Continuity and Change in Indian Foreign Policy

Foreign policy is conventionally thought of as the staid department of statecraft — slower than domestic politics, resistant to revolutionary change, carried forward by professionals whose instinct is to preserve. That intuition is only half right. Every foreign policy, India’s included, is simultaneously static and dynamic, and the analytical move that makes sense of the whole seven decades is to separate objectives from instruments. India’s objective has changed almost never; its instruments have changed repeatedly. That single distinction explains why the same policy looks unbroken when read from inside and transformed when read from outside.

Statism and dynamism: the two faces of any foreign policy

Before periodising anything, it is worth naming the two properties every foreign policy holds in tension. The vocabulary is unglamorous but it does real work, converting a vague impression of “change” into a question with an answer: which elements has the state chosen to hold constant, and which has it allowed to move?

Statism — the deliberate maintenance of the status quo

• Statism denotes the maintenance of the status quo in a state’s external conduct — the positions, commitments and self-imposed limits that survive changes of government, of international structure and of capability.
  • Its principal virtue is that static elements reduce risk. A position held for decades is legible to other states, cheap to defend, and requires no fresh domestic authorisation each time it is invoked.
  • Its cost is opportunity forgone: a constant held past its usefulness becomes a constraint, which is precisely the charge levelled at non-alignment after 1991.
• The cleanest Indian illustration is peacekeeping. India has contributed troops to peace operations only under a United Nations resolution and command — never outside that frame, never in a coalition of the willing, never under another state’s operational control.
  • India is among the largest cumulative troop contributors in the history of UN peacekeeping.
  • The constraint is self-imposed, not externally required — no treaty obliges India to route its soldiers through the Security Council — and it distinguishes India from every other major troop contributor with global ambitions, all of which have at some point deployed force outside a UN mandate or in support of an ally.
  • The one apparent exception proves the rule: the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka (1987–90) was deployed under a bilateral accord, not a UN mandate, and its failure is routinely cited inside the Indian system as vindication of the standing rule.
• The list of Indian constants is longer than peacekeeping alone: no formal military alliance, no foreign military bases on Indian soil, no participation in a war of choice outside the subcontinent, and no accession to the NPT. Each has held across governments of every political complexion.

Dynamism — the capacity to remould policy

• Dynamism is the ability to change or remould policy in response to a changed external environment or to a revolutionary shift in the domestic political scenario.
  • A dynamic policy displays a greater appetite for risk: it spends credibility on a bet that circumstances have altered, and accepts that the bet can be wrong.
  • Dynamism is not inconsistency. The test is whether the objective survives the change of instrument, which in India’s case it consistently has.
• The standard illustration is the Maldives, and it is worth following the whole arc rather than freezing it at any one moment, because the arc shows policy adjusting twice.
  • Under President Abdulla Yameen (2013–18), Delhi judged the relationship hostile enough to withhold visits at head-of-state and head-of-government level, a deliberate downgrade used as leverage.
  • When Ibrahim Mohamed Solih won the 2018 election, the Prime Minister attended his inauguration in Malé in November 2018 — a reversal executed within weeks, and a textbook instance of policy remoulded to a changed domestic political scenario in a neighbouring state.
  • The swing came back. Mohamed Muizzu won in late 2023 on an explicit “India Out” platform, and the withdrawal of Indian military personnel operating the donated aviation platforms was completed in 2024, with civilian technicians substituted.
  • Then it swung again. Muizzu’s state visit of October 2024 produced a currency-swap and budget-support package of around $760 million for an economy facing a reserves crisis, and the Prime Minister was guest of honour at the Maldives’ sixtieth independence anniversary in July 2025, where a further line of credit, a debt concession and FTA negotiations followed.
  • The lesson is not that India won. It is that the instrument moved three times in seven years — coercive downgrade, warm embrace, financial rescue — while the objective never moved at all: keeping the Maldives outside another power’s exclusive strategic ambit.

Statism is not inertia and dynamism is not drift; each is a choice about where to spend risk, and a mature foreign policy runs both at once.

• Every foreign policy contains both properties. The interesting question is therefore never “has India’s foreign policy changed?” — of course it has — but which elements were selected for constancy, and on what reasoning.

Periodising Indian foreign policy: three competing schemes

Periodisation is not a neutral filing exercise. Each scheme carries an implicit theory of what drives foreign policy, so adopting one silently smuggles in a causal claim. Three are in circulation, answering to the international system, domestic political leadership and the practitioner’s own self-description.

The systemic three-era scheme

Organised around the structure of the international system, on the reasoning that India’s choices are set by the configuration of power it faces rather than by who governs in Delhi.

• 1947–91: bipolarity. The League had withered and the United Nations was moulded by the victorious wartime allies; financial power sat with the West through the Bretton Woods arrangement, with the World Bank and IMF governing finance and the GATT, later the WTO, shaping trade.
  • India’s response was non-alignment: not being identified with either superpower while seeking political, security and economic support from both camps — so that a state emerging from two centuries of colonial rule could overcome its stresses without renting out its foreign policy. This was the staid and stable phase, arguably best suited to its times.
• 1991–2008: unipolarity. Two events in one year began the change — the collapse of the USSR, with Russia inheriting the UN seat, and India’s own foreign-exchange crisis, without precedent in its severity.
  • One state remained pre-eminent, while lesser poles began sprouting in the European Union, Russia, China, a dynamic Asia including Japan and India, and South America, particularly Brazil.
  • India weaned itself away from non-alignment toward multipolar alignment, adjusted its often adversarial relationship with the United States, incorporated globalisation into its external strategy, and paid greater attention to its neighbourhood.
• 2008–present: emergent multipolarity. The collapse of Lehman Brothers jolted the global financial system, producing a meltdown in the advanced economies and among erstwhile champion emerging economies.
  • American pre-eminence has been progressively chipped away, with much of the slack taken by China, which has also become a more attractive political model for some developing states. Poles have multiplied faster than before — the EU, ASEAN, Russia, Japan, India, BRICS, IBSA, the SCO — and the fulcrum of global power is shifting from the West to the East.
  • India has responded vigorously, with non-alignment dropped altogether as an operative label. Diplomacy now centres on the United States, China, the other permanent members and the neighbourhood; Look East has become Act East; Africa has come into focus and Latin America no longer looks distant; and economic diplomacy has taken the pole position.
• The scheme’s virtue is causal: it explains why the turns came when they did, because each turn follows a change in the system rather than a change of government in Delhi.
• Its limitation is that it flattens agency. It cannot easily accommodate decisions — Pokhran-I, the IPKF, Pokhran-II — that were driven by domestic calculation rather than systemic pressure.

