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In spring 2018 I taught a course on Indian foreign policy at Ashoka University. My bright young students were mostly born in this century; I was born in the first half of the last one. They rapidly taught me that familiar events from my lifetime were ancient history to them. When I said Mrs. Gandhi meaning Indira Gandhi, they heard Sonia Gandhi, who had headed the Congress Party in their lifetimes. My vivid memories of walking about Delhi with friends during the 1965 war enforcing the blackout against air raids was something their generation would never know, now that GPS and precision sensing have made blackouts irrelevant. It is sobering to realize that the events that frame your conscious life have already faded into the fog of history. But my students’ enthusiasm and interest in learning about and analyzing those events, no matter how remote they may have seemed to them, encouraged me to attempt this book.

At another level, my students only reflected the massive changes in India and Asia in the last seventy years. At the end of World War II India and Asia were still largely colonized. India was poor, backward, and weak, and Asia was little more than a geographical expression. Today, Asia is at the center of world politics, is the most dynamic and rapidly developing region in the world, and some Asian countries now worry about a middle-income trap. India and China have eliminated more poverty in a shorter amount of time than any other nations in history. Several Asian states have acquired agency in the international system unprecedented in their modern history.

This book is the story of India in that changing Asia, of how India has adapted to changes since Indian independence in 1947, when the modern Indian state came into being. While India is unique, and therefore a singular actor in many respects—geography, history, demography, culture—it has also always been a part of the Asian story and an active participant in it. Even as India experimented briefly after independence with an inward-looking approach in its quest to transform, develop, and strengthen itself, the country has consistently recognized that it must work with others in the international system to further its own interests. Paradoxically, as India has evolved and gathered power in the international system, its need for and dependence on the world have steadily increased. While India attempted from the start to pursue interests in partnership with other states and actors different from itself, it was often alone abroad because of the unique set of geopolitical compulsions and drivers for its foreign and security policies. Despite that, it was still able to achieve many of the nation’s international goals not only because of its relative power or influence, hard or soft, but because of its use of the shifting geopolitical situation around the country, particularly in Asia. That recent past, along with the consequences of India’s choices in Asia’s geopolitics, is still with us. Hence, the title of this book. Today, India is more connected to and involved with the world around it than ever before, as its interests grow and change. That is the story this book attempts to tell.

While this book is not a history of Indian foreign policy, or comprehensive in any way, and should not be considered a work of scholarship or of international relations theory, despite its development through an international relations department course, it does attempt to look at Indian foreign policy with a wide-angle lens. It examines Indian foreign policy, not as an autonomous activity driven by personality and domestic politics and reacting to external stimuli, but as part of larger historical shifts in Asia and world geopolitics, of which India is a significant constituent. From the very outset, with independence in 1947, and even before that under the interim government from September 1946, India was not just a reactive or passive object of Asian geopolitics but an active participant, and it sought to shape the Asian environment. This proactive role was played by India’s earliest leaders, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, and by later heads of government, P. V. Narasimha Rao, Atal Behari Vajpayee, and Manmohan Singh.

As an Indian diplomat, it often seemed to me that the explanations advanced in the media and in scholarly studies of the country’s policies were simplistic, unidimensional, or insufficient, no matter whether they were realist, liberal, or constructivist. Each of these approaches seemed to be useful but incomplete or unsatisfactory as an explanation of state and leader behavior. In my experience of diplomacy and policymaking, most of the brilliant thoughts, concepts, and ideas that analysts and historians discuss seldom influence the politicians and policymakers who make the decisions that are the raw material of history. At the same time, the better ones are acutely aware of how their decisions will appear to their constituencies and have a clear sense of the power equations and geopolitics around them. That brought me to the idea that it might be worth examining the geopolitics of India in Asia. Also, intellectual and other histories of geopolitics tend to overemphasize Europe and the Atlantic, and in an age of U.S. hegemony, the maritime domain. I wanted to explore Indian foreign policy through a geopolitical perspective for what it reveals about India’s past, present, and, possibly, future behavior.

