Imperialism,the Third World and the Fundamental Continuities in Indian Foreign Policy

Introduction

Among the luminaries gathered at the annual Munich Security Conference in February 2024 was the Indian Minister for External Affairs, S. Jaishankar, was a featured guest on a special interactive session that included the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and the German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. India, the interviewer suggested in her comments, had moved from ‘non-alignment to all alignment’—the country had refused to boycott Russia (a major global power) even as it waged an unprovoked war against a smaller, less powerful neighbour while at the same time pursuing closer relations with the US-Western Europe bloc. Jaishankar responded: ‘Why should it be a problem? I am smart enough to have multiple options. You should be admiring and not criticizing [it]’. As his counterparts looked on smilingly, the Minister continued,

I do not want, even inadvertently, to give the impression that we are purely and unsentimentally transactional. We are not. We get along with people, we believe in things, we share things, … but there are times when you are located in different places, different levels of development, different experiences.… Good partners provide choices, smart partners take some of those choices. ¹

Greeted rapturously by the Indian media, the exchange which went viral almost instantly has been presented as a pithy encapsulation of the foreign policy of the ‘New India’—assertive, unapologetic, willing to speak the language of national interest, and most importantly, reflecting the self-confidence of a country on the rise (see for instance, Iyengar, 2024). This turn, it has been argued across the political spectrum, marks a definitive shift (albeit one a few decades in the making) from the older imperatives of Indian foreign policy which prioritized almost rote anti-imperialism, non-alignment, and solidarity with the former colonies—principles that could be grouped under the umbrella of Third World solidarity.

For supporters of the ‘new’ India, the long-overdue change embodied and articulated by the urbane External Affairs Minister of the Modi regime symbolizes the breaking of Nehruvian ideological shackles, the embrace of national interests over the woolly principles of the past, and the assumption of India’s rightful position from the back benches of the Third World to the centre-stage of global politics. For critics, the vision being articulated by the BJP-led government and its allies signifies not just the craven embrace of self-interests but also the loss of solidaristic impulses which provided a principled cast to India’s presence on the global stage. Both perspectives, I would suggest, are problematic in that they enable only superficially correct narratives of rupture. Notwithstanding rhetorical flourishes by media-savvy personalities, strategic re-orientations, or even the dangerous and concerted efforts to recraft national identity along religious lines, I argue here that the story of the postcolonial Indian state’s foreign policy is instead best understood as one marked by a fundamental continuity—a continuity that can only be explained by situating the idea of ‘national interests’ in the context of imperialism as an international system. At one level, such a claim might seem almost too obvious. After all, Indian foreign policy as both a field of study and practice only emerged after independence from colonial rule. Even from the perspective of mainstream international relations scholarship, the importance of that experience in framing various strategic positions and priorities, especially in the early decades seems undeniable. In a literature that encompasses the major mainstream theoretical perspectives and highlights a range of issues, one can find varying levels of acknowledgement and engagement with the Indian experience of colonialism as a factor in shaping its foreign policy (Malone et al., 2015; Pant, 2018). My argument here, however, is of a different order.

In bringing the question of imperialism to the forefront, my goal is not to merely highlight the legacies of India’s colonial past. Following the well-established Marxist analysis of the phenomenon, I argue that the contemporary imperialist system is one that is fundamentally tied to the development of capitalism on a global scale, emerging with the very distinct transformation of capitalist social relations at the end of the nineteenth century. And while it took the form of colonial control, particularly up until the first half of the twentieth century, imperialism is not tethered to the notion of direct political control over territories and as such has persisted even in postcolonial world order (Saccarelli & Varadarajan, 2015). Situating the Indian state’s various strategic turns over the decades in this framework enables us to understand that far from exemplifying either some kind of principled ideological inflexibility or dithering incompetence, the manoeuvres were in fact based on the calculations of a fairly well-developed national bourgeoisie that strove to protect its interests in the global capitalist arena. In making this argument, I do not mean to suggest a crude narrative of simple cause and effect, one in which individuals and groups sans personality were merely enacting roles laid out by a pre-determined script that has remained written in stone for over a century. But any attempt to explain the logic of structure and agency would require attention to the complexities of capitalist social relations, and the ways in which they blur the distinction between the national and the international, while exposing the contradictions of a territorially bound political order anchoring a globally expansive economic system. In lieu of a more elaborate explanation, which is beyond the scope of this article, I present here a quick sketch of some important developments that should be seen as no more than a first pass at situating the question of class relations at the centre of foreign policy decision-making. In the decades following Indian independence, for instance, there were numerous seemingly seismic shifts from the rise and fall of Keynesianism as an organizing principle to the declarations of multiple ‘new world orders’ starting with the Cold War and continuing past its demise and the advent of a new millennium. While not fundamentally altering the logic of imperialism, these changes were consequential in the sense that they not only shifted the contours of the geostrategic terrain faced by the Indian national bourgeoisie but also altered the balance of forces within the class itself, strengthening at various points, one faction over another. It is these moments, I contend, rather than a fortunate change in leadership, the embrace of realpolitik by a ‘rising power’, or a long-overdue ideological maturation, that help explain the rationale underlying the twists and turns of Indian foreign policy.

