India’s tortuous stand on the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict reveals a fascinating portrait of the recent evolution of its foreign policy. For decades after Independence, India’s approach to the world was guided by its historical experience of western colonialism. After 200 years of a foreign country speaking for it on the world stage, newly-independent Indians, led by the fiercely anti-colonial Jawaharlal Nehru, were not willing to surrender their freedom to make their own decisions by joining either alliance in the Cold War. “Strategic autonomy” thus became an obsession, leading to the birth of “non-alignment”, or equidistance between the superpowers.
It was a complicated stance. As a leading voice for decolonisation, Indian moralism against imperialism and apartheid often manifested itself as anti-westernism, and indeed on such matters it often found itself ranged alongside the USSR and against the West, even while the country’s steadfast adherence to democracy and diversity at home endeared it to liberals in the West.
When the United Nations voted in 1947 to partition the former British Mandate Territory of Palestine into two states, Israel and Palestine, India voted against. As the victim of a British-driven partition of its own territory to favour a religious minority (when Pakistan was carved out of India’s stooped shoulders by the departing imperial power), it had no desire to acquiesce in another partition to create a Jewish state. India argued for a single secular state for both Jews and Arabs in Palestine, much like the state it had established for itself. It was, however, outvoted on the matter.
