Navigating Twin Fault Lines in the Amrit Kaal

India’s aspiration to be a leading power unfolds amid two simultaneous and sharpening fault lines. The first is the East–West divide, accentuated by the Ukraine conflict and the strategic contestation it has unleashed across military, economic, and technological domains. The second is the North–South gap, aggravated by Covid’s disparate effects on public health and supply chains, mounting debt burdens in developing economies, unmet climate commitments, and volatile food and energy markets. To advance national interests across both divides, India must steadily augment its comprehensive national power, convert capability into influence, and—as rising powers historically do—seek more friends while generating fewer problems.

This moment is framed domestically as the Amrit Kaal, a period of foundational transformation aimed at becoming a developed nation and a leading power. That inward trajectory must be mirrored outwardly by an approach that treats “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas”—working with all for the progress of all—as a foreign policy precept. The cultural-philosophical underpinning is equally important. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam—“the world is one family”—does not imply naivety. It signals a deliberate widening of India’s scope for friendship, influence, and coalition-building by affirming that values and sentiment can coexist with strategic calculation.

The era of episodic engagement is over. As India’s interests expand geographically and sectorally, diplomacy must become sustained, proactive, and diversified. This means broadening partnerships, deepening situational awareness, and engaging simultaneously across security, technology, finance, climate, health, and supply-chain domains. Crucially, India must shape the global landscape rather than merely operate within it. That requires building a dependable constituency of support—reliable partners and assured sources of political, economic, and technological backing—so that India’s actions are enabled by a political base and not constrained by its absence. The construction of such a base is inherently long-term, demanding a blend of values, sentiment, strategy, and operational patience.

Strategic Culture and Constituency-Building

Constituency-building is more than the aggregation of transactional ties. It demands relationships marked by reliability, care, and consideration, with space for sentiment—“blood is thicker than water”—and the solidarity of shared experience. For a country whose interests now stretch from the Western Indian Ocean to the Western Pacific and from the African littoral to Europe and the Americas, reliable partners are not a luxury; they are necessary enablers of reach, resilience, and risk mitigation.

Maximizing friends while minimizing problems becomes an organizing principle of foreign policy. It pushes India to:
– Accumulate goodwill in the Global South by addressing felt needs on health, food security, energy access, and climate adaptation, even while insisting on fairer global rules.
– Reassure major powers that India seeks a stable, multipolar order, not a redistribution of insecurity.
– Build redundancy and resilience into partnerships so that shocks—geopolitical or geoeconomic—do not derail national objectives.

Such a strategy is credible only if India’s activities and profile expand in step with its growing interests. It also requires discernment: differentiating between partners who show up reliably and those whose support is situational; balancing ambition with prudence; and combining persuasion with calibrated compellence when vital interests are at stake.

Ramayana as a Strategic Grammar of Alliances

Indian strategic culture has long drawn operational insights from epic narratives. The Ramayana, when read as a repertoire of problem-solving episodes, offers a grammar of alliance behavior highly relevant to modern statecraft.

• The Rama–Lakshmana dyad and the value of reliability. Lakshmana exemplifies the reliable ally—steadfast, courageous, and prudent. When the demon Viradh abducted Sita in the Dandakaranya forest, Lakshmana exhorted a shaken Rama toward swift counter-action, showing how trusted partners help restore composure and resolve in crisis. After Ravana’s abduction of Sita, he counseled patience and fortitude, underscoring that allies must sometimes restrain impetuosity to preserve strategic options. When the seagod Varuna initially refused passage to Lanka, Lakshmana urged Rama not to over-intimidate the deity, reminding us that escalation must be calibrated.

• Calibrated coercion and the politics of the possible. Rama’s threat to dry up the oceans prompted Varuna to promise not to wash over the bridge—a commitment “against his nature.” This episode illustrates that leverage, when credible and proportionate, can alter an opponent’s behavior without tipping into uncontrolled escalation. It is a template for maritime diplomacy and deterrence signaling.

• Coalition intelligence and the value of distributed networks. The vanara coalition did not wait for perfect information from a single source. It fanned out in multiple directions; the southern force under Prince Angada located Sita in the gardens of Lanka. Sampati’s extraordinary sight symbolized the need for unique vantage points—access to actionable intelligence on competitors and adversaries that others lack. In contemporary terms, coalition networks that pool surveillance, data, and analysis outperform solitary efforts.

• Technology solutions and enablers. Nala, son of Vishwakarma, provided the engineering solution for crossing the ocean by building a bridge; Varuna’s undertaking not to inundate it completed the operational design. Coalitions benefit when members contribute distinctive capabilities—niche technologies, logistics assets, corridor access, or specialized human capital—that unlock otherwise inaccessible options.

• Managing internal dynamics: difficult choices for larger strategic aims. Rama’s intervention in the Vali–Sugriva conflict—killing Vali and backing the weaker Sugriva—secured a durable ally and cohesive vanara support. Taking Vali’s son Angada under personal protection preserved unity and signaled that inclusion follows hard decisions. This is an admonition that alliance politics often requires choosing sides, managing succession issues, and compensating losers to prevent fragmentation.

• Alliance upkeep and discipline. Once in power at Kishkinda, Sugriva’s complacency invited a stern reminder; Lakshmana’s anger ensured obligations were honored and timelines met. Equally, Rama’s public acknowledgment of Pratardana, the king of Kashi, whose promised legions did not arrive in time for the battle in Lanka, demonstrated magnanimity. By recognizing intent even when delivery fell short, he kept doors open for future cooperation. Modern coalitions, too, need both enforcement mechanisms and reputational incentives.

Taken together, these episodes offer an integrated playbook: cultivate reliable partners who steady judgment; distribute intelligence collection; leverage unique capabilities; employ calibrated coercion; manage internal rivalries with clarity and compensation; enforce commitments without closing off future alignments.

Principles of Coalition-Building for a Rising India

Several principles follow for contemporary statecraft, reinforced by modern history from the World Wars through the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and ongoing situations where coalitions have proved decisive:

• Reliability over transactionalism. Durable partnerships are built on demonstrated care, consideration, and at times affection. They are reinforced by shared experiences—such as crisis relief or co-development of technologies—that generate political trust beyond written agreements.

• Specialization and complementarity. As operations become geographically distant and open-ended, allies with distinctive skills—intelligence, logistics, cyber, space, undersea, medical—are disproportionately valuable. Coalitions that allocate roles based on comparative advantage perform better than those that seek uniformity.

• Motivating partners: a spectrum of tools. Incentives, flattery, and assistance can be as effective as calibrated threats. Policymakers must identify the right mix, align components across competing interests, and accept trade-offs for the larger good. This includes sequencing asks, bundling issues, and offering off-ramps to reluctant participants.

• Strategic patience and coalition tempo. Coalitions assemble and move at the speed of their least efficient components. Anticipating delays, shortfalls, or partial compliance is prudent planning, not cynicism. Maintaining relationships through episodic underperformance increases the pool of future collaborators when conditions change.

• Public recognition of intent. Acknowledging partners who try—but fall short—sustains goodwill and signals that diplomacy values commitment. The Pratardana precedent cautions against zero-sum evaluations; reputational capital accrues from fairness and memory.

These principles must be ported into India’s contemporary operating environment across both East–West and North–South theatres, with an eye to resilient supply chains, secure technologies, and diversified financial and energy ties.

Policy Priorities and Instruments

A purposeful translation of strategy into policy suggests the following operational emphases:

• Build a “Lakshmana network.” As India’s power and exposure grow, so does the need for trustworthy partners and well-wishers across regions. This network should span major powers, middle powers, and pivotal developing states, with layered redundancy in critical domains—energy, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, space, maritime security—so that shocks cannot isolate India.

• Treat solidarity as strategic capital. Programs like Vaccine Maitri show how timely assistance in health emergencies creates enduring goodwill, especially in the Global South but also beyond. Such acts convert moral authority into political equity, strengthening India’s hand in multilateral negotiations on debt relief, climate finance, and technology access.

• Fuse values with pragmatism. In the Amrit Kaal, foreign policy should entwine Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas and Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam with hard-headed coalition-building. That includes capability-sharing and co-production, flexible financing for partners, and, when necessary, calibrated coercion—sanctions, access restrictions, or presence operations—scaled to the stakes.

• Manage coalition cohesion. Preserve unity by reassuring vulnerable partners (as with protecting Angada), enforce follow-through through timely reminders and conditionality (Lakshmana’s intervention with Sugriva), and acknowledge partial or delayed support (Pratardana) to keep channels open. Effective coalitions are not frictionless; they are resilient because they anticipate and absorb friction.

• Expand and synchronize India’s profile with its interests. Diversify diplomatic, defense, and developmental engagement across the Indo-Pacific, Eurasia, Africa, and the Middle East in ways that deepen situational awareness and align economic corridors, digital standards, and critical technology partnerships with national priorities. This is how comprehensive national power is converted into influence.

• Shape, do not merely participate in, international processes. Whether bridging the East–West divide over security architectures, or addressing North–South concerns on debt, climate, food, and energy security, India’s objective should be to design workable coalitions of consent. That requires patient, principled, and persistent statecraft anchored in reliable partnerships, unique capabilities, and a demonstrated capacity to deliver collective goods.

In sum, the path to leading-power status runs through constituency-building: maximizing friends and minimizing problems across both geopolitical and geoeconomic divides. It is a long game that prizes reliability, specialization, calibrated coercion, and strategic patience—lessons as resonant in modern diplomacy as they are in the Ramayana’s enduring strategic wisdom.

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A Fluid Order and the Imperative of Decisional Space

India’s rise has unfolded amid a global order in continuous motion. Rather than being a beneficiary of a fixed equilibrium, New Delhi has had to adapt to shifting alignments, emergent coalitions, and recurring power transitions. A persistent objective across these phases has been the preservation of decisional space—India’s capacity to make autonomous choices despite external pressures. This norm is not a rhetorical constant but a practical requirement for a continental-sized state with complex security externalities, a diverse economy, and a pluralistic polity. It has demanded an approach that is simultaneously relational and selective: building ties broadly, shaping expectations among partners, and retaining the freedom to disagree or stay aloof when core interests so dictate.

