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Power and Diplomacy
Power and Diplomacy
India’s Foreign Policies
during the Cold War
Zorawar Daulet Singh
1
1
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and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries.
Published in India by
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2/11 Ground Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002, India
© Zorawar Daulet Singh 2019
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
First Edition published in 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

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ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-948964-0

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by Tranistics Data Technologies, New Delhi 110 044
Printed in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd
In memory of
Captain Daljinder Singh, Deccan Horse,
who laid down his life in the India–Pakistan war
on 4 December 1971
Figures and Tables
Figures
I.1 Choice Paths during a Crisis 30
2.1 Choice Paths during the First East Bengal Crisis 92
3.1 Choice Paths during the 1954 Crisis 132
4.1 Choice Paths during the Formosa Crisis 174
6.1 Choice Paths during the Second Indochina Crisis 258
7.1 Choice Paths during the Second East Bengal Crisis 297
8.1 Choice Paths during the Sikkim Crisis 338
Tables
1.1 Nehru’s Peacemaker Role Conception 69
5.1 Indira Gandhi’s Security Seeker Role Conception 220

Abbreviations
BSF India’s Border Security Force

CDA Chargé d’affaires
CRO Commonwealth Relations Office
DMZ Demilitarized zone (demarcation line separating
North and South Vietnam at the 17th Parallel)
DRVN Democratic Republic of Vietnam
FCO Foreign and Commonwealth Office
FO Records of the Foreign Office, the National
Archives, London
FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States
IB India’s Intelligence Bureau
ICSC/ICC International Commission for Supervision and
Control in Vietnam
IR International Relations
J.N. Papers Unpublished Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, NMML
JAC Joint Action Committee
KMT Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party of China
MEA Ministry of External Affairs
NAI National Archives of India
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NMML Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
NVA North Vietnamese Army
P.N.H. Papers P.N. Haksar Papers, NMML
PLA People’s Liberation Army
PRC People’s Republic of China
PREM Records of the Prime Minister’s Office, The
National Archives, London
xii Abbreviations
R&AW Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external

intelligence agency
SWJN-FS Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, First Series
(pre-1946)
SWJN-SS Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second
Series (post-1946)
UK United Kingdom
UNSC United Nations Security Council
USA United States of America
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Preface
The Cold War is often called the ‘Long Peace’ when two gladiators
strode the planet as never before, bearing such destructive arms as
had never been seen before in human history. We are familiar with
this story, where the two superpowers discovered a shared interest
in their mutual stability and survival, despite an unceasing ideo-
logical and geopolitical rivalry. On the periphery of that struggle
lay a tumultuous and uncertain fate for the middle powers that
had recently emerged from the thrall of colonialism. Like several
of its peers, India found itself in the midst of these two colliding
worlds, and was compelled to craft a policy and strategy. The pres-
ervation of an independent personality and sovereignty, that is,
being non-aligned, was a basic impulse for India. However, craft-
ing a foreign policy was about other ideas too. This book is about
those wider sets of beliefs about how India defined its interests
and goals and produced security in the context of the Cold War.
And, it was in the neighbourhood where India confronted recur-
ring crises and geopolitical challenges. How and why Indian poli-
cymakers responded to those regional events remains obscured or
mired in competing interpretations.
As analysts and historians, we are obligated to fulfil our main
task and offer fresh vantage points to understand the past. However,
my urge to examine Indian statecraft during the Cold War years
was not merely to recover the past, which may be shrouded in the
archives, or to engage in a conversation with other scholars. We
xiv Preface
are also returning to a world that, in some ways, resembles the

one that we were confidently told had ended. How India ought
to respond to this world of competing great powers where no one
state or bloc holds sway over the international system is at the
heart of contemporary debates on India’s role in the neighbour-
hood and beyond. It is, hence, an apt moment to return to those
formative years of India’s foreign policy and understand how lead-
ers and strategists navigated through a competitive and uncertain
international environment. In doing so, we might draw some les-
sons or clues on how to craft a sustainable role, even if the future
rhymes a little differently.
***
This work could not have been possible without the support, coun-
sel, and friendship of many others. Sunil Khilnani has been a source
of constant support from the very outset, and did not dissuade
me from attempting such an ambitious project when he might
have known better. I was also fortunate to have Srinath Raghavan’s
counsel during my reclusive years of doctoral research. Most of
the pre-writing phase was spent at the archives—briefly at the
National Archives in London and then much of it in the Indian
archives. The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi
(NMML) is truly the gold standard as a repository for historical
documents in India and their staff was a delight to work with.
The National Archives of India is, in contrast, a more impersonal
and larger institution, but I was still fortunate to access several
relevant files and memoranda, sometimes by sheer happenstance!
It cannot be gainsaid that a study such as this could only have
profited from the collective memory of accomplished observers
and practitioners. The late Inder Malhotra, the late B.S. Das, M.K.
Rasgotra, K. Shankar Bajpai, Eric Gonsalves, Chandrashekhar
Dasgupta, G.B.S. Sidhu, Kishan Rana, Shyam Saran, Shiv Shankar
Menon, Prabhat Shukla, Ranjit Gupta, Sudhir Devare, Ashok
Parthasarathi, and Rana Banerji were all generous with their
time and reflections on past events. For these insightful conver-
sations, I remain deeply indebted. I also remain appreciative of
Preface xv
the thoughtful and perceptive comments by Jaspal Singh, Suman

Mann, Rudra Chaudhuri, and Swapna Kona Naidu on various
parts of this manuscript. Pratap Bhanu Mehta has been a source of
encouragement for several years, as has David Malone, and Walter
Anderson ever since I met him at Johns Hopkins University’s
School of Advanced International Studies in 2004. The Center for
the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania
was kind enough to invite me to present some of my research in
April 2015. As doctoral examiners, Vipin Narang and Paul McGarr
were discerning and generous in their assessment on an earlier
version of this manuscript. The Centre for Policy Research in
Delhi has offered me an exceptionally conducive environment to
remain engaged and to hone this study. Suneina has been a rock
by my side. Fateh and Viir provided perspective and comic relief
during the stressful phases. Without their affection, there would be
no book.
Introduction
It is often argued that India’s foreign policy in the post-1991 period

witnessed a dramatic break from past patterns, with fundamental
changes in India’s conception of its interests and its international
roles and behaviour.1 It is widely held that Indian leaders altered
their international images, their ideas relating to national inter-
est, the role of force and coercion in statecraft, and beliefs about
how India ought to relate to its regional and global environment.
But most of these notions of foreign policy change were not a new
phenomenon at all. India’s statecraft during the Cold War period
was infused by changing beliefs around precisely such themes.
Mainstream historiography portrays India’s foreign policy as that
of a postcolonial, non-aligned state standing apart from the Cold
War struggle by resisting being drawn into the political–military
embrace of one or other of the superpowers. Such a cursory and
static interpretation of a key period of India’s foreign policy rests,
it is argued in this book, on a neglect of more complex Indian
worldviews that evolved to condition state action. Indeed, the
dramatic shift in roles and behaviour from the Nehru period in
the 1950s to the Indira Gandhi period in the late 1960s and 1970s
suggests that the so-called ‘rubicon’ or seminal transformation in
India’s strategic thought and action had in fact been crossed earlier.
1 C. Raja Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India’s
New Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Viking, 2004).
Power and Diplomacy: India’s Foreign Policies during the Cold War.
Zorawar Daulet Singh, Oxford University Press (2019). © Zorawar Daulet Singh.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489640.003.0001
2 Power and Diplomacy
If we seek to make informed assessments about India’s future

foreign policy and possible contestations, we must revisit a much
larger and earlier slice of its strategic past in order to discern prior
policy patterns during times of inflexion and change. The Cold
War period offers a rich and relatively untapped empirical reserve
that can provide much needed depth to understanding Indian stra-
tegic thought and geopolitical practices. And, to truly understand
Indian statecraft, one must go beyond the study of non-alignment
and examine the more concrete ideas that have informed Indian
geopolitics over the years. This book attempts to explicate some of
these ideas and their application during some of the most signifi-
cant events and crises in India’s immediate and extended neigh-
bourhood over three decades during the Cold War.
The Argument
India’s foreign policy during the Cold War period from the 1950s
to the 1970s was not simply an exercise in the preservation of its
strategic independence. Analytical focus on a largely unchanging
self-image of non-alignment has led scholars to downplay what
was in fact a dramatic evolution in Indian foreign policy dur-
ing that period. Specifically, from projecting itself initially in an
extra-regional peacemaker role during the Nehru period, where
India intervened in several crises in Asian high politics, India’s
role dramatically contracted to that of a largely sub-continen-
tal security seeker in the Indira Gandhi period, with narrower
conceptions of order and security. Importantly, this shift was not
simply one of a change in geopolitical scope but also a change
in the modes of regional policy behaviour. The central argu-
ment of this book is that this change in Indian statecraft resulted
from a change in regional role conceptions from the Nehru to the
Indira Gandhi periods. Role conceptions emerge from policymak-
ers’ beliefs and images relating to their state’s interaction with
its external environment. As discussed later, these include the
appropriate scale of regional activity and functional goals, ori-
entation to this defined external environment, and the preferred
modes of behaviour. The behavioural shift between the Nehru and
Introduction 3
Indira Gandhi periods should, therefore, be seen as emerging from

different ideas that defined India’s regional role in each period.
The core question that drives this study—What explains the
transformation in Indian geopolitics during the Cold War?—has
certainly been acknowledged before. Michael Brecher, for instance,
noted the shift from ‘an active, dynamic involvement in world
politics’ under the ‘Nehru–Menon conception, to a more pas-
sive role, almost a withdrawal from conflicts external to India’s
narrowly-conceived national interests’.2 Yet this dramatic shift in
the scope and modes of India’s foreign policy behaviour between
the two periods has not been examined in any depth, and is usu-
ally portrayed either in terms of a reductionist contrast between an
idealistic and naive Nehru versus a hard-nosed and insecure Indira
Gandhi, or in terms of the structural deterministic argument that a
changing external environment made India’s foreign policy shift
all but inevitable.3 These popular images juxtaposing the Nehru
and Indira Gandhi periods have not received the detailed study
they deserve—both conceptually and empirically. More broadly,
there seem to be two basic weaknesses in how we study India’s
foreign policy. First, much of the existing body of work is unable
to confront the amorphous nature of non-alignment, and is thereby
unable to account for the variations in India’s foreign policy during
the Cold War period. Indeed, the focus on non-alignment has led to
a prolonged neglect of the more complex worldviews and strands of
ideas that also conditioned Indian geopolitics during the Cold War.
Second is the dearth of archival-based work on India’s foreign pol-
icy more generally, and the absence of a detailed empirical exami-
nation of regional statecraft during the Nehru and Indira Gandhi
2 Michael Brecher, ‘Non-alignment Under Stress: The West and the
India–China Border War’, Pacific Affairs 52, no. 4 (1979–1980): 629.

