The NALANDA Doctrine and INDIA’s Search For a New International Order: From Strategic Autonomy to Strategic Responsibility

Abstract

India’s foreign policy has historically sought to reconcile sovereignty with cooperation, strategic autonomy with international engagement, and civilisational identity with universal principles. Panchsheel represented one of the earliest systematic attempts to articulate this balance through principles of sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, equality and peaceful coexistence. Yet the strategic environment of the twenty-first century presents problems that Panchsheel could not have anticipated: contested multipolarity, technological dependence, artificial intelligence, economic coercion, fragmented multilateralism, great-power rivalry and the growing demand of the Global South for institutional representation. This article proposes the Nalanda Doctrine as a contemporary extension—not a repudiation—of Panchsheel. Drawing upon international-relations scholarship on realism, liberal institutionalism, the English School, constructivism, soft power and Global IR, it argues that India requires a foreign-policy vocabulary that explains not merely how it can remain autonomous, but what kind of international order it should help construct with its growing power. The Nalanda Doctrine places knowledge, dialogue, sovereign agency, reciprocal cooperation, institutionalised disagreement and continuous renewal alongside power, deterrence and strategic autonomy. BRICS provides the immediate institutional arena in which such an approach could be tested. The article argues that India should seek neither an anti-Western bloc nor a replacement hierarchy, but a plural international order in which differences can coexist without becoming domination or war.

Keywords: India; Nalanda; Panchsheel; strategic autonomy; BRICS; Global South; international order; Global IR; multipolarity; peaceful coexistence; civilisational dialogue; knowledge diplomacy.

The Question Beyond Strategic Autonomy

At times in foreign policy history, a state must do more than protect its immediate interests; it must explain the kind of international order in which those interests can remain secure, legitimate, and sustainable. India reaches such a moment as it chairs BRICS in 2026 and hosts the eighteenth BRICS Summit in New Delhi. The contemporary setting is unusually consequential: BRICS has expanded beyond its original five-member configuration; both cooperation and strategic rivalry mark relations among its members; the United States and China remain central to the structure of global power; Russia’s war against Ukraine continues to reshape European and global security; West Asia remains unstable; and technology, artificial intelligence, data, critical minerals and supply chains are becoming instruments of geopolitical power. Current commentary surrounding the New Delhi summit itself reflects the central dilemma: should BRICS become an anti-Western political project primarily, or can it instead become a constructive institution for development, global-governance reform, digital cooperation and a more representative international order? (The Indian Express, 2026a, 2026b)

India’s official foreign-policy formulation already contains the foundations of such a project. The Ministry of External Affairs describes India’s objectives in terms of security and prosperity, strategic space and autonomy, while emphasising peaceful coexistence, non-interference, peaceful dispute settlement, multilateralism, pluralism and South-South cooperation. It also recognises that international cooperation is indispensable because states cannot secure absolute goals at the expense of everyone else.

The intellectual problem, therefore, is not that India lacks principles. The problem is that India has accumulated a vocabulary of foreign-policy practice without yet fully consolidating a twenty-first-century theory of international order. Non-alignment explained how India would preserve independence during bipolar rivalry. Strategic autonomy explains how it preserves freedom of decision in a more complex system. Multi-alignment explains how it can work simultaneously with competing powers. Multipolarity describes the distribution of power. The Global South identifies an important constituency. But none of these concepts, by itself, fully answers the next question: what kind of world should India seek to build with the power it is acquiring?

Panchsheel: India’s First International-Order Proposition

The answer cannot begin by discarding Panchsheel. The five principles—mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence—were formally articulated in the 29 April 1954 India-China Agreement. India’s Ministry of External Affairs later described Panchsheel as an attempt to respond to a world searching for principles through which nations could coexist and prosper together. Panchsheel was therefore more ambitious than a bilateral diplomatic formula. It represented the post-colonial aspiration that newly sovereign states should not have to choose between independence and international cooperation. Its moral force lay in the proposition that international order should not be constructed exclusively around the preferences of the powerful.

Its strategic weakness, however, was equally instructive: principles cannot enforce themselves. They require reciprocity, institutional mechanisms, credible capabilities and a willingness by states to accept constraints upon their own conduct. The history of Panchsheel must therefore include 1962. The Sino-Indian war demonstrated the limits of assuming that a shared vocabulary of peaceful coexistence would necessarily produce reciprocal strategic behaviour.

Yet the appropriate conclusion is not that peace was naïve. Such a conclusion would be historically and theoretically simplistic. Srinath Raghavan’s reconstruction of the Nehru years demonstrates that Indian foreign policy was never simply an exercise in idealism; Nehru and his advisers repeatedly confronted questions concerning the utility of force, the risks of escalation, diplomatic alternatives and the management of competing strategic interests (Raghavan, 2010). The lesson of 1962 should consequently be more demanding: peace requires power; principles require reciprocity; trust requires verification; and coexistence requires credible deterrence. Any contemporary Indian doctrine that ignores this lesson would repeat history rather than learn from it.