In the early decades after Independence, this translated into a dual-track posture toward the industrialized West: India sought access to capital, technology, and markets while resisting entanglement in Cold War bloc discipline. The broad aim was to engage without alignment—creating pathways for cooperation yet maintaining the ability to chart independent positions in multilateral forums, on decolonization, and on security crises in the subcontinent and beyond. This balancing instinct, rooted in strategic autonomy, became a core feature of India’s strategic culture and continues to inform its statecraft under new conditions.

From Post-Colonial Solidarity to Cross-Bloc Pragmatism

A central strand of India’s early diplomatic activism lay in mobilizing the moral and political capital of decolonization. Through Bandung and the Non-Aligned Movement, New Delhi nurtured constituencies across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, leveraging shared experiences of imperialism to build solidarity on issues ranging from apartheid to economic sovereignty. This outreach was not merely rhetorical. It enabled coalition-building in the United Nations, helped buffer India from great-power coercion, and created political space for domestic institution-building without constant external interference.

Concurrently, India complemented this South–South solidarity with pragmatic cooperation across ideological lines, especially with the Socialist bloc. Soviet collaboration produced tangible economic and security outcomes: heavy industry and public-sector projects, licensed production in defense aerospace, technology transfers in key sectors, and a dependable supply of military hardware insulated from Western export controls. In security terms, Soviet support helped offset regional vulnerabilities, while in economic terms it allowed India to build capabilities in steel, heavy machinery, hydrocarbons, and dual-use technologies at a manageable political cost. This cross-bloc pragmatism coexisted with India’s principled insistence on non-alignment and reflected a mature recognition that ideology could not substitute for national capability.

Cold War Inflection Points: The Sino–US Rapprochement and the Soviet Anchor

The intensification of Cold War pressures and, crucially, the Sino–US rapprochement in the early 1970s forced consequential choices. As Washington and Beijing found common cause, the power geometry in Asia shifted in ways adverse to India’s security environment. It was in this context that New Delhi doubled down on its Soviet relationship. The 1971 Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation, sustained defense supplies, and diplomatic backing at critical junctures—most notably during the Bangladesh crisis—provided India with strategic insurance. This was not an ideological capitulation but a calibrated response to altered great-power dynamics: a hedge to ensure material support and veto cover in the UN Security Council when the risk of coercive diplomacy was acute.

An important constraint on India–West relations during this period stemmed from the West’s strategic bet on Pakistan as a Cold War ally. Islamabad’s utility in US-led alliances and, later, in Afghanistan, coupled with periodic military rule that facilitated alignment choices, skewed Western security assistance in ways that often disregarded India’s concerns. Arms flows, diplomatic indulgence, and episodic “tilts” compressed the possibilities for sustained India–West strategic convergence. For New Delhi, this reinforced the logic of diversified partnerships and deepened the reliance on Moscow for critical defense and diplomatic needs, even as India continued to seek economic and technological engagement with Western Europe and the United States where feasible.

Post–Cold War Readjustment, Momentum, and the Shedding of Ideological Baggage

The end of the Cold War triggered mutual readjustments: India reassessed its external dependencies and policy assumptions, and the international system recalibrated its view of India’s role and potential. Domestically, economic reforms expanded India’s growth horizon and altered the patterns of external engagement; externally, the unipolar moment and subsequent diffusion of power opened new avenues for technology access, investment, and security cooperation.

Over the subsequent quarter-century, these readjustments gathered steady momentum. India normalized and then incrementally upgraded relations with the United States, diversified ties with Europe, institutionalized long-term defense and energy linkages with Russia, and pursued a rebalanced engagement with China framed by both competition and managed coexistence. The multilateral domain saw India’s rising profile—from participation in export-control regime deliberations to key roles in G20 processes—alongside a more confident presence in the Indian Ocean and the wider Indo-Pacific.

In the last decade, this trajectory has been consolidated by shedding much of the ideological baggage that once cast major-power ties in zero-sum terms. New Delhi’s diplomacy is more explicitly interest-driven, issue-based, and transactional when necessary, while retaining an overarching commitment to strategic autonomy. The United States, in particular, is now seen far more as part of the solution than of the problem: a partner in technology co-development, maritime domain awareness, defense interoperability, supply-chain resilience, and critical and emerging technologies. This reappraisal has not displaced older partnerships; rather, it has reframed them within a plural alignment strategy that emphasizes complementarity and redundancy across defense, energy, technology, and multilateral support.

The Diplomatic Calculus: Advancing New Relationships While Retaining Earlier Ones

The core challenge today is less about choosing sides than about assigning appropriate weightage to specific partnerships so that India secures optimal outcomes in a transforming world. This calculus involves:

• Preserving decisional space by avoiding overdependence on any single partner or bloc.
• Maximizing capability gains through selective technology acquisition and co-development, balancing Western access with Russian legacy systems and European niches.
• Managing geopolitical risk through diversified energy, defense, and supply-chain relationships, including with middle powers and minilateral platforms.
• Leveraging multilateral and plurilateral forums to align external support with India’s domestic transformation, from infrastructure and clean energy to digital public goods.
• Ensuring that security partnerships translate into credible deterrence and crisis management options, particularly along contested land borders and in the Indian Ocean.

This balancing act is not static. It responds to structural drivers—great-power competition, regional instability, technological bifurcation, and coercive economic practices—that require periodic recalibration of relative weights in India’s portfolio of relationships. The objective remains continuous: to transform external partnerships into durable enhancements of India’s comprehensive national power without sacrificing autonomy of judgment or action.

An Analytical Lens for Assessment: The P5 as a Framework

To evaluate both record and prospects within this evolving strategy, a disciplined analytical lens is required. Focusing on India’s relationships with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council offers such a framework. These states set critical parameters for global security governance, shape technology and finance flows, and influence the norms that condition India’s external environment. Examining the configuration of India’s ties with the United States, China, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom allows us to assess how effectively New Delhi has balanced legacy equities with new opportunities, and where further recalibration may be warranted.

Within this frame, two relationships—India–US and India–China—represent distinct strategic theatres and will be analyzed in depth in subsequent chapters. Russia remains a pivotal legacy partner in defense and energy, France an increasingly valuable source of high-end technology and Indo-Pacific coordination, and the United Kingdom a conduit for finance, services, and diaspora linkages. Taken together, the P5 perspective illuminates how India has moved from ideology-laden postures to pragmatic, interest-based diplomacy, how it has managed structural inflection points from the Cold War through its end, and how it now assigns weight to partnerships to achieve optimal results in a world still very much in flux.

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Chapter 6 — The UK: A Contemporary Compact

Historical Evolution and the Colonial Shadow

The India–UK relationship has always carried an unusual mix of intimacy and abrasion. That duality is rooted in a colonial experience that bequeathed both material legacies and psychological scars. In the early post-independence decades, India chose a pragmatic path: retaining Commonwealth ties and sustaining dense elite exchanges that made relations essentially symbiotic for nearly twenty years. This served New Delhi’s strategic aim of avoiding Cold War entrapment and moderating American pressure by keeping London as a useful interlocutor and foil. Yet even then, the memory of subjugation lurked just beneath the surface of official cordiality, a sentiment that never wholly receded from public consciousness.

Partition and the immediate eruption of conflict in Jammu & Kashmir fixed a perceptional lens that proved enduring. When Pakistan attacked in 1947, New Delhi read UK behavior—particularly at the UN Security Council, where London supported proposals that India believed internationalized and complicated the dispute—as tilting toward Pakistan. That impression lingered through the 1965 and 1971 wars, when British positions, aligned with broader Western calls for ceasefires and embargoes, were viewed in India as insufficiently attentive to the strategic and moral stakes as New Delhi saw them. Structural shifts then intervened: Britain’s Cold War compulsions, its 1968 withdrawal from “East of Suez,” and its 1973 accession to the European Communities diluted the intimacy of the early period. After 2001, London’s advocacy of engaging Pakistan’s military leadership on Afghanistan—reflecting a familiar calculus that Rawalpindi was indispensable to Western aims—deepened Indian wariness not only about subcontinental politics but also about UK approaches to nuclear policy and export controls.

As India’s democracy broadened and self-confidence grew, elite-to-elite bonds weakened and space opened for a more independent reassessment. The symbolic repertoire of national identity likewise shifted. New Delhi has begun replacing British-era penal and procedural codes with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, and Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam. It has installed Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s statue under the India Gate canopy, and it articulates cultural beliefs without apology. These moves are not performative gestures; they signal a recalibration of agency that India expects partners—especially the UK, given the intimate past—to understand and respect. The popular resonance of the film RRR, with its unflinching depiction of colonial violence and resistance, is a reminder that history remains a living variable in Indian politics and foreign policy.

Contemporary Complications and Perception Gaps

Contemporary irritants stem less from state-to-state disagreement than from how domestic politics and civil liberties in the UK intersect with India’s security sensitivities. British vote-bank politics—even if less pronounced than in Canada—has at times enabled secessionist forces targeting India to exploit British freedoms for propaganda, financing, and targeted intimidation. London’s principled emphasis on free expression is acknowledged in New Delhi, but the operational challenge is real when speech shades into incitement or transnational criminality. Parallel to this is a current of ideological antipathy among some influential British constituencies toward India’s present political dispensation. Resistance to recognizing the depth of India’s social and legal transformation has produced friction, particularly jarring when contrasted with rhetorical invocations of a “special bond.”