This essay is an attempt to illustrate the larger argument through the prism of what was once regarded as a central plank of Indian foreign policy but has now been relegated to its dusty archives—the idea of the Third World. My focus is driven in large part by the fact that this notion, adopted with alacrity by the Jawaharlal Nehru-led government, has been treated by both supporters and critics as the framework that enabled and justified the many iterations of the putatively anti-imperialist and non-aligned policies and initiatives that characterized India’s position in global politics over the course of the twentieth century, one that needed to be set aside for genuine national interests to finally take centre-stage. The essay seeks to unpack the life and death of the concept of the Third World as a way to challenge this narrative.

In the first section, I provide a quick sketch of the standard account of the benefits and shackles of ‘Third Worldism’ on Indian foreign policy—one that tends to emphasize the importance of personalities (Nehru, Vajpayee, Modi etc.), a vague commitment to the politics of solidarity, and most importantly a sense of national confidence or lack-thereof in global affairs. In the second section, I provide an alternative accounting of the life and death of the ‘Third World’ within the discourse of Indian foreign policy by centring the shifting interests of the Indian bourgeoisie. I highlight in particular the two moments when the Indian capitalist class was able to articulate its specific interests (the need for protectionism at the moment of independence and for deregulation in the neoliberal moment) in the language of national interest. In doing so, my goal is to reveal the manner in which these interests—inextricably tied to the logic of imperialism—have shaped the alignment of the Indian state on the global stage.

Contortions and Adjustments

By the time of India’s independence, the wartime alliance between the USA and the Soviet Union had already begun to fray and the possibility of that estrangement defining the main fault line in international relations was a very real one. As histories of Indian foreign policy like to point out, Jawaharlal Nehru had made it clear, even as he was serving in the interim government, that independent India had no interest in choosing sides in this emerging battle. In an oft-quoted speech, Nehru described India’s posture as one crafted around steering away from ‘the power politics of groups, aligned against one another’ because such entanglements had led to world wars in the past and had the potential to lead to ‘disasters on an even vaster scale’. Beyond that, he asserted that Indian policy would be focused on building a ‘world commonwealth’, a ‘world in which there is free cooperation of free peoples, and no class or group exploits another’ (Nehru, 1967, pp. 2–3). These priorities, combined with the idea of working closely with other newly decolonized and decolonizing nation-states came to define the notion of ‘Third Worldism’—one that appeared constitutive of India’s stance in global affairs.

Regardless of whether or not he was familiar with the origins of the term, Nehru’s proposals for Indian foreign policy not only resonated with but in fact reflected the political platform of the Third World project and he himself became one of its major figureheads. ^{2 ‡} It seemed only logical that the widely admired, articulate Indian leader whose stance on world politics appeared to have been shaped by his long experience of the anti-colonial struggle, could lead his own country and others similarly positioned to manoeuvre strategically in the global arena, bypassing the two major powers. The idea underlying this orientation was a simple one—the more this alliance of nation-states bound by a shared history of suffering from and fighting against colonial exploitation grew, the more it could use the platform of the United Nations to demand an equitable global economic and political order, and the more it could defend the hard-won political and economic sovereignty. Within a decade, as Bandung set the stage for Belgrade and Nehru’s desire for non-alignment transformed itself into the ‘Non-Aligned Movement’ (NAM), this goal appeared to be within reach and India’s star on the global firmament appeared to be on the rise. As against brute force, the principled politics of ‘moral force’ seemed to be working—until it did not.