The conventional five-phase domestic scheme

Organised around leadership and domestic political economy, and the version most commonly encountered in Indian writing.

• Nehruvian idealism (1947–62) — non-alignment, Panchsheel, Afro-Asian solidarity, institution-building, an outsized diplomatic voice on a slender material base.
• The realist correction (1962–66) — the shock of defeat, defence build-up, arms from both blocs, and the abandonment of the belief that moral standing substitutes for capability.
• The Indira period of alignment and regional assertion (1966–84) — the Indo-Soviet Treaty, Bangladesh, the nuclear test, Sikkim, and the assertion of primacy in South Asia.
• The post-1991 economic reorientation (1991–2004) — liberalisation, Look East, the opening to Israel and the United States, and foreign policy recast around economic need.
• Multi-alignment since roughly 2014 — simultaneous partnerships across rival groupings, explicit articulation of interests, an aspiration to leading-power status.
• Its virtue is granularity about decisions; its weakness is that it risks reading foreign policy as a series of personalities and missing the systemic constraint that made each set of choices available.

Jaishankar’s six-phase scheme

Set out by S. Jaishankar in the Ramnath Goenka Lecture of November 2019 and developed in The India Way, this is a practitioner’s periodisation: it organises phases by the objective India was pursuing and the systemic setting it faced, and it is unusual in ending with a characterisation of the present, which most schemes decline to attempt.

First phase, 1946–62: optimistic non-alignment

• The setting was firmly bipolar, with camps led by the United States and the USSR.
• India’s objectives were twofold, and both were defensive in the first instance and ambitious in the second.
  • Resisting the constraining of its choices and the dilution of its sovereignty while it rebuilt its economy and consolidated its integrity.
  • As the first of the decolonised nations, leading Asia and Africa in a quest for a more equitable world order.
• The phase saw energetic Indian diplomacy from Korea and Vietnam to Suez and Hungary — an activism disproportionate to India’s material weight and made possible precisely by its uncommitted status.
• The 1962 conflict with China ended the period, and did so in a manner that significantly damaged India’s standing — the reputational cost mattered as much as the territorial one.

Second phase, 1962–71: realism and recovery

• India made pragmatic choices on security and political challenges despite a paucity of resources — the defining constraint of the decade.
• It looked beyond non-alignment in the interest of national security, concluding a now largely forgotten defence agreement with the United States in 1964 in the aftermath of the Chinese war.
• External pressures on Kashmir mounted in a period of acute vulnerability, when India’s bargaining position was at its weakest.
• The global context remained bipolar but now saw the emergence of limited US-Soviet cooperation, with South Asia a particular area of their convergence. Indian diplomacy consequently had to face the superpowers together, as it did at Tashkent in 1965.
• Domestic challenges were particularly acute, ranging from political turbulence to economic distress.
• Jaishankar’s own summing-up is the phase’s most quotable feature: the stress levels were higher, and yet India came through an anxious period without too much damage.

Third phase, 1971–91: greater regional assertion

• It opened with the decisive dismantlement of India-Pakistan equivalence through the creation of Bangladesh and closed with the IPKF misadventure in Sri Lanka — assertion and its limit inside one phase.
• The larger environment was dramatically different: the Sino-American rapprochement of 1971 upended the strategic landscape, and the Indo-Soviet Treaty and the adoption of more pro-Soviet positions on international issues were India’s response to that challenge.
• The phase was complex because the US-China-Pakistan axis that came into being at this time seriously threatened India’s prospects.
• Its end was structural rather than chosen: the collapse of the USSR, India’s close ally, and the not unconnected economic crisis of 1991, compelled a re-examination of the first principles of both domestic and foreign policy.

Fourth phase, 1991–2001: safeguarding domestic options

• The dissolution of the USSR and the emergence of a unipolar world characterised the phase and encouraged a radical rethink across a broad range of issues.
• Focus shifted to safeguarding strategic autonomy. As India opened up economically, that opening was reflected in new diplomatic priorities and approaches.
• The Look East policy summarised the changed Indian approach to world affairs, which also saw adjustments in India’s position on Israel, with full diplomatic relations established in 1992.
• India reached out to engage the United States more intensively while protecting its equities in critical areas — an early statement of the pattern that would later be called multi-alignment.
• The quest for autonomy was focused particularly on securing the nuclear weapon option, and was visible also in trade negotiations.
• By the turn of the century enough had happened for India to shift gear again: it was a declared nuclear weapon power, had fended off Pakistani adventurism at Kargil in 1999, generated enough growth to be of global interest, and managed well a United States increasingly focused on Asia and on Islamic fundamentalism.

Fifth phase, 2001–14: the rise of a balancing power

• A more competitive environment opened new windows for India, especially as the United States found it difficult to sustain the same degree of unipolarity.
• India consequently discovered the benefits of working with different powers on different issues — the operational core of what would later be theorised as issue-based alignment.
• The phase is one in which India gradually acquired the attributes of a balancing power, reflected in the India-US civil nuclear agreement and a better understanding with the West at large.
• Simultaneously India made common cause with China on climate change and trade, consolidated ties with Russia, and helped fashion BRICS into a major forum.
• It was a period of opportunity in which India moved the global needle by taking new positions rather than by reacting to others’.

Sixth phase, 2014 onward: energetic diplomacy

• India entered a world of convergences and issue-based arrangements, and read that world correctly as one that rewards flexibility over commitment.
• The reading was accompanied by a growing sense of India’s own capabilities, as it emerged among the major economies of the world.
• India shaped key global negotiations, notably Paris on climate change, and invested greater resources in development partnerships with countries of the South.
• The diplomatic agenda broadened considerably, as did the range of partners engaged in pursuing it.
• The closing claim is the scheme’s strongest: India now has an optimal mix of capabilities, relationships and positioning, can aspire to occupy one of the multiple poles of the emerging order, and has the confidence in this looser architecture to emerge as a leading rather than a balancing power.

