Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, left behind for his successors a daunting legacy of foreign-policy challenges in regard to both ends and means, or goals and capabilities. His enduring legacy was a grand strategy, organized around the fundamental aim of a foreign policy of independence rather than one subordinate to either of the two superpowers, the US or the Soviet Union. Associated with it was also the aspiration, largely implicit but at times explicit, for India to become a member of the major-power system.

Nehru's strategy was surely marked by a certain grandeur, and it was an open question whether his successors would be able to rise to the challenge of its demands. There is, indeed, a line of argument that maintains that, until almost the end of the twentieth century, his successors lacked both the vision of India as a major power, and the will and capacity to build and mobilize the requisite capabilities to achieve it. For example, Ashok Kapur holds that up to 1998 the various governments at the center after Nehru, headed by the Congress Party or former leaders from that party, were befuddled by a Gandhian and Nehruvian morality. Accordingly, they were too weak-kneed politically to make a determined push for a major-power role for India in defiance of the major powers, particularly the US. More specifically, they are said to have lacked the political and moral capacity to make a clear and public definition of India's strategic priorities, or the determination to pursue them.