India's Foreign Policy: Panchsheel, NAM and Act East

Foreign policy is the set of goals and methods with which a country deals with the rest of the world. India's foreign policy is made by the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, carried out by the Ministry of External Affairs, and its moral direction is written into the Constitution itself. India's multilateral diplomacy is in the news again as New Delhi hosts ministerial meetings of BIMSTEC, the grouping at the heart of the Act East policy; the lasting facts below are what examiners actually ask.

The constitutional base

Article 51, a Directive Principle of State Policy, directs the State to promote international peace and security, maintain just and honourable relations between nations, foster respect for international law and treaty obligations, and encourage settlement of international disputes by arbitration. Article 253 lets Parliament legislate to implement any international treaty or convention, and Entry 14 of the Union List places treaty-making with the Union. Jawaharlal Nehru, who was Prime Minister and his own Minister of External Affairs, gave the policy its early shape: anti-colonialism, anti-racism, Afro-Asian solidarity and independence of judgement between the two Cold War blocs.

Panchsheel: the five principles

The Panchsheel principles were set out in the preamble to the Agreement on Trade and Intercourse between the Tibet region of China and India, signed on 29 April 1954 by Nehru and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. The five are mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. The slogan of the years that followed was Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai; the border war of 1962 ended that phase, but Panchsheel survived as language India still uses in joint statements.

Non-alignment and the NAM

Non-alignment meant refusing membership of either military bloc while keeping the freedom to judge each issue on merit; it was not neutrality or isolation. Its road ran through the Asian Relations Conference at New Delhi in 1947, the Bandung Conference of Asian and African countries in Indonesia in 1955, and the Brioni meeting of Nehru, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito in 1956. The first summit of the Non-Aligned Movement was held at Belgrade in 1961. Its founding figures are remembered as Nehru, Tito, Nasser, Indonesia's Sukarno and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah. India hosted the seventh NAM summit at New Delhi in 1983, with Indira Gandhi as chairperson.

Landmark treaties and declarations

Doctrines and phases

The Gujral Doctrine, set out by Inder Kumar Gujral in 1996, offered India's smaller neighbours accommodation without demanding reciprocity, on the reasoning that a secure neighbourhood serves the larger power best. The Look East Policy was launched in 1991 under Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, when the Soviet collapse and economic liberalisation together pushed India towards South East Asia; it was recast as the Act East Policy in 2014, with connectivity, defence and the North East's development added to trade. Neighbourhood First puts South Asia at the top of the queue, and SAGAR, meaning Security and Growth for All in the Region, announced in 2015, frames India's role as a maritime security provider in the Indian Ocean.

The groupings India works through

India is a founding member of the United Nations and of the Commonwealth, and its nationals have served the world body from the start. SAARC was founded at Dhaka in 1985 and has its secretariat at Kathmandu. BIMSTEC was created by the Bangkok Declaration of 6 June 1997 and has its secretariat at Dhaka; its seven members link South Asia to South East Asia around the Bay of Bengal. India became a sectoral dialogue partner of ASEAN in 1992, a full dialogue partner in 1995 and a summit-level partner in 2002. BRICS held its first standalone summit at Yekaterinburg in 2009 and became BRICS when South Africa joined in 2010. India joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation as a full member at the Astana summit in 2017. India also works through the G20, IBSA with Brazil and South Africa, and the Quad with the United States, Japan and Australia. On nuclear policy India stayed out of the NPT and the CTBT, calling both discriminatory, tested at Pokhran in 1974 and 1998, and follows a declared no-first-use doctrine with credible minimum deterrence.