Parliament, States and Democratic Accountability in Indian Foreign Policy

India is a parliamentary democracy and a federation, and foreign policy is the one domain where it is functionally neither. It is an executive prerogative inherited from the Crown, exercised without legislative authorisation, on a Union subject on which the states have no formal voice. Yet Parliament has foreclosed concessions on Kashmir, made a boundary settlement possible and rewritten a nuclear liability regime; and a state government has stopped a river treaty the Union had already negotiated. The question is how a system with almost no formal checks nonetheless produces them.

The constitutional position: a Union subject and an executive prerogative

The starting point is that the Constitution places the entire external domain in the Union List and then never says who exercises it. That silence is the whole problem: it is filled by an executive power that no statute defines and no chamber authorises.

• Entries 10 to 21 of the Union List together cover the whole field of external relations, and Parliament alone can legislate on them under Article 246(1).
  • Entry 10 is foreign affairs, a deliberately open head covering all matters bringing the Union into relation with any foreign country.
  • Entry 11 covers diplomatic, consular and trade representation; Entry 12 the United Nations Organisation; Entry 13 participation in international conferences and the implementing of decisions taken there.
  • Entry 14 is the operative one — entering into treaties and agreements with foreign countries, and implementing of treaties, agreements and conventions with foreign countries.
  • Entry 15 is war and peace; Entry 16 foreign jurisdiction; Entries 17 to 19 citizenship, aliens, extradition, emigration, passports and visas; Entries 20 and 21 pilgrimages abroad and piracy and crimes on the high seas.
• The federal design here is unusually clean. Nothing external appears on the State List or the Concurrent List, and no residuary ambiguity clouds the allocation, which is why the constitutional case for state involvement has to be built on practice rather than text.

Article 253 and its federal consequence

• Article 253 empowers Parliament to make any law for the whole or any part of India for implementing any treaty, agreement or convention with another country, or any decision taken at an international conference or in an international body.
• The clause opens with a non obstante formula — “notwithstanding anything in the foregoing provisions of this Chapter” — which means it overrides the ordinary distribution of legislative power.
  • Parliament may therefore legislate on a State List subject if it is implementing an international obligation, and the state legislatures’ exclusive competence simply gives way.
  • This is not a theoretical possibility. Central environmental legislation, human rights and child rights statutes and parts of the intellectual-property regime rest on Article 253, even though water, public health, agriculture and land are state subjects.
• The consequence is a federal asymmetry of the sharpest kind: the Union can, by signing an instrument abroad, acquire domestic legislative competence it does not otherwise possess, and it can do so without consulting a single state government.
  • The Sarkaria and Punchhi Commissions both flagged this, and the case for a consultation requirement rests on it more than on anything else.

Article 253 lets the Union convert an external act into internal legislative competence — which is why treaty-making is not merely an executive question but a federal one.

Where the executive’s treaty power actually comes from

• Article 73 makes the executive power of the Union co-extensive with Parliament’s legislative power. Because Parliament can legislate on Entry 14, the Union executive can act on it.
• Since Parliament has never enacted a statute regulating treaty-making, that co-extensive executive power occupies the entire field by default. The treaty power is thus residual, not conferred — it exists because nothing has been put in its way.
• Its historical source is the British Crown prerogative, under which the making of treaties was an act of the executive and the legislature entered only where domestic law had to be altered. India inherited the prerogative at independence and never modified it by statute.
  • The Privy Council’s classic formulation of the position — treaty-making is executive, but performance requiring a change in domestic law requires legislation — remains an accurate description of India today.
  • The result is a nineteenth-century prerogative operating inside a twenty-first-century democracy, and the anomaly grows as the substance of treaties moves from diplomacy into domestic regulation.

What Parliament can do

Parliament’s foreign-policy role is real but consists almost entirely of powers exercised after the executive has acted or around what it has done. Four capacities are worth separating, because they are of very different weight.

Legislating to implement international obligations

• Parliament converts India’s external commitments into enforceable domestic law, and without it a ratified treaty is diplomatically binding but judicially unenforceable at home.
• The catalogue is substantial: the Extradition Act, the Geneva Conventions Act, the Anti-Hijacking Act, the Chemical Weapons Convention Act, the Protection of Human Rights Act, and the Weapons of Mass Destruction and their Delivery Systems (Prohibition of Unlawful Activities) Act, 2005, enacted to satisfy UN Security Council Resolution 1540.
• This is a genuine veto in principle: an obligation Parliament refuses to implement stays inert domestically. In practice a majority government secures the implementing statute it wants, so the veto is rarely visible.

Budgetary control

• The Ministry of External Affairs’ Demands for Grants must be voted, and the defence, atomic energy and space budgets alongside them.
• The occasion is used far more for scrutiny and complaint than for refusal — the Standing Committee’s annual finding that the ministry is underfunded is a use of the budget cycle as an accountability instrument rather than as a control.
• Cut motions exist and are moved, but a government with a majority defeats them, and rejection of a Demand for Grants would be treated as loss of confidence.

Holding the executive to account

• Questions — starred, unstarred and supplementary — are the most-used instrument and the most underrated. A written reply is an official statement of record, and much of what is publicly known about the size of the diplomatic service, mission openings, aid disbursement and evacuation operations exists only because a Member asked.
• Calling attention motions compel a ministerial statement on a matter of urgent public importance.
• Short-duration discussions under Rule 193 in the Lok Sabha allow a debate without a vote — the standard vehicle for foreign-policy debates, and significant precisely because nothing is decided at the end of one.
• Half-hour discussions permit a follow-up on an unsatisfactory answer to a question.
• Adjournment motions carry an element of censure; no-confidence motions put the government’s survival at stake, and a foreign-policy question has triggered that outcome exactly once.
• Committee examination, treated separately below, is the only sustained scrutiny in the system.