Among the main priorities of Nehruvian foreign policy had been the establishment of cordial relations with its large powerful neighbour, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), whose emergence almost concurrently with that of the independent Indian nation-state threatened to alter the contours of global geopolitics. Despite its initial close alliance with the Soviet Union, the PRC was seen by Nehru as an integral part of any meaningful Afro-Asian coalition outside of Cold War blocs. The ‘special’ relationship between the two countries, cultivated assiduously by the Indian government over a decade, collapsed ignominiously with the Sino-Indian War of 1962. And the fact that the Nehru government had not only been taken unaware by the Chinese attack but also had failed to harness support from either of the two Great Powers or its supposed allies in the Third World, was seen as a huge indictment of the direction of Indian foreign policy. Yet, the Nehruvian era survived not just this war, but the death of the man who had given it his name.

Successive Indian governments continued speaking the language of non-alignment, of support for oppressed nations, and of promoting new initiatives within the framework of the United Nations. They also seemed to do this while apparently holding on to an instinctive suspicion of the American dominance of global politics, which has variously been ascribed to Nehru’s supposed anti-Americanism by some and that of his less-able successors by others. ^{3 §} In this, the Indian foreign policy establishment seemed to be mimicking the more radical orientation signalled by newer leading states in the Third World such as Castro’s Cuba and Nyerere’s Tanzania—a group that Berger (2009) describes as ‘second generation Bandung regimes’ that held the promise of a ‘Golden Age of Third Worldism’. A decade that began with a new security pact with the Soviet Union (the Peace and Friendship Treaty of 1971) and a quick decisive victory over old rivals Pakistan in the war leading to the creation of Bangladesh, saw the Indian state take a critical role in the various initiatives proposed by NAM. On the political front, Indian diplomats were at the vanguard of the G-77, demanding a greater voice for such states in the deliberations of the United Nations. On the economic front, they played a key part in the call for a ‘New International Economic Order’ that would help restructure the prevailing trade imbalances and strengthen the economic sovereignty of Third World countries. It was, in other words, a decade that seemed to reflect the fruition of Indian leadership in the Third World project, and one that appeared to reinforce the notion of its ‘socialist’ tendencies.

By the 1980s, however, claims regarding the success of such initiatives started to ring more and more hollow, and the Third World project itself seemed to be fracturing. This was in full display at the 1983 NAM summit in New Delhi, as an event that was supposed to highlight Indian leadership became a showcase for the new kind of economic success embodied by the East Asian states, particularly Singapore and the marginalization of the political-economic initiatives that had shaped the movement in the past decades. That marginalization was underscored in the global arena by the actions of the USA. By this point, the USA had no hesitation in blocking moves by the G-77 nations in the United Nations flexing its economic muscles and withholding aid to ensure support for its own policies. If one adds to it the fact that the Soviet Union appeared to be caught in its own morass in Afghanistan and that a significant number of the Afro-Asian and Latin American states had spiralled into serious debt and were facing political instability, the picture of a project in crisis becomes quite apparent. The Indian foreign policy establishment, it appeared, was at least rhetorically still in thrall to the old mantras, even as the various Indian governments began the process of re-orienting themselves towards the USA. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the enforced introduction of neoliberal economic reforms—the death-knells, so to speak of the Indian state’s flirtation with socialism in international and domestic politics—this balancing act took an added urgency.

Looking back at the final decade of the millennium, as the Narasimha Rao-led Congress government gave way to the first-ever BJP government, the general analytical consensus seems to be that Indian foreign policy, caught between nostalgia and dealing with the new realities of a seemingly unipolar world, appeared to be characterized by a singular lack of direction. For most commentators, this indecisiveness ended with the successful nuclear weapons tests in Pokhran even as it successfully defended itself against Pakistani encroachments at Kargil. Though initially treated as a pariah by the USA, the Indian state signalled its willingness to work past the ‘estrangement’ with its fellow democracy and embrace a new alliance in the new century (Mohan, 2013, pp. 42–43). This willingness was not just an expression of the fact that India was led at that point by a political party other than the Congress and thus was not bound to the shibboleths of the past. Over the first quarter of the twenty-first century, both BJP and Congress-led alliances have remained committed to this re-orientation, even as they have flirted with the creation of new strategic partnerships supposedly in service of creating a multipolar world order. Regardless of the specific character of the initiative, whether it has taken the form of supporting multipolarity (as with BRICs) or highlighting the alliance with the USA (as with the Indo-USA Strategic Partnership) to prepare for a two-front war with China and Pakistan, what was apparent was that that the notion of Third World solidarity had reached the end of the line as far as the Indian foreign policy establishment is concerned.