This sits atop older strategic suspicions. UK positions on India’s nuclear choices—visible in the immediate post-1998 reaction before policy adapted to India’s de facto nuclear status and, later, to the NSG waiver—are recalled in New Delhi as instances where British instincts tracked broader Atlantic preferences rather than taking full account of India’s security reasoning. Advocacy of working through Rawalpindi on Afghanistan, long after the costs of that bet were evident, reinforced doubts about British judgment on subcontinental dynamics. This constellation of issues does not preclude cooperation, but it complicates the texture of engagement and requires conscious management to prevent episodic flare-ups from metastasizing into strategic distrust.

Resetting Terms: Security, Mobility, and Political Sensitivities

A central question is whether London will effect the kind of comprehensive reset with India that Washington executed over the past two decades. The UK’s relative lag has created distance, yet it also clarifies the path forward. A meaningful recalibration requires introspection in at least four domains:

• Political sensitivities: A more fine-grained appreciation of India’s evolving identity, including its legal reforms and civilizational self-expression, and a disciplined approach to diaspora-linked law-and-order issues, so that British domestic politics does not unwittingly enable anti-India extremism.

• Security posture: An overt recognition that South Asia’s security architecture cannot be mediated through Islamabad, and that India’s concerns on terrorism, cyber threats, and maritime security require direct, sustained UK partnership—bilaterally and with like-minded coalitions in the Indo-Pacific.

• Export controls and technology: A shift from residual presumption-of-denial mindsets to a presumption-of-partnership framework for dual-use and defense technologies. As a member of the Wassenaar Arrangement, Australia Group, and MTCR, the UK has the policy instruments to facilitate sensitive transfers responsibly; what is needed is political prioritization, responsive licensing, and co-development pathways that reflect India’s scale and requirements.

• Mobility and talent: A rules-based system that meets the UK’s economic and demographic needs while respecting India’s sensitivities on irregular migration. The Migration and Mobility Partnership, the Young Professionals Scheme, and consistent post-study work routes should be embedded as long-term features rather than episodic concessions, recognizing talent as a strategic connector.

The close historical association gives the UK both a heightened ability and a particular onus to get these adjustments right. For India, the appropriate posture is clinical: neither romanticizing shared heritage nor minimizing British capacities. A clear-eyed view sees the UK as a European gateway for Indian business, a node of world-class research and innovation, a still-influential actor in Africa, the Gulf, and the UN system, and the home of a successful, networked diaspora able to mobilize capital, ideas, and political goodwill.

Cooperation Architecture: From the 2030 Roadmap to Innovation and Finance

Notwithstanding frictions, a parallel reality of cooperation is firmly in place. The 2030 Roadmap offers a broad canvas that is both practical and purposive:

• Political and strategic dialogues: Regular leader-level and ministerial engagements that align assessments on the Indo-Pacific, Russia–Ukraine, Middle East stability, and the reform of multilateral institutions, including UNSC expansion and the governance of technology and finance.

• Economic and financial ties: Work toward an Enhanced Trade Partnership—ideally a balanced, modern FTA—that reflects complementarities in services, advanced manufacturing, and green transitions. The City of London’s role as a capital hub for Indian corporates, sovereign green bonds, and fintech collaboration remains central, provided regulatory predictability and market access are mutually assured.

• Skills, education, and research: Deepening university-to-university linkages, joint doctoral programs, and lab-to-market consortia, especially in clean energy, life sciences, AI and data governance, quantum, and space. The “living bridge” of students and professionals, if supported by stable visa regimes and mutual recognition, can be a structural asset rather than a bargaining chip.

• Security and resilience: Maritime domain awareness in the Western Indian Ocean, counterterrorism information-sharing, cyber norms and incident response, and defense industrial co-development. Projects that move beyond licensed production to genuine joint R&D—propulsion, electronics, materials, undersea systems—would signal a step-change. Coordinated approaches to supply-chain security in critical minerals and semiconductors should be integrated into this agenda.

• Societal cooperation: Protecting open societies while constraining transnational extremism. This requires law enforcement cooperation, clear thresholds for proscription, and a shared understanding that open civic space cannot be a permissive space for violence or intimidation.

The Roadmap’s breadth is not an invitation to diffuse ambition. It is a recognition that connectivity—of people, capital, ideas, and security postures—must be organized intentionally if the relationship is to outgrow its historical encumbrances.

Post-Brexit Dynamics and Strategic Alignment

Brexit has generated a different policy environment in London. Greater national control over trade, migration, and regulatory settings creates the possibility—not the guarantee—of a more agile UK. The negotiation of an Enhanced Trade Partnership with India, the institutionalization of a migration and mobility partnership aligned to demand and demographics, and the articulation of “Global Britain” in the 2021 Integrated Review (and its 2023 refresh) all point to a UK that defines itself as a Euro‑Atlantic power with an increasing Indo‑Pacific stake. For India, this alignment is useful if it translates into sustained presence and capability: Royal Navy deployments that complement India’s maritime priorities, development finance that leverages British expertise in Africa and the Indian Ocean Region, and politico‑diplomatic activism that supports rebalanced multilateralism.

These shifts also redistribute the internal balance among British personas. The “post‑European” UK, unbound from EU trade policy, needs the “City of London” to underwrite its competitiveness; the “innovation and education” UK depends on predictable mobility; the “strategic UK” requires coherent defense investments and partnerships east of Suez; and “Global Britain” cannot be merely rhetorical if it is to matter in Asia. Brexit, in short, has moved the global dimension closer to the forefront. How India engages should reflect this reweighting without assuming that everything is newly malleable.

India’s Multi-Track Approach to a Plural UK

India’s method is to work simultaneously with multiple British identities:

• Global Britain: Align on Indo‑Pacific security, resilient supply chains, and global governance reforms, including digital public infrastructure standards and climate finance.

• Atlantic UK: Use transatlantic linkages to triangulate standards in technology, finance, and sanctions regimes in ways that do not disadvantage Indian interests, while leveraging UK influence in NATO debates on China and critical infrastructure security.

• Post‑European UK: Exploit regulatory and trade agility for tailored market access in services, data, and pharmaceuticals, and for flexible mutual recognition arrangements.

• City of London: Harness deep pools of capital for infrastructure, energy transition, and innovation, including rupee‑denominated instruments and sustainable finance taxonomies.

• Diaspora UK: Support the community’s role as a “living bridge,” while working with British authorities to isolate and deter violent extremists who seek to capture diaspora platforms.

• Innovation and education UK: Build trusted research frameworks that protect IP, enable dual‑use pathways, and accelerate scale-up through joint incubators and testbeds.

• Strategic UK: Institutionalize defense dialogues, exercises, and industrial cooperation that privilege co-development and reduce barriers in export controls.

Engaging these facets in parallel recognizes that London is not a monolith. It also hedges against the risk that a setback in one channel—say, a controversy triggered by diaspora politics—derails progress in others.

Clinical Appraisal and the Tests Ahead

India should be unsentimental in recognizing what the UK brings to the table: a European gateway for Indian business; a successful, networked diaspora; a capacity for convening and influence that extends well beyond its material weight; and world-class technology and research ecosystems. The operative test of whether the relationship has entered a genuinely new era is twofold.

• Subcontinental sobriety: Can London work with New Delhi, rather than around it, on issues in the Indian subcontinent, abandoning reflexes that privilege mediation through Rawalpindi or overly legalistic framings at odds with ground realities? That includes measurable progress on counterterrorism cooperation and an unequivocal stance against extremist violence emanating from UK soil.

• Global delivery: Can the two countries convert intent into practice on the broader stage—coordinating in the Indo‑Pacific, co‑shaping technology norms, mobilizing climate and development finance, and building resilient supply chains—at a pace and scale befitting their capabilities? The 2030 Roadmap provides a scaffold; success will be judged by joint programs delivered, not communiqués agreed.

If both conditions are credibly met, the relationship will have moved beyond managing a difficult past to constructing a contemporary compact rooted in shared interests and a mature appreciation of each other’s strategic culture.

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The Enduring Logic of the India–Russia Partnership

India–Russia relations—rooted in India’s interactions with the USSR—have evolved from a pre-Independence period of suspicion towards the Indian national movement into a durable strategic partnership that has withstood systemic shocks, domestic transformations, and geopolitical churn since the Second World War. Their salience today derives less from dramatic reinvention than from steady continuity. In an international order marked by volatility and intensifying rivalries, this steadiness has provided strategic ballast for India.

The partnership’s economic weight remains modest when contrasted with India’s ties to the United States and China. Yet its strategic content is outsized. Defense, nuclear and space cooperation enshrine a legacy of trust, while energy, resources, and technology ties underpin India’s long-term national power. The unintended consequences of the Ukraine conflict have accelerated long-discussed possibilities: as Russia pivots to Asia and restructures its trade, it can emerge as a primary supplier of energy and commodities at precisely the moment India seeks to scale growth and secure resource inputs.

Convergence rests on a shared conceptual preference for a multipolar world—and, crucially for India, a multipolar Asia—as the organizing principle of international relations. Both favor autonomous, non-exclusive partnerships that avoid impinging on each other’s core interests, even when their external engagements are not perfectly aligned. For Indian statecraft, this speaks to strategic autonomy in practice: maintaining space to maneuver among major powers while reducing vulnerability to external pressures. It also points to a policy ethos grounded in empirical cost–benefit analysis rather than sentiment. While India’s historical relationships with both Britain and Russia evoke strong public emotions, the discipline of national interest requires pragmatic adjustment to a transforming geopolitical landscape.

Historical Trajectory and Strategic Inflections

In the pre-Independence and early Independence years, the USSR viewed the Indian national movement with suspicion and at times hostility. As sovereign diplomacy took root after 1947, however, shared interests began to take shape. The relationship deepened markedly after 1953–54, when Pakistan’s entry into US-led alliance systems and attendant Western arming heightened Indian security concerns. The USSR became both an insurance policy and a partner in capability-building, including industrial and defense sectors.

By 1971, at a strategic inflection point in the subcontinent, the USSR’s role proved pivotal. Its support at critical junctures—diplomatic, strategic, and material—cemented deep goodwill in India and a durable perception of Moscow’s sensitivity to India’s core interests. The Soviet break-up, while a moment of profound systemic change, did not dislodge the fundamentals. Within a decade, Russia and India re-discovered their mutual priority and preserved continuity.