Conferring legitimacy

• A position debated in Parliament and supported across parties acquires a standing that an executive decision alone does not, and negotiators use it abroad as evidence of a domestic constraint they cannot exceed.
• Nehru himself acknowledged that external affairs follow internal affairs — a statement about the sources of policy rather than the procedures for making it.

What Parliament cannot do

The four things Parliament cannot do define the system more accurately than the four things it can. Taken together they mean that no organ of the Indian state is required to obtain legislative consent for any external commitment, including the use of armed force.

• There is no ratification requirement. The government may negotiate, sign, ratify and bring a treaty into force without a vote in either House, and frequently without laying the text before Parliament at all.
  • There is no statutory obligation to table a signed treaty, no waiting period, no scrutiny window and no mechanism by which Members can compel a debate before entry into force.
  • Parliament’s involvement, where it exists, is downstream and optional: it arises only if implementation happens to require legislation.
• War can be declared and armed force used without parliamentary authorisation. Every use of force since independence — Goa in 1961, the wars of 1962, 1965 and 1971, the IPKF deployment, Kargil, the 2016 and 2019 strikes and Operation Sindoor — was an executive decision reported afterwards.
  • The apparent exception is not one. A Proclamation of Emergency under Article 352 requires approval by both Houses within a month, and by special majority, but that governs the internal constitutional consequences of an emergency, not the external act of using force.
• Budgetary control is theoretical wherever the government commands a majority, which is the normal condition. Control over supply is a real check only in a minority or fractious coalition Parliament.
• There is no confirmation of appointments. Ambassadors and High Commissioners, the Foreign Secretary, the National Security Adviser and the heads of the intelligence agencies are appointed by the executive with no legislative hearing, scrutiny or vote of any kind, and no obligation on any of them to appear before a committee.

How other democracies handle the same problem

System	Legislative role in treaty-making
United States	Senate advice and consent by a two-thirds majority for treaties. In practice over nine-tenths of international agreements since 1946 are congressional-executive or sole-executive agreements that bypass this; trade agreements go through both Houses by simple majority under fast-track authority
Germany	Article 59 of the Basic Law requires a federal statute for treaties regulating the political relations of the Federation or relating to subjects of federal legislation; the Bundesrat is involved where Länder interests are engaged
United Kingdom	The Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 puts the older Ponsonby convention on a statutory footing: a treaty must be laid before Parliament for 21 sitting days before ratification, and the Commons can delay ratification by resolving against it
France	Treaties on peace, commerce, international organisations, state finances, the status of persons and cession or exchange of territory require authorisation by statute
India	None. No ratification vote, no laying requirement, no scrutiny period; involvement only where implementing legislation is separately needed

• Two qualifications keep the comparison honest: even the strongest formal requirements are widely bypassed, as the American executive-agreement route shows, and a laying-and-delay mechanism like the British one is scrutiny, not consent.
• The point is not that India is uniquely undemocratic but that it sits at the far end of a spectrum along which every comparable democracy has moved and India has not.

The case for the Indian position

The defence of executive treaty-making is not frivolous, and any argument for reform has to answer it.

• Speed. Negotiating windows close, and returning to the legislature at each stage forfeits opportunities that appear and vanish inside a diplomatic calendar.
• Confidentiality. Positions revealed in open debate become the counterparty’s negotiating floor.
• The executive’s information advantage. Intelligence assessments, diplomatic reporting and technical evaluation sit with the government, and a chamber voting without them votes on impressions.
• Negotiating credibility. A team that must clear every concession negotiates from a position its counterparts can read — though the mirror argument, that a hard domestic constraint strengthens a negotiator’s hand, is the standard two-level game reply.
• Coherence. A single external voice matters more here than in any other field.

The reform debate on treaty-making

• The Constituent Assembly considered and rejected a ratification requirement. Members proposed subjecting treaties to legislative approval; the drafting committee preferred the flexibility of the inherited arrangement, and the matter was left to be settled by future legislation under Entry 14 — legislation Parliament has never enacted.
• The Law Commission examined the treaty-making power in 1958 and concluded that the constitutional position permitted Parliament to regulate the executive’s treaty power by statute, without recommending that it be compelled to.
• Private members’ Bills have repeatedly proposed a scrutiny mechanism, the best known being the Treaties Bill of 2016, which would have required treaties to be laid before Parliament and categorised by the extent of legislative involvement they need. Like its predecessors it lapsed, as private members’ Bills almost invariably do.
• The recurring design proposal across these efforts is consistent and modest:
  • A standing treaty-scrutiny committee drawn from both Houses, examining every signed instrument within a fixed period.
  • Classification into three tiers — agreements the executive may conclude alone; agreements requiring affirmative parliamentary approval; and agreements on which Parliament should be consulted during negotiation.
  • Mandatory consultation with affected state governments and stakeholders where a treaty touches State List subjects.
• The substantive argument for reform has strengthened sharply because the content of treaties has changed. A boundary or friendship treaty affects the state’s external posture; a modern trade agreement rewrites domestic regulation.
  • The India-EFTA Trade and Economic Partnership Agreement, in force since October 2025, carries an investment commitment of about $100 billion over fifteen years and reaches into intellectual property and services regulation.
  • The India-UK Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, signed in July 2025 and in force since 15 July 2026, and the India-EU free trade agreement concluded in January 2026, touch tariffs, procurement, standards, data and mobility — all matters with direct domestic distributional consequences.
  • Agreements of this kind allocate winners and losers inside India, which is precisely the sort of decision a legislature exists to authorise. A state that signs regulatory treaties cannot indefinitely justify concluding them under a prerogative designed for declarations of alliance.

