Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Glossary of Terms
- 1 Introduction – Identity, Values and Indian Foreign Policy
- 2 Reason and Culture
- 3 Nation-Building and International Relations Theory
- 4 Nationalism in India
- 5 Gandhi, Nehru and Ideological Politics
- 6 Foreign Policy and National Identity under Nehru
- 7 Foreign Policy and National Identity Today
- 8 Conclusion – The Identity–Strategy Conflict
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Gandhi, Nehru and Ideological Politics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Glossary of Terms
- 1 Introduction – Identity, Values and Indian Foreign Policy
- 2 Reason and Culture
- 3 Nation-Building and International Relations Theory
- 4 Nationalism in India
- 5 Gandhi, Nehru and Ideological Politics
- 6 Foreign Policy and National Identity under Nehru
- 7 Foreign Policy and National Identity Today
- 8 Conclusion – The Identity–Strategy Conflict
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(W. B. Yeats)Rationality itself… is ideology dependent.
(Harvey Siegel)Ideological politics (especially nationalism), the conscious political manipulation of mass sentiments by elite agents, has strongly negative connotations. It tends to irrationally conflate ends and means and it usually does so in the service of an illiberal, chauvinistic creed. Violence is often the result – internally, in the Procrustean process of fitting reality to an abstract idea, and externally, in foreign policy, as one ideologically charged unit will contrast and clash with others. For these reasons, ideological politics is viewed with great skepticism by liberal thinkers.
Are there ‘good’ forms of ideological politics? Are there ‘good’ elite agents, both in the sense of ‘morally good’ and in the sense of ‘capable’? Can Indian nationalism be different? Benedict Andersen argues that the historical experiences of nationalism in the West and in Russia have supplied all subsequent nationalisms, such as the Indian one, with a tool-kit from which nationalist elites could chose the tools they like (Anderson, 1991). Kedourie similarly believes that nationalism in third world countries was a replication of a Western idea (Kedourie, 1971). If this is correct, if nationalism in Asia and Africa simply worked with a tool-kit made available for it by the West, then Indians indeed have nothing left to imagine (Balakrishnan, 1996).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nation-Building and Foreign Policy in IndiaAn Identity-Strategy Conflict, pp. 165 - 197Publisher: Foundation BooksPrint publication year: 2009