In the summer of 2013, while dining at a Brooklyn restaurant, a senior British diplomat asked me about India’s geopolitical priorities. At that point, my reply reflected the default text-book priorities internalised by the Indian polity: they include prioritising the neighborhood, including managing or deterring threats from the western neighbour, continuing the upward trajectory of relations with the United States of America, management of relations with China — it has an economic and security component — safeguarding and promoting Indian equities in the Gulf and Europe, maintaining ties with Russia because of Cold-War era weapon systems dependence, and exploring the possibility of new economic linkages in Africa and Latin America.
More than 10 years later, the response to this question would be different, courtesy new geopolitical realignments and developments. As we reach the fag end of 10 years of the Narendra Modi government, an objective audit of his foreign policy and how far it has helped India leverage its market size, geography, soft power, particularly its normatively attractive democratic institutions, younger demographics, and favourable geopolitical developments is the need of the hour.
For his inaugural swearing-in ceremony, Prime Minister Modi had invited political leaders of neighbouring countries, including the then Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. The decade that has followed has seen a mixed record with neighbours in the backdrop of China’s looming shadow. The recent message of the new leadership in the Maldives to India to withdraw its troops is an example. With Nepal, the blockade of goods entering that country in 2015 for six months gave fodder to anti-India sentiment. India has found it consistently difficult to dispel the image of a next-door hegemon in Nepal’s post-monarchy phase. Within each of the South Asian countries, India has its own favourites and that creates sufficient room for instability in relations. In Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina Wajed enjoys New Delhi’s support; in the Maldives, the former president, Mohamed Nasheed, is a favourite; while in Sri Lanka, President Ranil Wickremesinghe is perceived to be the more amenable interlocutor.
Under Modi, after the Pathankot crisis in 2016, Pakistan is seen solely through India’s conflict management domain. The asymmetry in the civilian-military equation between the two countries and the existence of non-State actors, whose sole aim is to harm Indian citizens, make the engagement subject to risks. Luckily for India, Pakistan’s economic duress and it being part of the FATF grey list till 2022 raised the cost for enabling transnational terrorist strikes exponentially. The Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008 were a catalyst in this respect as Western countries, particularly the United States of America, became more receptive to India’s position. There were also provocative attacks, namely Uri in 2018 and Pulwama in 2019, but a receptive audience in the West enabled India to take an aggressive stance.
Another relation that is definitive for India’s Look East policy is with its Southeast Asian neighbour, Myanmar, that is witnessing rebellion in several parts of the country since the military coup of 2021. India has announced that it would do away with the Free Movement Regime along the Indo-Myanmar border. Given the complexity of the situation in Myanmar, the diverse ethnic ecosystem in India’s Northeast, and the overall regional economic potential, sound border management should have dictated the multi-stakeholder consultations. Not doing that has triggered contesting reactions among the region’s myriad communities and their leaderships.
China was arguably the most testing engagement in the last 10 years. Apart from his personalised style of engagement with China’s premier, Xi Jinping, in September 2014, which reportedly resulted in China’s commitment to invest $20 billion in India, Modi had two informal summits with his Chinese counterpart. In 2020, India faced territorial aggression in the Ladakh sector. In addition, China continued to block or delay the demand for the listing of India-centric terrorists under UN sanctions. A lack of transparency and confusion on China underline Modi’s record of 10 years. The capacity gap, military as well as economic, between the two countries lies at the heart of the obfuscation and confusion.
With rising capex spending facilitated by aggressive tax collection, India is an appealing market and investment destination. Those with a family income of over Rs 30 lakh in 2020-21, as per an estimate of the think tank, PRICE, is estimated to be at about 56 million; this figure will go up to 170 million consumers by 2030-31. This is a market equal to the population of some of the Western European countries. In this context, Modi and his team have persisted with the more than two-decade-old strategy of qualitatively enhancing India-US ties. The US-China tensions continue to bring India and the US closer. The engagement with the Gulf countries, including the United Arab Emirates and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, also got a boost and this enabled newer investment opportunities. This is partly explained by a desire of the Gulf countries to diversify their investments. However, social cohesion issues, particularly with respect to Muslims who are India’s second-largest religious community, continue to prick the monarchial leadership of Gulf countries from time to time. On the Israel-Palestine situation and Russian aggression in Ukraine, there is policy continuum rooted in realpolitik. With ASEAN countries, such as Japan and South Korea, the engagement is along the trajectory of the last two decades. In the post-Covid phase, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand have been the net gainers of diversification of supply chains away from China. This demonstrates that personal engagement alone cannot bring business.
Modi and his team, especially the foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, with timely and selective social media feeds of his external engagements, were able to popularise foreign policy issues to get domestic acclaim. But for a country of 1.4 billion, optimally seizing global opportunities for the greater good will require foreign policy to be in sync with domestic realities. Irrespective of the party to be voted into power in 2024,
self-serving arguments should make way for a granular addressal of domestic impediments, particularly in the populous and poverty-stricken Hindi-speaking states that are marked by poor social indices, fragmenting social cohesion and poor female employment participation.
While low-hanging fruits were plucked in foreign affairs, the handling of tricky issues requires vigorous, cross-institutional coordination with sufficient room for dissent, respect for democratic institutions, an ear for domain expertise, calibration, and subtle execution.
Luv Puri is the author of two books on Jammu and Kashmir, including Across the LoC