DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
invites you to a talk by 


DR. ATUL MISHRA
School of International Studies, Central University of Gujrat, Gandhinagar


 “FROM ‘NONALIGNMENT’ TO THE ‘MODI DOCTRINE’: THE INDIAN WORLDVIEW IN TRANSFORMATION”


Dr. Atul Mishra is Assistant Professor in International Politics at the School of International Studies, Central University of Gujrat, Gandhinagar, where he has been teaching International Relations Theory, Indian Foreign Policy, and Indian Government and Politics since 2010. His doctoral thesis, undertaken at the International Politics Division, Centre for International Politics, Organization and Disarmament, at Jawaharlal Nehru University examined post-partition ideas and practices of sovereignty in India and Pakistan. Dr. Mishra’s published theoretical research has been on state formation in South Asia. Dr. Mishra has, along with Prof. Rajesh Rajagopalan co-authored a Handbook on Nuclear South Asia, and is preparing a book manuscript on “The Sovereign Lives of India and Pakistan” for the Oxford University Press. Currently engaged in an ICSSR sponsored collaborative study of India’s regional relations, he is also working on developing a social theory of international relations of South Asia. Dr. Mishra writes occasionally for newspapers like Dawn (Pakistan) and The Hindu (India).


This talk will outline the deep transformation of India’s worldview spanning the past three decades and still ongoing. Nonalignment, in its Nehruvian conceptualization, was a sophisticated and strategically nuanced Indian worldview that sought to combine the goals of transcending and transforming the international order. It substantively governed India’s foreign policy until the early-1960s. With Nehru’s death, and in the face of newer international political and security challenges, India abandoned nonalignment in practice while continuing to pay lip-service to it, using it to seek international status and influence. Dr. Mishra will argue that since the mid-1980s, a parallel development has unfolded. Alongside expressions of commitment to nonalignment, there has been a long, gradual and thoroughgoing revision of the Indian worldview. A further development in this process has been the emergence of two divergent strands of thinking on India’s engagement with the world: a Liberal strand, which builds upon elements of Nehruvianism and Liberalism within the Indian polity, and an amalgam of ideas called the ‘Modi Doctrine’, which traces its lineage to the international thinking within Political Hinduism. The elements of order shaping and the pursuit of wealth, power and status remain common to both strands, but they also differ in crucial ways. The talk will highlight their differences, focusing especially on the features and limitations of the ‘Modi Doctrine’.