From Non-Alignment to Strategic Autonomy

The evolution of Indian foreign policy after independence is therefore best understood not as a succession of discarded doctrines but as an accumulation of responses to changing structures of power. Nehru’s non-alignment sought to preserve independent judgment in a bipolar world. India’s post-Cold War transformation required a much broader engagement with the global economy, the United States, East Asia and emerging institutions. Strategic autonomy then became the contemporary language for retaining decision-making freedom without returning to Cold War non-alignment. Shashi Tharoor’s Pax Indica, for example, argued for moving beyond the older vocabulary of non-alignment toward multi-alignment, while contemporary scholarship by C. Raja Mohan has examined strategic autonomy as a continuing effort to preserve Indian freedom of action amid deeper engagement with Western powers and other major centres of influence (Tharoor, 2012; Mohan, 2012). The evolution is important because it demonstrates that Indian foreign policy has never been static. The official Indian formulation itself describes foreign policy as necessarily dynamic and pragmatic while retaining certain guiding principles.

Yet strategic autonomy creates a conceptual paradox. It tells India how not to be subordinate, but does not fully specify what India should do with its freedom once it has acquired it. A state can be strategically autonomous and still behave narrowly, coercively or irresponsibly. It can resist domination while reproducing hierarchy in its own neighbourhood. It can demand sovereign equality while using economic dependence to influence weaker partners. It can advocate multipolarity while imagining that a world with several great powers is automatically a just world. The next stage of Indian foreign policy therefore requires a transition from strategic autonomy to strategic responsibility. The question is no longer merely whether India can make independent choices; it is whether India’s choices can help produce an international environment in which other states also possess meaningful choices.

What Realism Gets Right—and What It Cannot Explain

The contemporary debate about international order begins with a difficulty: the liberal international order that emerged after the Second World War has been under sustained pressure, particularly since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The attacks of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent “war on terror” exposed tensions between liberal commitments to international law, human rights and multilateralism and the security practices adopted by powerful states. At the same time, globalisation generated contradictions of its own. The expansion of markets did not produce political convergence; instead, it intensified inequalities, created new forms of economic dependence and exposed the limits of a universalising liberal model. World-systems theorists such as Immanuel Wallerstein interpreted these contradictions as evidence of a deeper structural crisis in the capitalist world-system (Wallerstein, 2003).

The distribution of power has simultaneously changed. The relative decline of unquestioned US primacy has been accompanied by the rise of China and the reassertion of Russia, while regional powers such as Iran have contested existing arrangements in their respective geopolitical environments. The result is not simply a transition from one hegemon to another but a more fragmented and contested order. Russia’s challenge to the European security order, China’s growing strategic weight in the Asia-Pacific, and continuing instability in West Asia illustrate different manifestations of this transformation. The wars and economic conflicts of the contemporary period, together with the return of protectionism and nationalist politics within the established centres of the liberal order, have further complicated the assumption that liberal internationalism is on an inevitable path of expansion.

The crisis is therefore not simply external. Liberalism is being contested from within its own core. The European Union has faced economic and political pressures while its response to conflicts in its wider neighbourhood has generated renewed debates about the relationship between strategic interests and values such as human rights. Across political systems, both the rise of the right and the resurgence of different forms of the left indicate dissatisfaction with the political and economic arrangements associated with globalisation. Ian Bremmer’s idea of a “geopolitical recession” captures a related condition in which established mechanisms of international coordination are increasingly unable to generate common direction (Bremmer, 2012). Robert Kagan similarly identifies fragmentation driven by economic stress, nationalism, declining confidence in institutions and the regionalisation of power (Kagan, 2012).

These anxieties were already visible at the Munich Security Conference in 2017, where political leaders and scholars debated the future of liberal democracy, open economies, multilateral trade and international agreements such as the Paris Climate Agreement. The subsequent trajectory has made the underlying question more urgent: if the existing order is fragmenting, what kind of order might emerge from its fragmentation?

The classical realist tradition remains indispensable to this argument. Hans Morgenthau’s emphasis on power and prudence, Kenneth Waltz’s structural account of international anarchy, and subsequent realist scholarship remind policymakers that international politics cannot be conducted as though states have escaped competition, uncertainty and insecurity (Morgenthau, 1948; Waltz, 1979; Baylis et al., 2023). A state that cannot defend its territory, secure its economy, protect its technological infrastructure or deter coercion cannot preserve meaningful autonomy. This is particularly relevant to India because its strategic environment includes a nuclear-armed China, a contested Himalayan boundary, an unstable neighbourhood and an Indo-Pacific in which great-power rivalry is intensifying.