I should perhaps explain at the outset why and how I use the rather slippery term geopolitics, despite its unsavory and often tortured intellectual history. One definition of geopolitics is “the study of how the political views and aims of nations are affected by their geographical position.”¹ In other words, geopolitics was, to begin with, the study of the influence of geography on the behavior of states and international relations. This was the sense in which Halford Mackinder and Alfred Mahan used the term in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—Mackinder stressing the importance of the Eurasian world island and Mahan of control of the oceans and the rimland.²

In its early form in the years before World War I, the study of geopolitics was the outcome of three factors. One was the rise of economic nationalism and trade protectionism as imperial Britain, France, and Germany adjusted to an increasingly interconnected global economy. It was also a period when imperial accumulation of new territories had led to confrontations in Africa and in pursuit of the “Great Game” in central Asia—what Mackinder called the post-Columbian era, namely, when Europe’s discovery of the world beginning with Columbus had come to an end. Geography was emerging in universities as an academic discipline in an era of rapid and major university expansion in Britain and Europe. The study of geopolitics was also an act of academic colonization of an activity previously conducted outside the academy in European chancelleries, foreign offices, and ministries of war in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.³

Geopolitics was ideologically suspect for quite some time due to the taint of its association with nazism and fascism and their associated policies of genocide, racism, spatial expansion, and domination of place. The German geographer Klaus Haushofer, described by Life magazine in November 1936 as the “guru of geopolitics” for the Nazis, and his Munich institute were regarded as having legitimized Nazi expansionism with the concept of Lebensraum, or “living space,” and of using geopolitics to justify Nazi policies of racial extermination. This was guilt by association rather than by commission, but the charge tarred the discipline for many years.⁴

The limited meaning in which geopolitics was used by Mackinder and his immediate followers has, however, long since been overtaken by the present-day use of the term to mean the study of the long-term drivers and factors that influence state behavior. Geopolitics is now defined as “a study of the influence of such factors as geography, economics, and demography on the politics and especially the foreign policy of a state.”⁵ Indeed, in popular parlance geopolitics is almost synonymous with power politics. It is in that broader sense of long-term drivers of a state’s quest for power, such as geography, history, economics, and demography, that I use the term geopolitics in this book.

In my opinion, these drivers or geopolitical factors help to explain the strong continuity in the foreign and security policies of successive governments of India, no matter their political color—despite each, particularly the present one under Prime Minister Modi, claiming to be unique and different, better than its predecessors, and somehow special.

Of course, when you hear people speak today of the return of geopolitics, it is quite possible that they are using a polysyllabic word even more loosely, as a synonym for power politics, or possibly just politics itself, in order to impress and dress up some fairly pedestrian ideas. For some of us, geopolitics and power politics never went away. It was a strange conceit that the fall of the Soviet Union⁶ meant the end of history or that what came immediately thereafter was now permanent, unlike everything that had come before. What is new today is indeed the fact that our politics and our international dealings have changed again, from the post-Cold War unipolar moment and the high tide of globalization that lasted until the 2008 global economic crisis. We are in flux, and this too shall pass.

The other difficulty with the term geopolitics lies in the determinism that some have ascribed to it. But the discipline cannot be blamed for the uses it is put to. As Braudel reminds us, “History is made not by geographical features but by the humans who control or discover them.” Geography and landscape do crucially impact human perception and behavior. But geopolitics cannot and should not diminish our concentration on human agency and responsibility.

It seems to me that geopolitics is more than just the effects of geography, history, and demographics on a state’s foreign and security policies. These are important, and a part of geopolitics, because they affect the perceptions of those who make those policies. There is a considerable subjective element involved in the making of policy. In studying geopolitics, therefore, we need to also get into the heads of those who made the decisions. To that extent, the preaching or morality of Indian policymakers in the 1950s and 1960s served a purpose. When coercive strategies were only available within the Indian subcontinent, conciliation and persuasion were what was left to be used beyond the inner ring. Morality, which every politician in every society professes, gave Indian policymakers another string to their bow. As other means have become available, and as the temperament of leaders has changed—from activist leaders of a freedom movement to today’s statists—the use, but not the utility, of moral suasion has diminished. But morality is still essential if power is to be converted into authority and legitimized, whether in democracies like India or in authoritarian states like China and Russia.