“The real obstacle to the rise of India is not anymore the barriers of the world, but the dogmas of Delhi.”

S. Jaishankar

The date boundaries, and why they differ

• The scheme is stated with slightly different phase boundaries in different places. The lecture renders the fourth and fifth phases as 1991–2001 and 2001–14; other statements of the same scheme render them as 1991–98 and 1998–2014.
• The divergence is not carelessness but a genuine question about which event closes the fourth phase — the exhaustion of the post-Soviet rethink around the turn of the century, or Pokhran-II in May 1998 as the moment India crossed a threshold it had been protecting for thirty years.
• The phase logic is the organising thing, and it is identical in both renderings: a period of protecting options after the Soviet collapse, followed by a period in which India converted protected options into leverage. Treat the boundary as a two-to-three-year band, not a date.

The ten characteristics of the current period

Jaishankar’s own account of what changed after 2014 is a set of observations about method rather than aims — itself evidence for this note’s argument.

• Issue-based alignments replace standing commitments as the organising unit of partnership.
• Great-power relationships are managed simultaneously, while regional outreach expands and the global footprint widens.
• Decisions are pragmatic and taken on a risk-benefit calculation rather than by reference to doctrine.
• There is an explicit willingness to use the instrumentality of military power, which earlier phases treated as a last resort to be discussed as little as possible.
• Defence policy is an integral part of diplomacy — sales, exercises, logistics agreements and technology partnerships as diplomatic currency.
• Business and investment are central to diplomacy, not adjuncts to it.
• There is a stronger drive in implementation, with delivery of announced projects treated as a diplomatic metric.
• Soft power is used strategically rather than incidentally, and the diaspora card is played more effectively — as a constituency, an economic asset and a channel of influence.

Scheme	Organised around	What it explains well	What it misses
Three systemic eras (1947–91, 1991–2008, 2008–)	Structure of the international system	Why turns happened when they did	Agency; decisions taken against systemic incentive
Five domestic phases	Leadership and political economy	Decisions, personalities, the 1991 hinge	Systemic constraint; risks a great-man narrative
Jaishankar’s six phases	India’s objective and its setting	Continuity of purpose across changed means	It is a practitioner’s self-description, not an independent finding

The phases in narrative

The three schemes converge more than they diverge, and a chronological account that separates the systemic setting, the objectives, the principal decisions and the assessment can carry all three at once. What follows uses the six-phase spine.

1947–62: an outsized voice on a slender base

• The setting. A bipolar system consolidating through alliance-building — NATO in 1949, the Baghdad Pact and SEATO in the mid-1950s, with Pakistan joining both and thereby importing the Cold War into South Asia.
• The objective. Preserve decisional freedom while rebuilding. Non-alignment was the instrument, not the aim — a refusal to pre-commit India’s judgement to another state’s threat perception.
  • The rationale was material as much as moral: alignment would have brought aid at the price of a veto over India’s choices, at the moment India was consolidating its territory and building a planned economy. It also created a market position — an uncommitted India could seek assistance from both camps, and did, taking Soviet steel plants alongside American food aid.
• The principal decisions.
  • Panchsheel, the five principles of peaceful coexistence, agreed with China in the 1954 agreement on Tibet and generalised thereafter as India’s declared normative framework. Its philosophical roots are developed in the companion note on the determinants of Indian foreign policy.
  • The Bandung Conference of 1955, where India acted as convenor and sponsor of Chinese participation, and where Afro-Asian solidarity acquired institutional form.
  • Korea: India chaired the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission and supplied its custodian force, resolving the prisoner-of-war question that had deadlocked the armistice — the clearest demonstration that non-alignment purchased usable diplomatic standing.
  • Early recognition of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and sustained advocacy of its claim to the Chinese seat at the United Nations.
  • Kashmir taken to the United Nations in January 1948 under Chapter VI, which internationalised a dispute India had expected to have resolved bilaterally and which remains the most criticised single decision of the period.
  • Goa in 1961: force used to end Portuguese rule, exposing the gap between India’s declared preference for peaceful settlement and its willingness to act on a claim it regarded as anti-colonial.
• The assessment is genuinely divided, and both halves are strong.
  • For the defence. India built the Non-Aligned Movement with Nasser, Tito, Sukarno and Nkrumah, giving newly independent states a collective voice; it made decolonisation and apartheid standing items on the international agenda; and it acquired diplomatic weight far beyond its material base while avoiding the client status alignment imposed on comparable states.
  • For the prosecution. The failure to settle Kashmir when India’s military position was strongest; the misreading of China, in which Panchsheel substituted for an assessment of Chinese intentions; inadequate defence preparation, with the forces starved of resources and the professional military marginalised in strategic assessment; and an idealism that, its critics say, mistook moral force for a substitute for power.
  • The synthesis. The premise of the phase was that international standing could compensate for material weakness, and in 1962 that premise collapsed — not because the diplomacy was worthless but because it had never been designed to deter an adversary indifferent to India’s standing.

1962 did not discredit non-alignment; it discredited the belief that non-alignment was a security policy.