3 Sumit Ganguly, Indian Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2015); David M. Malone, Does the Elephant Dance? Contemporary

Indian Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012);
J.N. Dixit, Makers of India’s Foreign Policy (New Delhi: HarperCollins,
2004); Surjit Mansingh, India’s Search for Power: Indira Gandhi’s Foreign
Policy, 1966–1982 (New Delhi: SAGE, 1984); Raju Thomas, Indian
Security Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
periods within a single research frame.4 The result of these gaps in

the literature appears sufficient enough to warrant a more exten-
sive comparative foreign policy analysis of these two periods.
Despite a recent wave of eclectic scholarship on India’s Cold
War foreign policy, especially on the Nehru years, India’s regional
policies have been relatively neglected. Not only is there a dearth
of serious work on Nehru’s regional policy in the 1950s, the nature
of interpretations of Nehru are either ‘hagiographic’ or polemical
critiques that ‘have not delved deeply enough into the material,
to explore the reasons behind his choices’.5 Typically, the peri-
odic focus is either on the pre-1950 Dominion period on India’s
norm shaping at multilateral settings such as the UN,6 pre-1950
statecraft and national consolidation,7 or on the outbreak of bilat-
eral problems with China in the late 1950s and its escalation in
the 1962 war.8 A study of Nehru’s foreign policy in geopolitical
4As Narang and Staniland suggest, ‘There is enormous room for further
research on the making of India’s foreign policy’ both in terms of ‘deeper
historical studies of the roots of strategic worldviews’ as well as ‘detailed
studies of the inner workings of the Indian foreign policy apparatus’.
Vipin Narang and Paul Staniland, ‘Institutions and Worldviews in Indian
Foreign Security Policy’, India Review 11, no. 2 (2012): 91. In a similar
vein, Raghavan observes that historians have mostly ‘ignored research’
on independent India’s foreign policy, ‘preferring to toil on the British
and earlier periods’. Srinath Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India
(New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2010), 3.
5 Jivanta Schottli, Vision and Strategy in Indian Politics: Jawaharlal
Nehru’s Policy Choices and the Designing of Political Institutions

(London: Routledge, 2012), 21.
6 Manu Bhagavan, The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One
World (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2012).

7 Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India; Chandrashekhar Dasgupta,
War and Diplomacy in Kashmir, 1947–48 (New Delhi: SAGE, 2002).

8 Steven A. Hoffmann, India and the China Crisis (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1990); S. Mahmud Ali, Cold War in the High Himalayas:
The USA, China and South Asia in the 1950s (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999);
Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970); Steven
A. Hoffmann, ‘Rethinking the Linkage Between Tibet and the China–India
Border Conflict: A Realist Approach’, Journal of Cold War Studies 8, no. 3
(2006): 165–94; Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India.
Introduction 5
terms—that is, in the realm of high politics and security—remains

understudied. The year 1962 so dominates mainstream historiog-
raphy that the decade of the 1950s is merely taken as a prelude and
build-up to that climactic event. Much of the work into India’s
foreign policy in the 1950s, hence, invariably tends to be over-
shadowed by the retrospective historical knowledge of an impend-
ing debacle.9 As a consequence, a whole interregnum, if it can
be called that, has been left unexplored or perfunctorily treated
in mainstream historiography. For the Indira Gandhi period, the
lack of detailed historical work is even starker. That a 1984 study
remains the only notable contribution on this subject exempli-
fies the point.10 Given the recent, if partial, accessibility of new
archival material for the Nehru and Indira Gandhi years, it is now
a fruitful moment to re-engage with that wider period. This book
offers another lens to interpret and understand the shift in India’s
foreign policy during the Cold War, in order to illuminate the con-
tinuity and change from the Nehru to the Indira Gandhi periods,
which often gets obscured under the rubric of non-alignment or
simplified in the binary of idealism versus realism.
Why is focusing on non-alignment as the main explanatory
framework for India’s foreign policy of limited analytical value?
The idea of non-alignment is ‘entrenched in the vocabulary of
India’s past, present and future’.11 Yet, even a cursory observa-
tion of India’s foreign policy practices reveals patterns of varia-
tion and change through the decades, despite a seeming continuity
of non-alignment. For instance, Nehru himself observed that
9 S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, Volume 2, 1947–1956

(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979). This is also exemplified in
Wolpert’s biography, which chronicles the period from 1950 to 1956 in ten
pages. Stanley Wolpert, Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996). Even memoirs by senior officials on this period
are typically afflicted with the same problem. T.N. Kaul, Diplomacy in
Peace and War (New Delhi: Vikas, 1979); Subimal Dutt, With Nehru in
the Foreign Office (Calcutta: Minerva, 1977); C.S. Jha, From Bandung to
Tashkent: Glimpses of India’s Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Sangam, 1983).
10 Mansingh, India’s Search for Power.
11 Rudra Chaudhuri, Forged in Crisis: India and the United States
since 1947 (Noida: HarperCollins, 2014), 253.

non-alignment ‘in itself is not a policy; it is only part of a policy’.12

P.N. Haksar, a key advisor of Indira Gandhi, clarified, ‘non-
alignment was not the essence and substance of India’s foreign
policy. Non-alignment is not, in a Kantian sense, a thing in itself.
Non-alignment was the means, at a particular time and in a par-
ticular place….’13 What such reflections suggest is that beyond the
rubric of non-alignment there were additional beliefs and images
that shaped the conduct of foreign policy in each of these periods.
By itself, non-alignment is essentially an identity or a self-image
with a ‘universe of possibilities for action’.14 But if non-alignment
is deemed to include several broad forms of statecraft, then it argu-
ably explains little.15 As this book examines, there was a funda-
mental distinction between the interpretations of non-alignment
12 Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy: Selected Speeches,

September 1946–April 1961 (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting, Government of India, 1961), 79. Elsewhere Nehru observes,
‘strictly speaking’, non-alignment ‘represents only one aspect of our
policy; we have other positive aims also….’ Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Changing
India,’ Foreign Affairs 41, no. 3 (April 1963): 456.
13 P.N. Haksar, India’s Foreign Policy and Its Problems (New Delhi:
Patriot Publishers, 1989), 32.

14 Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, Ideas and Foreign Policy:
Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (London: Cornell University

Press, 1993), 8.
15 Note, for example, what the editors of a study on Indira Gandhi’s
foreign policies have to say about the Cold War period: ‘India’s record of
fidelity to past policy and practice is unusual.’ India is ‘sui generis, as far
as foreign policy strategy and tactics are concerned. Successive leaders
in the same party and different parties have found it difficult to depart
from the Nehru line…. Against this general background of continuity,
stability and decorum, India’s relations with the outside world can be
appreciated as basically rational….’ It would be extraordinary if the authors
were actually unaware of the different approaches in Nehru and Indira
Gandhi’s statecraft. Rather, the problem here seems to be one of
conceptualizing the variation in India’s foreign policy after the Nehru
period despite continuity in India’s self-image in international politics.
A.K. Damodaran and U.S. Bajpai, eds, Indian Foreign Policy: The Indira
Gandhi Years (New Delhi: Radiant, 1990), ‘Introduction’: xiv–xv.
Introduction 7
in the Nehru and Indira Gandhi periods. It is, therefore, a misun-

derstanding to assert the analytical primacy of one of these fac-
ets of non-alignment and hold that as the default one. Rather, it
is necessary to identify the international images of policymakers
and the roles they construct for their state if we seek to under-
stand India’s foreign policy.
To typologize India’s foreign policy in terms of the binary
‘idealism’/‘realism’ does not take us too far either.16 For instance,
after contrasting an ‘idealistic’ Nehru with a ‘realistic’ Indira
Gandhi, Mansingh observes: ‘Realism is most simply defined
as the practice of accepting a situation as it is and being pre-
pared to deal with it pragmatically.’ Indira Gandhi ‘responded to
changes in the international environment in the 1970s and 1980s
realistically’.17 But as others emphasize, the two categories of
idealism and realism ‘are too vague, too broad, too open-ended,
too normative … to be of much use as a guide to social scientific
theory and research’.18 Moreover, there is little evidence to sug-
gest that policymakers during the Nehru period perceived them-
selves as unrealistic actors. Nehru perceived traditional realism as
‘the tactical small stuff’, and felt his role conception for India ‘was
more strategic’. The ‘tactical’ approach had proven to cause more
global problems and incessant conflict.19 Nehru actually viewed
his philosophy and statecraft as highly pragmatic and based on a
realistic appraisal of India’s external environment. ‘Idealism’, he
argued, was ‘the realism of tomorrow. It is the capacity to know
what is good for the day after tomorrow … and fashion yourself
16 Sumit Ganguly and Manjeet S. Pardesi, ‘Explaining Sixty Years of

India’s Foreign Policy’, India Review 8, no. 1 (2009): 4. Also see, Sunil
Khilnani, The Idea of India, 3rd edition (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003), 104,
112; Dixit, Makers of India’s Foreign Policy.
17 Surjit Mansingh, ‘Indira Gandhi’s Foreign Policy: Hard Realism?’,
in The Oxford Handbook of Indian Foreign Policy, eds David M. Malone,

C. Raja Mohan, and Srinath Raghavan (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2015), 112.
18 Jeffrey W. Legro and Andrew Moravcsik, ‘Is Anybody Still a Realist?’,
International Security 24, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 54.

19 Personal interview with Shiv Shankar Menon, New Delhi,
11 November 2014.
accordingly … the realist, looks at the tip of his nose and sees lit-
tle beyond.’20 Indira Gandhi, too, exhorted her own realism when
she insisted that foreign policy ‘must be allied to an astute, hard-
headed analysis of international affairs and events. At all times
this analysis has to be devoid of emotion and sentiment.’21
Clearly, realism cannot be a useful explanatory theory if its mean-
ing is so broad as to include diverse forms of choices, preferences,
and actions.22 Indeed, it is for this reason that most ‘contemporary
realists’, while continuing ‘to speak of international “power” …
have subtly shifted the core emphasis from variation in objective
power to variation in beliefs and preferences of power’.23
In recent years, a growing scholarship has made use of the vast
published collection of Nehru’s papers and confidential correspon-
dence, as well as unpublished documents and diplomatic cables of
senior officials from the Indira Gandhi period.24 Although admit-
tedly limited, such archival material does enable us to enter into
the decision-making ‘black box’, and try to connect Indian inter-
ventions and foreign policy responses to the inner thinking and
beliefs of the policymaking apex. This book hopes to add to this
small but growing body of work on India’s foreign policy. By going
beyond the idea of non-alignment and attempting to reconstruct
20Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy, 51.