The Nalanda Doctrine therefore cannot be an idealist escape from realism. It must incorporate realism’s central insight that capability is a condition of choice. But realism is insufficient as a complete theory of international order because power cannot by itself explain legitimacy, norms, identity, institutional cooperation or the possibility that states may voluntarily constrain their behaviour. A world organised exclusively around power risks replacing one hierarchy with another. India’s own colonial experience makes that conclusion particularly consequential.

The challenge is therefore not to choose between power and principle. It is to understand how power can be disciplined by principle without making principle dependent upon power alone. That is where the Nalanda proposition begins.

The English School and the Possibility of International Society

Hedley Bull provides a crucial bridge between realism and a more normative conception of international order. The English School, which emerged as a distinctive tradition in international relations during the 1970s, shifted attention from international politics understood exclusively as competition among states towards the possibility that sovereign states could constitute an international society. Associated with scholars such as Martin Wight, Hedley Bull, Adam Watson, John Vincent, Robert Jackson, Tim Dunne and Nicholas Wheeler, and later renewed through the work of Barry Buzan and Andrew Hurrell, the tradition offers an evolutionary understanding of international politics in which states remain sovereign and the international system remains anarchic, but shared rules, institutions and expectations can nonetheless generate considerable order (Bull, 2012; Baylis et al., 2023).

Bull’s concept of an “anarchical society” is central to this proposition. The absence of a world government does not imply the absence of order. Sovereign states have historically created institutions and practices through which they recognise one another, negotiate, establish rules and regulate the use of force. The international system may therefore be considerably more orderly and socially organised than realism or neorealism alone would suggest (Bull, 2012).

This does not mean that the English School underestimates violence. On the contrary, Bull regarded violence as an endemic feature of anarchical society. The point is that international law, diplomatic practices, morality and shared institutions can restrain violence even when they cannot eliminate it. The English School consequently occupies an important middle ground between realism and utopianism: it recognises that force cannot be abolished from international politics, while rejecting the assumption that states are condemned to perpetual conflict.

This also makes the role of great powers particularly important. International society depends in significant measure on whether powerful states behave as “great responsibles”—that is, whether they recognise that their greater capabilities impose responsibilities beyond the pursuit of narrow self-interest. Great powers can sustain international order, but they can also threaten it precisely because their capabilities permit them to circumvent or reinterpret common rules. The history of interventions conducted in the name of security, including the American-led “war on terror”, illustrates this tension.

The Nalanda Doctrine can enter this tradition without claiming to replace it. Its distinctive question is: how can international society renew itself when the distribution of power, the membership of the international system and the sources of knowledge themselves are changing?

This question becomes particularly important because the contemporary international order is increasingly plural. The old distinction between “Western” and “non-Western” is inadequate to describe the complexity of present international society. India, China, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, the Gulf states, African states and other emerging actors possess different political histories and strategic interests. They cannot simply be incorporated into a pre-existing theory as objects of study. The order itself must accommodate multiple historical experiences.

Nalanda therefore enters the English School conversation not as an alternative to international society, but as a proposition about how international society can become more genuinely plural without abandoning common rules.

Constructivism: Why Ideas Become Strategic Resources

Alexander Wendt’s constructivism adds another essential dimension. International politics is shaped not only by material capabilities but by identities, expectations and shared meanings. Constructivism emerged in the 1980s partly in response to the dominance of neorealist explanations and challenged the assumption that the social world of international politics could be understood independently of human consciousness. Nicholas Onuf’s The World of Our Making gave the tradition one of its foundational formulations, while scholars such as Peter Katzenstein, Friedrich Kratochwil, Emanuel Adler, Martha Finnemore, Christian Reus-Smit, Michael Barnett and Ted Hopf developed different aspects of the approach (Onuf, 1989; Wendt, 1999; Baylis et al., 2023).

The constructivist intervention is significant because it treats ideas not as secondary reflections of material power but as constitutive of political reality. States act on the basis of beliefs about who they are, who others are and what kinds of behaviour they consider possible or legitimate. A nuclear weapon possessed by an ally is therefore not necessarily interpreted in the same way as an identical weapon possessed by an adversary. Material capabilities matter, but their political meaning is socially constructed (Wendt, 1999).

This is captured in Wendt’s well-known proposition that “anarchy is what states make of it.” Anarchy does not mechanically produce self-help or permanent hostility. Through interaction, states construct relationships of rivalry, restraint or friendship. Wendt’s ideal types of Hobbesian, Lockean and Kantian cultures of anarchy illustrate how the same structural absence of a central authority can generate different patterns of interstate behaviour (Wendt, 1992).