1962–71: recovery under stress

• The setting. Continuing bipolarity with the beginnings of superpower détente, and South Asia an area where American and Soviet preferences converged — both wanted the subcontinent quiet, neither wanted India strong enough to act alone.
• The objective. Rebuild capability and survive a decade of simultaneous external and domestic crisis without surrendering decisional freedom.
• The principal decisions.
  • A defence build-up on an unprecedented scale: the defence budget roughly doubled after 1962, force levels expanded, mountain divisions were raised and defence production was prioritised.
  • Arms and assistance from both blocs at once — the 1964 defence understanding with the United States, negotiated in the wake of the Chinese war, running alongside a deepening Soviet arms supply relationship that would soon include licensed aircraft production. This is the phase’s most instructive fact: non-alignment was operated as a procurement strategy.
  • The 1965 war and the Tashkent Declaration of January 1966, mediated by the Soviet Union — a settlement returning captured territory and leaving India’s political objectives unmet, remembered as the moment India faced both superpowers together across a table.
  • The refusal to sign the NPT in 1968, on the reasoning that it divided the world into nuclear haves and have-nots on the arbitrary basis of a 1967 date, imposed obligations only on the non-nuclear and carried no credible disarmament commitment — while China’s 1964 test had placed a nuclear-armed adversary on India’s border.
  • The food crises of the mid-1960s and PL-480 dependence, with shipments released on a short tether that made the political price unmistakable. The lesson was to eliminate the dependence, producing the Green Revolution and a durable conviction that material dependence is a foreign-policy vulnerability.
  • Leadership consolidation under Lal Bahadur Shastri and then Indira Gandhi, with foreign policy increasingly run from the Prime Minister’s office.
• The assessment. A decade in which India was weakest and pressed hardest, and yet emerged with its core commitments intact. It establishes an operating pattern that recurs: when capability is scarce, India converts non-alignment from a normative posture into a bargaining position.

1971–91: assertion and its limits

• The setting. The Sino-American rapprochement of 1971 transformed India’s environment overnight, producing a US-China-Pakistan alignment that confronted India with three adversaries or unfriendly powers acting in concert.
• The objective. Establish and defend regional primacy, and secure a great-power guarantee sufficient to neutralise the new axis.
• The principal decisions.
  • The Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation, August 1971, whose Article IX obliged each party to abstain from assisting a third party in conflict with the other and to enter immediate consultations if either were attacked.
    • Whether it was an alliance in all but name is unresolved. Against: no automatic mutual defence obligation, full Indian freedom of action, a presentation consistent with non-alignment.
    • For: signed nine days before the crisis peaked, it delivered the deterrent effect an alliance is meant to deliver when the American carrier group entered the Bay of Bengal, and its consequence was two decades of pro-Soviet voting alignment on issues where India had no stake.
    • The honest reading is that the treaty was an instrument of autonomy that carried a cost in autonomy: it bought freedom to act in 1971 and constrained freedom to criticise thereafter.
  • The Bangladesh war of December 1971, which dismantled the India-Pakistan equivalence on which two decades of external diplomacy had rested, halved Pakistan and created a new state. The Simla Agreement of 1972 converted the outcome into a bilateral framework for Kashmir, excluding third-party mediation.
  • Pokhran-I, May 1974, described as a peaceful nuclear explosion. Its consequence was the Nuclear Suppliers Group and a technology-denial architecture aimed substantially at India, which shaped Indian technology access for three decades.
  • The merger of Sikkim in 1975, completing India’s northern territorial consolidation and confirming to smaller neighbours that Indian primacy had a hard edge.
  • The Janata interlude (1977–80) and Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s “genuine non-alignment” — the charge that non-alignment had become pro-Soviet in practice, and a corrective effort to restore equidistance, including an opening to China in 1979.
  • The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, December 1979, and India’s much-criticised response — abstention in the General Assembly and a formulation close to the Soviet account. It is the clearest instance of the price paid for the Soviet relationship, and damaged India’s standing among the non-aligned it had helped organise.
  • Rajiv Gandhi’s Action Plan for a nuclear-weapon-free world order (1988) at the UN, proposing time-bound universal disarmament — the last major Indian attempt to solve the nuclear problem normatively rather than by acquisition.
  • Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to Beijing in December 1988, the first in thirty-four years, which established that the boundary question would be pursued in a dedicated mechanism while the rest of the relationship developed in parallel — a separation that governed India-China relations for three decades until the 2020 crisis destroyed it.
  • The high-water mark of regional assertion, 1987–88. The Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka, deployed under the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord, escalated from guarantor to combatant and withdrew in 1990 having lost over a thousand soldiers and secured neither LTTE disarmament nor a settlement.
    • Operation Cactus in the Maldives, November 1988, by contrast, was a swift intervention against a coup attempt, and established India as a first responder in the Indian Ocean.
  • The doctrine underlying both is what commentators named the Indira Doctrine: India would not accept external intervention in a South Asian state’s internal affairs, would view any such intervention as inimical to its interests, and expected regional states to look to India rather than outside powers for assistance.
• The assessment. The phase demonstrated that India could reshape the subcontinent, and that its reach exceeded its resources. IPKF is the standing counter-example cited whenever intervention is proposed, and the economic weakness that constrained the whole period was what ultimately ended it.

1991–98: safeguarding options after the collapse

• The setting. Twin shocks together. The Soviet Union — India’s principal arms supplier, diplomatic protector and rupee-trade partner — ceased to exist, and India’s reserves fell to roughly a fortnight’s imports, forcing gold to be pledged abroad.
• The objective. Survive the transition without accepting the terms a unipolar order might otherwise impose, and rebuild external relationships around economic need rather than ideological affinity.
• The principal decisions.
  • Liberalisation from 1991 under Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh — devaluation, delicensing, tariff reduction and an opening to foreign investment. Its foreign-policy consequence was that capital, markets and technology became diplomatic objectives, which they had not been.
  • Look East, launched in 1992. Its logic was that India’s economic future lay with the fastest-growing region on its eastern flank, and that two decades of ideological distance had cost India a natural hinterland. India became an ASEAN sectoral dialogue partner in 1992, a full dialogue partner in 1995 and a summit partner in 2002.
  • Full diplomatic relations with Israel, January 1992, ending four decades in which recognition (1950) had not been converted into relations. The change was possible because the Cold War alignment that made Israel a liability had dissolved, and because the Madrid process had lowered the Arab political cost.
  • The opening to the United States, from estrangement to engagement, with defence contacts and economic dialogue beginning under considerable mutual suspicion over non-proliferation.
  • The border agreements with China of 1993 and 1996 — on maintaining peace and tranquillity along the Line of Actual Control, and on military confidence-building. Together they created the framework, including the bar on firearms near the LAC, that kept the boundary quiet for a quarter-century.
  • The Gujral Doctrine (1996–97), offering non-reciprocity to smaller neighbours: India would give without equivalent return, would not permit its territory to be used against a neighbour, and would settle disputes bilaterally — a deliberate correction to the coercive reputation of the previous phase.
• The assessment. The phase is India’s most successful adaptation, precisely because it was forced. Foreign policy was rebuilt around economic requirement while the underlying objective was defended — most visibly in the refusal to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, which preserved the nuclear option that the next phase would exercise.