21Indira Gandhi, The Years of Endeavor: Selected Speeches of Indira
Gandhi, August 1969–August 1972 (New Delhi: Ministry of Information
and Broadcasting, 1975), 685.
22 Indeed, neorealist assumptions, expressed by Kenneth Waltz
and others, impose ‘almost no constraint on state behavior, because it

subsumes the entire spectrum of possible motivations of states from
pure harmony to zero-sum conflict…. Only outright self-abnegation is
excluded.’ Legro and Moravcsik, ‘Is Anybody Still a Realist?’, 22.
23 Legro and Moravcsik, ‘Is Anybody Still a Realist?’, 34–5.
24 Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India; Srinath Raghavan, 1971:
A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (New Delhi: Permanent

Black, 2013); Andrew B. Kennedy, The International Ambitions of Mao
and Nehru: National Efficacy Beliefs and the Making of Foreign Policy
(New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Chaudhuri, Forged in
Crisis; Priya Chacko, Indian Foreign Policy: The Politics of Postcolonial
Identity from 1947 to 2004 (New York: Routledge, 2012); Bhagavan,
The Peacemakers.
Introduction 9
the foreign policy worldviews of two different national leaders

and their close advisors, this book offers fresh insights into how
policymakers related to their region and neighbourhood during
some of the most tumultuous events of their time.
This book questions the notion of an unchanging Nehruvian
image of power, which has entrenched itself deeply in mainstream
historiography on India’s foreign policy and which continues to
shape the nature of contemporary conversations and foreign
policy debates. We have been living with many sweeping gener-
alizations and interpretations of India’s regional statecraft dur-
ing the Cold War. There is an interesting dichotomy between the
interpretations of the first wave of scholarship, that is, contempo-
raneous of the Nehru and Indira Gandhi periods, and retrospective
evaluations of Indian strategic thought and behaviour. Ironically,
while the former could glean subtle aspects of Indian strategic
thought despite the lack of confidential archives, the later gen-
eration of work has offered diverse accounts that are not always
consistent with a careful study of the documentary evidence.
Part of the reason for this is we seem more interested in abstract
theorizing rather than paying careful attention to the empirical
record. Chacko’s indictment that theorizing of ‘Indian thinking on
international relations at a highly general level’ has usually not
succeeded in being ‘analytically illuminating’ is, hence, largely
accurate.25 This book builds upon and extends the first generation
work by scholars such as Michael Brecher and A.P. Rana as well
as more recent work by Andrew Kennedy.26 Yet, this is not just an
esoteric historical study. All the six crises examined in this book
will resonate with the present because they each also speak to
contemporary dilemmas and debates regarding a specific facet of
India’s foreign policy. Whether it is about crafting a sustainable set
25 Chacko, Indian Foreign Policy, 3.

26 Michael Brecher, India and World Politics: Krishna Menon’s View
of the World (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968); A.P. Rana, ‘The
Intellectual Dimensions of India’s Nonalignment’, Journal of Asian Studies
28, no. 2 (1969): 299–312; A.P. Rana, The Imperatives of Nonalignment:
A Conceptual Study of India’s Foreign Policy Strategy in the Nehru Period
(New Delhi: Macmillan, 1976); Kennedy, The International Ambitions of
Mao and Nehru.
of equations with competing great powers, formulating an intel-

ligent policy towards Pakistan, finding the appropriate approach in
managing India’s special ties with its smaller neighbours, dealing
with China’s rise and the attendant power flux in Asia, responding
to a Sino-American crisis or their broader competition in Asia, or
developing a sustainable Indian role in the extended neighbour-
hood, the chapters that follow will strike at the heart of today’s
policy conversations.
Images and Roles

A useful way to approach the Indian case is to attempt to concep-
tualize and categorize the hierarchy or levels of ideas that together
shape foreign policy.27 Nearly all the attention in India’s foreign
policy literature has been on the idea of non-alignment. But as
alluded to earlier, focusing exclusively on this single idea is of lim-
ited analytical value because the linkage between non-alignment
and behaviour is often indeterminate. To explicate this point, let
us explore the notion of ‘national images’, as this helps to identify
the appropriate level and types of ideas that will be engaged in this
book. An ‘image’ is defined as
the total cognitive, affective, and evaluate structure of the behav-

iour unit, or its internal view of itself and its universe … a decision
involves the selection of the most preferred position in a contemplated
field of choice. Both the field of choice and the ordering of this field
by which the preferred position is identified lie in the image of the
decision-maker…. The images which are important in international
systems are those which a nation has of itself and of those other bod-
ies in the system which constitute its international environment.28
27 It has been argued that ‘attitudes on specific foreign policy issues are
constrained (or predicted) by, first, foreign policy postures, and those, in
turn, by a set of core values’. See Jon Hurwitz, Mark Peffley, and Mitchell
A. Seligson, ‘Foreign Policy Belief Systems in Comparative Perspective’,
International Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (September 1993): 246.
28 Kenneth E. Boulding, ‘National Images and International Systems’, in
International Politics and Foreign Policy: A Reader in Research and Theory,

ed. James N. Rosenau (London: Macmillan, 1969), 423. Emphasis added.
Introduction 11
As we can notice, a complete image has a ‘self-image’ as well as

an ‘international image’ component. Both these components are
related in the sense that a change in self-images might also change
the images of the external environment. This distinction is help-
ful in explicating the two inter-linked levels of images in the case
of India and it is where this book will focus its attention in the
overall ideational explanation. The highest-level belief that under-
pins a state’s psychological setting is the self-image of a country’s
leaders, that is, how national leaders view and identify their own
state in the international system.29 For India, such a core self-
image during the Cold War was described as non-alignment. ‘It is
through negative terms’ that Indians ‘have expressed positive and
affirmative ideas of profound significance and critical importance
for their social evolution’.30 Non-alignment is one of those ideas.
Krishna Menon explained the origins of non-alignment:
Even if nobody conceived it, non-alignment was more or less a resi-

due of historical circumstances. In 1945, immediately before India
got her independence, it was all ‘one world’; by 1947 it was ‘two
worlds’, and we, for the first time, had to make up our minds on
the issue…. We would not go back to the West with its colonialism;
and there was no question of our going the Soviet way…. And with
the attaining of our independence we desired not to get involved
in foreign entanglements…. There were two blocs. Both the Prime
Minister (Nehru) and I exclaimed or thought aloud simultaneously,
‘why should we be with anybody?’31
In essence, non-alignment was ‘merely independence in exter-

nal affairs’. It was the ‘logical extension of nationalism’ and ‘the
conflict between nationalism and military blocs, the fact that we
had little in common with the raison d’être of the blocs’.32 An
29 Noel Kaplowitz, ‘National Self-Images, Perception of Enemies,
and Conflict Strategies: Psychopolitical Dimensions of International

Relations’, Political Psychology 11, no. 1 (1990): 39–82.
30 K.P. Misra and K.R. Narayanan, eds, Non-alignment in
Contemporary International Relations (New Delhi: Vikas, 1981), 198–9.
31 Brecher, India and World Politics, 3.
32 Brecher, India and World Politics, 4.

enduring self-image presumes shared representations of a

state’s view of itself across generations. Since the mid-1940s,
India’s leaders have espoused a consistent self-image of non-
alignment, which also became part of the state’s discourse.
In his first broadcast as head of the interim government on 7
September 1946, Nehru defined India’s core self-image: ‘We pro-
pose, as far as possible, to keep away from the power politics
of groups, aligned against one another, which have led in the
past to world wars and which may again lead to disasters on an
even vaster scale.’33 And, in March 1947, while inaugurating
the Asian Relations Conference: ‘We propose to stand on our
own legs and to co-operate with all others who are prepared to
co-operate with us. We do not intend to be the playthings of
others.’34 Given the incipient but palpable outbreak of the Cold
War in Europe, Nehru was expressing an impulse shared by
most Indian leaders and a large section of the assembled Asian
leaders who were wary of losing their newfound autonomy in
another great power struggle.
This conviction in preserving India’s sovereignty was rein-
forced by the experience of an unexpected and tumultuous divi-
sion of the subcontinent. In December 1947, four months after
Partition, Nehru stated, ‘We have proclaimed during this past
year that we will not attach ourselves to any particular group.
That has nothing to do with neutrality or passivity or anything
else’. Rather, at its core was that India ‘had an independent
policy’.35 Non-attachment was desirable because ‘joining a
bloc’ as Nehru explained in March 1948, could ‘only mean one
thing: give up your view about a particular question, adopt the
other party’s view on that question’.36 By the mid-1950s, India
had witnessed twenty years of intense Asian inter-state con-
flicts involving all the major powers. The pressures to conform
to bloc politics had become severe and these factors impelled
Nehru to strengthen India’s core self-image. He now identified
33 Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy, 2.

35 Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy, 24–5.
Introduction 13
India’s non-alignment as not simply a situational belief but

something deeper:
India has a very strong individuality for thousands of years. To con-

sider that we have not a mind of our own, not a soul and spirit of our
own and to consider that we can tie ourselves up with this or that
group regardless of what we are, seems to be a complete misunder-
standing of what India has been in the past, or what she is now and
what she is going to be in the future.37
Clearly, non-alignment was being represented as a dominant iden-

tity rather than simply a transient posture towards a bipolar world.
This is underscored by the persistence of this core idea into the
1960s. By this time, the rigidity of the blocs had loosened, with both
superpowers contending with dissenting allies and new ideological
cleavages. Aware of the evolving global structure, Krishna Menon re-
affirmed the essence of India’s self-image when he observed in 1966,
‘the issue within a short time would not be between Communists
and non-communists, Socialists and non-socialists, Left and Right,
but it will be between nationalism and non-nationalism’.38 Clearly,
for Indian leaders the concept of sovereignty and autonomy in inter-
national affairs was sacrosanct and remained unaffected by the ebbs
and flows in the interactions among the great powers.
Indira Gandhi, who in the post-Nehru years would re-define
India’s foreign policy, continued to declare adherence to non-
alignment. In 1970, Indira Gandhi underlined the essence of India’s
self-image as the refusal to ‘mortgage our decisions in domestic
and in international affairs to foreign dictates’.39 Non-alignment
was ‘essentially a declaration not of indifference or n eutrality
37 The Hindu, 26 December 1955. Again, in a Lok Sabha debate in

1958, Nehru located the deeper roots of non-alignment as ‘inherent in the
circumstances of India, inherent in the past thinking of India, inherent in
the conditioning of the Indian mind during our struggle for freedom, and
inherent in the circumstances of the world today’. Nehru, India’s Foreign
Policy, 80.
38 V.K. Krishna Menon, In Defence of National Policies: Speeches in
Parliament (New Delhi: Mainstream, 1966), 12.

