The late Jyotindra Nath ('J N') Dixit belonged to the old guard of South Block bureaucrats who could chide their political masters without appearing to be discourteous. He is reported to have once asked Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral, "How come, sir, Nehru was foreign minister for 17 years and still there was no Nehru Doctrine? You were prime minister for 13 months and there was a Gujral Doctrine." Gujral could not have missed the malice in the question; Dixit's sympathies for the Nehru-Gandhi family were, after all, quite well known. He probably wanted to ridicule Indira Gandhi's meek ambassador in Moscow, who emphasised non-reciprocity in India's relationship with neighbouring countries once he became prime minister. Dixit had served in Islamabad and Colombo, and was considered a foreign-policy hawk of the 'establishment' in New Delhi. There could be no other reason behind his seeming ignorance of the Nehru Creed of Indian foreign policy – an intentional slight to Gujral is the only explanation.
The more than five decades that father Jawaharlal Nehru and then daughter Indira governed India were pivotal in defining India's relationship with its smaller neighbours, in some cases even reshaping the political boundaries of the Subcontinent. M P Koirala's memoir, A Role in Revolution, and A C Sinha's analysis, Sikkim: Feudal and democratic, though unrelated in and of themselves, link the divergence and continuity between India's neighbourhood policy in these two eras. That drawing this connection is not the goal of either book only serves to highlight how greatly the policies of these two leaders impacted the region at that time, and continue to do so today.
For his part, Nehru remained foreign minister throughout his tenure, probably believing that nobody else in the Congress party matched his grasp of international politics or possessed the ability to handle geo-strategic challenges that the newly independent and freshly truncated Indian republic faced. He believed in handpicking envoys, and gave them detailed guidelines. These instructions later became foundations of the seldom enumerated but widely understood cannons of the Nehru Creed, which was based on three assumptions.
First, the Indian Union was considered to be the successor state of British India, which had to shoulder the role and responsibilities of the Empire in a region that stretched between Iran to Indonesia and the Hindukush-Himalaya to the Indian Ocean. The second supposition contradicted the first, and postulated that India would be the leader of anti-colonial struggles and would help to create a buffer of 'Third World' states free of fierce competition for spheres of influence between so-called First and Second World Powers. The third and last assumption was more concrete: Nehru wanted to collaborate with China and keep Asia free of superpower rivalry. All of Nehru's foreign-policy assumptions turned out to be fundamentally flawed in the end. Though the denouement of his dreams came with Indo-China skirmishes in the Himalaya, he had already created enough consternation in the neighbourhood well before that.