Commissioned by Yan Xuetong, Amitav Acharya, and Daniel Bell for a volume to be published by California University Press, this chapter tackles the concept of diplomacy. Presenting the traditional International Relations (IR) conceptualisation of diplomacy, demonstrated is how this leads to the occlusion or dismissal of Indian diplomacy and therefore how it is counterproductive to the disciplinary claim of accounting and explaining. It is to restore this metric, that Indian diplomacy is theorised without recourse to IR, for its categories are those that create the paradox of accounting and explaining without achieving either. Rather, diplomatic practice is made sense of in terms of Indian practitioners, to reveal a rationality aspiring to non-violently managing violence.