39 Gandhi, The Years of Endeavor, 693.
but of independence in judgment’.40 Again, a robust self-image of

autonomy animates the words of policymakers during this period.
P.N. Haksar, Indira Gandhi’s main strategist, located non-align-
ment in India’s colonial experience. Leaders ‘who fail to take into
account the feeling among the masses of our people against imperi-
alist domination will sever India’s policy from its moorings’.41 For
Haksar, non-alignment ‘was simply the refusal by a proud country
to be managed by anybody, especially after it had been managed
for a long time by the East India Company and its successor’.42
The persistence and depth of India’s self-image is apparent from
these recurring representations over decades, and, ironically, even
a voluntary alignment with one bloc after 1971 did not diminish
India’s core ethos. Indira Gandhi affirmed the continuity of India’s
self-image in her 1976 speech in Moscow: Non-alignment arose
from a ‘determination to be ourselves and to preserve our iden-
tity…. Our independence marked the beginning of the end of the
colonial epoch. How could we accept any new limitations on our
freedom of decision or action?’43
In essence, non-alignment was the external manifestation of
India’s sovereignty and represented the abiding belief in and pref-
erence for an independent foreign policy. Its primary behavioural
implication is that all political leaders were conditioned to main-
tain India’s strategic autonomy by resisting being pulled into a
great power-led treaty area. Beyond this, however, it is difficult to
extract any further behavioural implications. As Holsti remarks,
‘the term non-alignment tells us only something, but not much,
about the foreign policies or role conceptions of such states’.44
So why even highlight non-alignment at all if it tells us so little?
Some argue, ‘roles largely originate’ in a ‘self-image’, which is ‘the
40
Indira Gandhi: Selected Speeches and Writings, 1972–1977
(New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1984), 675.
41 P.N. Haksar, Premonitions (Bombay: Interpress, 1980), 39.
42 V.D. Chopra, ed., Studies in Indo-Soviet Relations (New Delhi:
Patriot Publishers, 1986), 15–16.

43 Indira Gandhi: Selected Speeches and Writings, 1972–1977, 763.
44 K.J. Holsti, ‘National Role Conceptions in the Study of Foreign
Policy’, International Studies Quarterly 14, no. 3 (September 1970): 253.

Introduction 15
ultimate source of motivation’.45 A core and robust self-image

does have some constraining effects in that the policymakers who
develop their other international images usually do so in ways
that are consistent with the dominant self-image. In this sense,
non-alignment structured the strategic cultural setting for Indian
decision makers by making it difficult to imagine and internalize
roles that violated India’s autonomy. But it still left open a range
of possibilities or agency that requires closer attention if the aim
is to understand the variation in India’s foreign policy during the
Cold War.46 And so, we need to direct our attention to these other
images and beliefs that might have had a more observable impact
on choices and actions. Leaders often define and promote foreign
policy roles for their state in different issue-areas that condition
behaviour in those domains.47 In short, we need to identify and
study the policymakers who constructed these roles for their state.
Whose Beliefs and Images?

National roles can be seen to emerge from ‘the shared political sys-
tem belief of authoritative decision makers about their country’s
45 Philippe G. Le Prestre, ed., Role Quests in the Post-Cold War Era:

Foreign Policies in Transition (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press,
1997), 8; Chih-yu Shih, ‘National Role Conception as Foreign Policy
Motivation: The Psychocultural Bases of Chinese Diplomacy’, Political
Psychology 9, no. 4 (1988): 601.
46 Non-alignment’s indeterminacy is not unique to India. For a study
on the wide variation in the types of non-alignment in the Arab world,

see Fayez A. Sayegh, The Dynamics of Neutralism in the Arab World:
A Symposium (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing, 1964). On the wider
eclecticism of non-alignment across states, see Peter Lyon, Neutralism
(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1964).
47 A national role conception may be seen as ‘the policymakers’ own
definitions of the general kinds of decisions, commitments, rules and

actions suitable to their state, and of the functions, if any, their state should
perform on a continuing basis in the international system or in subordinate
regional systems. It is their “image” of the appropriate orientations or
functions of their state toward, or in, the external environment.’ Holsti,
‘National Role Conceptions in the Study of Foreign Policy’, 245–6.
relationship to its external environment and the roles of gov-

ernment appropriate for pursuing the belief’. Put another way,
‘national foreign policy roles are determined by the beliefs of a
regime’s authoritative decision makers’.48 India’s political system
during the Cold War years was largely a one-party-dominant sys-
tem led by the Indian National Congress. Within the Congress
party, the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi dur-
ing much of their tenures at the pinnacle of the state was largely
uncontested,49 enabling these two national leaders to enjoy a high
degree of authority and autonomy and producing a ‘centralized
decision-making process’ at the state’s apex.50 And since typically,
‘the range of individual choice is greater higher up in the decision-
making hierarchy’51 Nehru and Indira Gandhi can both be seen to
possess a high degree of agency in the foreign policy realm, and
the dominant ideas that shaped India’s external behaviour were
embedded within the beliefs of these two political leaders and
their advisors—rather than in organizations such as the Congress
party or state institutions such as the Foreign Ministry.52
48Stephen G. Walker, ed., Role Theory and Foreign Policy Analysis

(Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 220.
49 By 1952, Nehru had ‘increased even further his complete dominance’
over the Indian Government with no Congress leader possessing the status
to challenge him when he had determined a course of action. ‘Taylor to
State Department’, 26 May 1952, Foreign Relations of the United States
(Vol. XI, Part 2). The Congress party split of 1969 is generally considered as
a turning point that paved the way for Indira Gandhi’s political dominance.
50 N.K. Jha, ‘Coalition Governments and India’s Foreign Policy’, in
Coalition Politics in India: Problems and Prospects, eds M.P. Singh and
A. Mishra (New Delhi: Manohar, 2004), 308–19.
51 Katarina Brodin, ‘Belief Systems, Doctrines, and Foreign Policy: A
Presentation of Two Alternative Models for the Analysis of Foreign Policy

Decision-Making’, Cooperation and Conflict 7, no. 1 (March 1972): 101.
52 J. Bandyopadhyaya, The Making of India’s Foreign Policy (New
Delhi: Allied Publishers, 2003), 60–1. Michael Brecher, Nehru: A Political

Biography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1959), 30, 71, 80, 564–5.
Narang and Staniland, ‘Institutions and Worldviews in Indian Foreign
Security Policy’, 82, 84–5. Nalini Kant Jha, ‘Nehru and Modern India:
Impact of his Personality on Foreign Policy’, in Jawaharlal Nehru and
Introduction 17
Indeed, the fact that Nehru concurrently held the Foreign

Minister’s post during his entire seventeen-year tenure as
Prime Minister underscores this point. In the Indira Gandhi phase,
the centralization of foreign policymaking is also widely recognized
as she too kept a tight control over the Foreign Ministry by appoint-
ing close confidantes to critical positions so as to preserve influence
and command over foreign policy.53 This is, of course, not to sug-
gest that these national leaders were insensitive to public opinion
or unaware of the advantages of legitimizing their preferences and
choices.54 This is also not to discount the possibility of foreign pol-
icy contestations and pressures that Nehru and Indira Gandhi might
have confronted, including from some of their most formidable polit-
ical rivals. To maintain analytical rigour, I have consciously elected
to also examine some of those periods or phases too where the for-
eign policy authority appears to have been contested at the apex.
Nevertheless, these two national leaders were endowed with a
position to profoundly shape the contours of India’s foreign policy,
and as Holsti recommends, when ‘decisions are made at the pinna-
cle of the government hierarchy by leaders who are relatively free
from organizational and other constraints’, it makes sense to focus
on the beliefs of such leaders.55 An ideational approach that seeks
to study India’s foreign policy during the Nehru and Indira Gandhi
Modern India, ed. T.A. Nizami (Aligarh: Three Way Printers, 2003),
17–22. George K. Tanham, Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive
Essay (Santa Monica: Rand, 1992), 52.
53 Bandyopadhyaya, The Making of India’s Foreign Policy, 265. Tanvi
Madan, ‘Officialdom: South Block and Beyond’, in The Oxford Handbook

of Indian Foreign Policy, eds David M. Malone, C. Raja Mohan, and
Srinath Raghavan (New York: Oxford University Press), 234.
54 Rudra Chaudhuri, ‘The Limits of Executive Power: Domestic
Politics and Alliance Behavior in Nehru’s India’, India Review 11, no. 2
(2012): 95–115. An example of Nehru’s approach to legitimizing his foreign
policy through a posture of transparency is indicated by his unorthodox
method of publishing select official but confidential exchanges between
India and Pakistan, and India and China from the early 1950s.
55 Ole R. Holsti, ‘Cognitive Process Approaches to Decision-Making:
Foreign Policy Actors Viewed Psychologically’, American Behavioral

Scientist 20, no. 1 (1976): 18. Also see, Margaret G. Hermann, ‘Explaining
periods can, therefore, with some reliability focus on the world-

views of these two national leaders and their close and trusted
advisors. This may not hold in the same way for later periods,
especially the post-Cold War era where fragmentation of India’s
political system and the rise of more diverse groups of actors began
shaping India’s interests and roles.56 In short, Nehru and his advi-
sors, and Indira Gandhi and her advisors, are assumed to constitute
the main unit of analysis—the ‘core policymakers’—who provided
the ideational substance and agency to India’s foreign policy.
Which Beliefs and Images?

As Nicholas Spykman once observed, ‘Every Foreign Office what-
ever may be the atlas it uses, operates mentally with a different
map of the world.’57 This book, in many ways, is about search-
ing for India’s mental maps during the Cold War. The idea of
an inside-out image of regions challenges orthodox geopolitics
where geographical spaces are deemed to possess objective facts
both for states in those locales and for the international system.
In classical geopolitics, states are typically assigned or prescribed
geopolitical roles in the scholar’s or great power practitioner’s
world image. Such claims emerge from a long-standing ‘geopoliti-
cal tradition, which from the beginning was opposed to the propo-
sition that great leaders’ could ‘determine the course of history,
politics and society’, but rather that ‘it was the natural environ-
ment and the geographical setting of a state which exercised the
greatest influence on its destiny’. Classical geopolitics ‘is taken
to be a domain of hard truths, material realities and irrepressible
Foreign Policy Behavior Using the Personal Characteristics of Political

Leaders’, International Studies Quarterly 24, no. 1 (1980): 13.
56 Falguni Tewari and Harsh V. Pant, ‘Paradiplomacy and India:
Growing Role of States in Foreign Policy’, Observer Research Foundation,

6 December 2016, accessed 27 March 2017, from http://www.orfonline.
org/expert-speaks/paradiplomacy-and-india/. Rajiv Kumar, ‘Role of Busi-
ness in India’s Foreign Policy’, India Review 15, no. 1 (2016): 98–111.
57 Jakub J. Grygiel, Great Powers and Geopolitical Change (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 25.

