Page 20 - A Gender-Sensitive Indian Foreign Policy- Why? and How?

Indian Council
of World Affairs

We may feel ‘at home’ with feminism as a term, but it is
important to not exclude those who do not explicitly say that
they are feminists. They are doing the groundwork for feminism,
irrespective of vocabularies we adopt and it is important to keep
those nuances in mind.

not merely branding or sloganeering. Consider that the Centre for Feminist
Foreign Policy has just launched an event to be held later this month, on
bringing together leading Global South feminists for a discussion on ‘how
we can ensure that feminist foreign policy does not reflect imperialism and
colonial patterns’. This comes from an understanding that there is already
existing discomfort about FFP, and how it is being presented as the panacea
to all the problems that people ‘out there’ continue to face in other parts of
the world. In this presentation, I try to put India’s gendered feminist foreign
policy in a historical, postcolonial context.

You cannot talk about feminism in India without the geographic and
cultural imaginaries of ‘South Asia’. Feminism in this region refuses policing
through borders, and is very rich, textured and even contentious. We have
had indigenous feminist movements, and also those with strong western
influences. Civil society participation has really been strong at both local and
national levels, and in fact we should always remember that in South Asia we
use the language of ‘social reform movements’ and ‘women’s movements’
more than ‘feminist movements’. We may feel ‘at home’ with feminism as a
term, but it is important to not exclude those who do not explicitly say that
they are feminists. They are doing the groundwork for feminism, irrespective
of vocabularies we adopt and it is important to keep those nuances in mind.

As a student of Indian politics, I would respond to the provocation about
a gender sensitive Indian foreign policy by stating that if we read back
into history, we will find that so many of the elements of gender sensitive
foreign policy or what is effectively being called feminist foreign policy, has
been there in shades. What might, then, be its main ingredients? I am not
suggesting that it was deliberately conceptualised with feminist ideals, or
that there was gender equality always embedded in it. However, the way in
which we have imagined ourselves and our relationship to the world, I think
is deeply reflected in our foreign policy approaches since independence.
Indian foreign policy discourse, is in some sense, an external manifestation
of a deeply ingrained sense of self, derived from India’s civilizational identity.
We can endlessly debate about what that might include these days or not,
but there are some core principles that we treat as Indian – universal good,
assisting the weak, sharing resources, compassion for the suffering, justice
20 for all, and more.

Indian Council of World Affairs An ICWA Conversation