This special section responds to the call for renewed attention to the international implications of decolonization with a particular focus on India and the South Asia region. The section offers insights into historical continuities and ruptures in Indian internationalism, interrogating divides between colonial and postcolonial as well as between national and international. In turn, it de-centres histories of global order-making in the twentieth century, building on the work of a growing chorus of international historians, political scientists, and international relations scholars seeking alternative visions of the international in an increasingly multipolar world order. In challenging the binary rupture of India's international outlook in the pre-and post-independence period, this special section forces us to reconsider the temporal landscape of India's decolonisation moment. Through an avowedly international outlook, many of the papers introduce new spaces, connections, and entanglements through which Indian independence was realised, and in turn through which the scales of the international can be scrutinised. This brief introduction introduces the papers, teasing out the wider themes that link them, and their connections with the broader purposes of the special section itself.
In January 1950, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Liaquat Ali Khan, seeking a joint declaration of a No War Pact by the governments of India and Pakistan. The two prime ministers undertook a lengthy correspondence on this subject, spanning a year that saw rising levels of resentment and hostility between the two countries. Yet, as the inter-dominion correspondence on the No War declaration during this period shows, neither government was actually predisposed to take a belligerent position and critically engaged with the possibility of signing a declaration that renounced the use of war. As I hope to show through my discussion of the 'No War Pact' correspondence, relations between India and Pakistan were not necessarily confined to hostile exchanges, and both governments also repeatedly engaged with each other to attempt to find spaces of agreement and compromise. Although much of the existing literature on India-Pakistan relations characterizes it as locked in acrimony and conflict, which arose from the bitterness of partition, a closer scrutiny reveals a more nuanced picture. Attempts at cooperation and dialogue between the two governments-and the rationale for undertaking them-complicate our understanding of a relationship apparently limited to instinctive antagonism, and help in creating a more rounded picture of the IndiaPakistan dynamic. *
This chapter argues that the decision to retain the institutional wisdom of the old External Affairs Department, as well as its predecessors, was taken quite deliberately, with a clear understanding of the problems this posed, as well as the advantages. The author argues that the arguments for retaining this structure were often advanced most persuasively by those who had the highest stakes in its continuance: bureaucrats and officials of the Indian Civil Service. These institutional memories continued to shape the foundational assumptions about both the conduct, as well as content, of Indian foreign policy, well after the transfer of power. Finally, it is argued, it is important to differentiate the various strands of political thought that went into constituting the often monolithically understood ‘Nehruvian foreign policy’: this was constructed by a variety of officials, politicians, and political lobbies who frequently differed with Nehru on the best approach to India’s foreign policy.
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