Introduction 19
natural facts’.58 There is a sense of ‘geodeterminism’ in this

approach where ‘political actions are determined, as if inevitably,
by geographic location or the environment’.59 Critical geopolitics,
on the other hand, seeks to understand the assumptions and ideas
that enter into the making of international politics and the rela-
tionship between a state and its physical environment.60 If clas-
sical geopolitics is about studying the impact of geography upon
foreign policy, critical geopolitics is about identifying the poli-
cymakers’ meanings, images, and even strategies regarding the
spatial environment around a state.61 The focus is on the ‘prac-
tice’ of decision-makers rather than an ‘international reality’, or
‘on the situated, contextual and embodied nature of all forms of
geopolitical reasoning’.62
One of the fascinating features of the Cold War was that despite
bipolarity there was extraordinary diversity in the role concep-
tions across the system among the middle powers. Much of the
policymakers’ attention in these spaces between the interstices
of the bipolar balance of power was aimed at regional and sub-
regional issues since most of these new states had emerged from
58 G. Ó Tuathail and John Agnew, ‘Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical

Geopolitical Reasoning in American Foreign Policy’, Political Geography
11 (1992): 191–2.
59 Colin Flint, Introduction to Geopolitics (London: Routledge,
2011), 10.
60 Critical geopolitics also evokes ‘post-modern’ types of analysis
where explanation is eschewed entirely altogether in favour of an open-

ended discursive inquiry. This book does not engage the insights of critical
geopolitics from that frame of reference. Rather, critical geopolitics as a
broad approach allows focusing closer attention on the types of ideas and
images that are necessary to identify and study national role conceptions.
Kelly poses an excellent question that suggests a middle ground, to which
I subscribe. Can critical geopolitics ‘be of utility toward clarifying and
strengthening the contribution of geopolitics’ in foreign policy analysis?
Phil Kelly, ‘A Critique of Critical Geopolitics’, Geopolitics 11, no. 1
(2006): 25.
61 Ó Tuathail and Agnew, ‘Geopolitics and Discourse’, 190.
62 G. Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby, eds, Rethinking Geopolitics
(London: Routledge 1998), 2, 6.

the ravages of a colonial system and were materially deprived of

the wherewithal and sinews to pursue global roles. Yet, the role
diversity even across these postcolonial, non-aligned states sug-
gests that geopolitical images were not simply reducible to mate-
rial factors or circumstances. Nehru expressed this point well: ‘If
you seek to understand us, you will understand us a little by dis-
cussing our economic, social and political problems … but you
have to look a little deeper to understand the ferment in the mind
and spirit of Asia. It takes different shapes in different countries.’63
Post-1947, Indian policymakers engaged in critical geopolitics
in that they rejected the geopolitics of the British Raj and searched
for alternative geopolitical images.64 For Indian policymakers,
classical geopolitics evoked the spectre of the nineteenth cen-
tury ‘Great Game’ and later imperial and Cold War geopolitical
images, which were perceived to have also contributed to India’s
partition.65 India’s leaders visualized new or adapted geopoliti-
cal images where the earlier British-Indian approach was deemed
inappropriate for the new state. For instance, Nehru’s system-
reforming beliefs were naturally consistent with his conceptual-
ization of an Asian area of peace concept. And Indira Gandhi’s turn
towards a more Indian ‘school’ of geopolitics, at first glance an
echo of classical pre-1947 images, was actually an antithesis of the
Cold War and great power geopolitical images of Southern Asia.66
63
‘The Destiny of Asia’, 3 October 1950, in Selected Works of
Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, vol. 15 (Part 1), eds Sarvepalli Gopal
Ravinder Kumar, H.Y. Sharda Prasad, A.K. Damodaran, Mushirul Hasan,
and Madhavan K. Palat (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund
1993), 500.
64 For a fine historical survey into the geopolitical images of the Raj
see, Parshotam Mehra, Essays in Frontier History: India, China, and the
Disputed Border (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007).
65 Nehru’s letter to his Chief Ministers, 1 August 1951, Madhav Khosla,
Letters for a Nation: From Jawaharlal Nehru to his Chief Ministers,

1947–1963 (Gurgaon: Penguin, 2014), 212–16. Also see, Narendra Singh
Sarila, The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s
Partition (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2006).
66 For a contribution to non-western forms of geopolitics see, Klaus
Dodds and David Atkinson, eds, Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of

Geopolitical Thought (London: Routledge, 2000).
Introduction 21
In this wider sense, both Nehru and Indira Gandhi embodied a

kind of critical geopolitics in that both sought a distinct, secure
and disassociated space for a non-aligned India from the Cold War
system, one that was consistent with their respective role concep-
tions. Yet, both these Indian leaders possessed worldviews that
were different and even antithetical to each other. For Nehru, it
was about developing an alternative regional philosophy of inter-
state relations where security dilemmas could be muted in both
Asia and India’s immediate vicinity; whereas Indira Gandhi aimed
to develop an Indo-centric sub-regional order where external
involvement could be restrained and Indian leadership asserted.
India’s centrality in Southern Asia and the geography did not
change. Rather, the mediation of policymakers who gave their dis-
tinct meanings to the appropriate relationship between India and
the regional environment changed.
Clearly, the idea of agency is central to the framing of the
regional environment that matters to a state and there is no
‘natural’ or rational geopolitical image that animates policymak-
ers’ strategic attention. Since we are interested in the changes
in regional statecraft from the Nehru to the Indira Gandhi peri-
ods, it is necessary to study a set of beliefs and images around
a common set of themes in order to examine and bring out the
ideational sources of the dominant role conception in each period
and be able to locate the main shifts in these ideas. Following
Boulding, Holsti, and Brecher’s conceptual insights,67 I contend
that regional role conceptions can be analytically recovered via
studying four inter-related beliefs relevant to the state’s interac-
tion with its environment:
1. A spatial or geopolitical dimension.

2. A functional dimension or desired purpose for the state in the
international system.
67 Boulding, ‘National Images and International Systems’; Holsti,
‘National Role Conceptions in the Study of Foreign Policy’; Michael

Brecher, The Foreign Policy System of Israel: Setting, Images, Process
(London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 251; Michael Brecher, Blema
Steinberg, and Janice Stein, ‘A Framework for Research on Foreign Policy
Behavior’, The Journal of Conflict Resolution 13, no. 1 (1969): 87.
3. A cognitive dimension, which includes orientations relating to

how national leaders understand fundamental aspects of inter-
national politics such as security, war and peace, and the nature
of world order.
4. An instrumental dimension or the preferred means and
methods of statecraft that leaders believe are appropriate for
their state.
Collectively, these four beliefs and images constitute role con-

ceptions. To ensure a consistency of analysis between the two
periods, these four images can be distilled into a standard set
of questions that will be posed for both the Nehru and Indira
Gandhi periods:
1. What is the appropriate scale of regional activity and desired

functions or goals?
2. What is the dominant image of the international order in terms
of the balance of power and the conception of security?
3. What is the appropriate relationship between means and ends,
and beliefs about the efficacy and legitimacy of the use of
force and coercion?
Since four interrelated terms (roles, beliefs, images, perceptions)

will appear in the rest of this book, let us briefly clarify how these
concepts are going to be used. A cognitive approach to foreign
policy behaviour is based on its underlying beliefs. International
images are akin to a snapshot of select aspects of the external
environment and can be viewed as abridged versions of a policy-
maker’s reality.68 These images are typically formed by a deeper
68
According to Holsti, ‘National images may be denoted as subparts of
the belief system. Like the belief system itself, these are “models” which
order for the observer what will otherwise be an unmanageable amount
of information’. Ole R. Holsti, ‘The Belief System and National Images:
A Case Study’, The Journal of Conflict Resolution 6, no. 3, Case Studies
in Conflict (September 1962): 245. Also see Nitai Chakrabarti, ‘Beliefs,
Perceptions and Foreign Policy’, The Indian Journal of Political Science
49, no. 3 (1988): 328–42.
Introduction 23
belief about some aspect of international order and are often based
on formative political events and lessons in the policymakers’
historical experience. Perceptions are situational ideas relating to
how external events or crises are interpreted (perceived) by the
decisionmaker. Thus, decision makers are both ‘believers’ and
‘perceivers’.69 Perceptions of external events are shaped by the
‘cognitive prior’ or pre-existing beliefs of the policymaker.70 For
this study, the dominant role conception serves as the overarching
cognitive prism, which is constituted by the beliefs and images of
the core policymakers in each period. In other words, ‘roles trans-
late beliefs into expected behaviour patterns’.71
Scope of Study
Given the extended era when Jawaharlal Nehru (seventeen years,
1947–64) and Indira Gandhi (fifteen years, 1966–77 and 1980–4)
were at the helm of the policymaking apex, it was both necessary
and pragmatic to study a smaller historical slice of both peri-
ods. While deliberating which parts to study, I have, however,
remained conscious of retaining those phases where the core
policymakers confronted political competition including over
foreign policy. The choice of the selected time frame was also
dictated by more mundane reasons like access to archival mate-
rial. As alluded to earlier, the focus will be on the post-dominion
phase (1950 onwards) up to 1955, a phase that is surprisingly
understudied but crucial to understanding Nehru’s ideas on
regional order and security. For the Indira Gandhi period, the
focus will be on the major phase of her tenure (1966–75) given
the importance of these years in understanding the post-Nehru
69 Ole R. Holsti, ‘Cognitive Process Approaches to Decision-Making’, 24.