The committee system

Committees are where scrutiny actually happens, and their weakness is the weakness of the whole accountability structure.

The Standing Committee on External Affairs

• It is one of the departmentally related standing committees created in 1993 and restructured in 2004, with thirty-one members — twenty-one from the Lok Sabha and ten from the Rajya Sabha, nominated by the presiding officers and reflecting party strength, and serving a term of one year.
• Its mandate has three parts: the MEA’s Demands for Grants, the ministry’s annual report and such subjects as it selects, and Bills referred to it. It cannot examine day-to-day diplomacy or matters under active negotiation.
• Its recent output is substantial and specific. Its Twelfth Report on the MEA’s Demands for Grants for 2026-27 found:
  • The allocation of ₹22,118.97 crore is a rise of only 7.81% over the previous year and amounts to just 0.41% of the Union Budget, which the Committee described as far below levels comparable with major global economies.
  • The ministry ranks twenty-third among all ministries in budgetary allocation — a striking statistic for a country claiming a leading role in world affairs.
  • It reiterated its demand for a 20% increase, a recommendation it has repeated across successive reports without result.
  • It recommended that the ministry prepare a formal Indian Foreign Policy Document — a publicly available medium-term strategic statement of objectives and guiding principles — noting that thirty-six countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and Russia, publish such documents while India has no single overarching formalised foreign policy strategy document.
  • On the diaspora it pressed for the Overseas Mobility (Facilitation and Welfare) Bill, 2025 as an urgent legislative priority, a dedicated Department of Overseas Indian Affairs, and expansion of the Protector of Emigrants network.
  • It sought security audits of all Indian missions abroad, an Indian Council for Cultural Relations budget of ₹500-600 crore, and protection of development assistance from cuts.
• The Committee has been persistent on capacity: the size of the Indian Foreign Service against India’s ambitions, the pace of new mission openings, and vacancies in the passport system. The publicly cited figures for the service’s strength come from parliamentary replies and committee reports rather than from any independent audit.

The Standing Committee on Defence and the other forums

• The Standing Committee on Defence examines the defence Demands for Grants and reports on capital procurement and its chronic underspending, modernisation, border infrastructure and indigenisation. Its findings on the gap between sanctioned and delivered capability are among the sharpest official criticism in the system.
• The Consultative Committee attached to the Ministry of External Affairs brings Members together with the minister informally. It is not a committee of Parliament, produces no report and takes no evidence; its value is briefing rather than scrutiny.
• Parliament may constitute ad hoc and joint committees for particular questions, and has done so for defence procurement controversies. It has almost never constituted one on a foreign-policy question, which is itself evidence of how the domain is treated.

Why committee scrutiny does not amount to control

• Committees review; they do not authorise. No treaty requires committee clearance, no appointment requires committee confirmation, and no deployment requires committee notice.
• Reports are recommendatory. The government files an action-taken reply, and a large share of those replies restate existing policy without accepting or rejecting the recommendation — which is why a demand such as the 20% budget increase can be repeated year after year with no consequence.
• Proceedings are private and the reports attract little attention, so the reputational cost of ignoring a recommendation is close to zero.
• Membership turns over annually and Members are not specialists, so the institutional memory that gives committees leverage elsewhere never accumulates.
• The intelligence agencies fall outside the system entirely. There is no Indian equivalent of an intelligence and security committee, no cleared subset of legislators receiving classified briefings, and no statutory charter for the external agency.
  • Its budget is not separately voted and its operations are examined by no body outside the executive. This is the largest hole in Indian democratic oversight of external policy, and every comparable democracy has at least attempted to close it.

When Parliament has actually mattered

Four episodes carry the entire case for parliamentary influence. Each shows a different mechanism — the outer limit set by opposition sentiment, the constitutional requirement that cannot be avoided, the arithmetic of a coalition, and the drafting of an implementing statute — and only the last two involved a vote.

Setting the outer limit: the Kashmir negotiations after 1962

• After the defeat by China in 1962, India sought Western arms and military assistance, and the United States and the United Kingdom pressed for progress with Pakistan on Kashmir as an implicit condition. Six rounds of ministerial talks followed in 1962-63.
• Parliament made concession impossible. Opposition and government benches alike treated any territorial adjustment as unacceptable, and the government negotiated inside a limit it had not set for itself.
  • Vajpayee, then an opposition member, publicly warned the United States and the United Kingdom against interference in Kashmir — the sharp expression of a mood the executive could not defy.
  • The talks produced nothing, which was the outcome the House had effectively fixed in advance.
• The mechanism here is worth naming precisely: Parliament exercised no formal power at all. It changed the executive’s estimate of what it could survive, which is what a legislature does most of the time in this domain.

