Undoing Borders for Counter-hegemonic Ends: Theorising an Alternative Foreign Policy Imaginary for India

Introduction

‘To theorise’, holds the poststructuralist endeavour in social sciences, ‘we must make strange what we have accommodated ourselves to … and … that can include ourselves’ (Derian, 1987a, p. 96). To theorize India’s foreign policy, therefore, I begin by making strange the very context within which foreign policy emerges: the taken-for-granted international state system as well as the Indian nation-state. To do so, I locate myself chronologically prior to the emergence of India as a sovereign nation-state within an international state system; and position myself outside of what might be considered the mainstream of the Indian nation and within Muslim anti-colonial discourse. In particular, I turn to the Khilafat Movement (1919–1924) that took place in India in the aftermath of the First World War, to illustrate how this movement constituted a deliberate push-back to an emergent liberal international order with nation-states as its constituent units, and use this as a way of theorizing an ‘anti-foreign policy’ for India. I further demonstrate that it is exactly such a sensibility that undergirded the politics of the Afro-Asian and the Third World movement via which India attempted to remake the post-War world—only this time the state was centre-stage.

Preliminarily, I theorize ‘anti-foreign policy’ as a practice that aims at undoing the distinction between the domestic and international in international politics. This theorization draws upon the poststructuralist insight that rather than simply being the external actions of the state as a pre-given entity, foreign policy is a practice that co-constitutes the state and the state system by establishing and reiterating the borders between states (Abraham, 2014; Campbell, 1998, p. 69; Hansen, 2006). Anti-foreign policy here may be considered as analogous to the concept of ‘anti-diplomacy’ as explicated by James Der Derian: ‘the purpose of diplomacy is to mediate estranged relations: anti-diplomacy’s aim is to transcend all estranged relations’ (Derian, 1987b, pp. 135–136). Thus, if we consider the international state system to be a hegemonic form of ordering the world, then foreign policy instantiates and perpetuates the hegemony; anti-foreign policy, on the other hand, dismantles the hegemony.

Hegemony here is understood as a condition whereby ‘a particular social force assumes the representation of a totality that is radically incommensurable with it’—as defined by Laclau and Mouffe (2001, p. x, emphasis in original) as part of their elaboration of Political Discourse Theory (also known as Poststructuralist Discourse Theory, henceforth PDT). This is a distinctly discursive notion of hegemony based on poststructuralist understandings of discourse as a differential but fundamentally open system of signification that is constitutive of the social world in meaning. Thus, while a hegemonic order takes on the appearance of universality and naturalness, it remains unstable and in need of constant reiteration to preserve this appearance of naturalness (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, p. xii; pp. 97–99). Any condition of hegemony then, is contingent, non-necessary, radically constructed and political—political because it depends on the exclusion of other possibilities (Laclau, 1996, p. 2). In this article, I articulate PDT with poststructuralist and postcolonial insights in International Relations (IR) as a way of theorizing an anti-foreign policy for India.

The argument in the article unfolds in the following steps: First, I turn to the post-World War I period to demonstrate how this moment may be understood as one where the liberal international order, constituted of a system of nominally equal, territorially organized, nation-states sought to establish itself as a hegemonic way of ordering the world, pushing alternatives to the periphery and circumscribing the identities of individual units. As part of this analysis, I demonstrate the consonant emergence of foreign policy as a practice intrinsic to the establishment and reiteration of the state system. Second, I take the case of the Khilafat Movement (1919–1924) in India to argue that even though alternative forms of ordering the world were pushed to the margins, they did not disappear entirely—but rather, sought to resist subjection to it by articulating alternate forms of political community. It is this counter-hegemonic attempt that I theorize as ‘anti-foreign policy’. Third, I demonstrate that the politics of the Afro-Asian Solidarity and the Third World movement via which India attempted to remake the post-War world drew upon the same ‘anti-foreign policy’ impulse but could not resist ultimate subjection to the hegemonic international. Despite its apparent ‘failure’, however, such politics remains available to us as a resource for decolonizing Indian foreign policy and IR away from its hegemonic concepts.