1998–2014: the balancing power

• The setting. Unipolarity beginning to fray. American attention absorbed by counter-terrorism after 2001, Chinese growth compounding, and after 2008 a visible weakening of Western economic pre-eminence.
• The objective. Convert the options preserved in the previous phase into leverage — get out from under the technology-denial regimes, and be courted by several powers without being captured by any.
• The principal decisions.
  • Pokhran-II, May 1998. Five tests, a declaration of nuclear weapon status, and immediate sanctions. The recovery came through the Jaswant Singh–Strobe Talbott dialogue — fourteen rounds over two and a half years — which converted a proliferation confrontation into a strategic conversation, and is the most consequential single negotiation in modern Indian diplomacy.
  • Kargil, May–July 1999. India confined operations to its own side of the Line of Control, and the international response for the first time assigned responsibility to Pakistan, the Washington statement of 4 July 1999 being the clearest instance. Restraint was rewarded with diplomatic capital — a lesson later inverted.
  • The Lahore Declaration (1999) and the Agra summit (2001) — the two attempts at settlement with Pakistan that bracketed Kargil, and their failure.
  • The transformation of the American relationship after 2001, running through the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership, the 2005 joint statement, the defence framework agreement of the same year, and the 123 Agreement.
  • The civil nuclear agreement, completed in 2008, with IAEA safeguards and the NSG waiver of September 2008 — an exception from a non-proliferation order India had refused to join, obtained without signing the NPT and without capping its strategic programme. Its domestic passage is treated in the companion note on Parliament and foreign policy.
  • Strategic partnership language extended simultaneously to the United States, Russia, France, Japan, the EU and China — the practice later named multi-alignment, arriving before the vocabulary did.
  • BRIC from 2006 and BRICS from 2010, IBSA from 2003, and the elevation of the G20 to leader level in 2008, which gave India a seat at the table where the post-crisis order was renegotiated.
  • 26/11, November 2008. India did not retaliate militarily, choosing diplomatic isolation of Pakistan instead. The restraint was praised abroad and criticised at home, and the domestic verdict on it made the post-2016 posture politically available.
• The assessment. India became a balancing power in a specific sense: a swing state courted by several and aligned with none — useful to Washington as a hedge against China, to Moscow as customer, to Beijing on climate and trade, and to the developing world as one of its own. That position rested on being wanted by more than one party at once, which describes leverage rather than strength.

2014 onward: activism and its neighbourhood test

• The setting. Multipolarity with a sharpening Sino-American competition, a fragmenting trade order, and a security environment in which India faces a two-front problem with a collusive dimension.
• The objective. Unchanged — decisional freedom — but pursued through participation rather than abstention, and increasingly framed as access to markets, capital, technology and energy.
• The principal directions.
  • Neighbourhood First, announced at the outset with the invitation of regional leaders to the 2014 swearing-in, and examined below because it is the hardest evidence in the whole assessment.
  • Act East from 2014, succeeding Look East and adding security and connectivity content — the trilateral highway, maritime exercises, defence credit lines — to what had been a trade policy.
  • Link West and the Gulf turn, the least-noticed and possibly most successful reorientation of the phase: strategic partnerships with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, energy and labour interests institutionalised, and Israel de-hyphenated from the Palestine question without abandoning the declared position on it.
  • The Indo-Pacific reconceptualisation and the revival of the Quad, at ministerial level in 2019 and leader level in 2021. The concept, the maritime doctrine and the Quad’s current standing are developed in the companion note on strategic autonomy and multi-alignment.
  • A willingness to use force below the threshold — the cross-border raids after Uri in 2016, the Balakot air strike of 2019, and Operation Sindoor in May 2025 after the Pahalgam attack. These evidence a changed posture; the doctrinal argument about the “new normal” belongs with the companion treatment of that operation.
  • The withdrawal from RCEP, November 2019, on grounds of trade deficits with China, inadequate safeguards and exposure of agriculture and dairy.
    • It was followed, in apparent contradiction, by the most intensive FTA period in Indian history: the UAE CEPA and Australia ECTA in 2022, EFTA’s TEPA in force October 2025, the UK CETA signed July 2025 and in force from 15 July 2026, the Oman CEPA in December 2025, the India-EU agreement concluded January 2026 and the New Zealand FTA in April 2026.
    • The two moves are consistent on one reading only: India will not accept a China-centred regional bloc, and will accept almost anything else.
  • The Ukraine position after February 2022 — abstention on the substantive resolutions, refusal to name Russia an aggressor in binding language, calls for dialogue, and a sharp rise in discounted Russian crude from a negligible share to roughly a third of imports at its peak.
    • Defended publicly and unapologetically, it was the principal irritant in the American relationship until the trade understanding of February 2026 removed the punitive tariff tranche; a limited American waiver in March 2026 allowed Russian purchases to recover partially rather than end. The balancing act it exemplifies is treated in the companion note on strategic autonomy.
  • The G20 presidency of 2023, which produced the New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration by consensus despite a membership split over Ukraine — a genuine diplomatic achievement, since consensus had been thought unattainable — and secured the African Union’s admission as a permanent member.
  • The Voice of the Global South Summits, three editions since 2023, the third in August 2024 drawing 123 countries — an attempt to institutionalise a constituency rather than merely address one.
  • The boundary crisis with China from 2020, including the Galwan clash of June 2020 — fatalities on both sides for the first time since 1975 — which collapsed the separation principle Rajiv Gandhi had established.
    • Disengagement at Depsang and Demchok was completed under the patrolling understanding of October 2024; direct flights and the Kailash Mansarovar yatra resumed in 2025; and the Special Representatives’ mechanism ran its twenty-fifth round in August 2026.
    • De-escalation has not happened — the forces deployed since 2020 remain in place — and the boundary is not settled.

