Basics of Indian Foreign Policy: Principles and evolution

After the April 1954 agreement, Nehru and Zhou Enlai issued the India-China Joint Statement in New Delhi on 28 June 1954, extending the principles beyond the Tibet trade context. On 29 June 1954, Zhou Enlai and U Nu issued a parallel statement in Rangoon. Both statements are correct.

Panchsheel consists of exactly the first five principles listed above. 'Collective defence under a great-power alliance' is the opposite of the Bandung and NAM spirit and is not part of Panchsheel. So five of the six statements belong to the original set.

As the MEA's 2014 statement recalls, Nehru referred in Parliament to Lord Buddha's use of Panchsheel as a moral concept and welcomed it as a name for the Five Principles. In Myanmar too, Panchsheel has Buddhist roots. Kautilya's shadgunya is a realist doctrine of six policy options, the opposite tradition.

Statement 1 is wrong: the idea of a second phase was set out by External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha in a speech at Harvard University in September 2003, as studies by ISAS (NUS) and others record; Gujral is associated instead with a doctrine for the neighbourhood. Statement 2 is correct: Sinha said phase two was characterised by an expanded definition of 'East', extending from Australia to China and East Asia, with ASEAN at its core. Statement 3 is correct: he described a shift from the first phase's focus on trade and investment to wider economic and security issues, including joint efforts to protect sea lanes and coordinate counter-terrorism. Phase two thus prepared the ground for the strategic content that the Act East policy formalised in 2014.

Describing the fourth phase, the lecture of 14 November 2019 said that after the collapse of the Soviet Union the world became unipolar and India's focus shifted to safeguarding strategic autonomy, which included protecting its nuclear weapons option; it then said, 'The Look East policy summarized the changed Indian approach to world affairs, which also saw adjustments in its position on Israel', a reference to the establishment of full diplomatic relations in 1992 alongside the economic reforms of 1991. The Gujral Doctrine of the mid-1990s was about generosity towards smaller neighbours, not a summary of India's whole approach; Panchsheel belongs to 1954; and Connect Central Asia was announced only in 2012.

Resolution 1236 (XII) of 14 December 1957, titled 'Peaceful and neighbourly relations among States', called on all States to strengthen peace and settle disputes peacefully, in language close to the Five Principles. 1514 (XV) is the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples; 2758 seated the PRC; 377 (V) is Uniting for Peace.

The Vice President's 2014 statement records that Hammarskjold called the principles a reaffirmation of UN obligations and aims, and that NAM accepted Panchsheel as core principles at Belgrade (1961). Bandung expanded them to Ten Principles; it did not reduce them, so statement 3 is wrong.

Nonalignment 2.0 (2012) was written by a group of independent analysts and former officials, including Sunil Khilnani, Shyam Saran and Srinath Raghavan, and published by the Centre for Policy Research. It argued that India should retain strategic autonomy while engaging all major powers. It was not a government document.