One popular line of argument holds that only India’s weakness and lack of confidence combined with the dominance of a Left-leaning establishment—one which had pushed for the adoption of ‘state socialism’ and closer ties with the PRC and the Soviet Union at various points of time—that had kept it aligned with the politics of the ‘Third World’. From that perspective, even if one were to buy into its symbolic purchase at certain historical moments, this was an entanglement that had rarely brought any material benefits to the Indian nation-state, especially in terms of finding support during its various wars with Pakistan and China. And therefore, breaking away from the Third World formation was not only overdue but something to be celebrated. Non-alignment, as C. Raja Mohan, one of the foremost scholars of Indian foreign policy puts it, ‘was the policy of a weak but ambitious country…’ By the 1990s, however, the Indian state seemed to have finally acquired the ability to ‘grasp its destiny’ and this is when its foreign policy establishment understood that if India wanted a ‘role in the management of the international system’, it would not be attained so long as it kept serving in the ‘role of a trade union leader of the Third World’ (2013, pp. 40–45). It has taken several decades but according to its spokespersons, Indian foreign policy has finally found its direction, moving from ‘diffidence to confidence’, with its clear articulation of priorities including the willingness to actively engage with other countries, and standing up for an ethical humanitarian approach (Vadlapatla, 2024). To paraphrase External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, instead of mésalliances promoted by Nehru that had led to major disasters, Indian foreign policy had finally moved to a phase where it was being shaped by a version of ‘Modi’s guarantee’, by the government’s commitment to putting ‘the nation’s interests first under all circumstances’ (Vadlapatla, 2024).

The admittedly brief sketch that I have presented above should give the reader a sense of the narrative arc of the notion of the Third World as an integral feature of Indian foreign policy as presented by mainstream political commentators, analysts and scholars. At one level, this narrative is indeed correct in terms of highlighting the specific moments at which this idea emerged, seemed to thrive in the limelight, and eventually exit stage left. However, even as they touch upon important politico-economic shifts in domestic and international relations, what gets left out of mainstream accounts is an explanation of the deeper underlying logic of global capitalist development that has shaped these shifts. This omission is problematic because it leads to a fundamental misrepresentation of not just the nature of the Third World project, but also the reasons why it served as a foundational yet finite element of the Indian state’s alignment in global politics. Unpacking the changing dynamics of capitalist social relations on an international and domestic scale, I contend, casts a very different light on the ‘anti-imperialist’ and ‘socialist’ bent of Indian foreign policy in the heyday of the Third World. It also shows us ways in which seemingly divergent articulations of strategic orientations or for that matter cults of personality representing dramatically different ideas of nationhood in fact serve to reinforce the interests of the same ruling class, underscoring the fundamental in the trajectory of Indian foreign policy. The rest of the essay is an attempt to illustrate these claims.

The Correct Posture

The belief that the shared experience of colonialism might help shape a new kind of force in global politics is one that has existed, even if in an amorphous form, since the early decades of the twentieth century. However, by the time it had coalesced into the ‘Third World’—both the term and the project—it included a certain taken-for-granted assumption about the progressive potential not just of anti-colonial nationalist movements in the abstract, but more specifically, bourgeois nationalist movements. This seemed to be apparent even in the explanation provided by the man who coined the term.

