India’s Foreign Policy: Nehru’s Non-Alignment to Modi’s Multi-Alignment

Published : Apr 08, 2025 13:51 IST - 8 MINS READ I have just been reading three books about the initial long decade of our Independence: JNU Professor Emeritus Aditya Mukherjee’s Nehru’s India: Past, Present and Future; Yale-NUS lecturer Swapna Kona Nayudu’s The Nehru Years: An International History of Indian Non-Alignment; and Australian scholar Andrea Benvenuti’s Nehru’s Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy, and comparing our foreign policy when we were a newly independent sovereign nation with that 75 years later in the time of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar. On the outbreak of the Korean War on June 25, 1950, India’s role grew even though Nehru held the rather “sombre” view that “our opportunities and our power to influence events are very much limited”. Leader of the Non-Aligned Movement Although Nehru’s India was flayed on all sides through 1950-52 for continuously advocating peace—with the belligerent parties variously describing India as “a beggar in a bumper year, which has decided to live off its two masters, the United States of America and Britain” ; the “parent of evil” ; being at best “dreamers and idealists” and at worst “instruments of horrible American policy” ; and an “anti-Indian bias was pervasive within the US at this juncture”—Nehru” stood up to this onslaught, “insisting that India follow what he considered ‘the right path’, that of not appeasing either side”. While much of the rest of the world is rising against the dismantling of the international economic order to the detriment of all world economies, India’s US policy is marked by abject concentration on the Prime Minister, Trump’s “very good friend”.