Being genuinely indispensable: the Land Boundary Agreement

• The 1974 Indira-Mujib Land Boundary Agreement settled an undemarcated stretch of border and provided for exchanging enclaves — pockets of one country’s territory wholly surrounded by the other’s, the residue of princely arrangements the Radcliffe line never resolved — and adverse possessions, land held by one side but legally the other’s.
  • 111 Indian enclaves in Bangladesh and 51 Bangladeshi enclaves in India were involved, home to tens of thousands of people living without functioning citizenship, policing or services.
  • India’s obligations went unfulfilled for four decades. Bangladesh had ratified in 1974; India had not acted.
• The obstacle was constitutional, and it came from a court. In the Berubari Union reference of 1960 the Supreme Court, advising the President under Article 143, held that cession of Indian territory to a foreign state cannot be effected under Article 3 but requires an amendment under Article 368.
  • That made the executive route unavailable, and required a two-thirds majority of those present and voting in each House, with an absolute majority of total membership.
• The Constitution Amendment Bill was introduced in the Rajya Sabha in December 2013 and could not be moved. It passed in May 2015 as the Constitution (One Hundredth Amendment) Act, unanimously in both Houses — carried in government by a party that had blocked it in opposition.
• Two conclusions follow, and they cut in opposite directions.
  • This is the strongest case in the record of Parliament being genuinely indispensable — the agreement could not have taken effect without it, and it did not take effect for forty-one years because the votes were not there.
  • But Parliament was indispensable because a court had said so, not because the Constitution assigns it a treaty role. Remove Berubari and the boundary settlement is an executive act like any other.

Parliament’s one uncontestable foreign-policy veto exists because the Supreme Court created it, which is a measure of how little the constitutional text supplies.

Coalition arithmetic: the civil nuclear agreement

• The July 2005 joint statement with the United States and the 2008 bilateral agreement that followed committed India to separating civil and military nuclear facilities in exchange for an end to its exclusion from civil nuclear commerce.
• The Left Front, whose external support kept the coalition in office, opposed the agreement as an alignment with the United States and withdrew support in July 2008.
• The government faced a confidence motion on 22 July 2008 and survived it. This is the only occasion on which an Indian government’s survival has turned on a foreign-policy question, and the deal proceeded only because the vote was won.
• The analytical point is that this was accountability by accident of arithmetic, not by design. No rule required a vote on the agreement; a vote occurred because the government’s majority was contingent and a coalition partner chose to make external policy the test of it.
  • The corollary is uncomfortable: the same agreement under a majority government would have required nothing at all. Parliamentary influence in India is a function of the party system, not of the Constitution.

Rewriting an international commitment: the nuclear liability statute

• Implementing the nuclear agreement required a liability law, and here Parliament did what it can do best — it legislated, and in legislating it changed the substance of India’s international position.
• The government’s Bill followed the international pattern of channelling all liability to the operator, which is what suppliers require before entering a market. The opposition and the Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment and Forests forced two departures.
  • Section 17(b) of the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010 gave the operator a right of recourse against the supplier where an incident resulted from equipment or material with patent or latent defects or from sub-standard services — recourse without proof of intent, which no comparable regime allowed.
  • Section 46 preserved the availability of other law, leaving open the possibility of tort claims against suppliers outside the Act’s channelling scheme.
• The commercial consequence was immediate and lasting. Foreign vendors treated the exposure as uninsurable, and no foreign-supplied reactor was built under the framework in the fifteen years that followed. The provisions were also regarded as inconsistent with the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage, which India signed in 2010 and ratified in 2016.
• This is the clearest instance of parliamentary scrutiny materially altering an international commitment — not by blocking a treaty, but by drafting the implementing statute in a way the executive had not intended and the counterparty could not accept.
• The provisions have now been undone, and the manner of their undoing is as instructive as their making.
  • The 2025 Budget announced the government’s intention to amend the atomic energy and nuclear liability laws and to open the sector to private participation.
  • The Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India Act — the SHANTI Act — was introduced on 15 December 2025 and had assent by 20 December, passing the Lok Sabha on the 17th and the Rajya Sabha on the 18th.
  • It repealed both the Atomic Energy Act, 1962 and the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010.
  • It confines the operator’s right of recourse to cases of express contractual provision or intentional misconduct, which removes the automatic supplier exposure that Sections 17(b) and 46 had created, and permits private operation of nuclear plants against a target of 100 GW by 2047.
  • A statute that took Parliament months of contested scrutiny in 2010 was replaced in four sitting days. The contrast is the sharpest available illustration of how much parliamentary influence depends on the government’s majority rather than on any procedural guarantee.
  • The scrutiny that the legislature did not supply has migrated to the courts: a writ petition filed in February 2026 challenges the Act’s liability, disclosure and regulatory-independence provisions under Articles 14, 19 and 21, and remains pending.

Endorsing decisions already taken

• Parliament’s most frequent foreign-policy act is to endorse a decision already taken, which builds domestic consensus and supplies negotiators with evidence of a national position, but decides nothing.
• The unanimous resolution of both Houses on Jammu and Kashmir, passed on 22 February 1994, declared the state an integral part of India and demanded that Pakistan vacate the areas it occupies. It remains the standard reference point for India’s formal position and has constrained every government since.
• The pattern repeats after every major external event: debates and statements after the 1998 nuclear tests, after Kargil in 1999, after the Mumbai attacks of November 2008, and after the Pahalgam attack of 22 April 2025 and Operation Sindoor.
  • In the monsoon session of 2025 the Lok Sabha held a special discussion of sixteen hours on the attack and India’s response, opened by the Defence Minister, with the Prime Minister and the External Affairs Minister participating.
  • Sixteen hours is a serious allocation by any standard. It was also entirely retrospective: the strikes had been conducted in May, and the House was debating an operation that was over.
• The structural observation is that Parliament ratifies sentiment rather than authorising action. It speaks after the event, and what it produces is legitimacy, not permission.

