Sooner than later, India will have to make a choice where it stands. Perhaps more important, what India stands for.
The Narendra Modi government’s policy of multi-alignment brought good results for the country’s foreign policy for most of Modi’s time as prime minister. But with Donald Trump acting like a bull in the china shop of world order, multi-alignment, at its best, has exhausted all possibilities. It was inventive while it lasted.
India needs a new foreign policy. Exposed to the scorching heat of Trump’s assaults on the existing order, the old policy is now like wine that tastes of wet cardboard. It emits an aroma similar to spoilt vinegar. The existing policy is no longer sustainable.
Repackaging it in shimmering new Bohemian crystal will not make the old wine any better. It will not be potable, although the new bottle may draw praise. The old policy must be discarded. Or else, South Block will be stranded by the receding tide of history.
In six months, Trump has decisively pulled the world away from multilateralism or even from plurilateral ways of advancing foreign policy. This may change if Trump does not complete his term for any reason, or if the next US president is either a Republican in the conventional mould or a Democrat. But India cannot wait for that. The challenge of adapting the country’s foreign policy to the new global realities is urgent. Every single day’s delay entails opportunity costs for 1.4 billion Indians whose aspirations, no longer circumscribed by the nation’s borders, are at stake.
India’s biggest contribution at the recent BRICS summit in the enchanting city of Rio de Janeiro was to propose a new expansion of that acronym. As India prepares to succeed Brazil as BRICS chair, Modi told his co-leaders at the summit: “Our goal will be to redefine BRICS as Building Resilience and Innovation for Cooperation and Sustainability.” That means BRICS will no longer be Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa. But in the Trump era, it falls short of hard bargains and transactional foreign policy. Modi is obsessed with catchy acronyms—his administration is peppered with them.
If India does not innovate and reconfigure its foreign policy, it will soon dawn on those in the vanguard of the country’s diplomacy that its ways are not working. Modi confidently said at Rio that “under India’s BRICS chairmanship next year… just as we brought inclusivity to our G20 presidency and placed the concerns of the Global South at the forefront of the agenda, similarly, during our presidency of BRICS, we will advance this forum with a people-centric approach”. The world has changed dramatically since India’s G20 presidency and will have changed even more before BRICS leaders meet in India in 2026. Much thought and preparation ought to go into how the next BRICS chair is going to adapt to those changes. There is not a moment to waste.
A bigger challenge for Indian diplomacy before its BRICS presidency will be the Quadrilateral summit of Australia, India, Japan and the US to be hosted by Modi later this year. Trump will not be travelling all the way to India to listen to niceties, which India is famous for in dealing with the mercurial US president. Trump will try within Quad to wreck the existing rules-based international order and impose his brand of unlilateralism.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar will be at his persuasive best through his long-time friend and US counterpart Marco Rubio to influence Trump into not wrecking this summit. If Jaishankar succeeds, India can proclaim victory like in Delhi G20, which was credible. But with Quad, any similar victory will be illusory. It will only signal that Washington doesn’t care enough about the Quad and is letting its next summit be anodyne in outcomes.
Such challenges are not new to India. They confronted South Block when P V Narasimha Rao was prime minister and the Soviet Union, India’s most important partner, was dissolved. India looked to Europe as an alternative because Washington was unwilling to take Moscow’s place in dealings with India. The Europeans, however, preferred to coalesce around their Maastricht Treaty of 1992 establishing the European Union. Still, Rao made progress bilaterally with Germany and the UK; but the EU’s subsequent common foreign and security policy limited the options.
What should be the contours of India’s amended foreign policy now? Taking a leaf out of Rao’s book, India must make bilateral relations the sheet anchor of its diplomacy. It must identify its core interests and push for strongerthan-ever bilateral relations with countries which share these core interests. India’s political leadership must get it out of their heads that this country is a vishwaguru or teacher of the world.
India cannot be the same for Russia and Ukraine—it defies logic. Modi’s visit to Ukraine 11 months ago was ill-advised, merely an exercise in vanity and delusion. Just as India reduced its involvement in the Non-aligned Movement and the Group of 77 in recent years, it is advisable to reduce the country’s ongoing multilateral engagements. What, for instance, is the purpose of investing so much effort and resources in BRICS when most of this group’s members are individually and separately trying to mollycoddle Trump and get the best out of him for themselves. Where was the need for New Delhi to send an ambassador to Pyongyang last month after a gap of four years when India’s core interests lie in further developing economic relations with South Korea? Upgrading relations with North Korea at this juncture merely served to create suspicions in Seoul about New Delhi’s intentions.
The scope for India’s strategic autonomy is rapidly shrinking because it has taken on too much in global engagement. Israel is a case in point. For reasons that cannot be spelt out here, India is now beholden to Israel to an extent where the two countries are joined at the hip.
In redrawing India’s foreign policy, lessons from American history should be imbibed. India, while seeking permanent UN Security Council membership, should remember that the US never joined the League of Nations. Between the two world wars, the US became isolationist in global politics, solely pursuing its economic goals. India should do the same.
K P Nayar | Strategic analyst
(Views are personal)