Hegemony: Foreign Policy

As a recent and burgeoning scholarship in international history has noted, the nation-state—bound up as it was with the discourse of European civilizational superiority and ethnic supremacism (for instance Fanon, 2001 [1969]; Nandy, 2009; Said, 2001)—was not the primary or only goal of anti-colonial movements across the world (see for instance Bose, 2019; Emiljanowicz, 2019; Gani, 2019; Getachew, 2019; Jones, 2019; Sajed, 2017, 2019; Sajed & Seidel, 2019; Veric, 2013; Wilder, 2015). Most anti-colonial activists and thinkers aimed to end imperialism and colonialism systematically, rather than simply ending colonial rule in their respective parts of the world (Gani, 2019; Getachew, 2019; Wilder, 2015). For instance, Gary Wilder has shown that anti-colonial thinkers such as Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor did not aim merely to secure the independence of Martinique and Senegal respectively—but instead sought to transform imperial France itself into a democratic federation that guaranteed self-determination to all its citizens (2015). Similarly, Adom Getachew, has demonstrated that black Anglophone colonial critics such as Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere were as much concerned with ‘world-making’—an attempt at creating a new, more equal, world order, rather than just nation-building (2019). Several strands of anti-colonial thought in India too nurtured a similarly ambivalent relationship with the idea of a nation-state (see for instance Devji, 2009b, 2012; Seth, 1999). ¹

Erez Manela argues that while there existed multiple political visions of a world after empire, Woodrow Wilson’s articulation of national self-determination as a key principle of world order in his Fourteen-Point Speech and its embodiment in the League of Nations inexorably transformed anti-colonial movements across Asia and Africa into national movements (2007). This, was primarily so, because Wilson’s articulation ‘launched the transformation of the norms and standards of international relations that established the self-determining nation-state as the only legitimate political form throughout the globe, as colonized and marginalized peoples demanded and eventually attained recognition as sovereign, independent actors in international society’ (Manela, 2007, p. 24; emphasis added). This occurred, demonstrates Manela, despite clear embedding of the principle of civilizational superiority of the West in Wilson’s principles and in the ways in which they were institutionalised within the League of Nations (2007, p. 29; also see Gani, 2019, p. 656; Vitalis, 2005, p. 169). Such a transformation of anti-imperial struggles into national ones, can therefore, be re-read as a process encapsulating the emerging hegemony of the nation-state and the international state system that made other visions of organizing the world appear absurd and fanciful.

Translating this into the terms of PDT, one could say that Wilson’s articulation of his Fourteen Points may be understood as a moment when the West as a particular social force, attempted to assume the representation of a universality that was radically incommensurable with it (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, p. x, emphasis in original). Such an articulation, as PDT notes, involves a political practice of contingently fixing meanings via the operation of a logic of equivalence (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, pp. 113–120; Nabers, 2015, p.111) involving the bringing together of various differential elements into a chain of significance such that their differences and particularities are temporarily dissolved with a particular element taking on representation of the entire equivalential chain (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, p. xiii). Wilson’s articulation of the territorial nation-state based on self-determination as being the ideal and legitimate constituent of world order, marks such an operation: it takes the particularity of the nation-state as a Eurocentric/colonial mode of organizing political community and universalizes it. ²

Another key aspect of a hegemonic discourse is that in establishing itself as the natural order of things, it starts affecting the practices of all its subjects such that they are constrained to identify with subject positions available in the given discourse (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001); they have no option but ‘to identify with a privileged signifier’ given by the hegemonic discourse (Nabers, 2015, p. 116). In the case of the international state system, this privileged signifier is the nation-state. This becomes evident when, as pointed out, despite the presence of substantial anti-colonial thought that conceptualized political community outside the scheme of reference of the nation-state, the only subject position available to them to identify with at independence was that of the nation-state.

Crucially, such an identification entails the drawing of borders between the domestic and the foreign, leading to the emergence of ‘a political practice that makes “foreign” certain events and actors’ (Campbell, 1998, p. 69). This is precisely the notion on which David Campbell’s re-theorization of foreign policy rests (1998). While Campbell does not delve into the exigencies of postcolonial states, he argues that the traditional understanding of foreign policy as ‘the external orientation of a pregiven and settled national identity’ (Campbell, 1998, p. 45) is sustained in IR owing to a ‘particular historical narrative’ (Campbell, 1998, p. 46) that traces the origins of the modern state to the Peace of Westphalia by constituting ‘a readily identifiable juncture’ at which the modern secular state could be said to have emerged in Europe (Campbell, 1998, p. 46; p. 56). ³