Where Parliament was bypassed

Decision	Parliamentary involvement
Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation, 1971	Negotiated in secrecy, signed in August 1971 with no prior consultation — a foundational realignment presented to the House as an accomplished fact
IPKF deployment to Sri Lanka, 1987	Flowed from an executive agreement; the largest overseas deployment in India’s history, sustained three years at heavy cost, with no authorising vote
Pokhran-II, 1998	Decided by a very small executive circle; Parliament informed after the tests
Cross-border strikes, 2016 and 2019; Operation Sindoor, 2025	Executive decisions announced afterwards; debated in retrospect
Trade agreements — EFTA, UK, EU, Oman, New Zealand	Negotiated, concluded and in some cases brought into force with no ratification vote and no laying requirement, despite deep domestic regulatory effect

The changing quality of parliamentary engagement

• The decline in sittings is the background condition. Both Houses now sit for a fraction of the days they did in the first decades, sessions are curtailed, and legislation passes with less debate — a general erosion in which foreign policy shares.
• The annual foreign-affairs debate has become perfunctory in many sessions: thinly attended, poorly informed and organised around domestic point-scoring rather than the substance of policy.
• The counter-evidence sits in the questions. The most careful study of the subject, by Walter Ladwig, examined over 10,000 written questions to the external affairs and defence ministries across three parliamentary terms and found a more complicated picture.
  • Attention is moderate rather than negligible — defence ranked fifteenth and external affairs nineteenth among ministries by question volume — but well below the levels found in the Australian, British, Dutch, Spanish and Italian legislatures.
  • The content is not what electoral salience predicts. Defence procurement drew far more questions than Pakistan; China attracted a very small share; and administrative matters, above all passport services, drew more questions than most substantive foreign-policy subjects.
  • No Member specialises. Around three-quarters asked at least one question in each field, but engagement is broad and shallow, with opposition membership, electoral marginality and a state’s military connections predicting higher interest.
• The finding that matters is that parliamentary questions have become a genuine channel of information. The published figures on the strength of the diplomatic service, on mission openings, on aid disbursement and on evacuation operations rest on written replies, and this is scrutiny of a real if unglamorous kind.
• The pattern is therefore less a collapse than a hollowing: the ceremonial forms have thinned while the retail, constituency-driven forms have grown, and neither substitutes for authorisation.

Parliamentary diplomacy

Parliamentary diplomacy is legislature-to-legislature engagement used as an instrument of foreign policy. It is softer than executive diplomacy, more deniable, and able to reach parties, constituencies and oppositions that governments cannot address directly without giving offence.

• Its distinguishing features follow from the fact that legislators do not bind the state.
  • A legislator can say what a minister cannot, and a position floated by a delegation can be disowned.
  • Legislators meet counterparts who will hold office later, and who vote on resolutions, sanctions, trade preferences and immigration rules affecting India.
  • Engagement is cross-party by construction, so relationships survive changes of government at both ends.

The institutional architecture

• The Indian Parliamentary Group was constituted in 1949, following a motion adopted by the Constituent Assembly in August 1948. It is an autonomous body with the Speaker of the Lok Sabha as ex-officio President, and membership open to sitting and former Members.
  • It functions as the National Group of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the global organisation of national legislatures, through which India participates in IPU assemblies and their resolutions on peace, human rights, gender representation and development.
  • It is also the Main Branch in India of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, and it hosts conferences, runs orientation programmes and confers the Outstanding Parliamentarian Award.
• India participates in the Asian Parliamentary Assembly and in the parliamentary formats attached to BRICS and the G20.
  • India hosted the Ninth P20 Summit — the Parliamentary 20 — in New Delhi in October 2023 during its G20 presidency, convening the presiding officers of G20 legislatures. It was the clearest recent signal that India treats legislative diplomacy as part of multilateral strategy rather than protocol.
• Bilateral parliamentary friendship groups pair Indian Members with a partner legislature. Their function is continuity and access: a standing channel that survives ambassadorial rotation, useful in legislatures where individual members shape policy on Kashmir, human rights, trade preferences or visa regimes.
• Speaker-level diplomacy — conferences of presiding officers, inbound and outbound visits — carries weight where the legislature is a constitutionally central actor, and reaches institutions that outlast governments.

Delegation diplomacy after Operation Sindoor

• The multi-party delegations sent abroad after Operation Sindoor are the most striking recent use of the instrument and worth setting out in detail.
• Seven delegations comprising fifty-nine members visited thirty-three countries in late May and June 2025, briefed before departure by Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri.
  • They were led by Baijayant Panda, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Sanjay Kumar Jha, Shrikant Shinde, Shashi Tharoor, Kanimozhi Karunanidhi and Supriya Sule — deliberately spanning the governing party, its allies and the principal opposition parties.
  • Their remit covered the Gulf, Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, Russia, the United States and Latin America, and their brief was to present India’s account of the Pahalgam attack and its response, and to seek cooperation against terrorism.
• Three things make the episode analytically interesting.
  • It was narrative-building by legislature: the message was that India’s position was national rather than governmental, which is a claim only a cross-party delegation can make credibly.
  • It co-opted the opposition into an executive decision it had not authorised, and the tension in that — most visible in the choice of an opposition front-bencher to lead the delegation to Washington — was widely commented on at home.
  • It demonstrated that parliamentary diplomacy in India is deployed by the executive, not initiated by Parliament. The delegations were constituted by the government, briefed by the government and reported to the Prime Minister on return.

