India-Democracy

Despite its curtailment during the 1975-7 Emergency  under Indira Gandhi, democracy is a  critical principle structuring  India’s engagement with  the international sphere and its incumbent institutions. With a domestic political record unprecedented for a post-colonial state after the Second World War, supporting and promoting democracy has continually informed some of New Delhi’s interactions with international society but in a harmonizing, rather than in a critically central, manner. This complementary nature rests upon concurrent key foreign policy tenets such as non-interference and non-intervention which prohibit India from getting involved in the internal affairs of other states. In turn, while in the Nehruvian era the promotion of democracy was more forthright and idealistic, after the 1960s this perspective has been in decline with the rise of realpolitik and pragmatism. Democracy has, however, not been completely disavowed as a foreign policy tool. Most notably in this regard, during their 2000s rapprochement, India and the United States took to calling each other natural allies, based (in part) upon their  democratic principles and their partnership in the global ‘war on terror’. In 2000, India also became one of the ten founding members of the Community of Democracies, and democracy is regarded as a key way to coordinate better relations between Asia’s democracies (Japan, Australia and Indonesia) and the United States.