The neighbourhood: the hardest evidence

The neighbourhood is where an activist foreign policy should show its clearest returns, and where the record is most contested.

Neighbour	The reverse	The recovery, or its absence
Maldives	The “India Out” campaign from 2023; Indian military personnel withdrawn in 2024	Substantially repaired: currency swap and budget support in October 2024, the 2025 visit, an FTA under negotiation
Nepal	Recurrent swings; the 2015 blockade perception, the 2020 map dispute over Kalapani	The Gen Z uprising of September 2025, an interim government under Sushila Karki, and March 2026 elections giving the Rastriya Swatantra Party 122 of 165 seats, with Balendra Shah as Prime Minister — a wholly new interlocutor
Bangladesh	The rupture of August 2024: Hasina’s removal, her refuge in India, an extradition demand, attacks on minorities, Indian budget support halved	The February 2026 election returned the BNP with a two-thirds majority under Tarique Rahman; India signalled engagement at the swearing-in, but is rebuilding from a low base
Sri Lanka	The 2022 economic collapse and the earlier Hambantota lease	India’s roughly $4 billion in emergency assistance was the largest single response; President Dissanayake visited Delhi in December 2024, and the first India-Sri Lanka defence cooperation agreement, debt restructuring and a Trincomalee energy hub followed in April 2025
Afghanistan	The Taliban’s return in August 2021 and closure of the Indian embassy	Pragmatic re-engagement: a technical mission from 2022, the acting foreign minister’s visit in October 2025, the Kabul mission upgraded to a full embassy, and increased aid — a reversal of India’s declared position
Pakistan	No dialogue since 2016; the Indus Waters Treaty held in abeyance since April 2025	No recovery, and none sought. The arbitral award of 31 August 2026 that the treaty remains in force was rejected, as was the tribunal’s competence

• The pattern is not failure but volatility. India’s difficulties in the neighbourhood arise chiefly from electoral turnover in small states where India is itself a domestic political issue, which no amount of diplomatic energy can prevent.
• The counter-pattern is that India now recovers faster than it used to. The Maldives took two years to repair, Sri Lanka’s crisis produced a deeper relationship than existed before it, and the Afghanistan reversal was executed without ceremony when interests required it.
• What the record does not support is the claim that activism has produced regional primacy. China’s economic presence has grown through every one of these cycles, and SAARC has not met at summit level since 2014.

Static and dynamic factors in Indian foreign policy

A second and more useful way of asking the continuity question looks not at periods but at underlying variables — which conditions of Indian life have held steady, and which have moved. The two lists are not symmetrical, and the asymmetry is the finding.

The static factors

• Relative political stability, particularly by comparison with India’s South Asian neighbours. Every neighbour has experienced military rule, constitutional rupture, insurgency-driven collapse or, most recently, an extra-constitutional change of government; India has had uninterrupted elected government since 1952 with a single interruption of civil liberties.
  • The consequence is predictability: partners negotiate expecting the state that signs to be the state that implements.
• The socio-religious balance settled by the constitutional choices of 1950 — secularism, fundamental rights, linguistic accommodation, federal design — which removed the question of what kind of state India is from every later government’s agenda, and underwrote a standing external position against religious criteria in international politics.
• Poverty reduction as a continuous state-led endeavour. Whatever the economic doctrine of the government, the elimination of poverty has remained the declared first purpose of policy, and therefore the standing justification for a foreign policy organised around development.
• Strategic independence sought in both policy and practice. The formulation deserves care: India gave up non-alignment as a policy tool but has been careful not to be identified with any camp, or with alliances directed against a third country or group of countries.
  • That thread connects Nehru’s refusal of the Cold War blocs to the present refusal of an alliance with Washington, and it is the constant the whole balance sheet turns on. The concept is developed at length in the companion note on strategic autonomy and multi-alignment.
• The continuity supplied by the Indian Foreign Service, which staffs the Ministry of External Affairs and India’s missions and posts abroad across every change of government.
  • A permanent, examination-recruited cadre carries institutional memory and negotiating positions through political transitions — which is why a change of government produces a change of emphasis rather than of position.
  • Its small size relative to India’s ambitions — roughly a thousand career diplomats for more than two hundred missions and posts — is the standing capacity critique, developed in the companion note on the Ministry of External Affairs.

The dynamic and responsive factors

• India’s geopolitical potential: the dominant power in South Asia by every material measure, and the principal resident player in the Indian Ocean region.
• India’s military capability, which contributes directly to flexibility in diplomatic posture.
  • Second largest in the world in active manpower, with an all-volunteer force of well over a million.
  • Fifth in global military spending, at about $92 billion in 2025 on SIPRI’s April 2026 publication, behind the United States, China, Russia and Germany. India’s own 2026-27 defence allocation is ₹7,84,678 crore, roughly 14.5% of central government expenditure.
  • The qualification that matters is the ratio to China’s, roughly a third — enough for regional deterrence, not for parity.
• The demographic dividend, resting on a young population generally anti-status-quo in disposition, which supplies both the labour force and the political appetite for a more assertive external posture.
• The catch-up-with-China pressure on the foreign-policy establishment, which forces innovation at every stage — the comparison is the implicit benchmark for Indian connectivity projects, development partnerships, multilateral initiatives and defence procurement alike.
• Digitisation, which has changed how diplomats communicate with each other and the public, and how the state delivers passports, visas and consular services — a quiet transformation in the citizen-facing half of diplomacy.
• The diaspora, the world’s largest, at around 35.4 million overseas Indians on the government’s own count, injecting dynamism into India’s overseas relationships and, through record remittances of $135.46 billion in 2024-25, into its external accounts. Its use as an instrument is treated in the companion note on diaspora and soft power.
• The size of the growing Indian market, now among the world’s largest economies by nominal GDP — sixth on the IMF’s April 2026 projections after a national-accounts base-year revision and rupee depreciation, with a return to fourth projected for 2027 — which converts market access into a bargaining chip India did not possess before 1991.