Over the last quarter century, India—now the fifth largest economy—has emerged as a nuclear weapon power, a technology center, a reservoir of global talent, and a vocal shaper of international debates. Over the last three decades, both countries have evolved autonomously, forging partnerships with other powers that are sometimes not convergent. Yet they have consistently intersected on key interests and exercised restraint in ways that avoided damaging each other’s core priorities. The Ukraine conflict has prompted Russia to reassess its westward focus, accelerating a shift towards Asia and creating new avenues for India–Russia economic and resource engagement.

Present Dynamics: Stability Amid Systemic Flux

The relationship today is globally salient and—despite its lower economic content—comparable in strategic consequence to India’s ties with the United States and China. For New Delhi, the security and strategic relevance of the partnership remains enormous. It rests on long-standing cooperation across defense, nuclear, and space domains, underwritten by sustained mutual confidence and a record of responsiveness at crucial moments for Indian national security.

Russia has, over recent decades, defined itself more nationally and asserted its Eurasian identity. It retains the ability to shape outcomes across regions and issue-areas, while sustaining notable strengths in energy, resources, and technology. India, meanwhile, has expanded its interests far beyond the Subcontinent and now bears the responsibilities that accompany a rising, technologically capable economy. In this context, the durability of India–Russia ties is striking precisely because it has not changed dramatically; the two have insulated their relationship from post-war upheavals by prioritizing geopolitics and mutual benefit.

The Ukraine conflict has paradoxically accelerated economic possibilities long under discussion. As Russia reorients flows of hydrocarbons, coal, fertilizers, and other commodities, India has an opportunity to secure affordable supplies that can power its growth. This geoeconomic turn complements—not replaces—the legacy strategic pillars. It also reinforces India’s broader objective of diversified, resilient supply chains less vulnerable to single-country risks.

Geoeconomic Turn: Connectivity, Resources, and Asian Rebalancing

A broadening of the India–Russia agenda, with a clear Asian tilt, is now both possible and necessary. The policy challenge is to move beyond the traditional triad of military, nuclear, and space cooperation toward a wider resource, technology, and connectivity compact aligned with India’s growth trajectory.

• Connectivity: The International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC) can rewire logistics between India, Russia, and Eurasia, reducing costs and time while increasing redundancy in trade routes. Complementing this, the Chennai–Vladivostok maritime route (Eastern Maritime Corridor) can link India’s east coast to the Russian Far East and Northeast Asia, connecting to inland networks and industrial clusters. Together, these corridors enhance trade resilience and strategic depth.

• Resources and investment: Greater Indian participation in the Russian Far East offers access to energy, timber, minerals, and food products, alongside upstream investment opportunities. The Arctic and Central Asia expand the canvas further, from hydrocarbons and LNG to critical minerals and shipping lanes. Geoeconomic collaboration across these theatres can future-proof India’s growth by diversifying inputs and reducing exposure to geostrategic chokepoints.

• Technology and standards: Leveraging Russian strengths in civilian nuclear power, space, and selected high-technology niches can complement India’s domestic capacities. Co-development and co-production, where feasible, should be anchored in transparent economics, lifecycle sustainment, and export potential—ensuring that legacy interdependence translates into contemporary competitiveness.

• Strategic architecture: India expects Russian support on issues central to its rise—most notably reform of the United Nations Security Council—while recognizing Moscow’s continuing interests in the existing architecture. Reconciling these imperatives requires sustained political dialogue and a common vocabulary on multipolarity that places a multipolar Asia at the core of a multipolar world.

Policy Priorities for a Multipolar Asia

• Preserve strategic autonomy through non-exclusive partnerships: Continue to pursue a multipolar world anchored by a multipolar Asia, maintaining room for manoeuvre while ensuring Russia appreciates and accommodates India’s ascent.

• Rebalance the agenda beyond the traditional triad: Leverage Russia’s shift to Asia to expand cooperation in resource security, technology, and industrial partnerships, anchored by rigorous cost–benefit analysis and long-term sustainability.

• Build resilient connectivity: Deepen engagement in the INSTC and operationalize the Chennai–Vladivostok route to reduce logistics friction, diversify corridors, and harden India’s trade architecture across Eurasia.

• Engage resource-rich geographies: Scale Indian involvement in the Russian Far East and pursue structured collaboration in Central Asia and the Arctic to diversify supply chains and enhance strategic depth in energy, commodities, and critical minerals.

• Align expectations in global governance: Seek continued Russian support for UNSC reform and related institutional questions, while both sides avoid actions that impinge on each other’s core interests.

• Ground choices in evidence, not sentiment: Acknowledge that historical relationships—British and Russian alike—can evoke emotion in the Indian public sphere, but keep policymaking anchored in empirical facts, opportunity costs, and measured risk.

Underlying these priorities is a set of implicit arguments central to India’s strategic culture. The very steadiness of India–Russia ties is strategic value: it creates predictability and resilience in a turbulent system. The Ukraine conflict, despite its disruptions, has opened a window for India to secure long-term resources at scale—an opportunity that should be pursued prudently. A truly multipolar order depends on a multipolar Asia, and Russia’s Eurasian character makes it a necessary player in that equilibrium. Mutual restraint—avoiding harm to each other’s core interests even while engaging other partners—has been the foundation of trust and should remain so. Finally, broadening the economic and connectivity pillars will future-proof the partnership by reducing over-reliance on legacy defense linkages and aligning cooperation with India’s growth imperatives.

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A Distinctive Profile and the “Third Way”

France has emerged for India as a relatively newer diplomatic discovery compared to the UK and Russia. The French colonial past in India—concentrated and concluded with little rancour—has largely receded from public consciousness. The absence of a heavy historical overhang has created room for pragmatic engagement unburdened by emotive legacies. This, combined with France’s focused approach to external partnerships, has enabled steady growth in select domains—defence, space, civil nuclear cooperation, maritime security, and high technology—rather than a sprawling, diffuse agenda.

Over the last two decades, the relationship has advanced in a measured and dependable fashion, largely free from surprises or externally triggered shifts. This stability is rooted in shared values and instincts: a premium on national autonomy, strategic self-reliance, and the deliberate construction of domestic capabilities. During the Cold War, both sought to maximize strategic space amid bloc politics—France through Gaullist autonomy within the Western camp, India through non-alignment. That early convergence of intent, traceable to the 1950s, laid a cultural foundation for the modern partnership.

For India, France’s espousal of a “Third Way”—neither subsumed by alliance discipline nor hostage to external agendas—has particular appeal. It aligns with India’s contemporary policy of rightsizing crucial partners: building dense, capability-centric ties without wholesale alignment. French discretion in not importing larger geopolitical quarrels into bilateral dealings, and its emphasis on autonomy and self-reliance, resonates with an India that seeks strategic flexibility as its interests expand.

Strategic and Defence Synergies

Successive generations of French platforms and equipment have become integral to India’s military posture. From the Alouette/Cheetah light helicopters produced by HAL, to the Mirage 2000 fleet that provided precision air power and deterrent signaling, and on to the Rafale induction with advanced sensors and weapons, French aviation has repeatedly filled critical capability gaps. At sea, the Scorpène-class submarines—built at Mazagon Dock with significant technology transfer—have expanded India’s undersea deterrence and sea-denial options, with associated weapons, sensors, and support ecosystems further deepening technical integration. These cumulative investments give India compelling reasons to regard France as a major national security partner rather than a transactional supplier.

France’s influence has also been conceptual. India’s nuclear-force posture bears the imprint of French experience, especially the doctrine of credible minimum deterrence. France’s emphasis on a survivable, proportionate, and politically controlled deterrent—sized for credibility rather than parity—resonated with India’s own strategic culture and material constraints. The French model demonstrated how a middle power could craft a tailored nuclear posture, calibrating force structure, basing modes, and signaling to deter without subscribing to maximalist arsenals.

Following India’s 1998 nuclear tests, France was the first nuclear weapon state to publicly recognize and understand India’s strategic compulsions, thereby distinguishing itself from others’ punitive reflexes. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s decision to make Paris his first bilateral stop thereafter, and his joint initiative with President Jacques Chirac to launch the India–France strategic partnership, institutionalized the relationship at a higher plane. French diplomatic support was equally consequential in 2008, when India secured a waiver at the Nuclear Suppliers Group that reopened the path for international civil nuclear cooperation. That outcome reflected French assessments of India’s non-proliferation record and its responsible stewardship of technology, and it catalyzed subsequent cooperation in nuclear energy and related high-technology fields.

Multilateralism and Normative Alignment

In the UN Security Council and across multilateral forums, France has been a consistent partner. Indo–French synergies have frequently converged on mobilizing UN action against terrorism and specific terrorist groups. Paris has been forthright in addressing cross-border terrorism as a matter implicating international peace and security, and has worked with India to strengthen sanctions regimes and target designated entities. France is also an unambiguous supporter of India’s case for permanent membership of the Security Council, a position it has articulated not merely as diplomatic courtesy but as a recognition of systemic legitimacy: a multipolar world order requires a representative Council.

French activism in global governance often complements India’s preferences: emphasis on rules and responsibilities over bloc politics, support for multipolarity, and readiness to innovate with flexible coalitions when formal bodies stall. This pattern has enabled both to push reforms and operational outcomes even when consensus is hard to forge in universal bodies.

Indo-Pacific Geometry and Coalition-Building

Global uncertainties and the strategic disequilibrium of a world in transition have sharpened Indo–French convergence, particularly in the maritime domain. The Indo-Pacific has become a priority theater where strategic geography and interests overlap: India sits at the geographic center of the region’s traffic and fault lines, while France is present at the bookends through its territories and exclusive economic zones in the Indian Ocean (Réunion, Mayotte) and the Pacific (New Caledonia, French Polynesia). This enables Paris to be a resident power with enduring stakes, not merely an external balancer.

