India's Foreign Policy

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INDIA’s RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE GULF REGION: PROSPECTS AND POSSIBILITIES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Kingshuk Chatterjee

In the five decades after India’s independence, several aspects of its foreign policy have come under criticism—its allegedly idealistic character in the Nehru era, its failure to be truly non-aligned for the better part of the duration of the Cold War, and its discomforting proximity to the USA since the late 1990s. There is hardly any major questioning of the two principal features of the Indian foreign policy—bilateralism and excessive focus on Pakistan. While India’s preference for bilateralism over multilateralism and even the Pakistan-fixation in its foreign policy have their own rationale (which is not always necessarily ...