What the two lists reveal

• The static factors are domestic and structural; the dynamic factors are capability-driven. Stability, constitutional settlement, the development imperative, the autonomy reflex and the permanent service are all facts about how India is constituted. Geopolitical weight, military capability, demography, digitisation, diaspora and market size are all facts about what India can now do.
• That asymmetry explains why Indian foreign policy changed so much after 1991 without changing its purpose. India’s capabilities changed; its structural conditions did not. A state whose constitution, political system and development imperative are unchanged, but whose economic and military weight has multiplied, will pursue the same objective by different means.
• It also predicts where change will next come from. The static column is unlikely to move; the dynamic column is still moving. The next reorientation will follow the next capability shift, not the next election.

The objective was fixed by what India is; the instruments were set by what India could afford — which is why prosperity, not doctrine, is what changed the policy.

The balance sheet: what continued and what changed

After seven decades the balance sheet presents a mixed picture. There have been episodes in which India punched well above its weight and episodes in which its performance fell short of what circumstances allowed. What the record does not show is discontinuity of purpose.

The continuities

• Strategic autonomy as the organising objective throughout — the capacity to decide issue by issue without a patron. Non-alignment was only ever one instrument of it, which is why abandoning the instrument did not abandon the objective.
• Opposition to a discriminatory nuclear order, unbroken from the NPT refusal in 1968 through the CTBT refusal in 1996 to the insistence in 2008 that the exception be granted without signature.
• Insistence on sovereign equality, non-intervention and opposition to coercive unilateral measures — the reason India objects to extraterritorial sanctions on principle, including when they are directed at states it has no particular affection for.
• Development as the first purpose of foreign policy. Every phase has justified its external choices by what they deliver domestically: aid and technology in the first decades, market access and investment now.
• The refusal of formal alliance, which remains the line India’s partnerships stop short of and the feature that distinguishes them from American treaty relationships.
• Peaceful settlement of disputes as declared doctrine, retained even where practice has departed from it — Goa, Bangladesh, Sikkim and the post-2016 strikes each sit uneasily with the declaration and none has caused it to be withdrawn.
• The neighbourhood’s primacy as a claim, asserted by every government under one label or another, whatever the record of delivery.

The changes

• From non-alignment to multi-alignment — from staying out of arrangements to being inside many at once.
• From principled abstention to a negotiated exception on the nuclear order: through the 2008 waiver India neither joined the regime nor overturned it, but was written out of it.
• From suspicion of foreign capital to competition for it, with investment promotion now a routine mission function.
• From third-world solidarity as rhetoric to Global South leadership with deliverables — vaccines, development credit, disaster response, and a G20 seat secured for the African Union.
• From excluding outside powers from South Asia to Neighbourhood First, which concedes that neighbours will have other partners and competes rather than asserting exclusivity.
• From autonomy to access as the organising principle — to markets, technology, energy and capital. This is the least remarked change and possibly the largest, because it alters what diplomacy is for.

Continuity	The change in how it is pursued
Strategic autonomy as the organising objective	From non-alignment (staying out) to multi-alignment (being in many arrangements at once)
Opposition to a discriminatory nuclear order	From principled abstention to a negotiated exception through the 2008 NSG waiver
Sovereign equality, non-intervention, opposition to coercive measures	Selective acceptance of plurilateral and minilateral commitments that constrain behaviour
Development as the first purpose of foreign policy	From aid recipient and import substitution to market access, investment, technology and energy security
Anti-colonial solidarity and Southern leadership	From rhetorical third-worldism to Global South summitry with concrete deliverables
Neighbourhood primacy	From the 1980s doctrine of exclusion to Neighbourhood First, with mixed results
Refusal of formal alliance	Partnerships deep enough to be mistaken for alliances — logistics agreements, joint exercises, technology co-development
Reticence about hard power	Explicit articulation of interests and willingness to use force below the threshold

The synthesis

• What has changed is not the objective but the means. Staying out preserved decisional freedom when the system was bipolar and there were only two doors to stay away from; being inside many arrangements at once preserves it when the system is multipolar and no single arrangement can capture you.
• The corollary is that the transition from non-alignment to multi-alignment is not a reversal but an adaptation, and reading it as a reversal is the single commonest error made about Indian foreign policy.
• The test of whether the objective has genuinely survived is behavioural, not rhetorical: does India still decline commitments that would transfer decisions to a partner? The refusal to join a mutual-defence arrangement, the refusal to accept sanctions regimes it did not vote for, and the Russian oil decision all suggest that it does.

Assessing “energetic diplomacy”

Jaishankar’s label for the present phase must be handled as a claim by a serving practitioner rather than a finding by an observer — which does not make it wrong, but does mean it requires evidence on both sides before it can be accepted.

The evidence for

• A sharply increased tempo of leader-level engagement, with standing bilateral summit mechanisms and heavy travel at head-of-government level.
• Simultaneous membership of formally inconsistent groupings — the Quad with the United States, Japan and Australia, and BRICS and the SCO alongside China and Russia. No other state sustains membership of arrangements this far apart in purpose.
• The G20 presidency of 2023, delivering a consensus leaders’ declaration across the Ukraine divide and securing the African Union’s admission, which changed the composition of the forum permanently.
• Vaccine and disaster diplomacy — Vaccine Maitri during the pandemic, and a pattern of first response in regional disasters.
• India-initiated institutions: the International Solar Alliance, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, the Global Biofuels Alliance and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor. Founding institutions rather than joining them is a real change of behaviour.
• The FTA wave since 2022, which reversed a decade of trade-agreement caution.
• A willingness to defend contested positions publicly, on Russian oil above all, and to argue the case rather than absorb the criticism silently.

The evidence against

• The underlying objective is continuous from Nehru. If the phase is defined by strategic autonomy, it is not a new phase at all; if it is defined by tempo, tempo is a description of style.
• The neighbourhood record is mixed to poor, with reverses in the Maldives, Nepal and Bangladesh at various points, no SAARC summit since 2014, and China’s economic footprint growing in every South Asian state through the period.
• Relative capability still constrains delivery. The gap with China in economic size, military spending and technological depth sets the outer limit of what activism can achieve, and activism does not close it.
• The boundary crisis since 2020 is unresolved. Disengagement is not de-escalation, and the arrangement Rajiv Gandhi built — boundary in one basket, the relationship in another — has not been restored.
• A self-characterisation by an incumbent minister is a claim, not an independent assessment, and every phase in the scheme except the last is described retrospectively while the last is described from inside it.