70 Acharya defines a ‘cognitive prior’ as ‘an existing normative
framework’, which includes ‘belief systems’. Amitav Acharya, Whose
Ideas Matter? Agency and Power in Asian Regionalism (London: Cornell
University Press, 2009), 21–2.
71 Walker, Role Theory and Foreign Policy Analysis, 227.
transformation in Indian geopolitics and because of the availabil-

ity of archival material.72
Since we are attempting to address the question of two very
different types of regional frameworks in the Nehru and Indira
Gandhi periods, it requires focusing on common types of events
where the policymakers’ worldviews can be probed for their effects
on behaviour in two temporally distinct periods.73 All the selected
cases in this book are a class of events that can be described as
‘regional crises’, that is, major events relating to war and peace or
perceived to hold significant implications for regional order and
stability.74 Each crisis typically had an identifiable outbreak
and termination point, and was perceived by decision makers
of that respective period as serious enough and with significant
implications for defined national interests and regional stability to
trigger a role response via a series of behavioural responses.
Finally, recalling my proposition that the regional behavioural
shift between the Nehru and Indira Gandhi periods involved a
contraction from the Asian to the South Asian domain or from
the extended to the immediate neighbourhood, it was neces-
sary to evaluate the dominant regional role conception (beliefs
and images) with the actual role performance (behaviour) in the
two domains—Asia and South Asia—that witnessed the changes
72 In contrast, in the last phase of Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership
(1980–4), empirical source material is still largely anecdotal or too limited

at the present time to enable a meaningful enquiry into the decision-
making process.
73 Holsti notes, ‘role and issue must be perceived to be linked before
knowledge of role conceptions’ are used to test role performance (‘typical

responses, decisions, and actions’). Holsti, ‘National Role Conceptions in
the Study of Foreign Policy’, 298–9.
74 Brecher offers an acceptable definition of a foreign policy crisis:
a situation where decision makers perceive the environment change as a

challenge or threat to values, the awareness of a finite time for response,
and the increased likelihood that military hostilities will erupt. Michael
Brecher and J. Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crisis (Ann Harbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1977). Also, see Richard Ned Lebow, Between Peace
and War: The Nature of International Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1981), 7.
Introduction 25
in India’s regional statecraft. In Nehru’s role conception, Asia

was deemed as the primary domain or scope of regional activ-
ity with South Asia or the subcontinent subsumed within that
larger defined image. In Indira Gandhi’s role conception, the pri-
mary domain of regional activity contracted to South Asia and
Asia became a peripheral domain for policymakers or one that was
viewed primarily through the sub-continental setting. The ratio-
nale for selecting crises in the two different domains takes us to
one of the core themes of this book: namely, the change in the
appropriate scope of regional activity between the two periods. We
want to understand how Indian policymakers operated in diverse
geopolitical contexts and spaces.75 Insofar as the specific crises in
each period are concerned, events have been selected that are gen-
erally considered as the most significant ones for that period, and
those that have received cursory attention in secondary accounts
or where interpretations of Indian behaviour remain contested.
Crises Selection
For the Nehru period, the 1950 East Bengal crisis is an under-
investigated episode and is also perhaps the only time during
that decade where India came close to an armed confrontation
with an immediate neighbour. What makes this crisis even more
interesting is that Nehru’s foreign policy authority was contested
by powerful political rivals led by Vallabhbhai Patel who fierce-
ly competed with the Prime Minister in shaping India’s strategy
towards Pakistani intransigence on the question of atrocities
75 Such an approach has the added advantage in that it compensates for

the classic ‘selection bias’, where my argument might have an inherent
advantage over rival explanations. For example, an instance of selection
bias would entail examining Nehru and Indira Gandhi’s regional behaviour
only in their primary domains, that is, Asia and South Asia, respectively.
By avoiding this bias, I open the analytical possibility to investigate crisis
situations where alternative ideas or rival arguments are expected to
have a substantial causal impact on policy choices and behaviour (that
is, ‘toughest test case’). Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case
Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2005), 121–2.
against Hindus in East Bengal and the sudden exodus of refugees

into India.76 More broadly, the events of 1950 also reflect a histori-
cal pattern in India’s Pakistan policy: the tussle between the idea
of strategic restraint and the impulse to employ coercive means to
persuade Pakistani leaders to take Indian interests seriously.
In the Asian domain, Nehru’s ambitious geopolitics continued
through the 1950s. For obvious reasons of space, it was necessary
to select a smaller slice from a decade of intense diplomatic activ-
ity. The Indochina crisis and the Formosa crisis are both signifi-
cant and understudied cases. The importance of 1954 is recognized
but rarely dwelled upon by historians. That year was an important
inflexion point in South Asian history, when the regional balance
of power was radically altered by a US decision to craft a military
alliance with Pakistan. During this same period, a crisis was also
brewing in South East Asia where both blocs jostled to preserve
their strategic positions on the Indochinese battlefield and through
a great power conference at Geneva. For Nehru, these twin cri-
ses were indivisible fronts of a common threat to Asian security
and it triggered an unorthodox but creative strategy that aimed to
counter the expansion of the Cold War in the region. Although the
lessons from these fascinating twin crises are perhaps too com-
plex to be summarized, what India’s response did demonstrate
was an approach to regional security that was inclusive and sus-
tainable, an outcome shaped by India’s determined diplomacy to
craft a zone or area in the extended neighbourhood where the great
powers could limit their antagonisms and aggressive impulses.
In short, Nehru sought to shape a new equilibrium for Asia.
Similarly, the 1954–5 Formosa crisis, also known as the first
offshore islands crisis, offers another forgotten event to examine
Nehru’s regional policy and understand his geopolitical vision for
a stable Asian order. So far, this episode has been studied from the
perspectives of the principal protagonists with India’s extraordi-
nary role in averting a major Sino-American conflict having largely
76
Such a context allows us to evaluate Nehru’s choices and role
performance under tough conditions: that is, when alternative theories
or accounts might have an equal if not stronger possibility to explain
Indian behaviour.
Introduction 27
been overlooked. India’s response to the possibility of a great power

collision in East Asia may be seen as a logical extension of Nehru’s
statecraft in the first Indochina crisis, namely, to stabilize the geo-
political status quo in the extended neighbourhood and arrest an
escalating crisis between a rising China and a dominant America
before it spiralled into wider regional instability or a hot war. In
essence, Nehru sought to promote an inclusive order where both
these great powers could preserve their vital interests in Asia’s
future. With the US and China resuming their historical rivalry,
the lessons for our time are easily apparent. Although their antago-
nism is unlikely to ever reach the extremes of the 1950s, the pos-
sibility of a future Sino-American collision in the Western Pacific
cannot be ruled out, and India might again confront the dilemma
of responding to a regional conflagration that could shatter Asia.
For the Indira Gandhi period, the second Indochina crisis in
1965–6 is a natural choice for understanding her Asia policy. Even
though the escalation of the Vietnam War was the most signifi-
cant Asian crisis of that decade, we rarely ever think about Indian
diplomacy during this conflict. But what makes this phase particu-
larly interesting is the post-Nehruvian foreign policy shifts vividly
reflected in the contestations and debates on India’s posture and
strategy towards the Vietnam War. Hence, we will be able to evalu-
ate Indira Gandhi’s foreign policy in the extended neighbourhood
very early in her tenure when domestic rivals contested her leader-
ship and authority at a time of significant flux in Indian politics and
disruption in global great power relations. In many ways, the sec-
ond Indochina crisis marks the final displacement of Nehru’s peace-
maker role conception with an alternative security seeker role.
In South Asia, the 1971 crisis in East Pakistan was one of
the most destabilizing events in the subcontinent since India’s
partition in 1947, and thus, is a seminal case for that period.
While this case at first glance suggests an over-scrutinized
event, in terms of careful archival-based foreign policy analy-
sis it is actually less so. Our understanding of Indira Gandhi’s
motives still remain obscure and revisiting the early and middle
stages of the crisis might reveal some clues because the funda-
mental ingredients of India’s strategy were actually laid quite
early on. Finally, the Sikkim crisis, by contrast, might appear
nderwhelming compared to the explosive events of 1971. Yet,

u
it offers a vivid canvas to contrast Nehru and Indira Gandhi’s
regional role conceptions and how they conditioned two distinct
geopolitical approaches to managing India’s security interests on
its periphery. In retrospect, the contestations over the Sikkim
policy also exemplify a recurring and broader pattern in India’s
approach to its immediate neighbourhood, and we will recognize
the debates and disagreements of those years as reflective of con-
temporary India’s foreign policy.
Establishing the Argument

Role conceptions should be viewed as ‘an analytical tool for
explaining certain ranges or patterns of foreign policy decisions and
actions’.77 And the stronger a role conception, ‘the more likely’ it
‘sets limits on perceived, or politically feasible, policy alternatives’.78
In each of the six case studies, the narrative will examine the link
between beliefs and behaviour—that is trace to the extent that is
empirically possible the link from the ‘cognitive prior’79 or pre-
existing beliefs and images to the ideas revealed through the com-
municative and deliberative record involving the key policymakers
during the decision-making process.80 In other words, attention will
‘be directed to the linkages between beliefs and certain decision-
making tasks that precede a decision—definition of the situation,
analysis, prescription’.81 For it is only by establishing a congruence
77 Holsti, ‘National Role Conceptions in the Study of Foreign Policy’,

308.
78
Holsti, ‘National Role Conceptions in the Study of Foreign Policy’, 298.
79
Acharya defines a ‘cognitive prior’ as ‘an existing normative
framework’, which includes ‘belief systems’. Acharya, Whose Ideas
Matter?, 21–2.
80 Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey T. Checkel, ‘Process Tracing: From
Philosophical Roots to Best Practices’, in Process Tracing: From Metaphor

to Analytic Tool, eds Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey T. Checkel (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), 6–7.
81 Holsti, ‘Cognitive Process Approaches to Decision-Making’, 20.
Introduction 29
between worldviews and practices that we can claim that a policy-

maker’s ideas influenced a course of actions.82
The presence of distinguishable ideas during the decision-
making process can be quite useful while substantiating an ide-
ational account. ‘To make the case for a causal connection between
behaviour and frameworks, we must show how actor goals and
understandings are the product of particular frames of reference.
Ideally, we would like to demonstrate that the behaviour in ques-
tion was inconsistent with other frames, or only consistent with
those central to the actors in question’.83 Similarly, ‘is it possible to
conceive of any credible policy options in the same situation that
would not have been consistent with those same beliefs? If all
the possible actions that the decision-maker might have taken’
are seen as consistent with the dominant role conception, ‘then
the explanatory power of those (underlying) beliefs is negligible.
Conversely, if other policy options were available which were
not consistent with the decision-maker’s own beliefs, then the
investigator has additional presumptive evidence of the explana-
tory power of his beliefs’.84 Figure I.1 depicts such an approach
and allows us to critically examine the evidentiary record during
each crisis. It depicts multiple potential behavioural responses in
a given regional crisis and specifies the pathways that are congru-
ent, consistent but unlikely, and incongruent, with the dominant
beliefs of that period. At the end of each case study, this thematic
framework will be given to show the policy options that were
available and actually exercised by the decision makers.
82 Alexander L. George, ‘The Causal Nexus between Cognitive Beliefs

and Decision-Making Behaviour: The “Operational Code” Belief System’,
in Foreign Policy Analysis Volume 1, eds Walter Carlsnaes and Stefano
Guzzini (New Delhi: SAGE, 2011), 282. Also see Alan M. Jacobs, ‘Process
Tracing the Effects of Ideas’, in Process Tracing: From Metaphor to
Analytic Tool, eds Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey T. Checkel (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), 49.
83 Richard Ned Lebow, Constructing Cause in International Relations
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 75.