Constructivism therefore rejects the billiard-ball image of international politics in which states appear as internally undifferentiated objects colliding within an external system. It asks us instead to examine the ideas, identities and domestic meanings that shape how states interpret their environment. Finnemore’s work demonstrates how international norms can influence state interests; Katzenstein shows how domestic political structures and identities affect foreign-policy behaviour; and Hopf demonstrates how domestic constructions of identity can shape understandings of external actors (Finnemore, 1996; Katzenstein, 1996; Hopf, 2002).

The implication for the Nalanda Doctrine is substantial. If international orders are partly constituted through ideas, then changing the language through which states understand themselves and one another can alter the possibilities of international politics. Conflict is not always produced by irreconcilable interests; it can also emerge from historically produced assumptions, misrecognition and incompatible interpretations. This does not mean that dialogue eliminates material conflict. It means that the interpretation of material conflict is itself politically consequential.

The contemporary Nalanda idea must therefore avoid civilisational triumphalism. It cannot claim that ancient India possessed a complete theory of modern international relations. That would be historically indefensible and theoretically counterproductive. The stronger proposition is that Nalanda can provide a civilisational vocabulary for intellectual openness.

The Founder’s Note of The Nalanda describes Nalanda as a space of inquiry, dialogue, ethical reflection, human welfare and democratisation of knowledge, culminating in the idea of a “Doctrine of Renewal”. Its contemporary significance lies not in claiming ancient superiority but in translating those values into institutions capable of addressing modern problems.

The contemporary policy discourse around Nalanda increasingly moves in this direction. Lt. Gen. Syed Ata Hasnain’s recent formulation of the “Nalanda Approach” similarly presents Nalanda not simply as a historical university but as an international knowledge ecosystem whose contemporary relevance could be realised through university partnerships, joint research, scholar exchanges, technology collaboration and sustained intellectual dialogue (Hasnain, 2026).

Nalanda thus becomes meaningful not because it supplies an ancient answer to every contemporary problem, but because it offers a way of thinking about how societies learn, encounter difference and renew their institutions. The doctrine is therefore constructivist in an important sense: it treats international order as partly a product of the meanings through which states understand power, sovereignty, difference and cooperation.

From Soft Power to Knowledge Power

Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power demonstrated that influence can arise from attraction, legitimacy, culture and institutions rather than solely from coercion or payment (Nye, 1990, 2004). India possesses substantial potential in this domain, from its cultural traditions and democratic experience to its educational, technological and scientific capacities.

But the Nalanda Doctrine should deliberately go beyond the conventional language of soft power. The objective should not merely be to make other societies admire India. It should be to create shared intellectual infrastructure through which societies can learn from one another.

Universities, research centres, medical institutions, legal academies, scientific laboratories, libraries, archives, technology partnerships and international scholarship programmes can create relationships that survive changes of government because they are rooted in knowledge rather than transactional diplomacy. Nalanda thus becomes a proposition about knowledge as strategic infrastructure.

This also marks a distinction between knowledge power and conventional cultural diplomacy. Cultural diplomacy often seeks attraction; knowledge diplomacy can generate capacity. A state that contributes to the intellectual capacities of other societies acquires influence without demanding dependence. Such influence is potentially more durable because it enlarges the capabilities of partners rather than narrowing their choices.

This is particularly appropriate to India because the historical memory of Nalanda is inseparable from the movement of scholars across Asia. The contemporary translation should be equally outward-looking: knowledge travelling across borders, not knowledge becoming another instrument of geopolitical monopoly.

The Liberal Institutionalist Lesson

Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony offers another foundation. Keohane asked whether cooperation could survive without the dominance of a single power and argued that international regimes could facilitate decentralised cooperation even when hegemony declined (Keohane, 1984). This is directly relevant to BRICS. If BRICS becomes merely an expression of dissatisfaction with Western dominance, it will remain reactive. If it creates institutions through which states with divergent interests can cooperate on development, health, climate, finance, technology, connectivity and crisis management, it can contribute to a more plural international order.

The theory of complex interdependence developed by Keohane and Nye is particularly useful here because it complicates the traditional assumption that international politics is organised primarily around military security. Security remains important, but economic security, technological capacity, financial stability, energy, climate and supply chains have become deeply intertwined with national power. International politics is also increasingly plural in its actors: states remain central, but multinational corporations, international organisations, universities, civil society organisations, technological platforms and transnational networks shape outcomes. Relations among states consequently cannot be understood solely as a struggle in which one side’s gain is necessarily another’s loss. Cooperation can coexist with competition (Keohane & Nye, 1977).

This does not mean that the world has ceased to be anarchic. Rather, it is characterised by complex interdependence within anarchy. States remain concerned with survival and relative power, yet their interests are increasingly embedded in networks that make complete autonomy impossible. Strategic autonomy must therefore be reinterpreted not as insulation from interdependence but as the capacity to manage interdependence without becoming structurally subordinate.

