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the towering figure in Indian foreign policy. For his entire tenure as prime minister, from 1947 to 1964, he was his own foreign minister. One of India’s first foreign secretaries,* K. P. S. Menon, explains in his autobiography, “We had no precedents to fall back upon, because India had no foreign policy of her own until she became independent. We did not even have a section for historical research until I created one. . . . Our policy therefore necessarily rested on the intuition of one man, who was Foreign Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.” This meant that India’s early foreign policy was driven by Nehru’s principles and prejudices, which were distinctive. Nehru was an idealist, even a moralist. He was for nonalignment and against the Cold War. His mentor, Mahatma Gandhi, was an unyielding pacifist. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” Gandhi used to say, “and soon the world will be blind and toothless.” The mahatma was revered in India almost like a god, and his strategy of nonviolence had brought down an empire. Like many of his followers, Nehru was determined to chart a new course in international affairs that lived up to those ideals.

Nehru rooted India’s foreign policy in abstract ideas rather than a strategic conception of national interests. He disdained alliances, pacts, and treaties, seeing them as part of the old rules of realpolitik, and was uninterested in military matters. He asked his friend Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy (who briefly served as India’s first head of state), to organize the defense bureaucracy and intervened only to resist any recommendation that would give the uniformed military too much power, which reminded Nehru too much of Britain’s imperial structure. When Mountbatten suggested that there be a powerful chief of defense staff, Nehru turned down the recommendation, since he wanted to have a civilian minister as the unrivaled boss. A week into his new government, he walked over to the defense ministry and was furious to find military officers working there (as they do in every defense ministry in the world). Since then, all armed service personnel who work in New Delhi’s “South Block” wear civilian clothes. For much of Nehru’s tenure, his defense minister was a close political confidant, V. K. Krishna Menon, who was even less interested in military matters, much preferring long-winded ideological combat in parliament to strategic planning.

Indian foreign policy in its early decades had an airy quality, full of rhetoric about peace and goodwill. Many Western observers believed these pieties to be a smoke screen behind which the nation was cannily pursuing its interests. But sometimes what you see is what you get. In many of his dealings, Nehru tended to put hope above calculation.* When he was warned that Communist China would probably seek to annex Tibet, for example, he doubted it, arguing that it would be a foolish and impractical adventure. And even after Beijing did annex Tibet, in 1951, Nehru would not reassess the nature of Chinese interests along India’s northern border. Rather than negotiate the disputed boundary with China, he announced the Indian position unilaterally, convinced of its rightness. And so he was shattered when China invaded India in 1962, settling the dispute decisively in its favor. “We were getting out of touch with reality in the modern world and we were living in an artificial atmosphere of our creation,” Nehru said in a national address. He was never the same again, and two years later died in office.

Although the rhetoric often remained sanctimonious, India’s policies have become more realistic over the years. Ironically, they were especially tough-minded and shrewd during the reign of Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi. There was a quiet maturation of the country’s foreign policy elite. And yet New Delhi was still not able to play a larger role in the world. Nehru and Indira Gandhi were international figures, but India operated under severe constraints. Conflict in the neighborhood—with Pakistan, China, Sri Lanka—kept it tied down and limited in