84 George, ‘The Causal Nexus between Cognitive Beliefs and Decision-
Making Behaviour’, 287.

Explanatory Variable Dependent Variable: Regional behaviour
Option A
ur
vio
t beha
uen
Co ngr
Role conception Consistent but
(Beliefs and Option B, C
unlikely behaviour
images)
Inc
o
Ceh ngrue
avi n
our t
Options G, H
(credible in the
decisional situation)
Figure I.185 Choice Paths during a Crisis
Sources
A comment on the archival material in India’s case and on the
various primary sources that went into the making of this study
is appropriate here. Because of inflexible de-classification norms,
the Government of India until recently did not adhere to the typi-
cal 30-year rule for releasing confidential archival material for
public access.86 Despite recent transfer of diplomatic records to
the National Archives of India (NAI),87 the volume and variety of
85 Figure I.1 is adapted from George, ‘The Causal Nexus between
Cognitive Beliefs and Decision-Making Behaviour’, 288. All choice path

figures in this book are based on this source.
86 According to a January 1997 Government of India order on Public
Records, official papers can be declassified after a 25-year period. But the
MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) only began adhering to this norm by
a change in its declassification process in 2011–12. See ‘MEA Files at the
National Archives of India’, MEA press release, 4 June 2012, accessed 6
April 2017, from http://mea.gov.in/press-releases.htm?dtl/19811/MEA+Fi
les+at+the+National+Archives+of+India.
87 The NAI is the central repository for records produced by the
Government of India.
Introduction 31
documents is still not even remotely comparable to that available

in US and British archives. Archival limitations are, therefore, an
inherent feature in India’s case, and, like most others, I have had
access to an incomplete record of confidential communications on
foreign policymaking. With that caveat out of the way, it must be
emphasized that there has never been a more conducive time to
engage with India’s diplomatic and strategic history. It is remark-
able how much of the Indian decision-making setting can be recre-
ated with equal portions of persistence and luck.
For the Nehru period, the abundance of published docu-
ments from the Prime Minister’s personal papers88 offers a cred-
ible glimpse into his worldview and a partial glimpse into that
of his advisors, colleagues and senior officials. This is further
supplemented by the unpublished collection89 held at the Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi (NMML),90 which has
enabled a much richer enquiry into those years including provid-
ing access to numerous cables and memoranda authored by the
Prime Minister’s closest advisors such as Krishna Menon and
other senior officials and diplomats. For the Indira Gandhi period
under inquiry, the archival constraints were, in contrast, formi-
dable. The blanket lack of access to the Prime Minister’s papers is
to a large extent compensated by a fortuitous public access, since
the past decade, to the unpublished papers of her closest advisors,
especially P.N. Haksar and T.N. Kaul. Haksar was Indira Gandhi’s
88 This includes both the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, First
Series (SWJN-FS), 16 volumes, which cover the pre-1946 period as well as

the Second Series (SWJN-SS), which include 73 volumes (as of this time)
that cover the period 1946–60. This collection is envisaged to eventually
include Nehru’s entire tenure until 1964.
89 Since around 2015, scholars have been provided the opportunity to
apply to the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, to gain access

to this restricted collection. Prior to this, the complete collection of
Nehru’s papers had only been perused by the editors of the Selected Works
series who published a selection of this vast archive.
90 The NMML archival collection consists of personal papers (including
copies of official government files and memoranda) relating to several

Indian statesmen, policymakers, and other public figures.
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Fig. 105. Fig. 106.
The feather edge which is formed on the inside is removed by a

few strokes of a stone called a slip. Hold the slip firmly against the
face so as not to form a bevel. Fig. 106. Slips are of various sizes;
one that fits the curvature of the gouge should be selected.
56. Sharpening Plane-Irons.—Plane-irons are sharpened straight
across like the chisel, with the
exception of the jack plane, as previously noted. Their corners,
however, are very slightly rounded off to prevent their leaving marks
on the wood. Where one plane is made to serve the purpose of
smooth, jack and fore-plane, it should be ground straight across. In
whetting, increase the pressure on the edges alternately so as to
turn up a heavier feather edge there than in the middle, thus
rounding the whole end very slightly. This feather edge may be
removed in the usual manner.
57. To Tell Whether a Tool is Sharp or Not.—Examine the
cutting edge, holding
the tool toward the light. If the tool is dull, the cutting edge will
appear as a white line, the broader the line the blunter the edge. Fig.
107 A. If the tool is sharp, no white line can be seen. Fig. 107 B.
Fig. 107. Fig. 108.
A better way—the method a mechanic would use—is to test the

edge by drawing the thumb along it lightly. Fig. 108. If the tool is
sharp one can feel the edge “taking hold.” If dull, the thumb will slide
along the edge as it would along the back of a knife blade.
Good judgment is necessary in this test or a cut on the thumb may
be the result. No pressure is required, just a touch along the edge at
various points.
What actually takes place is this: The cutting edge, if sharp, cuts
the outer layer, the callous part of the ball of the thumb, just a little.
The sense of feeling is so keen that the resulting friction, slight as it
is, is transferred to the brain of the worker long before any injury
need be done the thumb. If the tool is dull, no cut, hence no friction
can result. Do not use the finger, as it is not calloused as is the
thumb.
CHAPTER VI.
Form Work, Modeling.
58. Making a Cylinder.—The cylinder is evolved from the square

prism by increasing the number of sides
until a prism is formed with so many sides that its surface can be
easily transformed into a cylinder by means of sandpaper.
Fig. 109.
(1) Begin by making a square prism which shall have the same
dimensions for its width and thickness as is desired for the diameter
of the cylinder. (2) Change this square prism to a regular octagonal
or eight-sided prism by planing off the four arrises. The gage lines
which indicate the amount to be taken off of each arris are made by
holding the gage block against each of the surfaces and gaging from
each arris each way, two lines on each surface. These lines must be
made lightly. The distance at which to set the spur of the gage from
the head is equal to one-half the diagonal of the square end of the
prism. Fig. 109. Since the ends are less likely to be accurate than
any other part, it is advisable to get this distance as follows: Lay off
two lines on the working face a distance apart equal to the width of
the prism. These lines with the two arrises form a square the
diagonal of which can be measured and one-half of it computed.
Fig. 110.
Carpenters in working on large timbers lay the steel-square

diagonally across so that there are twenty-four divisions from arris to
arris. They then mark off the timber at seven and seventeen inches.
Fig. 110. These numbers, while not mathematically correct, are near
enough for practical purposes. In planing the arrises off, the piece
may be held in the vise or placed against the bench-stop. Fig. 111.
Care must be taken not to plane over the lines, for not only is the
one side enlarged, but the adjacent side is lessened, thus
exaggerating the error. (3) Judging with the eye the amount to take
off, plane the eight arrises until there are sixteen equal sides.
Fig. 111.
Again plane the arrises, making the piece thirty-two sided. On a

small piece this will be sufficient; if the piece is large, the process
may be continued until the piece is practically a cylinder. (4) To finish
a small cylinder wrap a piece of sandpaper around it, rub lengthwise
until the surface of the wood is smooth and the piece feels like a
cylinder when revolved in the hand.
59. The Spokeshave.—Fig. 112. The spokeshave is used
principally to smooth curved surfaces. It
may be drawn toward or pushed away from the worker, whichever is
more convenient. By means of screws, the blade may be adjusted to
take light or heavy shavings. The spokeshave is practically a short
plane with handles at the sides, and in using it the aim should be, as
with the plane, to secure silky shavings of as great length as the
nature of the work will allow.
Fig. 112.
60. Making Curved Edges.—To make curved edges on a board,

finger-gage on each side lines which
shall indicate the amount of curvature. Fig. 113.
Fig. 113.
If the curve is to be a gradual one reaching from one of these lines

over the middle of the edge to the other two lines should also be
finger-gaged on the edge. Finger-gage from each side using a
distance equal to one-fourth the whole thickness of the piece.
Fig. 114. Fig. 115.
With the spokeshave, Fig. 114, carefully cut off the two arrises to
the pencil lines so as to form two bevels. This gives three surfaces to
the edge of the board. Estimating the amount with the eye, cut off
the two arrises formed by these three surfaces until five equal
surfaces are formed in their place. This process may be repeated
until the surface of the edge is practically a curved surface. With a
piece of sandpaper held as shown in Fig. 115, rub until the surface is
smooth and evenly curved.
61. Modeling.—This term is used to apply to the method of
making objects of such irregular form that the
judgment of the worker must be depended upon to give the correct
result without the aid of gage and knife marks. The forming of a
canoe paddle or a hammer handle are good illustrations.
Fig. 116.
Generally a little forethought will show a way in which the piece of

work may be partly laid out with knife, square and rule. To illustrate,
take the hammer handle, Fig. 116. The steps would be as follows:
First, plane a face side and a face edge, and square the two ends so
that the piece shall have the length desired for the finished handle.
Second, draw a center line on the face side, parallel to the face edge
and lay off on either side of this the two straight lines which shall
indicate the amount of taper; also sketch in the lines of curvature.
Plane the two edges to the tapering lines and square with the face
side. Then cut to the curved lines, keeping this surface also square
with the face side. In a similar manner, lay off on the face edge a
center line parallel to the face side, mark the taper and lines of
curvature, and work these surfaces as in the second step. Third, the
piece may be laid off still further by drawing on the larger end the
form of the ellipse which that end is to assume. With spokeshave,
judging the curves of the middle with the eye, work out the desired
form. The steel scraper is to be used for finishing after the piece has
been made as smooth as is possible with the spokeshave.
CHAPTER VII.
1. Laying Out Duplicate Parts. 2. Scraping and
Sandpapering. 3. Fastening Parts.
62. Laying out Duplicate Parts.—Frequently a piece of work will

require the making of two or more
like parts. To lay out these parts, that is, to mark out the location of
intended gains, mortises, shoulders of tenons, etc., so that all shall
be alike, the following method is used: (1) On the face edge of one of
the pieces measure off with the rule and mark with knife the points at
which the lines for the joints are to be squared across. If knife marks
would show on the finished surface as scratches, use a sharp pencil
instead. (2) Lay the pieces on the bench top with the face edges up;
even the ends with the try-square. Fig. 117. Square lines across the
edges of all of them at the points previously marked on one of them.
The pieces may then be separated and lines corresponding to the
lines just made on the face edges, be carried across the face sides
of each piece separately, the try-square beam being held against the
face edge in so doing, of course.
Fig. 117.
In all duplicate work the aim of the worker should be to make as