This is why India should resist the temptation to define BRICS primarily through opposition. Current discussion surrounding the New Delhi summit has itself stressed the need to move beyond an “anti-West” conception toward development, infrastructure, climate action, digital innovation, resilient supply chains and reform of global institutions. The Nalanda Doctrine provides an intellectual justification for that approach: institutions should enlarge the capacity for cooperation rather than merely institutionalise geopolitical resentment.

Global IR and the Decolonisation of International Theory

Amitav Acharya’s Global IR project presents perhaps the strongest theoretical justification for developing an Indian contribution to international-order theory. Global IR challenges the assumption that theories developed primarily from European and North American experiences can simply be treated as universal. Acharya’s work on a “multiplex” world is especially relevant because it describes a world characterised by overlapping political, economic, technological and cultural structures rather than a single hierarchy (Acharya, 2014, 2017). The implication is not that Western theories should be discarded. It is that international relations should become genuinely global in its sources of concepts and historical experience. Nalanda must therefore avoid becoming another form of intellectual universalism. The proposition should not be “Indian civilisation has the answer.” It should be: “Indian intellectual history can contribute to a conversation in which no civilisation possesses a monopoly over the meaning of international order.” That distinction is fundamental. The greatest danger to the Nalanda project would be to reproduce, in Indian form, the epistemic hierarchy it seeks to overcome.

The Small-State Test of Great-Power Responsibility

This leads to a principle that should become central to India’s emerging international philosophy: the test of a great power is not how it treats equals, but how its rise affects the choices of weaker states.

Major powers can proclaim sovereignty while exercising pressure over smaller neighbours; they can celebrate non-interference while using financial, technological or infrastructural dependence as leverage; and they can advocate multipolarity while simply seeking a larger share of hierarchical power.

India should therefore ask a difficult question of itself: does India’s rise enlarge the choices of smaller states, or merely enlarge India’s own choices?

This is not simply a moral question. It is strategic. A major power whose neighbours experience its rise as security, opportunity and respect is likely to generate durable influence. A major power whose neighbours experience its rise as coercion will eventually encourage balancing behaviour. The Nalanda Doctrine therefore connects sovereignty with responsibility: the stronger state has the greater responsibility to preserve the agency of the weaker state.

The China Test

China will be the most demanding test of the doctrine. India must simultaneously regard China as a major neighbouring power, economic actor, civilisational interlocutor and strategic competitor. The experience of the Himalayan border demonstrates why peaceful coexistence cannot mean strategic complacency. The recent history of India-China relations, including the 2020 crisis and subsequent efforts at disengagement and stabilisation, confirms that dialogue and deterrence must operate together.

Tanvi Madan’s Fateful Triangle demonstrates historically how China shaped both American and Indian strategic perceptions and how the India-US relationship cannot be understood independently of the China factor (Madan, 2020). The contemporary lesson is that India should neither define its foreign policy entirely through opposition to China nor ignore China’s effect upon India’s strategic environment. 

The Nalanda position is more demanding: engagement without surrender, preparedness without permanent hostility, competition without dehumanisation, and dialogue without strategic naivety.

The Russia and Ukraine Problem

Russia presents a different challenge. India’s relationship with Moscow has deep historical, military, technological and diplomatic roots, while India has simultaneously developed closer relations with the United States, Europe, Japan and other partners. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has therefore tested the practical meaning of strategic autonomy.

A serious Indian doctrine cannot respond by pretending that geopolitical interests do not exist; nor can it accept a selective understanding of sovereignty that becomes applicable only when strategically convenient.

The United Nations Charter already places sovereign equality, peaceful settlement of disputes and the prohibition of the threat or use of force at the heart of international order. The Nalanda Doctrine should reinforce rather than weaken these universal principles. Strategic autonomy should mean the ability to communicate with adversaries, maintain independent judgment and pursue national interests while continuing to recognise the normative importance of territorial integrity and peaceful dispute settlement. Autonomy should enlarge India’s capacity to uphold principles, not its freedom to suspend them selectively.

West Asia and Diplomatic Plurality

West Asia presents the same challenge in a different form. India’s interests involve energy, trade, investment, maritime security, food security, technology and the welfare of a vast diaspora. India simultaneously maintains important relationships with the Gulf states, Iran and Israel while navigating the consequences of regional conflicts and wider great-power rivalry. A rigid bloc-oriented foreign policy would therefore be self-defeating.

The appropriate principle is diplomatic plurality. India should retain the capacity to speak to states that cannot speak to one another. This is not moral indifference; it is diplomatic capacity.