While poststructuralist scholars such as Campbell (1998) have criticized the Westphalian origin story for the role it plays in naturalising an order based on the notion of a multiplicity of states where ‘order’ persists domestically and anarchy internationally (among others see Ashley, 1995, p.115), those with a postcolonial bent have further argued that the Westphalian narrative embeds a deeply Eurocentric and colonial bias to IR since the narrative does not account for the ‘colonial and imperial systems [that] were being established beyond Europe’ at the same time as Westphalia (Keene, 2002, p. 97). Such an occlusion diverts from the fact that the international order supposedly established by Westphalian peace, was ‘decisively shaped by’ the denial of sovereignty to the colonized (Seth, 2011, p. 173; also see Barkawi, 2004, p. 20). Indeed, as historian Frederic Cooper notes, European powers of the time are more accurately qualified as ‘empire-states’ rather than ‘nation-states’ (2012, p. 44). As such, one could argue that decolonization, was not simply a matter of the ‘inclusion’ of the formerly colonized into a preexisting ‘international society’ (cf. Bull & Watson, 1984; Buzan & Little, 2000; Watson, 2009 among others), but instead, recognition as ‘full and legitimate members of the international system’ was contingent upon the rather impossible condition of homogenizing the domestic vis-à-vis the international, resulting in tremendous violence and pain (Abraham, 2014, p. 2).

As Sankaran Krishna has pointed out with regard to South Asia, such a remaking of ‘plural civilizations into lean, uniform, hypermasculine, and disciplined’ nation-states (1999, p. 20) had to be based on ‘exclusionary narratives of the past and univocal visions for the future’ giving rise to a seemingly endless ‘spiral of regional, state, and societal violence’ (1999, p.19). It has also resulted in a constant sense of what Krishna terms ‘postcolonial anxiety’—the attempt at forging a nation-state along the European model as ‘an attempt at replicating historical originals that are ersatz to begin with’ (1999, p. 20). Similarly, in his study examining the international dimensions of state formation in India, Itty Abraham notes that the internalization of the logic of national self-determination led to a forgetting of ‘this region’s long and polyglot histories of social inclusion, popular mobility, and cultural hybridity’ (Abraham, 2014, p. 18). The process of drawing borders between the domestic and the foreign, he argues, resulted in ‘unequal domestic political arrangements’ ‘stripping some Indian subjects of full participation in the newly formed nation-state and denying other Indian nationals the weight of state protections they had every right to expect’ (Abraham, 2014, p. 24). Specifically, Abraham argues that the impossibility of meeting the criteria of a nation-state, where a nation is unproblematically aligned with a particular territory, led India to attempt ‘to bind nation and state through territory such that there is a unique identification of a nation with a state and a territory’ (2014, pp. 15–16). Such an attempt led, in turn, to the creation of ‘insiders-without’—nationals who live beyond the state’s territorial borders (diaspora populations); and ‘outsiders-within’—non-nationals who live within recognized state borders (Abraham, 2014, p. 16), that is, members of religious ‘minorities’ particularly Muslims, who are seen to belong ‘insufficiently’ to India (Abraham, 2014, p. 16).

In terms of PDT, this process of drawing borders may be understood as the articulation of an ensemble of differential positions in a chain of equivalence vis-à-vis an antagonistic other. In India, these differential positions emerged in debates about nationalism and national self-determination that had been going on since at least the 1820s (for instance, Bayly, 2004). These debates were primarily a response to the claim by the colonizers that nationhood was a privileged status reserved for the civilized, which the colonized were explicitly denied (see for instance, Gani, 2019; McCarthy, 2009; Seth, 2011, 2013). This supposed equivocation whereby a form of political organization is apprehended as both universal, but simultaneously exclusive to Europe, in turn, may be understood in terms of Partha Chatterjee’s conceptualization of ‘the rule of colonial difference’ whereby ‘a normative proposition of supposed universal validity … is held not to apply to the colony on account of some moral deficiency in the latter’ (Chatterjee, 2012, p. 34; also Chatterjee, 1993, pp.16–18). As Ashis Nandy has argued, this generates a desire among those denied, to prove their worthiness and claim the status (2009, pp. 2–3)—another way in which the hegemonic discourse functions—thereby also accounting for the stickiness and persistence of colonial categories. Attempts at the recovery of nationhood in India, therefore, explicitly sought to also reclaim civilizational status by proving India’s similarity with the Europeans (Bose & Jalal, 2004; Jaffrelot, 2007; Sarkar, 2001; Thapar, 1989). Thus, the discourse of Hindu nationalism drew upon a colonial historiography premised on a religiously differentiated past to claim that India was an ancient Hindu civilization, which was subsequently despoiled by waves of Muslim invasions (Chacko, 2012, p. 6; Thapar, 1989). This discourse not only othered the Muslims of India as representatives of a foreign civilization that invaded and conquered the indigenous Hindus but also sought civilizational status by claiming affinity to the Europeans via a shared ‘Aryan’ ancestry (Birkvad, 2020; Figueira, 2012; Jaffrelot, 2007). A counter-discourse among the Muslim elite, in turn, drew upon the same colonial historiography to claim that the Muslims of India were foreigners and thus formed a distinct nation that deserved its own homeland (Asif, 2016; Jalal, 2002).

