Advocacy Coalitions and the Shaping of India’s Contemporary Afghan Policy

This paper will examine India’s foreign policymaking process vis-à-vis Afghanistan post 1996. After a period of political alienation in Kabul, New Delhi signed a comprehensive Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) with the Afghan government in October 2011. The primary shift came in the departure from India’s traditional policy of boycotting the Taliban, and its decision to intensify the training of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). Given its strategic priorities there are a number of explanations for why this change happened. However, there is hardly any study on how this shift came about i.e. the process in India’s policymaking circles. Drawing on the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), this paper will study the process by which contesting ideas got refracted through state and non-state institutions and reshaped India’s Afghan policy. It explains how best to theorise this process keeping India’s domestic diversity and international power play in perspective.