A state capable of maintaining channels across political divides can contribute to de-escalation without pretending that all parties are equally responsible for every crisis. The Nalanda idea of dialogue becomes strategically useful here because dialogue is not synonymous with agreement. It is an instrument through which disagreement can remain political rather than becoming permanently violent.

Connectivity Must Increase Choice

The twenty-first-century contest for influence will increasingly be conducted through connectivity: ports, railways, roads, digital networks, energy corridors, payment systems, satellite infrastructure and supply chains. Connectivity can be transformative, but it can also generate dependence. The distinction should therefore become a central principle of India’s international economic diplomacy: connectivity should increase choice rather than create dependency.

The proposition has particular relevance to Central Asia, where India’s geographical limitations are obvious but its historical and intellectual connections remain substantial. India cannot reproduce the physical advantages possessed by China or Russia. It can, however, develop educational, scientific, technological, medical and cultural networks that create a different form of connectivity. A corridor should not merely move goods. It should move choices. This is the contemporary strategic meaning of the Nalanda approach.

Central Asia and the Intellectual Corridor

Central Asia offers an unusually appropriate arena for such a strategy. The region should not be treated merely as a geopolitical chessboard in the competition among Russia, China, the United States, Turkey and India. It possesses its own historical agency, cultural inheritance and intellectual traditions. India’s engagement should therefore be designed around partnership rather than strategic extraction.

Universities, research institutions, medical schools, archaeology, cultural preservation, water research, climate science, artificial intelligence, public administration and diplomatic education could create an India-Central Asia intellectual corridor. Such a policy would not ask Central Asian states to choose India against another power. It would seek to give them more partners, more knowledge and more strategic options. That is a more durable form of influence than geopolitical competition alone.

The Indian Ocean and the Maritime Nalanda

The Nalanda concept should also be maritime. India’s historical intellectual networks did not operate solely across continental Asia; knowledge, religion, commerce and people moved across the Indian Ocean. Contemporary Indian foreign policy should therefore connect the intellectual idea of Nalanda with maritime security, disaster relief, climate resilience, blue-economy cooperation, freedom of navigation and humanitarian assistance.

The Indian Ocean should not become another theatre in which great powers simply reproduce balance-of-power competition. India can instead contribute to an understanding of maritime security as a public good. The modern Nalanda should therefore have both a library and a horizon: knowledge moving across borders while maritime networks sustain the material conditions of shared prosperity.

Technology and the New Meaning of Sovereignty

Panchsheel was formulated in an age when sovereignty was primarily territorial. Today sovereignty also concerns data, artificial intelligence, semiconductor supply chains, telecommunications, satellites, cyber infrastructure, digital payments and critical minerals. A country can formally possess territorial sovereignty while becoming technologically incapable of making independent decisions.

The Nalanda Doctrine should therefore extend non-interference into the technological age through a principle of technological non-coercion. States should not use technological dependence as a concealed mechanism for controlling the sovereign choices of other states.

Yet technological sovereignty should not become technological isolation. India’s own experience demonstrates the value of international scientific and technological exchange. The principle should instead be: resilience without isolation and openness without dependency.

The BRICS Test

BRICS provides the most immediate institutional arena in which the Nalanda Doctrine can be tested. Originating as BRIC in 2001, the grouping became a political forum in 2006, held its first summit in 2009, and expanded with South Africa in 2011. Its subsequent expansion brought Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE into the grouping from 2024, followed by Indonesia as a full member in 2025. This expansion has increased BRICS’ geographical and economic weight, particularly in energy, trade and South-South cooperation, while also making its internal political differences more pronounced. Rather than constituting simply an alternative to the West, BRICS increasingly seeks reform of global financial and political institutions, greater representation for developing countries, and stronger cooperation in areas such as development finance, technology, climate and health. India has supported this expansion while remaining cautious about China’s structural dominance within the grouping. Its approach has therefore combined strategic autonomy with institutional engagement: preserving consensus-based decision-making, advocating reform of the UN and international financial institutions, and using BRICS to advance development diplomacy and wider Global South cooperation (The Indian Express, 2026c). 

The central challenge, however, is that BRICS brings together states with substantially different political systems, strategic interests and relationships with the United States, China and Russia. India-China tensions, for instance, coexist with economic and institutional cooperation. This diversity is often interpreted as a weakness, but it can instead be understood as an institutional experiment in managing disagreement. The question is therefore not whether BRICS can produce agreement on every geopolitical issue, but whether it can sustain cooperation despite disagreement. Keohane demonstrates how institutions can facilitate cooperation among states with divergent interests; Bull shows how international society can generate order under anarchy; constructivism explains how shared practices can reshape expectations; and Global IR calls for a more plural architecture of international order (Acharya, 2014; Bull, 2012; Keohane, 1984; Wendt, 1999). The Nalanda Doctrine brings these insights together in a simple proposition: peace is not the absence of disagreement; peace is the institutional management of disagreement. BRICS therefore becomes significant not because it replaces an existing centre of power, but because it tests whether multipolarity can be organised without reproducing hierarchy, whether cooperation can survive difference, and whether the expansion of international voice can occur without creating another exclusive bloc.

