The Indian National Congress: Crafting India’s Global Outlook

Long before India became a sovereign nation in 1947, it already had the outlines of a foreign policy. That policy was not crafted in a government ministry but in the resolutions, debates, and overseas journeys of the Indian National Congress (INC). As the freedom struggle matured, the Congress stopped seeing itself purely as a domestic protest organisation and began acting like the voice of a future nation-state with views on war, peace, empire, and justice. The principles it articulated during these decades, including anti-imperialism, disarmament, collective security, and solidarity with oppressed peoples, would later become the bedrock of independent India’s diplomacy.

From domestic protest to global outlook 🔗

In its earliest years, the Congress concentrated almost entirely on constitutional reform within the British Empire. Founded in 1885, it began as a moderate body petitioning for greater Indian representation. International affairs were simply not on its agenda, because foreign policy was controlled entirely by London. Before independence, India’s external relations were determined by the British government and shaped around supporting the interests of the British Empire, with very limited independent diplomatic engagement.

The shift came after the First World War. The war exposed the contradictions of empire, the disappointment of constitutional reforms like the Government of India Act of 1919 deepened, and events like the Jallianwala Bagh massacre hardened public anger. The Congress began to recognise that the struggle in India was part of a much larger global contest against colonialism. This realisation transformed the organisation. It started to think and speak about events far beyond Indian shores.

The Khilafat moment and the first international cause 🔗

The Khilafat Movement of 1919 marks one of the earliest moments when an essentially international issue became fused with Indian domestic politics. The movement was an agitation by Indian Muslims, allied with Indian nationalists, to pressure the British government to preserve the authority of the Ottoman Sultan as Caliph of Islam after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the war. The concern was foreign, centred on the fate of the caliphate and the territorial settlement imposed on Turkey, yet it galvanised mass politics at home.

Mahatma Gandhi recognised the opportunity. He saw in the Khilafat cause a chance to rally Muslim support and forge Hindu-Muslim unity against British rule. At the Nagpur Session of the Congress in 1920, Gandhi linked the demand for Swaraj with the Khilafat demands and adopted the non-cooperation plan to pursue both objectives together. The combined Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movement became the first all-India agitation against British rule, marked by an unprecedented degree of Hindu-Muslim cooperation.

What matters here for the evolution of India’s world-view is the precedent. The Congress demonstrated, for the first time on a mass scale, that a question of international politics could be woven directly into the national movement. The boundary between “domestic” and “foreign” concerns began to dissolve.

The early resolutions: a nation finding its voice 🔗

The 1920s saw the Congress formally articulating positions on world affairs through its resolutions. These documents are where India’s diplomatic instincts were first written down.

The 1921 landmark and the Madras Session of 1927 🔗

The meeting of the All India Congress Committee in Delhi in 1921 is often described as a landmark in the history of India’s foreign relations. For the first time, the Congress passed a resolution on foreign policy, asserting that the existing government of India did not represent Indian opinion. This was a bold claim, because it implied that Indians, not the British administration, were the rightful authors of India’s relations with the world.

The Madras Session of 1927 went further. The Congress passed a resolution stressing the need to conduct the external relations of India independently, without the interference of the British government. Historians regard this session as laying the foundations of India’s foreign policy. The Congress was no longer simply criticising British conduct; it was claiming the right to an independent international identity.

Disarmament and collective security 🔗

Among the most enduring contributions of these resolutions was the commitment to universal disarmament and collective security. The Congress repeatedly expressed a desire for India to live in peace and friendship with its neighbours and to build strength on the basis of international cooperation and goodwill. It declared that a free India would gladly associate itself with a world order founded on disarmament and collective security.

Yet the Congress attached a sharp condition to this vision. It argued that genuine world cooperation was impossible so long as imperialism survived and one nation dominated another. In other words, peace and disarmament could not be separated from the end of colonial exploitation. This linkage between peace and anti-imperialism became a signature feature of how India would later approach global institutions.

Looking outward: solidarity with the colonised world 🔗

The Congress did not confine its internationalism to paper resolutions. It also reached out to other movements struggling against empire, and no episode illustrates this better than the Brussels Congress of 1927.

The Brussels Congress and the League Against Imperialism 🔗

In February 1927, more than 170 delegates from around the world gathered in Brussels for the founding meeting of the League Against Imperialism (LAI). Jawaharlal Nehru attended as the representative of the Indian National Congress and became one of the founders of the organisation, sitting on its executive council. He shared the platform with anti-colonial figures from across the globe, including representatives of the Chinese Kuomintang, the African National Congress of South Africa, and Indonesian nationalists.