Less than a decade after the end of the war in which he had fought as a member of the French Resistance, Alfred Sauvy wrote a short piece for L’Observateur evocatively describing the tripartite division of the world (Prashad, 2008, p. 11). In an era that was being shaped by the seeming impregnability of the Iron Curtain and the worry about the new Cold War, two blocs—the First and Second, led by the USA and the Soviet Union respectively—appeared to be the primary movers of global politics. However, this focus as Sauvy correctly pointed out, left out the vast majority of the world’s population. Comprised primarily of the colonized and formerly colonized of Asia, Africa and Latin America, this was the ‘Third World’—third, not because it was an afterthought, but because of certain historical parallels Sauvy wanted to draw. In the period preceding the French Revolution, the Bourbon rulers of the country were meant to draw on the counsel of the groups categorized as the three estates—the aristocracy (the ‘First’); the clergy (the ‘Second’) and the bourgeoisie (the ‘Third’). In the end, it was the ‘Third Estate’, the most numerous, the most overlooked and scorned of the group, which reconstituted itself as the National Assembly, invited the people to be sovereign over it, and inaugurated a new revolutionary chapter in human history. This historical role, Sauvy believed, had been inherited by the newly constituted ‘Third World’, which would ‘speak its mind, find the ground for unity, and take possession of the dynamic of world affairs’ (Prashad, 2008). Other than the fact that he had drawn on well-known treatises about the nature of the Third Estate, Sauvy himself did not belabour the issue of class dynamics (Sieyès, 1789/1899). However, his description of the Third World found favour with a substantial section of Left-leaning activists of the period, for whom this way of thinking about global politics, resonating as it did with Lenin’s early argument about the potentially progressive role of the bourgeoisie in anti-colonial nationalist struggles, provided a way to balance the calls for internationalism and the support for nationalism. ⁴ It is beyond the scope of this essay to trace the political history of the specific moments at which Abbe Sieyès and Lenin presented their arguments about the revolutionary potential of the bourgeoisie. For now, I will merely note that it would be hard to argue the same socio-political conditions, the same balance of class forces, persisted in the post-World War II era. In fact, it was precisely the changed conditions that made the very existence of the Third World project possible, and gave it shape.

The end of British colonial rule and India’s debut as an independent nation-state on the global stage occurred at a moment when a particular conjuncture of events had not just given the capitalist system a new lease of life but had recast it as an American system. Imperialism, once understood in terms of the struggle between competing powers now took on the appearance of a system overwhelmingly dominated—both in economic and military terms—by a single power. Differing in qualitative ways from Pax Britannica, order in the American-led imperialist system did not require the kind of colonial control that had been exerted by the older European powers. In fact, even prior to the war, surmising correctly that the closed colonial economies under declining European empires posed a serious hindrance to the expanding interests of American capital, the USA not just supported but actively encouraged decolonization. While that strategy very soon gave way to Cold War imperatives, what remained in place at least for a few decades was a global economic system in which American preponderance actually enabled and facilitated a manoeuvring space for nationalist ruling elites in the former colonies. Within this space, structured as it was by the guarantees of the Bretton Woods system, nationalist regimes in the newly independent countries supposedly had control over vital economic decisions including the flow of capital, and craft autonomous plans for development. However, as Radhika Desai points out in an incisive analysis, the ‘autonomy’ granted to these regimes, which would coalesce around the category of the ‘Third World’, was of a very specific, circumscribed variety. To put it bluntly, regardless of invocations of independence, opposition to economic exploitation or even anti-imperialism, these regimes were meant to be in some never stated manner, capitalist (Desai, 2004, p. 171). In that sense, the ‘Third Way’ was not so much a new path, but rather the lure of a more benign, perhaps more restrained capitalism, a version as it were, of Keynesianism.

Interestingly enough, the possibility of this space was assured not just by what Desai aptly describes as American ‘intellectual and ideological support’, but also by the very existence of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to the USA, particularly in its political machinations. To be clear, by this time the USSR bore little resemblance to the state established by the Bolsheviks. Stalinist degeneration had systematically replaced the notion of revolutionary internationalism with a form of national and nationalist ‘socialism’ which while preserving most of the old iconography of 1917, substantially subverted its content. Unlike the early Soviet state under Lenin, which saw the global defeat of imperialist forces as essential for the very survival of socialism, the Stalinist bureaucracy had made very apparent that they were willing to engage with and make concessions to the imperialist powers so long as they could hold on to power within their boundaries. ⁵ Of course, this is not to say that the ‘peaceful co-existence’ proposed by Nikita Khruschev necessarily translated into the absence of conflict. In more instances than not, the attempts by the two superpowers to out-manoeuvre the other resulted in massive casualties in the Third World. Despite this, the Soviet Union still served as a critical ideological-political bulwark for the former colonies in the crafting and articulation of strategic imperatives.