A Doctrine of Disagreement

This may be the most distinctive theoretical contribution of the Nalanda proposition. Universities exist because propositions can be challenged. Intellectual progress depends upon disagreement disciplined by reason, evidence and dialogue. International order can be understood similarly. The objective should not be to construct a world in which all states think alike. That would be impossible and potentially oppressive. The objective should be to construct institutions through which differences remain differences without automatically becoming violence.

The contemporary world urgently needs such a philosophy. Great powers disagree over security; developing countries disagree over development priorities; states disagree over technology, sanctions, climate finance, intervention and sovereignty. The alternative to disagreement is not consensus. It is often coercion. A mature international order is therefore not one in which everyone agrees; it is one in which disagreement can remain political.

BRICS as an Institution of Renewal

The immediate policy implication is that India should resist defining BRICS simply as a counterweight to the G7 or the West. Such a conception would make BRICS structurally dependent upon the very order it opposes because its identity would be defined negatively. The stronger project is institutional renewal: reform the United Nations and international financial institutions, expand developmental finance, strengthen South-South cooperation, build resilient supply chains, cooperate on artificial intelligence and digital governance, improve climate finance, and create mechanisms through which member states can address crises without requiring ideological uniformity.

The significance of BRICS would therefore lie not simply in the aggregate economic or demographic weight of its members, but in whether it can demonstrate that institutional cooperation is possible among states that do not share a common political ideology. The Nalanda Doctrine gives strategic coherence to this approach by shifting the question from “Who replaces the existing hegemon?” to “What institutions are required when no single power should possess the capacity to define the order?”

The Knowledge Commons

India should therefore propose a BRICS Nalanda Forum: a permanent network connecting universities, research institutions, diplomats, jurists, scientists, economists, technologists and young scholars. Its purpose should not be ceremonial cultural exchange. It should address the hardest questions of international order: sovereignty, strategic stability, international law, artificial intelligence, climate change, development, critical minerals, public health, technology governance and civilisational dialogue.

A second initiative could be a BRICS Knowledge Commons, creating mechanisms for sharing publicly funded research, educational materials, scientific cooperation and translations, subject to appropriate intellectual-property and security safeguards.

Such a proposal would convert the symbolic memory of Nalanda into contemporary institutional infrastructure. It would also make the idea of knowledge diplomacy materially different from conventional cultural diplomacy. The underlying principle is simple: knowledge becomes a source of power without becoming a source of monopoly when its circulation enlarges the capabilities of others.

A Contemporary Panchsheel

India could further propose a contemporary declaration of peaceful coexistence—not to replace the five principles but to extend them. The first principle would remain sovereign equality. The second would be non-aggression combined with credible deterrence. The third would become non-interference and technological non-coercion. The fourth would be equality, reciprocity and mutual resilience. The fifth would remain peaceful coexistence, but with an additional commitment to institutionalised dialogue.

To these could be added four contemporary principles: enlargement of sovereign choice; development without structural dependency; knowledge without monopoly; and continuous institutional renewal. The result would not be Panchsheel abandoned for Nalanda. It would be Panchsheel enlarged by the lessons of seventy years of international politics.

The Critique of Nalanda

The danger of invoking Nalanda is obvious. Civilisations can become instruments of romantic nationalism, and historical memory can be selectively reconstructed to legitimise contemporary power. If Nalanda becomes merely another claim that ancient India possessed all the answers, the project should be rejected.

Its legitimacy must therefore arise from precisely the opposite proposition. Nalanda is valuable because it represents openness to intellectual encounter. Its contemporary meaning cannot be “India knew everything”; it must be “India has something to contribute because India has also learned from others.”

This distinction separates civilisational confidence from civilisational superiority. A genuinely Nalanda-inspired international order would invite Chinese, African, Islamic, European, Southeast Asian, Latin American and other intellectual traditions into the conversation. The purpose would not be to Indianise international relations, but to de-monopolise the production of international thought.

From Strategic Autonomy to Strategic Responsibility

India’s foreign-policy evolution can now be understood as four broad historical movements. The first was the struggle for anti-colonial sovereignty. The second was Panchsheel and non-alignment, through which India sought peaceful coexistence and independent judgment in a bipolar world. The third was strategic autonomy and multi-alignment, through which India acquired greater room to cooperate simultaneously with competing centres of power. The fourth, now emerging, must be strategic responsibility: the question of what India should do with the power and autonomy it has accumulated.