much use as possible of the tool he has in hand before laying it
down and taking another. To illustrate, if there should be a number of
like parts each requiring two different settings of the gage, he should
mark all of the parts at the first setting, then all at the second setting
rather than to change the gage for each piece so that each piece
might be completely marked before another is begun.
63. Scraping.—In smoothing hard wood surfaces, a scraper will
be found helpful. If the grain should happen to be
crossed or curled, a scraper will become a necessity. The plane-iron
may be made ever so sharp and the cap-iron set ever so close to the
cutting edge, still the surface of some woods will tear. Sandpaper
must not be depended upon to smooth a torn surface.
Fig. 118.
Cabinet scrapers for plane and convex surface work are

rectangular pieces of saw steel. Fig. 118 shows a swan-neck scraper
suitable for smoothing concave surfaces.
Beginners frequently mistake surfaces which have been planed at
a mill for smooth surfaces. They are not; and, unless the “hills and
hollows” which extend across the surface of every mill-planed piece
of lumber are removed before the finish of stain or filler is applied,
the result will be very unsatisfactory.
These “hills and hollows” are present even in the smoothest of
mill-plane surfaces. The reason is easily understood. When a board
is mill-planed, it is run through a machine which has a flat bed over
which the board is moved and above which revolve two knives. Fig.
119. Unless the grain of wood is very badly crossed or curled, it will
be found very much easier, and time will be saved if the mill marks
are removed with a smooth-plane before the scraper is applied.
A—Delivery Roller. D—Roller. G—Work Table.
B—Cutter Head. E—Roller. H—Knives.
C—Feed Roller. F—Board.
Fig. 119.
Scrapers may be pushed or pulled. Fig. 120. When properly

sharpened thin silky shavings will be cut off. The cutting edge of a
scraper is a bur which is formed at an arris and turned at very nearly
a right angle to the surface of the scraper.
Fig. 120. Fig. 121.
When a scraper becomes dull (1) each edge is drawfiled, Fig. 121,
so as to make it square and straight, with the corners slightly
rounded. Sometimes the edges are rounded slightly from end to end
to prevent digging. Frequently the scraper has its edges and
surfaces ground square on an oilstone after the drawfiling that the
arrises may be formed into smoother burs. (2) After filing, the
scraper is laid flat on the bench and the arrises forced over as in Fig.
122. The tool used is called a burnisher; any smooth piece of steel
would do. (3) Next, turn these arrises back over the side of the
scraper. Fig. 123. Great pressure is not necessary to form the burs
properly.
Fig. 122. Fig. 123.

64. Sandpapering.—To know when to use and when not to use
sandpaper is as much the sign of a good
workman as to know how to use the tools.
Sandpaper should never be used until all tool work has been done
as well, and carried as far as is possible. Sandpaper is, as its name
implies, sand paper. In sanding a surface, this fine sand becomes
imbedded in the wood and should an edged tool be used thereon it
will be dulled. Slovenly work should never be done in expectation of
using sandpaper to fix it up. This practice is dishonest. Sandpaper
should not be expected to do the work of edged tools or
disappointment will follow. The sandpaper sheet, for use, is usually
divided into four parts, one of these parts being of good size for large
work.
Fig. 124.
For flat surfaces these pieces are placed on a sandpaper block.

This block is but a piece of wood squared up to a length equal to that
of the piece of paper and to such a width that the edges of the paper
will extend far enough up the edges of the block to allow the fingers
to grasp them firmly. Fig. 124. Do not waste the paper by wrapping it
around in such a way as to throw part of it on top of the block. The
block should be held flat upon the surface when sanding near an
arris, otherwise the arris will be rounded. The arrises should be kept
sharp unless on a table leg, arm of a chair or something similar, in
which the sharp arrises would be likely to injure the hand or become
splintered through usage. In such cases the sandpaper may be run
along the arrises once or twice, just enough to remove the
sharpness. Sometimes the plane is set shallow and drawn over the
arris after the surfaces have been squared, to remove the
sharpness.
On curved surfaces, the sandpaper is held free in the hand, no
block being used. Fig. 115 illustrates the manner of sanding the
convex curve of the coat hanger. The sandpaper should be rubbed
along the grain and the rubbing should proceed only long enough to
smooth the piece and to bring out the grain clearly.
On the back of a piece of sandpaper will be found a number. This
number indicates the relative coarseness of the sand sprinkled upon
the glue covered paper. 00, 0, 1, 1¹⁄₂ and 2 are the numbers
commonly used; 00 being finest and 2 relatively coarse. On table
tops and surfaces which are not very smooth to begin with, the
coarse sandpaper is first used, this is followed by the next in
coarseness and so on until the finest is used.
Never attempt to sandpaper surfaces or parts which are to be put
together later on to form joints, the edge tools alone must be
depended upon to secure proper smoothing.
65. Hammers.—Fig. 125 shows the two kinds of hammers most
commonly used by workers in wood. The plain
faced hammer has a flat face and is somewhat easier to learn to use
than the bell-faced hammer, which has a slightly rounded face. The
advantage of the bell-faced hammer lies in one’s ability to better set
a nail slightly below the surface without the assistance of the nailset.
This is a very great advantage on outside or on rough carpenter
work. This setting of the nail with the hammer leaves a slight
depression, however, in the wood, and is therefore not suited for
inside finishing.
Fig. 125.
The handle of the hammer is purposely made quite long and

should be grasped quite near the end.
66. Nails.—Nails originally were forged by hand and were
therefore very expensive. Later strips were cut from
sheets of metal and heads were hammered upon these by means of
the blacksmith’s hammer, the vise being used to hold the strips
meanwhile. These were called cut nails. Early in the nineteenth
century a machine was invented which cut the nails from the sheet
metal and headed them.
Steel wire nails have about supplanted the cut nails for most
purposes. They are made by a machine which cuts the wire from a
large reel, points and heads the pieces thus cut off.
Wire nails, like cut nails, are roughly classed by woodworkers as
common, finishing and casing nails. Thin nails with small heads are
called brads. Wire nails are bought and sold by weight, the size of
wire according to the standard wire gage and the length in inches
being taken into consideration in specifying the size and fixing the
price per pound.
In former practice, the size of nails was specified according to the
number of pounds that one thousand of any variety would weigh.
Thus the term sixpenny and eightpenny referred to varieties which
would weigh six and eight pounds per thousand, respectively, penny
being a corruption of pound. In present practice, certain sizes are still
roughly specified as three, four, six, eight, ten, twenty and thirty
penny.
Fig. 126.
Common wire nails are thick and have large flat heads. They are
used in rough work where strength is desired. Fig. 126 A. Finishing
nails, Fig. 126 B, are used for fine work such as inside woodwork,
cabinet work, etc. Casing nails, Fig. 126 C, are somewhat thicker
and stronger than finishing nails; they have small heads.
67. Nailing.—Especial care is necessary in starting cut nails. Fig.
127 shows two views of a cut nail. From these it will be
seen that the sides of the nail form a wedge in one of the views while
in the other they are parallel. The nail should be so started that the
wedging action shall take place along, not across the grain.
Fig. 127. Fig. 128.
In nailing through one piece into the edge of another, assume a

position so that you can look along the piece into the edge of which
you are nailing. Fig. 128. If the nail is to be driven plumb, it must be
sighted from two directions several times in the beginning of the
nailing. Having driven the points of the nails slightly below the
surface of the first piece, adjust the two pieces properly, force the

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Power and diplomacy: India's foreign

policies during the Cold War Zorawar

US Presidents and Cold War Nuclear Diplomacy Aiden

Russia's 2022 War Against Ukraine and the EU’s Foreign

Between Diplomacy and Non-Diplomacy. Foreign relations

Japan and the Middle East. Foreign Policies and

Economists and COVID-19: Ideas, Theories and Policies

The Politics of U.S. Foreign Policy and NATO:

A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination, And Faith During

Economic Diplomacy and Foreign Policy-making 1st ed.

Zorawar Daulet Singh

© Zorawar Daulet Singh 2019

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

First Edition published in 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-948964-0

ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-19-909533-9

Typeset in Trump Mediaeval LT Std 9.5/13

2.1 Choice Paths during the First East Bengal Crisis 92

3.1 Choice Paths during the 1954 Crisis 132

4.1 Choice Paths during the Formosa Crisis 174

6.1 Choice Paths during the Second Indochina Crisis 258

8.1 Choice Paths during the Sikkim Crisis 338

5.1 Indira Gandhi’s Security Seeker Role Conception 220

BSF India’s Border Security Force

R&AW Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external

are also returning to a world that, in some ways, resembles the

the thoughtful and perceptive comments by Jaspal Singh, Suman

It is often argued that India’s foreign policy in the post-1991 period

1 C. Raja Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India’s

New Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Viking, 2004).

If we seek to make informed assessments about India’s future

Indira Gandhi periods should, therefore, be seen as emerging from

2 Michael Brecher, ‘Non-alignment Under Stress: The West and the

India–China Border War’, Pacific Affairs 52, no. 4 (1979–1980): 629.

Press, 2015); David M. Malone, Does the Elephant Dance? Contemporary

periods within a single research frame.4 The result of these gaps in

Nehru’s Policy Choices and the Designing of Political Institutions

World (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2012).

War and Diplomacy in Kashmir, 1947–48 (New Delhi: SAGE, 2002).

terms—that is, in the realm of high politics and security—remains

9 S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, Volume 2, 1947–1956

11 Rudra Chaudhuri, Forged in Crisis: India and the United States

since 1947 (Noida: HarperCollins, 2014), 253.

non-alignment ‘in itself is not a policy; it is only part of a policy’.12

12 Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy: Selected Speeches,

Patriot Publishers, 1989), 32.

Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (London: Cornell University

in the Nehru and Indira Gandhi periods. It is, therefore, a misun-

16 Sumit Ganguly and Manjeet S. Pardesi, ‘Explaining Sixty Years of

in The Oxford Handbook of Indian Foreign Policy, eds David M. Malone,

International Security 24, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 54.

20Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy, 51.

and others, impose ‘almost no constraint on state behavior, because it

24 Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India; Srinath Raghavan, 1971:

A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (New Delhi: Permanent

the foreign policy worldviews of two different national leaders

25 Chacko, Indian Foreign Policy, 3.

of equations with competing great powers, formulating an intel-

Images and Roles

the total cognitive, affective, and evaluate structure of the behav-

International Politics and Foreign Policy: A Reader in Research and Theory,

2.1 Choice Paths during the First East Bengal Crisis 92

3.1 Choice Paths during the 1954 Crisis 132

4.1 Choice Paths during the Formosa Crisis 174

6.1 Choice Paths during the Second Indochina Crisis 258

8.1 Choice Paths during the Sikkim Crisis 338

5.1 Indira Gandhi’s Security Seeker Role Conception 220

R&AW Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external

nderwhelming compared to the explosive events of 1971. Yet,