In contrast to these exclusive nationalisms, the most prominent discourse of the Indian National Congress (INC), under the leadership of Nehru and Gandhi, who expressed a keen awareness of the colonial and racist underpinnings of the concept of nationhood (Devji, 2012; Majeed, 2015; Nandy, 2009), sought to fashion an ‘inter-religious’ or syncretic understanding of Indian nationhood (Roy, 2007; Varshney, 1993). I say ‘most prominent’ here since the INC functioned as a big tent that allowed for the expression of several different ideas of nationhood and community within itself (Varshney, 1993). Yet even this attempt at recasting nationalism, appeared to have been unable to escape the exclusivist ideas embedded in it, with its reliance on a similar historiography as the religiously informed nationalisms (Asif, 2016; Jalal, 2002), and a largely Hindu symbolism (Abraham, 2014; Vanaik, 2017). Thus, even this attempt at refashioning nationalism in anti-colonial and more inclusive terms, it could be argued, was largely unable to escape the coloniality of nationhood (Abraham, 2014).

Taken together, thus, this ensemble of differential identities arguably came together as the majority versus the minorities; autochthonous versus outsiders; tolerant versus prejudiced; spiritual versus fanatical; modern versus traditional; scientific versus religious and so on. ⁴ In this chain of equivalence, it is the male, upper-caste Hindu who ends up taking on the representation of the national universality, vis-à-vis the Indian Muslim who becomes the representative of the antagonistic other, even though other ethnic and cultural minorities also form a part of it. This is schematically demonstrated in Figure 1.

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Figure 1.

Schematic Description of the Chains of Equivalence and Difference Constituting Indian National Identity.

While the border is supposed to demarcate the domestic from the external, the operation of chains of equivalence and difference also ends up creating an uneven internal space with the border crisscrossing the domestic itself (on this also see Abraham, 2014, p. 17; Campbell, 1998, pp. 70–71). As Campbell notes, ‘inscribing domestic society, arriving at a representation of the state involves … a double exclusion. The interpretations of domestic society resistant to its inscription must be excluded from the internal realm’ (Campbell, 1998, p. 71).… ‘The outcome of this is that boundaries are constructed, spaces demarcated, standards of legitimacy incorporated, interpretations of history privileged, and alternatives marginalized’ (Campbell, 1998, p. 75). The constraining of the self to the subject position of the nation-state is, therefore, not a simple process, but involves the disciplining of the diversity, ambiguity and openness of the self. Reconceptualizing this in terms of PDT then, foreign policy may be understood as the process of the articulation of a chain of equivalence between diverse elements constituting the domestic vis-à-vis antagonistic others who are externalized. Thus understood, foreign policy is essential to the reiteration of states and the hegemonic international state system of which they are a part. The need for constant reiteration through foreign policy arises since the hegemonic formation is based on the exclusion of other possibilities and therefore, remains vulnerable to them. In the next section, I theorize ‘anti-foreign policy’ as the disarticulation of the chain of equivalence of foreign policy that sustains the state and the state system and illustrate this process through the case study of the Khilafat Movement that took place in India towards the end of the First World War.