The brief outline of the ‘First’ and ‘Second’ worlds provided above should give the reader a sense of the continuing constitutive role of imperialism in shaping the post-war global order, and the way in which it enabled the ‘Third World’. That, however, still leaves open the question of why the Indian state, from the very moment of its independence seemed to gravitate towards that notion, to the point that it embraced the mantle of Third World leadership and remained aligned with it for decades. To answer that question, we need a closer look at the politics of the Indian nationalist movement, particularly the class character it assumed, in the period immediately preceding the creation of the postcolonial nation-state.

In the decades prior to independence, the Indian capitalist class emerged as a strong force especially in the realm of the economy vis-à-vis foreign capital, as the result of a struggle facilitated in part by the two world wars, the Great Depression, and the crisis faced by British imperialism during that period (Mukherjee, 2002). However, the emergence of this class was also inextricably tied to the growth of the Indian nationalist movement. At the institutional level, early nationalist leaders like M.G. Ranade were at the forefront of organizing regional industrial associations and ensuring that they were organically connected to the Indian National Congress (INC). ⁶ Eventually, these were brought under the aegis of a single national-level umbrella organization in 1927, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce (later re-named the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and commonly known by the acronym FICCI) which was portrayed by its founders not only as the ‘national guardian of trade, commerce and industry’, but also as an organization that would actively support the cause of Indian nationalism.

There were, as I have shown elsewhere, some major debates amongst the Indian bourgeoisie about the form that this support would take, particularly in the 1930s when Nehru’s flirtations with Marxism were at their peak (Varadarajan, 2010). This was, however, ultimately resolved in favour of a continued integration with the INC pushed for by the ‘more far-sighted leaders’ of the capitalist class. The latter, comprising titans of industry including G. D. Birla and Purshotandas Thakurdas, argued that given the INC’s dominance in the nationalist movement and the likelihood of Nehru assuming its leadership, it made no sense to break from him or the party itself. Rather, the bourgeoisie needed to strengthen the hands of the right-wing within the INC to pressure Nehru, while making sure it could never be seen as being supportive of the colonial state. Going even further, this group declared their support for the establishment of a strong, centralized interventionist state that could mobilize national resources for sustained industrial growth and would actively protect national industries from the threat of foreign capital through regulatory measures (Chibber, 2006; Thakurdas et al., 1954; Varadarajan, 2010). It is crucial to note that the leaders of the Indian bourgeoisie did not perceive these measures as eventually paving the road to socialism in India. For them, the idea of a state that played an important controlling and coordinating role was simply a feature of modern, advanced industrialized economies (2009, pp. 391–432). Fortunately, as we saw, this was a notion that fit well within the post-WWII Bretton Woods system.

The vision of the Indian state as both the force behind a large public sector and the main patron of the private sector eventually became the cornerstone of ‘Nehruvian socialism’—a system of thought, that while carrying the rhetorical elements of Nehru’s tryst with Marxism, ultimately reflected the successful establishment of bourgeois hegemony. The latter process, however, did not simply cease with the attainment of independence from colonial rule and the institutionalization of economic policies described in the broad brushstrokes above. To maintain its hegemony, the Indian bourgeoisie had to constantly strive to make the connection between its particular interests and the general interests of the nation at large appear seamless and natural. In the domain of international politics, this translated primarily into support for state sovereignty on both political and economic fronts. To put it differently, postcolonial India was primed to align itself with a defence of the right of states, especially colonies and former colonies, to not just political independence, but also autonomous development. In this context, the yoking of Indian foreign policy imperatives to the idea of the Third World seems not only fated but necessary.

