Paper short abstract:

This paper evaluates the factors that drove a radical change in India’s neighborhood policy over the last thirty years. It questions to what extent this indicates a new Indian self-perception, or merely a new strategy to achieve regional preponderance.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to understand the factors that drove a radical change in India's neighborhood policy over the last thirty years. During the 1980s, India executed several coercive and interventionist policies towards its smaller neighbors, following Indira Gandhi's regional doctrine. Examples between 18987 and 1989 include Operation Cactus in the Maldives, the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka, and the economic blockade against Nepal. But just a few years later, India was underlining the importance of unilateral and asymmetric concessions to these same neighbors, most importantly articulated under the Gujral doctrine. This paper argues that while India's economic reforms after 1991 played an important causal role in this transformation, encouraging India to play a smoother and more conciliatory role, there were many additional factors at play, including a growing economic and power imbalance between India and its smaller neighbors, which reassured India's self-perception as the regional hegemon, a more assertive Chinese presence in the region, and also the new reforms and economic openings of the smaller South Asian countries, now in even direr need of Indian investments. While reviewing these various drivers, this paper also evaluated to what extent India has fundamentally altered its self-perception in the region, or whether it may recede into the previous interventionist avatar of using force to achieve its predominance.