Asia Program
Policy Brief
May 4, 2010
Summary: India is in many re-
spects the world’s most globalized
society, having both absorbed and
exported traditions and ideas over
the centuries. This dynamic has also
given Indian society an exceptional
level of continuity. Consequently,
India continues to live its past as it
grapples with the responsibilities
and challenges of its future.
The divide in India’s foreign policy
between globalization and insular-
ity is accentuated by its democratic
politics, with Lord Curzon’s expan-
sionistic vision of India’s interna-
tional presence in competition with
the inward-looking non-alignment
associated with Nehru. While there
is a broad consensus on issues such
as terrorism and India’s presence in
multilateral institutions, the contest
between these two visions will
continue to define how India sees its
place in the world.
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Understanding the Duality in Indian Strategic
Thinking
by Manvendra Singh1
A security seminar involving Indians
and Chinese should, logically, focus on
borders, territory, war, and peace. But at
the end of a security seminar in Beijing
a couple of years ago, a colonel from the
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) asked
a question that went completely against
the grain of proceedings. He inquired,
with genuine concern, about how India
had globalized as a society and economy,
and yet kept its cultural moorings intact.
While it can be debated whether the
concern expressed by the PLA colonel
delved into China’s condition as much as
it probed India’s, there was clearly more
than neighborly envy in the question.
India and Bharat
Analyzed dispassionately and historically,
India could quite conceivably be thought
of as the most globalized society in the
world. The country has been in the busi-
ness of globalization for more millennia
than much of the world has been inhab-
ited. In economic terms, it boasts a very
long history of trade with Mesopotamia,
eastern Africa, the Mediterranean, and
East Asia. That is an impressively large
footprint by any standards in any era.
What, however, is as extraordinary is the
1
Manvendra Singh is editor of the Defence & Security Alert, and formerly a member of the Indian Parliament. The views expressed
here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
global movement of thoughts and ideas
from and through India. It is from this
essential fact that an understanding of
India begins. In parts of the country,
people like to believe that the first Chris-
tian proselytizer arriving on Indian shores
was a contemporary of Jesus, while the
first Muslims came during the lifetime
of the Prophet (by which time, of course,
there was already a thriving Indian Jewish
community).
The idea of India existed long before
geographical boundaries and centralized
governance appeared to give it its
structure and physical contours.
Conceptually in existence prior to the
consolidation of political power, India
and its civilization are rooted in ideas and
the perpetual quest for knowledge. India
is unique among countries in that it was
not created by a family, a feudal authority,
a faith, or a war. Despite many repeated
attempts to change the nature of India,
the strength of its ideas and thoughts
have allowed it to experience a continu-
ity that is also exceptional. A 21st century
visitor to the town of Varanasi, for
example, would describe the experience
in a language not dissimilar to that used
by Chinese pilgrims centuries earlier.
Asia Program
Policy Brief
India continues to live its past as it grapples with the responsi-
bilities and challenges of the future.
It is this duality that poses the greatest challenge to understand-
ing India. The country and its people are divided between those
completely globalized in thought and response, and those who
continue to carry the past with them. Commentators have long
described the two groups, both inhabiting the same geographi-
cal space, as India and Bharat. Bharat is the traditional historical
name for what constituted India in the era when it lacked both
political unity and exact boundaries.
The essential psychological contest within India, therefore, is
between its globalized and insular parts. What is worrisome,
though, is that the distance between the two groups is ever
increasing. While the purpose of democratic practices is to bring
unity and consensus to decision-making, the very exercise of
democracy in India also shows up differences. Indian politics
and policymaking is replete with examples that underline this
fact. This struggle for the soul of India gets manifested in the
functioning of the state.
Curzonians and Nehruvians
If there are two individuals who best represent the competing
visions of India’s position in the world, they would be India’s
first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the former British
viceroy, Lord George Nathaniel Curzon. Some might contest
these choices, but the philosophical influences of the two remain
evident even today.