Uses and limits

• Its uses are real: building constituencies for India in legislatures that vote on matters affecting it, reaching opposition parties abroad so relationships survive alternation, giving legislators exposure that improves domestic debate, and opening channels where formal relations are strained.
• Its limits are equally real.
  • Delegations carry no mandate and can commit nothing.
  • There is no continuity: membership changes, friendship groups lapse between Parliaments, and follow-up is rare.
  • Delegations are sometimes treated as travel rather than work, a criticism made within Parliament itself.
  • There is no research or briefing capacity on foreign policy — no equivalent of an independent congressional research service — so Members depend on the executive for the information with which they are meant to scrutinise it.

The judiciary

Indian courts approach foreign affairs with a strong presumption of deference, close to the American political question posture: recognition of states and governments, the conduct of relations, entry into or exit from a treaty and the deployment of force are treated as committed to the executive and unsuited to judicial standards. The deference is not absolute. Where an external act produces a domestic consequence for rights, property or liberty, the courts have not treated the foreign-policy label as a bar.

The dualist position on treaties

• India is dualist: international law and domestic law are separate systems, and a treaty does not become part of Indian law merely because India has ratified it. It requires implementing legislation, ordinarily under Article 253.
• The consequence is that a treaty India has ratified may be entirely unenforceable in an Indian court, and a litigant cannot found a claim on it. The classic statement is that until municipal law is changed to accommodate the obligation, what binds the court is the former and not the latter.
• Two softenings matter.
  • Customary international law may be treated as incorporated into Indian law where it is not inconsistent with a statute — the position the Supreme Court adopted in the Gramophone Company case.
  • Where domestic law is silent and there is no inconsistency, courts read international instruments into the content of fundamental rights.

Reading international law into fundamental rights

• The doctrine is best stated as a rule rather than a list of cases. Where a fundamental right is engaged, domestic law is silent, and the international instrument is not inconsistent with any Indian statute, the court may use the instrument to give the right content.
  • The instrument does not become law. It supplies the standard by which an existing constitutional guarantee is interpreted, which is why the technique enlarges rights without violating dualism.
• In Vishaka the Court used the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which India had ratified but not implemented, to frame binding guidelines against sexual harassment at the workplace in the absence of any statute — legislation followed sixteen years later.
• In Vellore Citizens’ Welfare Forum the Court held the precautionary principle, the polluter pays principle and sustainable development to be part of Indian environmental law, drawing them from international environmental instruments and reading them into Article 21.
• In NALSA the Court drew on international human rights material in recognising transgender persons as a third gender entitled to constitutional protection.
• The technique has a real limit: it works only in the rights direction. A court will use an unimplemented convention to expand a protection; it will not use one to impose a burden on a citizen or to override a statute.

Where courts have shaped foreign policy directly

• Berubari Union, 1960. The advisory opinion that cession of territory requires a constitutional amendment is the most consequential judicial intervention in Indian foreign policy. It forced the Ninth Amendment in 1960 and, fifty-five years later, the Hundredth — converting a boundary settlement from an executive act into a supermajority parliamentary one.
• The Enrica Lexie proceedings. After two Indian fishermen were shot off the Kerala coast in 2012 by Italian marines aboard a merchant vessel, which state could try them became a live jurisdictional dispute — and Indian court proceedings kept it an irritant with Italy and the European Union for nearly a decade.
  • An arbitral tribunal under the law of the sea held in 2020 that India was entitled to compensation but that the marines enjoyed immunity from Indian criminal jurisdiction.
  • Italy paid ₹10 crore in compensation, and the Supreme Court closed the Indian criminal proceedings in June 2021, directing distribution to the victims’ families and the affected fishermen. The matter is settled.
• Extradition and deportation. Courts determine whether a request satisfies the Extradition Act and the relevant treaty, and their rulings become diplomatic facts.
  • In the Abu Salem matter the Supreme Court held the Union bound by the sovereign assurance given to Portugal at the time of extradition — a domestic court enforcing an international undertaking against its own government.
• International adjudication. The International Court of Justice, on 17 July 2019 in the Jadhav case, found that Pakistan had breached the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and required effective review of the conviction and sentence, which Pakistan sought to discharge by ordinance in 2020 and statute in 2021.
• The nuclear liability challenge. The pending petition against the SHANTI Act, argued on Articles 14, 19 and 21, is the current instance of a familiar pattern: where legislative scrutiny is compressed, litigation becomes the residual check.

Judicial involvement in Indian foreign policy is occasional and indirect, but it is not negligible — and it grows in exact proportion to how far international obligations reach into domestic rights.

Paradiplomacy: the concept

• Paradiplomacy is international activity conducted by non-central governments — states, provinces, regions and cities — to further their own interests, in parallel with and sometimes in tension with the central government’s foreign policy.
  • The prefix carries the meaning exactly: this is diplomacy alongside, not diplomacy instead of.
• The terminological proliferation reflects a contested field: sub-state diplomacy, constituent diplomacy, decentralised cooperation, multi-layered diplomacy and intermestic affairs — a coinage for issues simultaneously international and domestic. Town twinning and sister-city arrangements are the most visible everyday form.