Reflecting this focus, India and France have anchored practical alignment through minilateral formats. The India–France–Australia trilateral links maritime democracies with complementary capabilities in the Indian Ocean and South Pacific; even amid shifting circumstances, it retains value for domain awareness, HADR, resilience of supply chains, and coordinated presence. The India–France–UAE trilateral adds an energy, technology, and West Asian vector to Indo-Pacific cooperation, knitting together critical infrastructure, defense-industrial collaboration, and logistics nodes. These coalitions operationalize shared objectives without creating rigid alliances—an approach both countries prefer.

Autonomy, Convergences, and Long-Term Frameworks

India and France share a long-standing insistence on decisional freedom. This impulse yields robust convergences, but it also ensures that each retains distinct perspectives shaped by geography, history, and domestic priorities. Paris’s Atlantic–European obligations and overseas territories will sometimes lead it to weight issues differently from New Delhi, which faces continental pressures in the Himalayas and a distinct arc of maritime challenges. The maturity of the partnership lies in managing these differences while deepening practical cooperation.

The relationship will require assiduous tending to sustain momentum and navigate external shocks. The articulation of a joint Horizon 2047 roadmap—marking the 25th anniversary of the strategic partnership—provides an ambitious, forward-looking frame for cooperation in defense co-development, space, critical technologies, energy transitions, and resilient value chains. It institutionalizes a shared planning horizon that matches the scale of both countries’ capabilities and ambitions.

Set within a broader frame of three permanent members with whom India maintains dense relations—the UK, Russia, and France—the French example contrasts with others yet underscores a common lesson: ties with permanent members of the Security Council carry influence far beyond that body. As India’s interests globalize, nurturing such relationships becomes a structural requirement, not a discretionary choice. France’s autonomy, its commitment to a plural distribution of power, and its reticence in importing extraneous concerns into bilateral dealings position it as a durable partner for an India committed to multipolarity and strategic self-reliance.

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Resetting with the West

Historical legacies and the long shift in outlook

India’s postcolonial encounter with the West has always carried the imprint of colonial experience, even as that very period created elite networks and institutional affinities—legal traditions, language, university linkages—that endured after 1947. For decades, a romanticized foreign policy sought moral authority and distance from great-power politics. Over seventy-five years this yielded to a measured realism, recognizing that statecraft must prioritize interests, capabilities, and outcomes over ideological comfort. As India’s material base and societal confidence expanded, partners once kept at arm’s length were reassessed on merit, not memory. The reset with the West emerges from this evolution: a pragmatic, interest-driven engagement that leverages convergences in the Indo-Pacific and Europe while managing frictions rooted in colonial legacies, Western hegemonism, developmental asymmetries, and a persistent East–West contradiction.

The United States and the Anglosphere: from ambivalence to qualified alignment

Among Western powers, the United States bore no direct colonial baggage in India but complicated its own standing by early and sustained alignment with the Pakistani military and, later, with the People’s Republic of China. This strategic calculus coexisted with deepening economic, technological, and societal ties between India and the US in the decades after independence. Historically, India worked more naturally with the UK and Canada—the preferred Anglosphere partners—undertaking early international forays, including mediatory roles on Korea and Vietnam, in tandem with them. The US remained a dominant yet distrusted presence, viewed through the prism of Cold War alignments and regime-change anxieties. The 1962 war with China proved an inflection point: Western countries, despite earlier reservations, stepped forward with assistance that contributed to infrastructure creation and agricultural self-sufficiency, reinforcing the case for calibrated cooperation with the Western bloc. These experiences helped temper ideological distance with a recognition that selective Western partnerships could accelerate national development.

From 1962 to the Indo-Pacific: strategic re-alignment and the Quad

India’s long “Look East”/“Act East” turn and the emergence of the Indo-Pacific concept reframed strategic geography and highlighted the salience of maritime security, resilient supply chains, and technological interdependence. Shared concerns about coercion, rule manipulation, and the integrity of the global commons deepened alignment with the United States and Australia, culminating in India’s recognition of their critical value within the Quad. Here, alignment of geopolitical outlook—not treaty formalism—proved decisive in building trust and practical cooperation. The Indo-Pacific has thus become a contemporary pathway for India–West convergence, linking strategy to development through connectivity, innovation ecosystems, and standards-setting in critical and emerging technologies.

Partners, frictions, and the politics of rules

The West is a natural partner for India by virtue of shared attributes—pluralistic societies, democratic polities, and market economies. Yet commonality also generates friction. When Western hegemonism manifests as excessive advocacy of specific practices or prescriptive agendas, it collides with postcolonial assertions of identity and autonomy. India’s position is not relativism but pluralism: different traditions and yardsticks exist, and objective evaluation will not always favor Western practice. A more respectful, less doctrinaire engagement is needed.

Developmental frictions persist as advanced economies seek to protect leads in trade, climate regimes, patents, and cross-border transactions—an endemic tension between long-dominant powers and rising challengers. Calls for a “rules-based order” and for fidelity to the UN Charter often become instruments for selective agenda-setting and norm-definition. India argues for fairer, more consistent application of rules as part of a broader rebalancing and multipolarity, and is increasingly willing to call out unacceptable practices. At the same time, the fastest-rising Asian economies partnered deeply with the West—an empirical reminder that calibrated engagement can outperform ideological distance in delivering results.

Strategic autonomy reframed: from defensive distance to proactive diversification

Indian discourse has too often equated “strategic autonomy” with distance from the West, especially the United States—an irony that, in practice, created dependency elsewhere and narrowed options. A similar misapplication afflicted non-alignment when it slid into a posture rather than a strategy. In a more capable and confident era, autonomy should be understood as proactive, diversified, and benefit-maximizing: driving policy by interests rather than insecurities, building multiple compacts, and avoiding doctrine as a substitute for judgment. Contemporary context should outweigh distant history in shaping choices; being non-West does not justify being anti-West, which yields little strategic or developmental profit. Hedging remains prudent, but an attitude must not harden into strategy.

Economics, demography, and the knowledge economy

Policy must align with economic, sociological, and cultural realities. Western markets and geographies offer better access for Indian products and talent, and there is a durable fit between Western demand and India’s demographics in shaping the global knowledge economy. Affinities with the West—university systems, research ecosystems, venture capital networks, and standards bodies—are multipliers for India’s human capital. In a tech-driven world, however, straddling or sidestepping choices is increasingly untenable, especially across the digital domain and critical and emerging technologies. India needs clinical assessments of systemic convergences and contradictions—on data governance, supply-chain security, intellectual property, and dual-use technology—so that technology partnerships advance resilience, not dependency.

Europe as a strategic theatre

The Modi government has markedly intensified outreach to Europe, moving beyond earlier passivity and a narrow focus on the UK, France, and Germany. Structured engagement now targets the European Union as a collective actor, sub-regional platforms, and smaller states, yielding steadier political rhythms and diverse sectoral cooperation. Regular India–EU summits have improved atmospherics, enabled the resumption of FTA negotiations, and expanded the agenda to connectivity, green transitions, and digital standards.

Germany is a “key account” with visible headroom: strategic recalibration in Berlin—after years of prioritizing other Asian relationships—creates openings in advanced manufacturing, climate technologies, and supply-chain de-risking. Progress with Germany can radiate into broader EU engagement, catalyzing consensus on trade, investment screening, and technology flows. Subregional tracks have been particularly productive. Nordic partnerships, anchored in innovation, sustainable energy, and digital public goods, have delivered political and economic returns. The Mediterranean vector—Italy and Greece especially—has been less collective but notably enthusiastic and impactful; the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) gives this axis new strategic significance in connectivity and logistics. The Mobility and Migration Partnership Agreement (MMPA) with Portugal proved timely and catalytic, signaling a more confident approach to talent mobility and helping energize EU-level discussions. India is also expanding presence and experimenting with formats across Central and Eastern Europe, extending diplomatic footprints in the Baltic and the Caucasus, including through new embassies, to better align political outreach with supply-chain and technology objectives.

Managing the East–West contradiction: distinguishing Russia from China

Navigating the East–West contradiction remains a central diplomatic challenge. For India, “the East” is not unitary: relations with Russia are qualitatively distinct from those with China and should not be conflated. The India–Russia partnership has generally lacked competitive elements and is grounded in continuous mutual consideration across defense, energy, and geopolitical consultation. China is a very different story: an unresolved boundary question, repeated transgressions, and structural competition in India’s immediate neighborhood complicate engagement. India rejects analyses that place Russia and China in the same basket or that demand Indo-Pacific templates be extrapolated uncritically into Europe. New compacts should reflect rebalancing and multipolarity, allowing differentiated logics across theatres. Western understanding of this strategic calculus is essential for durable convergence.

Platforms for stability and the politics of rebalancing

India’s national-interest-driven positioning can help mitigate global frictions by lowering the temperature of great-power rivalry and keeping the global economy functional. The G20 has been a notable platform in this regard, where India has emphasized calming discourse, bridging North–South divides on debt, climate, and digital public infrastructure, and promoting fairer, less selective applications of rules. Such efforts align developmental goals with system-stabilizing behavior: advancing technology partnerships and knowledge-economy integration, advocating equitable norm-setting under the UN Charter, and supporting a rules-based order that is genuinely rules-consistent. The objective is neither alignment as fealty nor distance as virtue, but a discerning reset with the West that maximizes India’s agency while contributing to global stability.

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Historical Roots, Diaspora, and Strategic Solidarity

India–Africa relations are anchored in long civilizational contact and a shared political inheritance. Centuries before the modern state system, dhow-borne maritime links across the Indian Ocean and caravan routes into the African interior enabled dense exchanges of commerce, culture, and ideas. These ties were profoundly altered by Western colonialism, which not only reoriented trade but also transplanted Indian communities to Africa—through indenture and later through mercantile migration—creating diasporic bridges that endure. The postcolonial convergence of India and numerous African polities around anti-colonial struggles and the moral economy of sovereignty generated a durable solidarity that persists in multilateral arenas. This historical fabric informs a strategic culture that sees the India–Africa partnership as normative as much as instrumental: a relationship framed not as a donor–recipient dyad, but as one animated by respect for agency, shared experiences of structural subordination in the international system, and a preference for demand-driven cooperation.

