Lal Bahadur Shastri: An Era of Transition in Indian Foreign Policy

Dr. Shri Ram Sharma, Professor of Political Science (Retd.) Gwalior is an alumnus of London School of Economics and Political Science where as a regular student in the Department of International Relations he creditably completed his doctoral dissertation. In the country he will be remembered for having launched a pioneer project of annual survey series on Indian Foreign Policy in which he has brought out single handed a set of twelve volumes one for each year from 1971 to 1982. He stopped the series with the latter year as some department of Jawaharlal Nehru University had adopted this project, though in a compilation form. Even they have stopped it after publishing a few volumes. The analytical survey of Bangladesh crisis as a crucial issue in Indian Foreign Policy, the second part of the first volume in the annual survey series, was published as an independent volume. His books, Gandhi – the Man, and Freedom Movement 1857 to 1947 mainly addressed to the young generation would continue to serve as a source of inspiration to the teenagers. His new ventures are: three monographs, each dealing with India’s relations with USA, USSR and China from 1947 to 1971 and Lal Bahadur Shastri: an era of transition in Indian Foreign Policy 1964-66. In his efforts to up date the previous set of these monographs, he has brought out the second part of the set covering the years 1972-91. The third and final part of the series is under active preparation along with another project which seeks to analyse the ideological dimensions of Indian Foreign Policy.