Remnants of the Raj, India, non-alignment, economic independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, colonialism, foreign policy
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Ukraine, following hard on the heels of his controversial embrace of Vladimir Putin in Moscow, reminded the world of India’s curious ability to work with both sides of a major conflict and remain on friendly terms with both. The same could be arguably said about India maintaining close relations with Israel during the Gaza conflict while being one of a handful of countries to maintain an embassy in the Palestinian capital of Ramallah.
Foreign policy is arguably one of the foremost examples of India’s assertion of its independence and sovereignty. Indians tend not to dwell on their country’s colonial past. We have long refused, by and large, to hold any grudge against the United Kingdom for 200 years of imperial enslavement, plunder, and exploitation. But Indians’ equanimity about the past does not annul the depredations of the British Raj, just as it does not annul the reality that, in the almost eight decades since Independence, a sweeping array of India’s choices has emanated from her harrowing colonial experience.
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Foremost among these choices was free India’s foreign policy, whose helmsman was our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Since the days of the freedom struggle, he had drafted resolutions on international affairs for the annual sessions of the Indian National Congress, the principal vehicle of India’s anti-colonial crusade.
Enjoying an unchallenged authority as the crafter and enunciator of foreign policy, he carried this on into his prime ministership of seventeen years, serving throughout as the Minister for External Affairs.
Having had foreigners speak for India in global councils, with an Englishman even leading India’s delegation to the League of Nations, Nehru was determined that India alone would speak for itself in the world.
“What does independence consist of?” he once mused aloud in the Constituent Assembly of India, before promptly answering that “[I]t consists fundamentally and basically of foreign relations. That is the test of independence. All else is local autonomy.” Nehru’s foreign policy radiated from India’s anti-colonial quest for democracy, human rights, and self-determination.
Nehru’s India played a prominent role in building up an inchoate United Nations and devising a globally accepted definition of human rights.
For instance, at the United Nations Commission of Human Rights in 1947–1948, the only other woman delegate alongside Eleanor Roosevelt was the Indian feminist and freedom fighter Dr Hansa Mehta, who led the charge in supplanting the term “men” with “human beings” in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which proclaims that “All human beings are born free and equal.”
Simultaneously, Nehru evolved the doctrine with which his foreign policy became synonymous: ‘non-alignment’. Anchored in five principles he wished to see followed in world affairs — respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality, and peaceful coexistence — non-alignment, starting from the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference of 1955, blossomed into an international movement of developing, postcolonial countries that were determined to avoid entanglement in the Cold War.
It was a direct legacy of the colonial experience. Because today there are no longer two superpowers to be non-aligned between, and India herself has graduated from non-alignment to multi-alignment, it might be argued that Nehru’s vision is no more relevant in the 21st century.
But in its essence, non-alignment was about sovereign autonomy; it ensured that India and other newly-independent Afro-Asian nations could take their own positions, their voices unmuffled by any neo-colonial diktats; the Nehruvian vision was about guarding their independence and self-respect against potential encroachments on their sovereignty.
Indians can never afford to forget the shambles in which we found our country at Independence. What had once been one of the world’s richest and most industrialised economies, accounting for twenty-seven percent of global GDP in 1700, was reduced by British despotism and despoiling to one of the poorest, most backward, and illiterate societies on earth by 1947.
As a result India’s economic policies for a long time also reflected its anti-colonialism. The instinctive Indian reaction to colonial commercial exploitation was to rejected its assumptions and practices.
The struggle for freedom from colonial rule involved overthrowing both foreign rulers and foreign capitalists. Because of colonialism, the luminaries of Indian nationalism associated capitalism with slavery: the fact that the East India Company came to trade, but stayed on to rule, made our leaders suspicious of every foreigner with a briefcase, seeing him as the thin-end of a neo-imperial wedge.
Thus, instead of integrating India into the global capitalist system — as a few postcolonial countries, like Singapore, so effectively did — free India’s founders decided that the political independence they had fought for could only be guaranteed through economic independence.
In 1944, a cohort of leading industrialists demanded governmental monopoly in such crucial sectors as energy, infrastructure, and transport. So self-reliance became our economic credo, the protectionist barriers went up, and India spent forty-five years with bureaucrats rather than businessmen ruling the “commanding heights of the economy”, subsidising unproductivity, regulating stagnation, and trying to distribute poverty.
Our current economic growth and global visibility is a result of new choices made after the initial visceral rejection of British colonialism and its methods. When my book ‘An Era of Darkness’ hit bookstores in India in 2016, British Prime Minister Theresa May was just days away from a visit to seek Indian investment; in 2022, India overtook the United Kingdom to become the world’s fifth-largest economy. As I have often argued: You need not seek revenge upon history. History is its own revenge.
India also remains beleaguered by regressive, colonial-era laws. While instituting an Indian Penal Code (IPC) in 1863, which endured till 2023, the British saddled India with archaic prejudices they have long abandoned at home but which remain, for the most part, entrenched in India, causing untold misery to millions.
Among other things — and these are only two examples — the IPC, drafted by British imperialists in the mid-19th century, criminalised homosexuality, and enacted the draconian offence of ‘sedition’ which, in the previous decade of BJP rule in India, has not even spared university students shouting slogans, all thanks to the loose, colonially-motivated wording of the law.
While the Supreme Court of India decriminalised homosexuality in 2018 following an interminable legal battle, it refused — just last year — to recognise the right to marry of members of the LGBTQIA+ community.
As for sedition, though the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government claims to have removed it by replacing the IPC with a new, ostensibly decolonised criminal code, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the offence of sedition simply seems to have slipped on another mask — that of the stringently punishable ‘subversive activities’.
The influence of colonial-era laws is all-too-visible in policing practices, which emerge from a culture of oppression rather than of community protection.
As we in India, clutching on to our founders’ vision, strove to clamber out of the socio-economic destitution into which the British Raj had immersed us, we realised that one of the lessons you learn from history is that history sometimes teaches the wrong lessons.
Our post-colonial rulers often wield the colonisers’ batons of control and repression, deploying them against their own citizenry. In order to be truly free, we must decolonise our practices, laws, and attitudes; we must also never be afraid to recognise that a policy or system — either a colonial vestige or an anti-colonial instrument — is not working for us. After all, real freedom and decoloniality are reflected in our capacity to adapt, discard, and innovate in pursuit of a future that reflects our own vision, not the shadows of our past.
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