Worldly Wise

Diplomacy is a process; real successes and failures sometimes manifest years after the event. What is hailed as a triumph today may be perceived as an optical illusion or even a debacle later. This listing also filters out the foreign policy achievements that are the accumulated outcome of technological progress (such as the Peaceful Nuclear Explosion of 1974) or military power (the battlefield victory in Bangladesh in 1971 or the Kargil war), although both categories of achievements had a significant diplomatic aspect. This is a listing of known and less well-known diplomatic achievements that showcase Indian diplomacy's ability to seize opportunities, think out of the box, and hold its nerve in the face of intense global pressure.

- T.C.A. RAGHAVAN

Ending War in the Korean Peninsula 

1952-54

India played peace broker in ending the Korean conflict, the first major proxy conflict of the cold war. Initially rebuffed in the United Nations by the US and the Soviet Union, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru persisted. As a result, the final peace agreement of July 1953 owed much to the compromise suggested by India, which also played a major role in the supervision of the agreement. For a recently independent country, this was an audacious foray into the complex terrain of Cold War politics, and the experience served India well in the coming decades.

The Bandung Conference 

Indonesia, 1955

The conference of 29 Afro-Asian nations in Bandung gave India a platform to move into a leadership position in what is now termed the 'Global South'. Although neither 'Bandung' nor the later NonAligned Movement came T from a solely Indian initiative, they were substantially indebted to Indian diplomatic ideas and moves to consolidate a broad front of former colonies that functioned as a separate grouping in the bipolar world of the 1950s and 1960s.

UN Conference on Environment

Stockholm, 1972

The liberation of Bangladesh in December 1971 and the India-Pakistan Summit and Agreement in Simla in July 1972 overshadow India's participation at the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Sweden in June 1972. As climate change now dominates global agendas, the position India then took was paradigmatic for the Global South as a whole. By coining the phrase 'Poverty is the greatest polluter', PM Indira Gandhi articulated a developing country's perspective and underlined that economic development of the Global South and environment protection would have to be an integrated process.

Saving Angkor Wat