The vision of Lord Curzon, who represents the “expansionist”
vision, was best captured in his seminal 1907 Romanes lecture,
entitled “Frontiers.” From his concept of India arose an effort
—still underway—to define what constituted India’s natural
space. In his exposition on frontiers, Curzon set the benchmark
fairly high, arguing that the Indian political footprint should be
covering more space than it had for many centuries. In indepen-
dent India, his strain of thinking has influenced how the state
has worked to enforce its boundaries.
In the foreword to his 1977 book Pakistan’s Western Borderlands,
which discusses the same area making headlines today, the emi-
nent historian Ainslie Embree captured this Curzonian perspec-
tive. He argued that it was futile to have assumed that Indian
interests in Afghanistan would wane after independence; in fact,
they were as deep as during the British colonial period.
In contrast, Nehru, despite his Western civilizational ethos,
elucidated a policy that pulled India from its inherently global-
ized form of thinking and clubbed it with a set of insecure and
inward-looking countries. This was best reflected in the creation
of the Non-Aligned Movement. India’s natural interests in a
flexible foreign policy were jettisoned in favor of membership
of a club that believed in the virtues of poverty. Moralizing
became the mantra of governance. This strain is still evident in
India’s policymaking and politics today, in some ways more than
the expansionist view. The contest between the Curzonian and
Nehruvian visions produces the intellectual questions that today
confront the Indian state and its society.
Finding a consensus
As with almost every other democracy, there are some aspects
of policy that unite the two schools. One particularly promi-
nent issue is India’s presence at the global level. Despite India’s
emergence in recent years, there is a continuing disquiet about
multilateral agreements and arrangements. The Curzonians and
Nehruvians share the belief that the major multilateral arrange-
ments and institutions arose out of political maneuvering in an
age when India was supine and vulnerable.
Another issue that concerns most Indians is the question of
terrorism, in its various manifestations across the country. This
may be the single most important issue confronting Indian
policymakers and the government. Indians believe that their
country is the one most often in the crosshairs of terrorists,
whether international jihadists or the homegrown extreme
left-wing variety. But in the tackling of terrorism, the various
strains of thinking in India again display their differences. While
more lives and more money have been lost as a result of terror-
ist activity than in almost any other country, there is no national
consensus on a strategy to deal with it.
Therefore, no understanding of India, not even on multilat-
eral negotiations or international terrorism, can be considered
2
Asia Program
Policy Brief
complete without appreciating the importance of thoughts and
ideas. Returning to the security seminar in Beijing, a staff mem-
ber at a local university made another insightful intervention,
noting that India had occupied China for about a thousand years
without firing a shot or sending a soldier. Instead, it had occu-
pied China’s mind, with its export of ideas and philosophies.
.
About GMF’s Asia Program
The German Marshall Fund’s Asia Program addresses the implications
of Asia’s rise for the West—in particular, how Asia’s resurgence will im-
pact the foreign policy, economic, and domestic challenges and choices
facing the transatlantic allies—through a combination of convening,
writing, strategic grants, study tours, fellowships, partnerships with
other GMF programs, and partnerships with other institutions. Led by
Senior Fellow for Asia Daniel Twining and Transatlantic Fellow Andrew
Small, the program’s initiatives include the Stockholm China Forum
and India Forum, seminars and other activities in Japan, a Japanese
fellowship program, Asia-related panels at GMF’s flagship events at
Brussels and Halifax, and a paper series on transatlantic approaches to
wider Asia and on deepening cooperation between democratic Asia and
the West. For more information see http://www.gmfus.org/asia.
About GMF
The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) is a
nonpartisan American public policy and grantmaking institution
dedicated to promoting greater cooperation and understanding
between North America and Europe. GMF does this by supporting
individuals and institutions working on transatlantic issues, by
convening leaders to discuss the most pressing transatlantic themes,
and by examining ways in which transatlantic cooperation can
address a variety of global policy challenges. In addition, GMF
supports a number of initiatives to strengthen democracies. Founded
in 1972 through a gift from Germany as a permanent memorial to
Marshall Plan assistance, GMF maintains a strong presence on both
sides of the Atlantic. In addition to its headquarters in Washington,
DC, GMF has seven offices in Europe: Berlin, Bratislava, Paris, Brussels,
Belgrade, Ankara, and Bucharest.