The theoretical foundation

• Panayotis Soldatos supplied the framing that remains standard: paradiplomacy is the direct and indirect entry of non-central governments into international relations, and its cause is a crisis at the level of the nation-state’s systemic process and foreign-policy performance.
  • His crucial argument is that this need not fragment the state. Decentralisation can enhance unity and efficiency in external relations because actor segregation does not become policy segregation, and sub-national paradiplomacy helps to rationalise the whole foreign-policy process rather than to disrupt it.
  • The claim is the opposite of the intuitive fear, and it is the strongest available answer to the objection that states in the international arena must weaken the national voice.
• Ivo Duchacek supplied the typology, and the categories are distinguished by geography.
  • Transborder regional paradiplomacy — contacts between sub-national units lying across a shared international border, driven by physical adjacency: rivers, roads, markets, migration.
  • Transregional paradiplomacy — contacts between units in neighbouring states that do not themselves share a border.
  • Global paradiplomacy — contacts between units of states with no shared border at all, typically investment, technology and city-to-city links.
  • Protodiplomacy is his separate category: external activity by a sub-state unit that carries a separatist agenda, using engagement abroad to build recognition for eventual sovereignty.
    • The distinction separates ordinary economic activity from a constitutional threat — and conflating the two is how central governments justify refusing the first.
• Noé Cornago developed the security dimension, examining how sub-state diplomacy reshapes both cooperation and conflict, and how central states normalise and domesticate it rather than suppress it. Alexander Kuznetsov has provided the fullest theoretical synthesis of the field.
• The study of paradiplomacy grew out of federalism scholarship in Canada and Australia rather than out of international relations, which explains its comparative and institutional character.

Drivers

• Globalisation and liberalisation are the twin forces. Once an integrated world economy reaches directly into a state’s industry, employment and revenue, its government acquires an external interest independent of the centre’s.
• Competitive federalism. States compete against each other for investment, and investment is mobile and international. The contest is therefore conducted abroad.
• Resource limits. Sub-national governments depend on the Union for resources, and every government’s are finite; foreign direct investment is the alternative that requires no transfer from the centre.
• Diversity of need. A single national growth model fits no Indian state exactly, and paradiplomacy lets each pursue one matched to its own endowments.
• The aggregate effect is the globalisation of local issues — a state’s employment, water, migration and infrastructure questions become internationally negotiated ones.

The comparative record

Case	Form and significance
Belgium	The strongest case anywhere. The 1993 constitutional revision gives regions and communities treaty-making power in their own exclusive competences — external competence follows internal competence, and Belgium can be bound only with sub-state consent in those fields
Canada and Quebec	Quebec maintains an extensive network of overseas delegations and asserts a right to extend its internal competences externally; the provinces collectively sustain a diplomatic footprint comparable to that of the American states
Germany	The Basic Law permits the Länder to conclude treaties with foreign states within their legislative competence, with the consent of the federal government
Australia	State trade and investment offices abroad, alongside a federal external-affairs power that has been used by the Commonwealth to expand its own competence at the states’ expense
China	Central coordination combined with municipal diplomacy and dense sister-city networks; a large part of its FDI performance is credited to this. The decisive case, because it shows paradiplomacy is an artefact of neither federalism nor democracy
Brazil	São Paulo, the wealthiest city in Latin America, rose partly through sustained municipal paradiplomacy

Paradiplomacy in India

• For the first two decades states had almost no external activity: policy was made in Delhi by a very small circle, the economy was closed, and there was little for a state to seek abroad.
• The opening created after 1967 was political rather than economic. Regional and coalition governments increased state autonomy and the willingness to assert distinct interests, but the licensing economy gave them nothing external to pursue and the period remained barren.
• The 1991 liberalisation was the real hinge. Once foreign investment could enter and states competed to attract it, external engagement became a state interest with a measurable payoff.
  • The emblematic early case is the 1992 agreement between the Government of Maharashtra and the American firms Enron and General Electric to finance the Dabhol power project, concluded when the power sector was first opened to foreign private investors.
  • Its collapse is as instructive as its signature: the project became operational only after the central government actively supported it, a change of state government produced repudiation and renegotiation, and the failure ended in international arbitration.
    • A state can open a door it cannot keep open, and the guarantee that matters is still the Union’s.
• Engagement accelerated after 2014, driven by a competitive-federalism framing at the centre, the involvement of Chief Ministers in the Prime Minister’s outbound and inbound visit programmes, and the normalisation of state-level investment promotion abroad.

What Indian states actually do

• Investment summits are the institutionalised form — Vibrant Gujarat, Magnetic Maharashtra, Invest Odisha, the Tamil Nadu Global Investors Meet, Invest Karnataka, and the equivalents in Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Telangana, Haryana and the north-east.
  • Each involves partner countries, foreign delegations and pre-summit roadshows abroad, and Chief Ministers now travel to promote them, Davos included.
• Border-state trade facilitation is the most genuinely diplomatic activity states undertake.
  • Punjab has pressed for and built additional trade capacity at the Wagah-Attari crossing, and its economy has borne the cost of every closure of that route.
  • Tripura has been the most successful state at organising border haats — periodic markets on the India-Bangladesh frontier where local residents trade specified goods without formal customs procedure, reviving an economy the partition line severed.
  • The north-eastern states are the operational stake in the Act East policy: connectivity through Myanmar, the Bangladesh transit and port arrangements, and the trade corridors that determine whether the region is a frontier or a gateway.
• Sister-city and sister-state agreements pair Indian states and cities with foreign counterparts on culture, urban management, skills and technology, cleared by the Union.
• Representation abroad. Several states maintain investment-promotion offices or retained representatives in foreign markets, and use Indian missions and the diaspora as a channel — a thin version of the Quebec model.
• Migration and mobility. Kerala runs a dedicated department for non-resident Keralites and engages the Gulf continuously on wages, welfare, recruitment and repatriation; Punjab, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have comparable arrangements.
  • States are now stakeholders in India’s migration and mobility partnerships with Europe and Japan, because state skilling systems supply the workers.
• Non-economic cooperation is expanding — environment, transboundary water, natural resource management, disaster response, security cooperation on shared borders and public health — and here the boundary with the Union’s exclusive competence is least clear.