Even as India became embroiled in multiple wars with neighbouring states over the first four decades or so of independence, this alignment well as its rhetorical framing seemed more or less set within certain parameters—solidarity with the oppressed, challenging American dominance in world affairs, forging alliances with other former colonies etc.—described admiringly or pejoratively (depending on one’s position on the political spectrum) as ‘Nehruvian’. During this period, as the seemingly stable Keynesian post-war order experienced what initially seemed to be minor tremors, the conflation of the protection of the interests of domestic capital with a defence of hard-won political sovereignty was still plausible. This was the heyday of the various proposals and initiatives demanding a greater role for the Third World in the global economic and political order outlined in the first section. However, the crisis of capitalism—that had merely been deferred by the promise of the Bretton Woods system—stuck hard by the 1980s. The USA, whose economy had felt the shocks of not only excessive military entanglements but also relative decline in terms of Europe and East Asia, joined with the United Kingdom in casting aside Keynesian policies and institutions, inaugurating in its stead the era of neoliberalism, of financial globalization. This was a period in which even the possibility of autonomous economic development which had sustained bourgeois nationalisms—in India and the Third World at large—simply ceased to exist. This, however, implied not so much the end of bourgeois hegemony but rather its realignment with the interests of global capital in ways that did not fit in with the earlier parameters.

Struggling to justify what was seen as a craven surrender to the IMF, the Indian ruling elites doubled down on presenting the enforced adoption of neoliberal policies as the political choice of a nation-state that finally had the self-confidence to play in the big leagues. ⁷ Enabling this dubious strategy, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere, was a domestic realignment of class forces, the strengthening of a new fraction of the Indian bourgeoisie which embraced the alliance with metropolitan capital, pushing particularly for greater technological links and foreign investment (Varadarajan, 2010). The older alliances amongst the Indian bourgeoisie had already begun to show some serious cracks through the 1970s and 1980s, most visibly evident in the splitting of the venerable FICCI and the creation of newer business organizations, particularly the grouping that would come to be known as the ‘Confederation of Indian Industries’ (CII). These manoeuvrings in which older and newer stars in the bourgeois firmament jockeyed for space were not merely about organizational power, but rather reflected a change in power relations within the bourgeoisie itself. For the first time in post-independence Indian history, the older, traditional ranks of the Indian bourgeoisie were being challenged by newer actors who presented themselves as ‘dynamic and efficient’ as against the ‘moribund, aging dowagers’ that sought protectionism (Varadarajan, 2010, pp. 117–120). Giving credence to the Indian state’s claim that it was now time for a ‘self-confident’ India to let go of the shibboleths of the past, including the ephemeral idea of a ‘Third World solidarity’, and embrace the neoliberal era, it was this faction of the Indian bourgeoisie that not only emerged triumphant in its internecine struggles, but has remained so even as various alliances have captured state power over the course of the twenty-first century.

Political slogans aside, the question of whether India is ‘shining’ in the twenty-first century is undoubtedly answered in the affirmative by representatives of this faction of the Indian bourgeoisie who have seen fortunes made and multiplied many times over, who are sought out and feted as high-flying members of a transnational capitalist class, even as they play up their national credentials. Serving on boards of venerable Western cultural institutions, acquiring international brands, expanding holdings across sectors, embracing conspicuous displays of wealth that was anathema to the older generation of the Indian bourgeoisie, it is these actors that stand behind an Indian state which as its current Minister of External Affairs put it has finally recognized that it was ‘has multiple options’, and thus, has been able to finally break from the restraints of the worthy, yet by now, quaint and outdated notion of ‘Third Worldism’.

Conclusion

This article has been an attempt to re-centre the question of class in the study of Indian foreign policy. While space constraints have precluded a more elaborate discussion of the multiple twists and turns through which bourgeois hegemony was established and maintained in the post-independence Indian state, it is to be hoped that the highlighting of the two moments—that of independence and of the introduction of neoliberal reforms—gives the reader a sense of how domestic and foreign policies are inextricably interwoven. These were not just moments central to the defining of the Indian nation domestically speaking, but also marked a re-orientation on the global stage as seen through the courting of, and divorcing from, the idea of ‘Third World’ solidarity. However, these are struggles that are still ongoing. As of now, under the shadow of crises of legitimacy at home and abroad faced by regimes across board, as the USA prepares itself for what it perceives to be an almost certain stand-off with its putative rivals, Russia and China, the Indian ruling elites have needed and found a manoeuvring space in global politics that can now be completely unyoked from the remnants of the ‘Third World’. The accommodation to imperialism has undoubtedly taken on different forms—new strategic priorities, new alliances, new posturing—but the fundamental logic of the bourgeoisie seeking to protect its interests while cloaking it in the discourse of ‘national interests’ remains the same. That continuity, I would suggest, is the hallmark of the postcolonial Indian nation-state’s foreign policy.