Description
While India presented a systematic plan for universal nuclear disarmament to the UN General Assembly in 1988, it conducted nuclear tests in 1998, and subsequently negotiated the India-US Nuclear Agreement (2008). Nuclear decision-making is entwined with strategic as well as diplomatic considerations; but when do states adapt nuclear strategy for cooperation, and when for confrontation? The paper examines variations in Indian nuclear diplomacy by integrating insights from Diplomatic History, Strategic Studies, and Comparative Politics through a FPA (Foreign Policy Analysis) lens. It identifies domestic politics as a crucial variable therein and argues that the matter is not whether domestic politics influence changes in nuclear diplomacy, but rather how and when. The period between 1988 to 2008 represents a crucial phase in Indian history, as India navigated the post-Cold War landscape as a rising power and the accompanying choices, themes and tensions continue to shape Indian diplomacy. Based on 36 elite interviews and archival sources across multiple sites within India, this exercise historicizes and expands the understanding of diplomacy in a rising power in tandem with the parallel reconfigurations of global order and domestic politics. Such an exercise contests conventional understandings of nuclear strategy and widens the conceptual and empirical template of nuclear proliferation and security studies with historical grounding.
