ISAS Working Papers

This paper argues that India's foreign economic policies were shaped to a substantial extent by developmental ideas within the Indian state and by the international context of the Cold War. Individuals mattered, but the preferences of leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, P V Narasimha Rao, Atal Behari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh were filtered through Indian politics and political economy. This involved engagements between the Indian state and economic actors. It was the interaction of the Indian state navigating state-society relations between domestic social constraints and international political constraints that generated different types of economic policies and external engagement for India.3 I lay out the major conceptual issues in this section. This will help to run an analytic narrative in the next one.