“India does not see the world through borrowed eyes. Its experience, its history, and its culture have given it a distinctive perspective.” — S. Jaishankar
Most discussions of foreign policy treat states as interchangeable rational actors — as if India, the United States, and China all approach the world through the same lens, differing only in their power and interests.
Jaishankar rejects this framing. India is not a generic state that happens to be large. It is a civilization — one of the oldest and most continuously inhabited civilizations in human history — and that civilizational heritage profoundly shapes how India perceives the world, what it values, and how it behaves.
Understanding India’s foreign policy requires understanding the cultural and philosophical traditions that formed India’s world view long before the modern state existed.
Kautilya’s Arthashastra, written approximately 2,300 years ago, is one of the most sophisticated works of statecraft and political theory in any tradition. Kautilya was the prime minister of the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta, and his treatise addressed every aspect of governance — from taxation and administration to espionage, diplomacy, and war.
The Arthashastra is notable for its unsparing realism. Kautilya did not prescribe idealized behavior — he described the world as it actually operates, including the ways in which states pursue their interests through any means available, including deception and force.
Among Kautilya’s most enduring contributions is the “mandala” theory of interstate relations. The theory holds that:
This framework maps onto modern India’s strategic environment with remarkable precision: India’s relationships with Pakistan and China (neighbors, adversaries) versus India’s relationships with Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Japan (neighbors of neighbors, natural partners) reflect Kautilyan logic.
The Arthashastra also established that strategic relationships should be determined by interests, not sentiments — an insight that Jaishankar echoes repeatedly throughout the book.
The Mahabharata is not merely an epic poem — it is a profound meditation on duty, ethics, and the complexity of political action. Bhishma’s discourse on statecraft in the Shanti Parva represents thousands of years of Indian thinking about governance and international relations.
The epic’s central ethical tension — between dharma (righteousness/duty) and practical necessity — maps directly onto the perennial tension in foreign policy between values and interests.
India’s embrace of strategic realism is not a Western import. It has deep roots in its own philosophical tradition.
Two centuries of British colonial rule had profound effects on India’s strategic tradition. The colonial period:
The founders of independent India — Nehru foremost among them — were products of this colonial experience. Their foreign policy instincts were shaped by the imperative to escape great-power dominance, not to engage as an active player in great-power competition.
This explains much about the non-alignment movement and India’s early foreign policy — it was a rational response to India’s specific historical experience, not a universal principle.
Non-alignment was neither naive nor passive — it was a sophisticated strategy for a newly independent, resource-constrained state navigating a bipolar world. Its achievements were real:
Non-alignment’s critics often miss the strategic logic: for India in 1947, choosing sides would have meant subordinating Indian interests to either American or Soviet priorities. Independence of action was worth the cost of alignment’s potential security benefits.
But non-alignment also had costs and limitations:
Jaishankar’s argument is not that non-alignment was wrong for its time but that it is inadequate for India’s current moment and ambitions. The world has changed; India’s strategy must change with it.
Beyond formal doctrine, India’s civilizational heritage provides several genuine strategic assets:
India’s thousands of years of absorbing, synthesizing, and coexisting with multiple traditions — linguistic, religious, philosophical — gives it a unique ability to engage with diverse civilizations without demanding conformity.
In a world where Western liberal universalism is increasingly contested, India’s pluralistic tradition provides an alternative model of engagement: you can trade with us, learn from us, and cooperate with us without adopting our values.
India’s experience as a former colony, a developing democracy, and a non-Western civilization that achieved significant development without becoming Western gives it genuine credibility across the Global South — Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East.
This credibility is soft power that cannot be manufactured. It is earned through shared history and genuine empathy for the challenges of development.