Israel-Palestine and Myanmar: How PV Narasimha Rao’s cold realpolitik eroded India’s moral diplomacy

Former Indian Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao is best known for opening up the Indian economy to a liberal market regime after he took charge in 1991. But what is not so well known is that Rao engineered a subtle yet decisive shift in Indian foreign policy from “idealism” to “pragmatism”.

Aided by Rao’s own ideological impulses and the broader geopolitical shifts triggered by the end of the Cold War, this change immediately reflected in India’s relations with two countries – Myanmar and Israel.

The policy tweaks were so critical that they continue to colour India’s approach to the two countries more than three decades later, despite the fact that the world today looks very little like the early 1990s.

In that sense, Rao’s calculative and arguably self-serving realpolitik – which foreign policy scholars often like to effusively paint as “pragmatism” – became a leitmotif of an India that struggled to adapt to a new global political and economic order.

A U-turn

Before Rao’s tenure began, Myanmar had been all but deadlocked in a seemingly unending civil war between a brutal regime led by the military autocrat, General Ne Win, and various ethnic armies.

In 1988, when the junta cracked down on nonviolent protesters in Rangoon and other parts of Myanmar, thousands...

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