The judgement

• The label is justified as a description of style and tempo and overstated as a description of objective. Both halves of that sentence are needed; taking either alone produces a caricature.
• The genuinely novel feature of the present phase is not energy but the willingness to sustain formally inconsistent alignments simultaneously — the Quad and the SCO, Russian oil and American aircraft, the G20 chair and the Global South convenor. Earlier phases had energy; none had this.
• The vocabulary of non-alignment cannot describe that behaviour, because non-alignment is defined by what a state stays out of. Multi-alignment names it better than energetic does, because it identifies the structure of the behaviour rather than its pace.
• The test of the phase is whether activism converts into outcomes — in the neighbourhood, and in a resolution of the China question. Neither is deliverable by tempo alone, and both are the measure that will apply when this phase is described retrospectively rather than from within.

Energy is an input; the phase will be judged on outputs, and the two hardest outputs — a stable neighbourhood and a settled boundary — are still outstanding.

From Nehruvianism to neoliberalism? A phase transition examined

The proposition that Indian foreign policy has been in transition from Nehruvianism to neoliberalism is best answered on its own vocabulary, which comes from Kanti Bajpai’s three-schools classification of Indian strategic thought. The classification, and its use as a determinant of Indian choices, is set out in the companion note on the determinants of Indian foreign policy; what matters here is what it implies about phases.

Three schools divide the field, and the middle one is the term the question uses. Neoliberalism here means a school of strategic thought, not an economic doctrine.

School	Source of conflict	Route to security
Nehruvianism	Misunderstanding and mistrust	Institutions, dialogue, normative leadership
Neoliberalism	Lack of economic interconnection	Trade, growth, interdependence
Hyperrealism	Endemic in a system of self-interested states	Military capability and the willingness to use it

The case that the transition is real

• Economic diplomacy has taken the pole position in Indian foreign policy, above political and security issues — which is the neoliberal proposition operationalised.
• The FTA wave since 2022 treats trade agreements as instruments of strategic alignment, not merely of commerce.
• Investment-seeking is now a routine mission function, and market access is what India offers in negotiations where it once offered only political solidarity.
• Connectivity has replaced solidarity as the language of engagement with the neighbourhood and the Global South — corridors, ports, grids and payment systems rather than declarations.
• Interdependence is explicitly invoked as a stabiliser, most obviously in the argument that trade with China should continue notwithstanding the boundary dispute.

The complication

• India has moved toward the third school as well. Uri, Balakot and Operation Sindoor, the explicit doctrine of retaliation on India’s own terms, the refusal to accept nuclear blackmail as a constraint, and the sustained defence build-up are hyperrealist propositions, not neoliberal ones.
• The two movements are simultaneous, not sequential, which is what makes “Nehruvianism to neoliberalism” a partial description rather than a wrong one.
• The Nehruvian element has not disappeared either. The insistence on autonomy, the refusal of alliance, the preference for multilateral institutional solutions to global problems, and the framing of India as a normative voice for the Global South are all recognisably Nehruvian, and all still operative.
• The most accurate statement is therefore compositional: India’s current policy runs on neoliberal means and hyperrealist reflexes, held together by a Nehruvian insistence on autonomy. That is the reason it resists single-label description, and the reason every attempt to name the present phase — energetic diplomacy, multi-alignment, hyper-realism — captures part of it.

Pressures on the current phase

The phase runs under standing constraints, each limiting what diplomatic activism can deliver. These are treated at length in the companion note on contemporary challenges to Indian foreign policy.

• Nuclear weapons. An increasingly weaponised world, arms-control architecture in disarray, and two nuclear-armed neighbours whose collusion India must plan against.
• Energy security. Crude import dependence reached a record 88.7% in 2025-26, exposing the economy to price shocks and requiring simultaneous management of Gulf suppliers, Russian discounts under sanctions pressure, and the American relationship.
• Water. The Indus Waters Treaty has been in abeyance since April 2025; a Court of Arbitration award of 31 August 2026 held it remains fully in force and that the abeyance does not suspend it, and India rejected both the ruling and the tribunal’s competence. The 1996 Ganga Waters Treaty expires in December 2026, with renewal talks under way.
• Food security. A rising population against finite land and water and decelerating productivity gains — which is why agriculture is the sector India protects most fiercely in trade negotiations.
• Terrorism, which respects no boundary and cannot be defeated nationally. India’s neighbourhood contains a state governed by a former insurgent movement, and a state that both sponsors cross-border terrorism and suffers from it.
• Climate change, where the industrialised economies with centuries of head start are the principal historical cause, and where India accepts the obligation to act but not identical conditions on latecomers — the equity argument anchoring India’s position since Rio.

Conclusion

• The seven-decade record is one of near-total continuity of objective and near-total transformation of instrument. Read the objectives and Indian foreign policy looks unbroken from Nehru to the present; read the instruments and it looks like the policy of a different country.
• The reason is capability, not conversion. The static factors that set India’s purposes — its constitutional settlement, its political stability, its development imperative, its permanent service — have not moved. The dynamic factors that set its options — economic weight, military capability, demography, diaspora, market size — have moved enormously.
• Each phase transition followed a shock that made the existing instrument unusable: 1962 for the belief that standing substitutes for strength, 1971 for the belief that the superpowers would balance each other in South Asia, 1991 for the whole architecture of the first four decades, 1998 for nuclear ambiguity, 2020 for the separation of the boundary from the China relationship.
• India has demonstrated its will to be counted as a pole in its own right rather than as part of somebody else’s. Whether it becomes one depends on what foreign policy cannot supply by itself — continued stability and prosperity at home, and political consensus on the broad parameters of external policy.
• The unfinished business is where the next phase will be defined: a neighbourhood in which activism has not yet produced primacy, a boundary with China that is disengaged but unsettled, and a global order in which India has enough weight to be courted by everyone and not yet enough to set terms for anyone.

What the record asks for is not a new doctrine but a clearer definition of interests and a determined pursuit of them.

“You cannot cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.”

Rabindranath Tagore