Mapping the trajectory of India’s foreign policy through the prisms of liberal pluralism and pragmatic realism

While decoding the journey of the last Seventy-five years as a sovereign, independent nation, the foreign policy of India offers interesting paradigm shifts in focus and tectonic change in strategy, for academic inquiry, intellectual debate and strategic thought. Situating India in the larger discourse of contemporary foreign policy choices and challenges reveals a trajectory of gradual evolution from a nascent post-colonial state, embracing liberal pluralism to an emerging global power pursuing proactive policies based on pragmatic realism in the twenty -first century. At the stroke of the midnight hour on the eve of independence, India as a newly independent state had articulated the Nehruvian idealist vision based on transformative ideas to shape the post-war world order. But gradually it veered towards a more pragmatic approach to confront a world increasingly shaped by realism. The present paper strives to analyze the dynamic character of the international and domestic milieu that shaped India’s foreign policy after independence. It further delves into critically examining the objectives and principles of India’s foreign policy, which determined the transformative assertion of an emerging power in the global arena in the present century. The paper aims at presenting a nuanced interpretation of various political, ideological, and strategic rationales of India’s foreign policy by contextualizing it in the backdrop of its post-colonial predicaments and the contemporary geopolitical and geo-economic challenges in an increasingly globalizing world.