Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

This special section responds to the call for renewed attention to the international implications of decolonization with a particular focus on India and the South Asia region. The section offers insights into historical continuities and ruptures in Indian internationalism, interrogating divides between colonial and postcolonial as well as between national and international. In turn, it de-centres histories of global order-making in the twentieth century, building on the work of a growing chorus of international historians, political scientists, and international relations scholars seeking alternative visions of the international in an increasingly multipolar world order. In challenging the binary rupture of India's international outlook in the pre- and post-independence period, this special section forces us to reconsider the temporal landscape of India's decolonisation moment. Through an avowedly international outlook, many of the papers introduce new spaces, connections, and entanglements through which Indian independence was realised, and in turn through which the scales of the international can be scrutinised. This brief introduction introduces the papers, teasing out the wider themes that link them, and their connections with the broader purposes of the special section itself.

Department of International Relations

World University root node

International History Review

The Limits of Decolonisation in India’s International Thought and Practice: An Introduction

In trying to assemble the structure through which bilateral relations between India and Pakistan could be conducted, policy makers drew heavily from European models of inter-state peace-making evolved in the inter-war decades. The aftermath of the break-up of large multinational empires along ethnic-majoritarian lines posed administrative questions that were, in many ways, also similar to the aftermath of the partition of the subcontinent along religious lines. In this article, I attempt to relate these developments with the signing of the Nehru–Liaquat Pact of 1950, between the governments of India and Pakistan. According to this Pact, both governments would now be accountable to one another for the protection of their minorities in the Bengal province. I argue that this approach to dealing with the question of minority populations after a partition, had been initially developed by the League of Nations and that emulating these models were part of an attempt by India and Pakistan to borrow from, but also further refine models of European statehood for their own purposes after their partition. This article attempts to evaluate the extent to which these expectations were met in the making of a ‘minorities' regime' in South Asia.