Leadership, High-Level Engagement, and the AU’s Seat at the G20

The contemporary revitalization of India–Africa ties has been catalyzed by sustained high-level political outreach and personal leadership. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s July 2018 address to the Ugandan Parliament articulated a guiding doctrine: India’s cooperation with Africa would be demand-driven, responding to Africa’s priorities rather than imposing an external agenda. This declaration has structured policy choices and signaled a shift in diplomatic posture from transactional projectization to responsive partnership. Modi’s own engagement—possibly deepened by Gujarat’s longstanding mercantile and people-to-people linkages with East Africa—has been consequential in lending political energy to this approach.

A marked symbol of this leadership was India’s successful push to secure the African Union’s membership in the G20. Having committed at the Bali Summit to advancing the AU’s inclusion, New Delhi worked assiduously with other G20 leaders over the ensuing year to translate commitment into consensus. The announcement at the New Delhi G20 Summit granting the AU a full seat was thus not merely procedural; it was a strategic assertion of the Global South’s voice and an extension of India’s normative claim that global governance must reflect contemporary realities. This act also reaffirmed India’s solidarity with Africa in international forums, aligning ethical aspiration with diplomatic practice.

Sustained political engagement has accompanied this advocacy. Since 2014, India has recorded 34 outgoing high-level visits to Africa by its President, Vice President, and Prime Minister, and received more than a hundred incoming visits at comparable levels from African counterparts. These interactions have provided the scaffolding for a “quantum jump” in sectoral initiatives and for aligning national development priorities across both sides, building on the ambitious targets tabled at the 2015 India–Africa Forum Summit (IAFS).

Tangible Outcomes: Infrastructure, Human Capital, and Digital Public Goods

A decade after IAFS 2015—despite the disruption imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic—India has substantially delivered on projects and capacity-building commitments. Approximately 200 development projects have been executed across the continent, with 65 under execution and 81 in the pipeline. Many are first-of-their-kind assets in their national contexts and serve as visible markers of partnership credibility. These include the Tema–Mpakadan Railway and the Presidential Palace in Ghana; the National Assembly building in The Gambia; the Rivatex textile revival in Kenya; the Metro Express project in Mauritius; and the Mahatma Gandhi International Convention Centre in Niger. The selection of projects—transport connectivity, democratic infrastructure, industrial capability, urban mobility, and conferencing facilities—reflects a dual logic: meeting immediate developmental needs while also generating long-run institutional capacity and public goods.

Human capital has been a second pillar. Since the last IAFS meeting, India has extended more than 40,000 scholarships, intensifying training and exchanges across technical, managerial, and governance domains. This is complemented by an expanding architecture of digital connectivity. The pan-Africa e-network, now augmented through e-VidyaBharti (distance education) and e-ArogyaBharti (tele-health), operationalizes India’s comparative advantage in frugal, scalable platforms. These initiatives exemplify a distinctive blend in India’s development cooperation toolkit: hardware (iconic infrastructure) paired with software (knowledge systems and service delivery), enabling both visible state-building and cost-effective diffusion of public services.

The modality itself is resonant with India’s strategic culture. A demand-driven template, formulated in response to African priorities, has meant greater receptivity to localization, reduced conditionality, and a pragmatic focus on outcomes rather than on prescriptive models. The emphasis on training and digital public goods also leverages India’s own developmental experience—particularly the orchestration of inclusive services at scale—while respecting the sovereignty and policy space of African partners.

Economic Interdependence and the Forward Agenda: Digital, Green, and Health

Trade and investment have deepened alongside political and developmental ties. India has emerged as Africa’s fourth-largest trading partner and fifth-largest investor, an interdependence that spans energy, minerals, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, textiles, and increasingly, services and technology. During the Covid-19 pandemic, India’s provision of vaccines, medicines, and medical equipment at a critical juncture reinforced the political capital of the partnership and demonstrated an ability to mobilize supply chains for public health needs under duress.

Looking ahead, three themes increasingly define the horizon of cooperation. First, digital delivery—building on e-learning and telemedicine—envisions interoperable, low-cost platforms for identity, payments, and service delivery that can be adapted to African contexts. Second, green growth suggests joint work on renewable energy, grid stability, climate adaptation, and resilient infrastructure—areas where Indian firms and public institutions possess deployable capacity at scale. Third, affordable health consolidates lessons from pandemic cooperation into sustained collaboration on pharmaceuticals, vaccines, diagnostics, and supply-chain resilience. This triad mirrors a broader strategic convergence: Africa’s development priorities align with India’s comparative strengths in technology-enabled inclusion and frugal innovation. It also reflects a values-based partnership architecture—responsive, scalable, and oriented toward long-term resilience—that binds historical solidarity to contemporary statecraft.

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Diversifying India’s Diplomatic Geography: From Periphery to Partnership

India’s strategic culture has steadily widened its diplomatic geography beyond proximate theatres, recasting regions once treated as distant or peripheral into arenas of purposeful engagement. This expansion is neither ornamental nor episodic. It leverages trade complementarities, demand-driven development cooperation, and high-level political signaling to create durable stakes across Latin America, the Pacific Islands, and the Caribbean Community. The through line is a practical synthesis of soft power and material interests: health and digital public goods reinforce commercial presence; climate action and capacity building amplify voice and goodwill; diaspora linkages and politically-led frameworks accelerate implementation and trust. The Covid pandemic proved catalytic, enabling India to display solidarity in ways that consolidated perceptions of reliability among partners with long memories and specific needs.

Latin America: From Distant Market to Strategic Corridor

India’s Latin American pivot has moved beyond periodic political visits and symbolic representation to a substantive presence in trade, investment, and sectoral partnerships. While Africa remains the primary locus of Indian lines of credit and grant assistance, Latin America has become integral to India’s economic security calculus as a salient supplier of energy, natural resources, and food. This supply diversification reduces vulnerability to disruptions in proximate theatres and aligns with India’s strategic objective of broadening inputs for growth.

The region’s expanding middle class creates a natural consumer base for Indian pharmaceuticals and vehicles, reinforcing a mutually beneficial dynamic in which affordability and reliability meet rising demand. Parallel to goods trade, the Indian IT industry is firmly entrenched across Latin American markets, a sign of high-value services integration and knowledge-based linkages that are harder to displace than commodity flows. Rapid growth in overall trade turnover underscores that India’s presence is now serious and sustained; it is no longer analytically defensible to treat the region as a marginal adjunct to India’s global posture. India’s ranking among the top five trade partners of both Brazil and Argentina marks the consolidation of economic profile in the region’s largest economies and attests to the momentum behind this east–west corridor.

Investment patterns mirror trade diversification. Indian investments across sectors—from energy and mining to automobiles, pharmaceuticals, and IT-enabled services—are growing apace. This commercial spread is increasingly matched by strengthening political collaboration, including consultative mechanisms and sectoral dialogues that align regulatory frameworks with business needs. The net effect is that Latin America is no longer a “bridge too far” for Indian diplomacy; rather, it functions as an extended flank of India’s economic security strategy, embedding supply security, export opportunities, and political goodwill in one of the world’s key commodity- and demand-rich regions.

The Pacific Islands: Politically-Led, Demand-Driven Development

India’s engagement with the Pacific Islands over the last decade illustrates a conscious decision to extend political attention and development partnerships to non-proximate regions that have outsized significance in multilateral diplomacy, climate negotiations, and ocean governance. Three summit-level meetings with Pacific Island countries within this period—most recently in 2023 in Papua New Guinea—signal sustained high-level commitment. The warm public reception to the 2023 summit mattered symbolically; substantively, it showcased a demand-driven agenda designed around Pacific priorities rather than donor preferences.

Health sits at the core of this agenda. Indian commitments include establishing a super-speciality hospital in Fiji; conducting Jaipur Foot camps; provisioning dialysis units and sea ambulances across all member states; and creating centres for the supply of cost-effective pharmaceuticals. These measures move beyond episodic aid, building local capability and lowering the structural costs of healthcare delivery in archipelagic contexts. Digital connectivity has been treated as a force multiplier: the creation of an IT hub in Papua New Guinea is intended to bridge the region’s digital deficit by providing skills, infrastructure, and platforms that enable service delivery in health, education, and public administration.

A complementary pillar addresses data, oceans, and climate resilience. India has launched a warehouse to host geo-spatial data sets, providing a shared repository that underpins disaster readiness, infrastructure planning, and ecosystem monitoring. In parallel, a centre for sustainable coastal and ocean research links scientific cooperation to the blue economy, fisheries management, and coastal protection—areas where small island states face acute vulnerabilities. Ongoing endeavours in solarization and community skillbuilding reflect a long-term approach: decentralizing energy generation lowers operational costs and enhances resilience, while skills programs foster local ownership and sustainability.

The political resonance of these initiatives was heightened by the Covid experience. Many Pacific nations publicly acknowledged India’s assistance during the pandemic—through medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, and vaccine outreach—creating a reservoir of goodwill. Equally, the region’s endorsement of India’s climate action initiatives indicates convergence on a normatively charged agenda where India’s advocacy for equitable transitions has practical relevance. Taken together, summit-level diplomacy and a needs-based program mix have transformed tenuous contacts into a structured partnership that integrates science, development, and politics.

The Caribbean Community: Diaspora Leverage and a Programmatic Turn

A parallel trajectory is visible with the Caribbean Community, where deep historical linkages are being converted into actionable cooperation. A significant diaspora presence has long underwritten cultural familiarity and political access, but the relationship was often low-key and infrastructurally thin. Recent years show a shift toward programmatic engagement characterized by development projects, larger investments, and focussed capacity-building that prioritize measurable outcomes.