Counter-hegemony: Anti-foreign Policy

The previous section has sketched out how the international state system and the states that are its constituent units emerged as hegemonic forms of organizing political community, marginalizing alternative formations as absurd, unthinkable and unrealizable. In doing so, they also perpetrated deep violence by creating exclusions domestically and externally through the creation of chains of equivalence and differentiation. In the case of India, it was the particular identity of the upper-caste Hindu male, that took on the representation of a totality of the national identity that was radically incommensurate with it, while it was Muslims primarily who were demarcated as the antagonistic others in reference to whom the chain of equivalence took its signification. In this section, I theorize anti-foreign policy as the opposite process—a counter-hegemonic attempt to undo the borders created by foreign policy via the disarticulation of the chains of equivalence through which foreign policy operates. I now turn to the discourse of the Khilafat movement (1919–1924) to illustrate my argument.

A key aspect of PDT is that hegemony is politically articulated—and disarticulated. Just as chains of equivalence help constitute the hegemonic formation, the logic of difference serves to disarticulate it by highlighting the particularity of the elements in a chain of equivalence. Such disarticulation, by itself, however, is simply anti-hegemonic—it increases the complexity of the social space, multiplying forms of plurality and displacing the frontier of antagonism to the periphery of the social (Laclau, 1996, p. 38; Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, pp. 116–117). A counter-hegemonic move, on the other hand, involves a further articulation of a new antagonistic frontier via a new chain of equivalence (Laclau, 1996, p. 38; Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, pp. 116–117). This is precisely what anti-foreign policy may be conceptualized as vis-à-vis the state and state system as hegemonic formations.

As noted previously, in India, resistance to colonialism was not linked exclusively to nationalism. Even as nationalist discourses ended up reiterating colonial ideas, much of the anticolonial struggle either actively resisted the very idea of a nation-state, or at the very least displayed an indifference towards it. For instance, Faisal Devji has demonstrated that contrary to popular reconstructions of the event as a nationalist struggle, the 1857 mutiny among the troops of the East India Company in India, represented what could be termed as ‘the struggle of an empire against a nation rather than the reverse’ (Devji, 2009b, p. 413). He argues that in this instance the mutineers were protesting what they saw as the homogenizing or nationalizing effect of company rule, and that the revolt constituted ‘a refusal to subordinate their caste and religious distinctions to some undifferentiated notion of being Indian’ (Devji, 2009b, p. 413).

In a similar manner, Sanjay Seth shows that the early politics of the INC in the period 1870–1905—often classified as a politics of ‘moderate nationalism’—was not in fact aimed at the institution of a nation-state for India (Seth, 1999). The 1907–1921 Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, often understood in terms of economic nationalism, too was equally aimed at the forging of a knowledge-based internationalism that side-stepped the British Empire (Manjapra, 2012). Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s influential interventions in the anti-colonial struggle too proceeded from a sense of unease with the framework of a majoritarian nation-state for India and his politics can be understood from the perspective of a revival of what Devji terms the imperial dimensions of Indian anti-colonialism—the aim to reform and democratize the British Empire from within rather than seeking to separate from it (2012). Specifically, to explicate my notion of ‘anti-foreign policy’, I turn now to the Khilafat Movement (1919–1924), often considered to be the first mass anti-colonial movement in India, but one that had as its aim distinctly non-national aim of preventing the impending dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire by the allies, and the restoration of the Caliphate in Turkey in the aftermath of the World War I (Devji, 2009a).

The Khilafat Movement has been approached by historians primarily as a puzzle and an anomaly within the broader scheme of the anti-colonial movement—a quixotic quest, out of step with the times, and symbolizing the lack of modernity—of Indians in general, and Muslims in particular. The literature positions it, either as a strategic response to national needs—whether in terms of forging Hindu-Muslim unity (Minault, 1982), or of bringing Muslims into the mainstream of the national movement (Ahmad & Butt, 2012; Qureshi, 1999); an initiator of mass politics in India, and/or as a pre-cursor to the movement for the struggle for Pakistan (Ahmad & Butt, 2012). Exceptions include Faisal Devji, who identifies the movement as a nascent form of foreign policy, with Islam providing India the tools to have a greater say in world affairs (2009a), and more recently Faridah Zaman, who in exploring the role played by the Khilafat Delegation in Europe, argues that the movement was a manifestation of the liminality of the inter-war years when different possibilities of the organization of world politics were not yet settled (2024, p. 236). I extend this argument further to make the case that the Khilafat Movement’s aim to preserve the Caliphate as part of a secure Ottoman Empire, was a direct attempt at preventing the emergence of a liberal world order based on the principle of national self-determination as articulated by Woodrow Wilson—as well as a proposal for an alternative way of ordering the world. It did so, as I explicate below, by attempting to disarticulate the borders instituted by the emergent hegemony of the liberal international, while also articulating a counter-hegemony by attempting to draw the colonized into a relation of equivalence against the colonizers. At this point, it is also important to note that the Khilafat was not simply an elite initiative, but had a huge support base, with everyday people contributing materially (in terms of money, in kind, and via labour) to the effort (for instance see Ahmad & Butt, 2012, p. 16; Aydin, 2017, p. 126)

