7 - India

Summary

India’s foreign policy in the regional Asian Cold War mainly dealth with the territorial disagreement with its two largest neighbors. The country fought three wars with Pakistan over Kashmir and Bangladesh, and one with China over Himalayan borders. The four conflicts between 1947 and 1971 and the rapprochement between its two hostile neighbors in the 1960s forced India to forego one after another of its foundational principles: the pursuit of a policy of peace, the renunciation of a large standing army and nuclear weapons, and the elevation of internationalism over its own national interests. In international politics, Delhi also gave up its equidistance to Washington and Moscow by signing a Friendship Treaty with the Soviet Union in 1971 and by recognizing communist North Vietnam in 1972. While India in the early 1950s had enjoyed much public admiration in the Socialist Camp, the Free World, and the decolonizing Global South for its principled foreign policy and internal political system, it re-emerged in the 1970s as an internationally isolated giant with its democracy in tatters and its domestic body politic frayed.