A politically-led framework has catalyzed this turn. Leadership-level direction aligns sectoral initiatives—ranging from health and pharmaceuticals to digital services and clean energy—with national and regional priorities. The emphasis on demand-driven programming has improved local buy-in and accelerated implementation, particularly in smaller states where administrative bandwidth is limited. The Covid pandemic provided a consequential opening: Indian solidarity during the crisis deepened trust and made subsequent cooperation in health systems strengthening, vaccine access, and digital health solutions both credible and welcome. As in the Pacific, the credibility of post-pandemic programming derives in part from having met urgent needs in a crisis, not merely from announcing new projects.

Policy Modalities and Instruments

India’s toolkit in these expanded geographies draws on instruments honed elsewhere while adapting to local contexts. Lines of credit and grant assistance—traditionally concentrated in Africa—provide precedents and templates for scalable financing in Latin America, the Pacific Islands, and the Caribbean Community. Where feasible, concessional finance is paired with turnkey execution models that incorporate training, maintenance, and local content requirements.

Demand-driven development programming is the organizing principle. Priority sectors include acute health needs (hospitals, dialysis units, sea ambulances, prosthetics camps, and pharmaceutical supply centres); digital connectivity (IT hubs and e-governance platforms); climate action (solarization and resilient infrastructure); and community skillbuilding (technical and vocational training). The creation of shared data assets, such as a warehouse for geo-spatial datasets, and of research institutions like a centre for sustainable coastal and ocean research, anchors these programs in evidence and local applicability.

Summit-level diplomacy provides political impetus and visibility, aligning bureaucratic machinery behind agreed deliverables. India’s three summits with Pacific Island countries—including the 2023 meeting in Papua New Guinea—illustrate how top-level signaling can unlock practical collaboration. Sectoral investments and trade diversification, particularly in pharmaceuticals, vehicles, and IT services, reinforce these efforts by embedding commercial interdependence. The presence of Indian IT firms in Latin America exemplifies this logic: services trade and local employment create stakeholders who benefit from policy stability and deeper ties.

Diaspora networks function as enabling infrastructure. In the Caribbean, diaspora linkages help socialize Indian technologies, pharmaceuticals, and educational offerings; they also anchor people-to-people ties that sustain political attention beyond single electoral cycles. Politically-led frameworks ensure coherence across these instruments, converting historical goodwill into programmatic, results-oriented partnerships.

Strategic Implications for India’s National Security and Strategic Culture

This diversified outreach has direct implications for India’s national security policy and strategic culture. First, supply diversification lowers strategic risk. By broadening access to energy, natural resources, and food from Latin America, India reduces overreliance on proximate suppliers and regional chokepoints. Concurrently, expanding export markets in pharmaceuticals, vehicles, and IT services across Latin America, the Pacific, and the Caribbean cushions India against demand shocks in traditional markets.

Second, the coupling of high-level political engagement with targeted assistance in health, digital connectivity, and climate action strengthens India’s soft power while generating practical influence in multilateral settings. Small states in the Pacific and Caribbean occupy influential roles in global climate negotiations and norm-setting related to oceans and sustainable development; their recognition of India’s responsiveness bolsters coalitions where numbers matter.

Third, a demand-driven, capacity-building approach aligns India’s external assistance with partner priorities, enhancing sustainability and local ownership. Programs such as dialysis units and sea ambulances in all Pacific member states, solarization initiatives, and community skillbuilding are designed to be absorbed and maintained locally, not just inaugurated ceremonially. The warehouse for geo-spatial data sets and the centre for sustainable coastal and ocean research epitomize a data-informed model that integrates science with policy.

Finally, diaspora networks and politically-led frameworks work as accelerators of trust and execution. In the Caribbean particularly, diaspora communities lend social capital to India’s overtures, while leadership-level commitments translate into administrative traction. The experience of Covid—when Indian assistance resonated in both the Pacific and the Caribbean—has left an enduring imprint on perceptions of reliability, turning crisis-born solidarity into a platform for long-term cooperation.

Collectively, these developments signal an India increasingly comfortable with a global posture that blends material interests with normative leadership, and transactional gains with public goods. The result is a rebalanced diplomatic portfolio that better insulates India from shocks, deepens export and investment pathways, and augments strategic agency in an era of fluid alignments.

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Prioritising the Near Abroad in a Rising India’s Statecraft

India’s strategic culture has historically privileged stability and influence in the immediate and extended neighbourhood as both a prerequisite and multiplier for global agency. The current decade has seen a marked deepening of this orientation through the Neighbourhood First policy, even as India’s diplomatic bandwidth widened across the Indo-Pacific and beyond. The logic is straightforward: geographic contiguity generates security externalities—terrorism, insurgency, illegal flows, pandemics, and climate shocks—that cannot be managed at distance. Equally, prosperity is path-dependent on regional connectivity, market integration, and policy coordination with proximate partners.

What distinguishes recent practice from earlier rhetoric is execution. A concerted push on cross-border projects, faster delivery of development assistance, targeted crisis response, and routine institutional consultations have cumulatively produced a qualitative shift in India’s linkages. This has attenuated trust deficits, created new habits of cooperation, and raised the opportunity cost for neighbours of strategic drift. In short, India’s rise has been anchored, not distracted, by a deliberate focus on its near abroad.

Developmental Diplomacy as Strategy: Connectivity, Energy, Heritage, Housing, and Capacity

Neighbourhood First has operationalised a development-first toolkit that privileges tangible, multi-modal connectivity and everyday public goods—positioning India as a practical partner in nation-building.

• Rail, road, air, and waterways: Reopened and new rail links with Bangladesh (such as Haldibari–Chilahati and the Akhaura–Agartala line), integrated check-posts and highways to Nepal and Bhutan, and bridges like the Maitri Setu over the Feni have shortened distances and reduced logistics costs. The India–Bangladesh Protocol on Inland Water Transit and Trade has revived riverine arteries to serve India’s Northeast, while civil aviation arrangements have sustained mobility in lean periods and under stress.

• Energy interdependence: Cross-border power trade with Bangladesh has expanded; petroleum pipelines such as Motihari–Amlekhgunj (to Nepal) and the India–Bangladesh Friendship Pipeline have lowered transport risks and costs. During acute shortages, India has enabled emergency fuel and essential supplies, underscoring the reliability of shared grids and supply chains as instruments of regional resilience.

• Heritage and urban livelihoods: Restoration projects—from Bagan’s temples in Myanmar to cultural centres in Sri Lanka—have reinforced civilisational affinities while spurring tourism and local economies. These are not cosmetic; they anchor trust and soft connectivity that support harder security aims.

• Housing and social infrastructure: The Indian Housing Project in Sri Lanka, urban housing initiatives in the Maldives, and community development schemes across the neighbourhood have delivered visible benefits to everyday lives, altering perceptions of India’s intent and capability.

• Capacity expansion: Scholarships, civil service training, defence and maritime courses, digital public infrastructure cooperation, and research collaboration have widened the talent and institutional base of neighbouring states. Importantly, these investments support regulatory convergence and interoperable systems—crucial for long-term connectivity and security cooperation.

Through this matrix, India has embedded itself in the quotidian functioning of neighbouring economies and societies. Developmental diplomacy is thus not ancillary to security; it is its most sustainable expression.

Resilience in Hard Times: Covid-19, Balance-of-Payments Shocks, and Mutual Dependence

Crises are the ultimate test of neighbourhood policies. The Covid-19 period intensified India’s ties, converting latent goodwill into demonstrable trust. Early medical assistance, the SAARC Covid-19 Emergency Fund, Vaccine Maitri deliveries, and the facilitation of essential supplies made India’s contributions tangible when global supply chains were brittle. The Vande Bharat repatriation effort, executed at scale, underscored the capacity to care for diaspora and neighbours alike.

The Sri Lankan balance-of-payments crisis further crystallised regional perceptions of India as a dependable first responder. Lines of credit, currency support, and timely shipments of fuel, food, and medicines helped bridge an acute gap, providing relief while international programmes were negotiated. This responsiveness—delivered without intrusive conditionality—enhanced India’s credibility and nurtured a sense of regional togetherness.

Beyond extraordinary emergencies, the routinisation of assistance matters. Regular humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions, seasonal support for power and commodities, and joint border management have created predictable patterns of cooperation. Neighbours increasingly evaluate partnership choices through a lens of reliability and speed; by that metric, India’s stock has risen.

The Extended Neighbourhood: ASEAN, the Gulf, Central Asia, and the Indian Ocean Island States

India’s concentric circles of engagement logically extend beyond immediate borders to proximate regions that shape its security and prosperity. The approach has been to reinforce regional architectures, widen cooperation agendas, and align connectivity with strategic interests.

• ASEAN and its centrality: India’s Act East has matured into a steady advocacy of ASEAN centrality and cohesion within the Indo-Pacific. The cooperation agenda has broadened: physical connectivity through the India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway and the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project; development assistance and Quick Impact Projects in CLMV countries; expanded research and education linkages, including science and technology funds and academic exchanges; and a more frank security conversation spanning maritime domain awareness, counterterrorism, and cyber. Digital interoperability—such as the UPI–PayNow link with Singapore and acceptance of Indian digital payment instruments in parts of Southeast Asia—has added a contemporary layer of connectivity.

• The Gulf as a strategic partner: After decades of episodic attention, India has instituted sustained high-level engagement with the Gulf. The Covid-19 stresses—health security, diaspora welfare, and supply chain stability—accelerated habits of consultation and operational coordination. Economic ties have deepened through instruments such as the India–UAE CEPA, expanded energy and petrochemical partnerships, and Gulf sovereign investments in Indian infrastructure, technology, and renewables. Strategic collaboration now spans defence exercises, maritime security, counter-radicalisation, food and energy corridors, and new plurilateral formats such as I2U2. Local currency settlement arrangements and the growing acceptance of Indian digital payments in the region reflect a pragmatic, efficiency-driven integration.