The first point to note is that by claiming the political right to have a say in an issue far beyond the borders of India, the movement undid the principle of the territorially based nation-state as a container of political action and aspiration, and thereby, made the autochthonous/outsider binary irrelevant. As Faridah Zaman notes, ‘the very undertaking of the burden of defending the Ottoman Caliphate from destruction … was already an assertion that Indian Muslims shared in a diffuse political and religious authority, and were entitled to help shape the meaning and future of this institution’ (2024, p. 233).

An indication that the movement was pushing back against the prevailing hegemony is evident in the fact that contemporary observers frequently termed it as anachronistic, and sometimes, even anarchic (for instance in Gandhi, 1999, pp. 349–351; also Zaman, 2024, p. 260). In turn, the proponents of the Khilafat asserted that their defence of the Caliphate was very much a response to contemporary events, and was therefore not only thoroughly modern, but also a moral and rational choice given the options. For instance, Gandhi, who is considered instrumental in turning the Khilafat Movement into a mass movement, notes that:

It is just my sense of moral responsibilities which has made me take up the Khilafat question and to identify myself entirely with the Mahomedans. It is perfectly true that I am assisting and countenancing the union between Hindus and Muslims, but certainly not with ‘a view of embarrassing England and the Allied Powers in the matter of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire’. I hold it as true that if the Indian Mussalmans have a cause that is just and is supported by scriptural authority, then for the Hindus not to support them to the utmost would be a cowardly breach of brotherhood and they would forfeit all claim to consideration from their Mahomedan countrymen. As a public-server therefore, I would be unworthy of the position I claim, if I did not support Indian Mussalmans in their struggle to maintain the Khilafat in accordance with their religious belief. (1999, pp. 349–351)

Gandhi then goes on to speak of the broader anti-colonial benefits of the Hindus being involved in such a counter-intuitive ‘Muslim cause’ as enabling a coalition of anti-colonial people even outside of India (1999, pp. 349–351). In Gandhi’s view, therefore, support for a religiously oriented cause was no reason to call it anarchic—even if it ran counter to the secular sensibilities embedded in the liberal international. Rather, in presenting the movement as anti-colonial and anti-imperial, proponents argued that it was very much of its time.

As opposed to the charge of anachronism and backwardness thus, the continued existence of the Caliphate as part of a secure Ottoman Empire was instead re-presented as a modern-day anti-imperial question. Proponents of the movement argued that, it was, in fact, the proposed post-war liberal international order, based on the division of the world into nation-states that were a re-packaging of the ‘same old factors’ of imperialistic and financial exploitation ‘that have already destroyed the freedom and culture of so large a portion of the non-European world’ (Muhammad Ali in Abbas, 1923, pp. 248–249; also Zaman, 2024, p. 252).

‘India, as well as the Muslim world’, they argued, is not willing that the last of the Islamic States, constituting the sole symbol of the temporal tradition of Islam shall pass from the world, as one more victim of the insatiable lust of European aggrandizement. (Muhammad Ali in Abbas, 1923, pp. 248–249)

