Engendering Indian Foreign Policy Analysis: AIWC, Women Delegates and Recasting of IFP Thought and Diplomatic Praxis

How can Indian Foreign Policy analysis account for the epistemic gap that exists in its knowledge production and diplomatic historiography with reference to mapping the contributions made by women collectives and their delegates? To explore this question and to mainstream the contributions of women collectives, this article draws upon the conceptual frameworks of post-colonial feminist theory (PFT) and Feminist Foreign Policy analysis (FFPA) approach to highlight the intersectional feminist agendas that the early women collective such as the All-India Women’s Conference (AIWC) were able to circulate domestically and internationally. Conventional foreign policy analysis (FPA) frameworks embedded in gendered social hierarchies tend to elide over the multiple complexities and levels of interventions made by these women collectives in fostering a feminist informed anti-colonial standpoint in the international. It analyses the activism of AIWC, to argue that, by pursuing an intended geo-strategic feminist spatial praxis, they as politico-diplomatic agents dented the masculine domestic and imperial projects by challenging the spatial/epistemic and public/private segregation for the anti-colonial cause. Additionally, capitalizing on their feminist diplomatic clout these women delegates infused the international with practices that circumvented masculine networks and subverted them.