctives to mainstream accounts of state behaviour and their conventional modes of setting the spatial, functional and temporal remits of international politics (Chowdhry & Nair, 2004; Varadarajan, 2010). Third World internationalism drew on multiple, eclectic networks to sustain itself. India, an active participant in the coalescing coalitions, espoused the multiplicity of agendas these stood for and which it helped shape. The ‘know-where’ that John Agnew refers to becomes, then, a potential starting point to excavate such unacknowledged lineages (Agnew, 2007). Although these debates in IR have begun to inform foreign policy analysis, it continues to largely focus on high politics. The article sought to highlight the multifaceted nature of India’s (sub)diplomatic engagements with the rest of the world and why these merit fuller attention. These encounters not only bring out the dynamic and non-linear ways through which these solidarities were built and sustained, they also defy the easy binaries staple accounts of the Cold War often reinforce. Did such fraternities signify, to paraphrase Kanwar, ‘a fragment of a future or a ruin in reverse?’ (Kanwar, 2017, p. 142). Critical retellings would embrace the fragment for its subjectivity and its potential to redefine the whole. The polyphonic transnational solidarities outlined above similarly revelled in the alternative visions of the universal that they proposed. Although some adapted better than others to the changing geopolitical context, it cannot be denied that these ‘imagined collectivities’ shaped India’s place in the world.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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