The experience profoundly shaped Nehru. Scholars argue that he emerged from Brussels devoted to the idea of blending nationalism with international anti-imperialism, seeing India’s struggle as part of a larger, global contest. The conference mattered because it positioned the Congress as a participant in a worldwide network of liberation movements, not just a single colony pleading its own case. Nehru argued that the fight against imperialism was universal and that colonised peoples needed to support one another.

Nehru as the architect of the world-view 🔗

Nehru’s role in shaping the Congress’s international outlook can hardly be overstated. His travels in Europe between 1926 and 1927 and his exposure to socialist and anti-colonial thought made him the organisation’s effective foreign policy architect. On returning to India, he pressed the Congress to demand complete independence, a goal formalised at the Lahore Session of 1929 with the declaration of Purna Swaraj. That same drive towards full sovereignty naturally pushed the Congress towards a more assertive position on foreign affairs, because a fully independent nation would need its own foreign policy.

Building the machinery of diplomacy 🔗

By the early 1930s, the Congress moved from articulating positions to building actual institutions. In 1932, it established a Foreign Department under the chairmanship of Jawaharlal Nehru, with Ram Manohar Lohia as its secretary. This was the first formal step towards an independent foreign policy framework, signalling that Indian nationalists now viewed themselves as actors on the global stage rather than subjects waiting for British direction.

The department focused on engaging with international issues connected to colonialism and imperialism. Its creation showed that the Congress was preparing, in a practical sense, to take over the conduct of India’s external relations the moment independence arrived.

Reading the world in the 1930s and 1940s 🔗

An assessment of the Congress resolutions from the 1920s to 1947 reveals a remarkably consistent world-view. According to analyses of these documents, they show an acute awareness of the dangers of fascism, sympathy towards the Soviet Union, consistent criticism of Western imperial expansion, and a sensitive exposure of racial and economic discrimination. The Congress condemned fascist aggression in places like China and Spain and warned against the drift towards another world war.

This positioning was significant. The Congress was forming opinions on conflicts that had no direct bearing on India’s immediate freedom struggle, which is precisely what a nation conscious of its global responsibilities does. The organisation was rehearsing the role of a sovereign state long before it possessed sovereignty.

The enduring legacy in independent India 🔗

When India became independent, it did not invent a foreign policy from scratch. The values forged during the freedom struggle became the guiding principles of the new state’s external conduct. The continuity is striking. The 55th Session of the Congress at Jaipur in 1948 declared the party’s commitment to world peace, the freedom of all nations, racial equality, and the abolition of imperialism and colonialism. These were the same themes that had run through Congress resolutions for nearly three decades.

The pre-independence emphasis on anti-imperialism and solidarity with colonised peoples flowed directly into the Non-Aligned Movement, which Nehru helped lead. The insistence on disarmament resurfaced in independent India’s advocacy at the United Nations and, later, in initiatives like Rajiv Gandhi’s call for a nuclear-free world. The commitment to friendly relations with all countries regardless of their political systems echoed the Congress’s early language of peace and cooperation. Nehru himself, who had absorbed these ideas at Brussels and in the resolutions he helped draft, became both Prime Minister and the first Foreign Minister, ensuring that the world-view he shaped within the Congress became the official policy of the Indian state.

The journey from the Khilafat agitation of 1919 to the institutional foreign policy of 1947 was therefore not a series of disconnected episodes. It was a gradual, deliberate construction of a national world-view, built resolution by resolution and journey by journey, by an organisation that came to see itself as the custodian of a future nation’s conscience.

What do you think? Did the Congress’s habit of linking peace and disarmament to the end of imperialism strengthen India’s moral standing in the world, or did it set unrealistic conditions that limited India’s room for manoeuvre? And how much of the world-view crafted before 1947 still genuinely guides Indian diplomacy today, versus surviving only as rhetoric?

References

1. https://vajiramandravi.com/upsc-exam/evolution-of-indias-foreign-policy/
2. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/khilafat-movement/
3. https://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Khilafat_Movement
4. https://lotusarise.com/indian-foreign-policy-upsc/
5. https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/periodicals/labour_monthly/1938/06/x01.htm
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_against_Imperialism
7. https://academic.oup.com/dh/article-abstract/44/1/168/5609068
8. https://www.studocu.com/in/document/siliguri-institute-of-technology/btech-computer-science/unit-1-useful/62354715
9. https://objectiveias.in/political-science/evolution-of-indias-foreign-policy/