In another instance of contesting the charge of being ‘unmodern’, the Khilafatists also took head-on the accusation that they were supporting a despotic regime that was bent on ‘murdering its subjects’ (the reference here is to the Armenian genocide) and in the process also resisting claims for separate statehood for the constituent nationalities of the Ottoman Empire (Abbas, 1923, p. 157). Mohammad Ali Jauhar, a key figure in the Khilafat Movement, argued instead that the movement supported ‘full autonomy and right of free development of all non-Turkish races within the Turkish Empire as embodied in the Fourteen Points of President Wilson’ and ‘it was Britain, instead, that pursued the “vivisection of Syrians”, the mandates over Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia, and the continued protectorate over Egypt, despite the latter’s ‘unanimous desire for independence’ (Abbas, 1923, pp. 156–157). Ali further pointed out while the League’s Mandate System was sold as a form of benign tutelage that would prepare the former territories of the German and Ottoman Empires for independence, ‘India, a land that had enjoyed 150 years of such benevolent tutelage, was still not deemed ready for self-determination’ (Ali, 1920a). The Mandate System, that Ali refers to here allowed for territories of the defeated powers (the Ottoman Empire and Germany) to be placed under the supervision of Allied powers (primarily Britain and France) who as trustees to the League were to oversee their transformation from ‘backward’ to ‘modern’ and thus, in principle, capable for self-governance and sovereignty (Anghie, 2006, pp. 746–747). As legal theorist Antony Anghie has noted, however, this supposedly benign intervention, made the mandate territories accessible to European intervention, even as ‘the interior realm of Western states (and of course of their colonies) was immune from international scrutiny by the League’ (2006, p. 747). This, in turn, meant that the sovereignty to be enjoyed by non-European states was to be qualitatively different from that of European nations and ‘created in a way that could continue to serve Western interests’(Anghie, 2006). Ali’s pronouncements demonstrate that the Khilafatists were acutely aware of this distinction and the double standards involved in offering a pathway to self-determination to the territories of the Ottoman Empire, while leaving British and French colonial interests untouched.

The Khilafat Movement’s publications noted that it ‘approached the question of the future of the Turkish Empire not as a Turkish or an Arab question, but as a Muslim question’ and an anti-colonial question, that while on the one hand

the preservation of the temporal power of the Khalifa and the Khalifa’s wardenship of the Holy Places of Islam was one of the essential injunctions of the Muslim faith, on the other hand the preservation of a non-European Empire was essential for the dignity of the colonised. (Ali, 1920b, p. 7, emphasis added)

In doing so, the members of the movement harked back to the early nineteenth century when territorial control was not a defining element of sovereignty (see for instance Benton, 2010, pp. 2–3) and overlapping sovereign claims were commonplace. As a result, racialized Muslims and other colonized often turned to the intercession of the Ottoman Sultan for the preservation of their rights (however unsuccessfully) within various European empires (see Aydin, 2017, pp. 37–64).

Moreover, as Cemil Aydin has argued, the embracing of the Caliphate by Indians was largely for cosmopolitan and modernist reasons: the Ottoman Empire and its capital Istanbul, was, for many an embodiment of inclusivity, women’s rights in Islam, Republicanism, racial equality and tolerance of the other—with the Ottoman Empire having taken successive reforms to modernize itself (Aydin, 2017). Indeed, to the Khilafatists and many others in the so-called ‘Muslim World’, the Caliphate served as an alternate, legitimate and thoroughly modern way of organizing political community as opposed to the nation-state that was instead apprehended as embodying colonialism (see for instance Chen, 2014; Gani, 2019).

The claim of the Caliphate as being a modern institution can, in turn, be traced back to the writings of Muslim reformists such as Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida, Muhammad Iqbal and others who identified the concepts of the Islamic golden age and independent human reasoning (ijtihad) as the foundation for imagining new transnationalism based on a symbiosis between Islam and the East (see for instance Aydin, 2017; Chen, 2014, p. 27). Referring to the ‘golden age’, Sulaiman Nadwi, a member of the Khilafat Delegation to Europe, described the era of the Rashidun (the Rightly Guided) as the period when Islam was ‘truly a Commonwealth, and the Khalifa its elected Chief and Leader’ and that this was the model to which the caliphate aspired to: the ‘Islamic Brotherhood is a Republic and the most determined advocate of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’, he argued (Nadwi, 1883 [1953], pp. vi–ix). Mohammad Ali stated that the caliph was the ‘Amir-ul-Mumineen’; he commands Muslims ‘within the law of Islam and on behalf of God. He does not arrogate to himself a kingly function’. The doctrine of the Khilafat was, accordingly, ‘the doctrine of a Republic’, and thus, ‘alone among the Sovereigns of the world the one whose Coronation ceremony does not take place in a palace is the Khalifa’ (George & Ali, 1920, pp. 14–15). The Caliphate as an institution, further embodied a world of non-territorially organized polities and overlapping sovereignties and solidarities.