This is the intellectual transition that Beyond Panchsheel proposes. India has spent much of the last century asking how it can remain free in an unequal world. The next question is more difficult: Can India help make the world itself less dependent upon unequal power? That requires more than military strength or economic growth. It requires institutions, ideas, knowledge, credibility and restraint.

Strategic responsibility does not mean self-denial. Nor does it require India to sacrifice national interests for an abstract global morality. Rather, it means recognising that as capabilities increase, the consequences of their use also expand. India’s strategic maturity will therefore be measured not only by its capacity to protect its interests but by its ability to exercise power without unnecessarily narrowing the choices available to others.

The Nalanda Doctrine

The Nalanda Doctrine can therefore be stated through nine propositions: sovereignty without domination; security without aggression; autonomy without isolation; connectivity without dependency; development without subordination; dialogue without ideological surrender; knowledge without monopoly; power with responsibility; and institutional renewal without historical amnesia. This is not an attempt to romanticise the past. It is an attempt to use the past to ask a contemporary question.

Realism teaches that power matters. Liberal institutionalism demonstrates that cooperation can be organised even without hegemony. The English School demonstrates that an international society can exist without world government. Constructivism shows that identities and meanings shape strategic relationships. Nye demonstrates the influence of attraction and legitimacy. Global IR challenges the monopoly of any one intellectual tradition over the definition of world order. Indian strategic thought—from Nehru and Panchsheel through non-alignment, strategic autonomy and contemporary multi-alignment—provides the historical experience through which these ideas can be tested.

Nalanda adds one further proposition: international order must possess the capacity to learn. That is why the central idea should not be nostalgia but renewal. Panchsheel gave the post-colonial world a grammar of peaceful coexistence. Strategic autonomy gave India a method of preserving freedom of judgment. BRICS gives the emerging world an institutional platform through which power can be redistributed. The Nalanda Doctrine seeks to connect these inheritances into a philosophy for a plural century. Its ultimate test is simple but demanding: Does India’s rise enlarge the choices of others? If it does, India’s power acquires legitimacy beyond power itself. If it does not, multipolarity merely becomes another name for competing hierarchies.

The international order India should seek is therefore neither a Western order with India added to it, nor a Chinese order with India accommodated within it, nor an anti-Western order constructed in opposition to Washington, nor an Indian order imposed upon others. It should be a plural order in which sovereignty is real, power is restrained, institutions are representative, knowledge is shared, smaller states retain agency, disagreement remains possible, and international institutions possess the capacity to renew themselves.

That is the deeper meaning of Beyond Panchsheel. It is not a rejection of India’s diplomatic inheritance. It is its next question. And perhaps that is the most appropriate lesson Nalanda can offer a twenty-first-century world: civilisations survive not because they remain unchanged, but because they possess the intellectual courage to renew themselves.

Policy Propositions for India’s BRICS Chairship

 

1. BRICS Nalanda Forum — a permanent network of universities, diplomats, jurists, scientists and public intellectuals.

 

2. BRICS Charter of Peaceful Coexistence 2.0 — Panchsheel updated for sovereignty, technology, economic coercion, development and crisis management.

 

3. BRICS Crisis-Communication Mechanism — direct channels for preventing border, maritime, cyber and technological disputes from escalating.

 

4. BRICS Knowledge Commons — open scholarly and scientific cooperation across member states.

 

5. BRICS Responsible AI Framework — principles concerning human responsibility, safety, technological sovereignty and non-coercion.

 

6. BRICS Connectivity-and-Choice Principle — major infrastructure should enlarge participating states’ strategic and economic options rather than create structural dependency.

 

7. Global South Mediation Network — a pool of diplomats, jurists and experts available for preventive diplomacy and mediation.

 

8. Small-State Sovereignty Test— major powers should evaluate whether their policies enlarge or restrict the practical choices of smaller partners.

 

9. BRICS Institutional Renewal Review— periodic examination of whether BRICS institutions remain representative, effective and capable of adapting to changes in global power.

 

Taken together, these propositions suggest that the Nalanda Doctrine is not a call for India to abandon strategic autonomy, but to redefine what autonomy should enable. India’s growing power acquires international significance not merely through its capacity to resist pressure, but through its ability to enlarge the institutional and political choices available to others. The BRICS framework provides a practical arena in which this principle can be tested through dialogue, connectivity, knowledge-sharing, institutional renewal and the management of disagreement. The question, therefore, is not whether India can become another centre of power, but what kind of centre of power it chooses to become. In this sense, Nalanda moves from a civilisational metaphor to an institutional proposition: a model of international engagement in which power is accompanied by responsibility, autonomy by openness, and institutional stability by the capacity for renewal.

 

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