• Central Asia’s structured template: The 2022 India–Central Asia summit set out a comprehensive engagement framework that has since guided a more structured approach across trade, connectivity, energy, counterterrorism, space, health, and education. With Afghanistan’s uncertainties complicating overland access, India has actively pursued alternative corridors—leveraging Chabahar Port and the International North–South Transport Corridor—while scaling capacity-building programmes and exploring renewable and pharmaceutical cooperation. The region now assesses Indian partnerships with greater enthusiasm, valuing predictability, technology transfer, and training ecosystems.

• Island neighbours in the Indian Ocean: From Sri Lanka and the Maldives to Mauritius and Seychelles, India has been a dependable partner in both difficult and routine times. The SAGAR doctrine has framed an integrated approach to maritime security and blue economy cooperation; coastal radar networks, EEZ surveillance, hydrography, and Dornier deployments have enhanced local capacities. Housing, ports and bridges, water and sanitation projects, and community assets have improved daily life. Regular HADR missions—whether responding to cyclones, floods, or logistical disruptions—have created a lived experience of reliability that is rare in a crowded maritime theatre.

Taken together, these vectors portray an India that is more engaged, more responsible, and more contributive in its surrounding regions. The strategic pay-off is cumulative: reduced vulnerabilities at the periphery, denser networks of interdependence, and a neighbourhood that increasingly sees India not merely as a large neighbour, but as a source of shared prosperity and security.

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Global South and Global Good

India’s ascent is marked by a dual vocation: as a sovereign actor advancing its national interest and as a convening voice for a wider Global South constituency. This is neither altruism nor rhetoric. It is a strategic synthesis of moral responsibility and interest-based statecraft that seeks to shape a re-balancing global order in which developing countries acquire voice, agency, and tangible benefits. The resulting posture—simultaneously principled and pragmatic—locates India’s credibility in the provision of public goods, the stewardship of global commons, and the capacity to mobilize consensus across diverse coalitions. In this frame, internationalism is not an offset to national interest; it is a multiplier of it, particularly as India’s capabilities and expectations grow.

A Landscape of Compounded Crises

Developing economies entered the 2020s facing a cascade of shocks that exposed structural vulnerabilities:

• The Covid period imposed harsh constraints on health accessibility and affordability. Travel restraints deepened inequities, separated labor from opportunity, disrupted education, and complicated post-pandemic recovery.
• Fragile economies bore the brunt of lockdowns and supply-chain ruptures, grappling with declining trade, rising debt burdens, and eroded fiscal space that jeopardized development trajectories.
• The Ukraine conflict layered additional stress by elevating 3F prices—food, fuel, and fertilizers—intensifying inflationary pressures and threatening a fragile recovery across the Global South.
• Endemic terrorism in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia added persistent security and economic costs, undermining investment climates and diverting scarce public resources.
• Extreme climate events, occurring with greater frequency and intensity, disproportionately affected developing countries, placing the 2030 Agenda and climate commitments under strain.

These converging headwinds rendered many in the Global South under-represented in decision-making yet over-exposed to the consequences—a disequilibrium India has sought to correct through advocacy, partnership, and delivery.

India’s Strategic Rationale: Internationalism as National Interest

India’s foreign policy blends a civilizational ethos of responsibility with a realist appreciation of power and interdependence. Three propositions animate this synthesis:

• Speaking for the Global South is a strategic act. By articulating the priorities of those with limited presence at consequential tables, India accentuates a re-balancing process that moderates great-power dominance and widens the circle of beneficiaries.
• Delivering global good—humanitarian relief, development partnerships, and collective stewardship—creates friendships, influences opinion, and builds coalitions that directly support India’s interests in stability, markets, and norms.
• Inclusive platforms such as the G20 offer leverage to promote equitable growth, resilience for vulnerable societies, and consensus on contested issues. India’s presidency in particular operated as a premium stage to assert internationalism over resurgent nationalism, highlighting the indivisibility of global and national welfare.

This approach is operationalized through multi-vector engagement—expansive, networked, outcome-focused—ensuring that no region, however distant, is considered irrelevant to India’s calculus.

Operationalising Solidarity: Actions and Initiatives

India’s strategic culture privileges timely assistance as both a moral imperative and a credibility-enhancing practice:

• Humanitarian operations delivered emergency succour after earthquakes in Türkiye and Nepal; during the Yemen civil war; following mudslides in Sri Lanka; and amid floods in Mozambique—demonstrating readiness to act swiftly across West Asia, South Asia, and Africa.
• During Covid, Vaccine Maitri supported 100 partners, while medicines and equipment reached 150 countries. India also deployed personnel to the Maldives, Mauritius, Madagascar, Seychelles, Comoros, and Kuwait—evidence of solidarity at scale as well as logistics and medical capability.
• Beyond crisis response, India invests in public goods that enhance safety, security, and sustainability—from HADR (Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief) networks to capacity-building for digital public infrastructure—positioning itself as a reliable provider rather than a transactional donor.

These actions accrue reputational capital, socializing partners to India’s leadership and deepening trust-based interdependence.

Stewardship of Global Commons and Thematic Initiatives

India has increasingly linked regional security, economic resilience, and global commons management:

• The Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative (IPOI), announced at the East Asia Summit in 2019, has gathered momentum around cooperative pillars—maritime security, blue economy, connectivity, and disaster risk reduction—anchoring an open, inclusive Indo-Pacific in practical collaboration.
• The Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA) addresses illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing and related maritime challenges by enhancing transparency, capacity, and cooperative monitoring—an essential deterrent to resource predation and grey-zone coercion.
• The Quad’s remit has broadened from connectivity and pandemic response to emerging and critical technologies, supply-chain resilience, and standards—illustrating minilateral agility that delivers demand-driven, modular outcomes.
• India’s championing of the International Year of Millets integrates climate action with food security by promoting climate-resilient crops and diversified diets, a policy with particularly significant implications for Africa’s nutrition and agricultural sustainability.

The cumulative effect is to frame India not merely as a littoral stakeholder but as a systemic contributor to maritime and food-security architectures.

Platforms and Partnerships: Multilateral, Regional, Minilateral, Bilateral

India’s layered diplomacy leverages institutional diversity for targeted outcomes:

• Multilateral advocacy: India articulates Global South concerns through the G-77, Non-Aligned Movement, and L.69 Group, combining empathy and solidarity with agendas on reform, equity, and representation.
• Small Island Developing States: Tailored partnerships emphasize development projects, renewable energy diffusion, and disaster resilience, reflecting vulnerability-specific programming.
• Regional engagement: The East Asia Summit ecosystem, BIMSTEC, IORA, GCC formats, and a collective approach to Central Asia deepen strategic and economic ties in India’s immediate and extended neighborhood.
• Continental breadth: Platforms such as the India–Africa Forum Summit (IAFS), Arab League dialogue, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), Pacific Islands Forum, CARICOM, and CELAC extend India’s network across Africa, West Asia, the Indo-Pacific, and the Americas.
• Europe: Intensified dealings encompass the EU and key member-states, including the Nordics and the Slavkov format, enabling diversification and densification of partnerships across technology, supply chains, and green transition.
• Continuities and innovations: Long-standing commitments like the Commonwealth persist alongside elevated priorities like the G20 and flexible arrangements including BRICS, RIC, IBSA, the Quad, I2U2, and multiple trilaterals.
• Bilateral anchors: Key relationships and select regional priorities reinforce these layers, jointly determining the smoothness and sustainability of India’s rise.

This networked geometry provides redundancy and reach, allowing India to route around blockages and tailor instruments to issue-specific demands.

Strategy-in-Action: Logic of Multi-Vectorism

Investing in the Global South aligns principled identity with pragmatic advantage:

• Principled and pragmatic: Support for developing partners reflects India’s civilizational ethos while building a re-balanced order that moderates asymmetries in rule-making and resource access.
• Building constituencies: Provision of global good expands soft power, enhances trust, and cultivates constituencies that support India’s positions in multilateral negotiations—from development finance and debt to technology and climate.
• Internationalism as differentiator: In an era of resurgent nationalism, India’s emphasis on inclusive growth, resilient supply chains, and climate-resilient development—spotlighted during its G20 presidency—distinguishes its leadership style as consensus-seeking rather than coercive.
• Flexible delivery: Multi-vector engagement across multilateral, regional, minilateral, and bilateral channels maximizes outcomes, providing flexibility, redundancy, and targeted delivery calibrated to partner needs and issue-areas.

For Bharat, the strategic payoff lies in converting empathy into influence and delivery into durable legitimacy.

Outcomes and Perceptions

The cumulative effect of these choices is visible in altered perceptions and practical gains:

• India is increasingly perceived as a source of ideas, a champion of causes, a driver of initiatives, and an advocate of consensus—a status underwritten by consistent delivery.
• By treating no country or region as irrelevant, India broadens diplomatic bandwidth and builds resilient networks that hedge against geopolitical volatility.
• An intensive and enlightened engagement with the Global South reinforces credibility and influence, translating moral agency into strategic capital that strengthens India’s position in global agenda-setting.

Specifics and Timelines

• Covid-19 solidarity: Vaccine Maitri for 100 partners; medicines and equipment supplied to 150 countries; deployment of Indian personnel to the Maldives, Mauritius, Madagascar, Seychelles, Comoros, and Kuwait.
• Humanitarian operations: Rapid responses in Türkiye, Nepal, Yemen, Sri Lanka, and Mozambique.
• Indo-Pacific frameworks: The Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative announced at the East Asia Summit in 2019; IPMDA mobilized to counter IUU fishing and enhance maritime transparency.
• Thematic priorities: International Year of Millets advancing climate and food-security objectives, with substantial implications for Africa.
• Macro benchmarks: Persistent reference to the 2030 Agenda and climate commitments as orienting goals; attention to elevated 3F prices as a post-pandemic and conflict-induced stressor for developing economies.