On the whole, the proponents of the Khilafat

identified the concerns of Muslims and other colonised as similar, and found a solution in a return to the intra-Asian relations torn asunder by colonialism. Collectively, they sought to ‘vitalize Islamic’ and ‘Eastern’ connections as the basis for achieving social progress as well as for establishing a new politics that mirrored past eras of greatness. (Chen, 2014, p. 26)

Responses to questions of relevance and anachronism by proponents of the Khilafat, thus offer an insight into the ways in which they sought to inscribe the liberal international as colonial and present their cause as an anti-colonial one—thus disarticulating the national/foreign frontier and instead articulating a colonial/anti-colonial boundary. In doing so they also articulated nation-state as a colonial technology that served to divide communities and circumscribe political obligation to the national community. The newly articulated chain of equivalence may be depicted in Figure 2.

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Figure 2.

Schematic Description of the Chains of Equivalence and Difference Constituted by the Khilafat Movement.

What we see in the effort of the Khilafat movement, therefore, is not just an attempt to disarticulate the chain of equivalence posed by various Indian national movements in which the particular identity of the upper-caste Hindu male took on the representation of a totality that was radically incommensurate with it, while othering the Muslims of India as antagonistic others, it articulated a new chain of equivalence that brought Hindus and Muslims together with other colonized vis-à-vis the colonizers. In this sense, it also undid the politics of majority and minority to which much of Indian nationalist thought came to be constrained. ⁵ The form of the Caliphate, also offered an alternative vision of global order that imagined a ‘return’ to ‘Eastern’ connections as a way of breaking the stranglehold of the nation-state. It is thus an instance of anti-foreign policy as conceptualized at the beginning of this section.

Conclusion: Afterlives of Anti-Foreign Policy

Even though the Ottoman Caliphate ended up being abolished by a majority vote in the Turkish parliament in 1924 (Aydin, 2017, p. 130), and the Turks led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, seemed to have endorsed the model of the nation-state, their decision did not settle the question once and for all (Aydin, 2017, pp. 130–132). In fact, anti-colonial movements across the world continued to grapple with the question of nation-hood, as much as they contended with colonialism itself (see for instance Emiljanowicz, 2019; Gani, 2019; Sajed, 2017, 2019). One could, in fact, argue that this question continued to concern the leaders of nascent postcolonial states, even in the aftermath of independence and emergence on the world stage as nation-states in their own right (for instance Getachew, 2019). In the case of India particularly, this is evident in the form of internationalism independent India nation pursued under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru.

In attempting to disarticulate the borders being drawn by the hegemonic international and the national state, the Khilafat Movement pursued a form of anti-foreign policy that opened an alternate geography of Islam as a field for social, cultural and political relations for India. I argue that anticolonial Islamic thought and specifically the legacy of the much-reviled Khilafat Movement played an important role in India’s internationalist positions—even though these were now inflected with secularism. Specifically, the visions of the beyond-the-borders transnational community imagined by the Khilafatists were not entirely done away with. Rather, Nehru subtly co-opted the counter-hegemonic politics and rhetoric of the Khilafat and transformed it into an articulation of Third World and Asia–Africa solidarity.

This is evident in the conspicuous similarities between the structure and rhetoric of the Khilafat and Asia–Africa solidarity movements. Both movements sought to create solidarities and political communities on the basis of pre-colonial relations that existed between the nations of the East and which were said to be sundered by colonialism (see for instance Jansen, 1966, p. 13), both involved a turn to the civilization and culture of the non-Western world as a basis of articulating new modernity, and involved bringing the colonized together to overthrow colonial domination.

Nevertheless, in contrast to the Khilafat attempt to build a political community by undoing the nation-state, Nehru’s vision tended, ultimately, to centre the nation-state. This closure happened gradually—while the 1947 and 1949 Asia Relations Conferences held in Delhi tended to have expansive invitees including movements and peoples, by the time of the 1955 Bandung Conference, the list of invitees was explicitly limited to independent nation-states (Jansen, 1966, pp. 13–16; also see Abraham, 2008). This suggests that while India’s attempt to remake the post-War world in the form of Asia–Africa solidarity drew upon the same ‘anti-foreign policy’ impulse as the Khilafat movement, it could not resist subjection to the hegemonic international. Despite its apparent ‘failure’, however, the politics of anti-foreign policy as exemplified by the Khilafat remains available to us as a resource for decolonizing (Indian) foreign policy and IR away from its hegemonic concepts.