I am acutely aware that the determinism that early European advocates of geopolitics professed or suggested was biased, reflecting their times and a faith in European hegemony and dominance rather than rigorous academic discipline or method. Nothing in geopolitics enables one to predict what a nation will do—no more than one can predict an individual’s behavior based on knowledge of a situation and psychological profile. We make our own fate, and India must do so now if it is not to miss the bus to developing a prosperous and secure country for all its people.

Harold MacMillan, the British prime minister, was once asked what worried him and kept him awake. “Events, dear boy, events,” was said to have been his answer. The answer to the thinking leader’s nightmare of being driven by events, as MacMillan described it, is to use policy to shape and manage the environment and to try and increase his or her available options. This is, therefore, also the story of some significant events in India’s dealings with the world since independence and of how India developed the capacity to shape events, obtaining increasing agency in the international system by going beyond events, working with others, and building partnerships and national capability while accumulating power.

To some extent, analysis of India’s foreign and security policies suffered in the 1950s and 1960s from the hangover of a nonviolent freedom movement. Subsequently, a post-independence generation of younger scholars like Srinath Raghavan brought strategy, war, and peace into the study of independent India’s foreign and security policies. They also took it to the next and, in my view, necessary level of analysis by adding geopolitics. Thus, one sees India as not just a reactive power, the object of others’ actions, as it may have largely been soon after independence, but as a participant in Asian and ultimately global geopolitics. This volume, too, takes that point of view.

It is necessarily an Indocentric view and will be open to accusations that its internal logic stems from India’s view of itself as central to the subcontinent and Asian affairs. The attempt, however, is to offer more than an Indian worldview and to examine the historical and geopolitical factors that have marked India’s dealings with the world. In essence, I argue here that there is a broader Asia. Until recently, east and west Asia were so different that when outsiders referred to “Asia,” they seldom meant the whole continent from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. In the West, Asia used to mean east and southeast Asia. Now it also includes India. In southeast Asia, Asia is often used to include eastern, southeastern, and south Asia, but not west Asia. For reasons examined in chapter 10, this is no longer a workable way of considering politics. Asia is now physically tied together by infrastructure, trade, and investment. Globalization means that the prosperity of east Asia depends and can be threatened by what happens in west Asia. Radical ideologies and terrorism, which get their financing and inspiration from west Asia, are spreading to south and southeast Asia, as we see in India, the subcontinent, the Philippines, southern Thailand, with the Rohingya, and even in Indonesia. It is Asia, with its 4.4 billion people, about 60 percent of the world’s population in forty-nine nations, that increasingly drives global growth and affects global security. Asia matters, and its internal linkages mean that all of Asia will be the primary determinant of the external environment in which India must operate.

In writing this book I came to see that India is very much a part of the Asian story and always has been. Indian policymakers have not just been the objects of others’ policies but have exercised agency and worked actively to shape trends and developments in Asia, from the inception of independent India. The record also shows that India is not an island but an interdependent part of that Asia and has been most successful when most connected to that world.

In telling this story from India’s independence in 1947 to the present day, I have chosen to do so chronologically. “The Past,” which is examined in chapters 2 through 8, attempts to describe India’s role and responses to the major trends of the time, including decolonization, the reshaping of borders in the subcontinent, the Cold War, the Sino-Soviet split, the tacit U.S.-China alliance after 1971, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of China. While the division of chapters by decades may seem arbitrary, when elastically defined the decades actually coincided with changes in the Asian environment and with phases of Indian policy. By describing policy over time, I hope to convey a sense of the times, of the simultaneity of major events as history evolves, which is, in fact, how policymakers perceive the world. The second part of the book, “The Present,” from chapters 9 onward, is a thematic treatment of the present situation, as I see it, of a globalized world, with China risen and other powers rising, in a crowded Asian environment. Finally, chapter 13 looks forward, as diplomats are wont to do, attempting to predict and prescribe India’s future course in an Asia that faces multiple likely futures, ranging from a set of multiverses to the more familiar pattern of several states of varying size, power, and capabilities contending to defend their interests in a globalized world.