The institutional response

• The Ministry of External Affairs set up a States Division in 2014 to serve as the interface with state governments — briefing them, facilitating their external engagements, coordinating their participation in incoming state visits and clearing their agreements with foreign entities.
• Practice has developed around it: a nodal officer designated in each state, Chief Ministers included in delegations and in incoming visit programmes, and the ministry’s outreach and regional conferences.
• The honest assessment is that this remains ad hoc rather than a framework. There is no statutory basis, no defined category of agreement a state may conclude, no consultation requirement binding on the Union, and no dispute-resolution mechanism when the centre and a state disagree.

The friction cases

West Bengal and the Teesta agreement

• The Teesta rises in Sikkim, runs through north Bengal and enters Bangladesh, where it irrigates a large agricultural region. Dry-season flows are inadequate for both sides, and a sharing formula had been negotiated between the two governments by 2011.
• The agreement was to be signed during the Prime Minister’s visit to Dhaka in September 2011. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee withdrew from the delegation and refused consent, on the ground that the volume to be conceded would damage north Bengal’s irrigation and drinking-water supply. The agreement was not signed, and it remains unsigned.
• Why a state is engaged so directly is the analytically important part.
  • Water is a State List subject. Irrigation, water supply and drainage belong to the states, and the Union’s Article 253 power to legislate over that head does not create the practical capacity to deliver water the state controls.
  • Implementation is entirely at the state level. The Union can promise a flow; only the state can operate the barrage, regulate abstraction and absorb the agricultural loss.
  • The political cost is local. A Chief Minister representing the districts that would bear the loss cannot survive endorsing it, and the Union has no instrument to compensate her for that.
• Why the Union could not simply proceed is the second half of the answer. Legally it could have signed; politically it could not. An agreement repudiated by the state that must implement it would have been worthless in Dhaka, and in 2011 would have cost the coalition a partner.
• The consequences have been long-running. Teesta remains the principal irritant in a relationship otherwise transformed, has been used by Bangladeshi political actors as evidence of Indian unreliability, and opened space for Chinese proposals for Teesta river management inside Bangladesh.
• The question is live again. The 1996 Ganga Waters Treaty expires in December 2026, and renewal engages West Bengal’s share directly. The state has taken part in the inter-ministerial consultations and its requirements have been folded into India’s negotiating position — a quiet institutionalisation of the consultation that had no framework in 2011.

Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka and the fishermen

• Tamil Nadu’s engagement with Sri Lanka policy is the longest-running instance of a state shaping India’s position toward a neighbour, running back through the 1987 Accord and the IPKF deployment, both of which were driven substantially by Tamil Nadu opinion and both of which rebounded on it.
• After the war ended in 2009 the state legislature and all its major parties pressed the Union over accountability for the final phase.
  • India’s votes at the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2012 and 2013 — backing resolutions on Sri Lanka it would otherwise have been disinclined to support, while working to soften their terms — were shaped by that pressure, and in 2013 a coalition partner left the government over it.
• The fishermen question — arrests in the Palk Bay, the status of Katchatheevu and the recurring demand for its retrieval — keeps the state permanently engaged, because those detained are its citizens and their livelihoods its politics.

Kerala, the marines, and the others

• Kerala’s insistence on prosecuting the Italian marines who shot two of its fishermen in 2012 turned a criminal case into a decade-long strain with Italy and the European Union, and the state’s political consensus made a quiet diplomatic resolution impossible for years.
• Punjab and Haryana carry the cross-border dimension of river and canal disputes, most visibly in the political consequences of the Union holding the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance after the Pahalgam attack, which changes the water available to both.
• The north-eastern states shape policy on migration from Bangladesh, on citizenship questions with an external dimension, and on connectivity through Myanmar, where instability across the border is a state-level security problem before it is a national one.

The constitutional and normative debate

• The textual position is unambiguous: external relations are exclusively the Union’s and states have no treaty capacity, with no Indian equivalent of the Belgian or German provisions.
• The workable reading of the Constitution’s silence is that it is permissive on economic engagement and restrictive on political engagement. Nothing prevents a state from promoting investment, running a summit, opening a trade office or twinning a city; everything prevents it from taking a position on recognition, borders, alliances or the use of force.
• The Sarkaria Commission examined state involvement in matters affecting them and favoured consultation on external agreements with direct state consequences; the Punchhi Commission went further, seeking greater state consultation where treaties touch the State List and proposing a strengthened Inter-State Council under Article 263 as the permanent forum for it.
• The reform proposals are modest and convergent: a standing inter-state forum on external economic engagement; a statutory consultation requirement before concluding agreements affecting State List subjects; a defined category of agreements states may conclude with clearance; and a capacity-building role for the States Division.
• The overall condition is that paradiplomacy in India is real but nascent and unframeworked. The friction cases do not negate its benefits; they demonstrate the cost of having no rules, and they are the kind of dispute that formal institutions and clear guidelines would resolve.
  • The workable division of labour is the one the practice already gestures at: states pursue economic and functional engagement, and the Union acts as observer and monitor, keeping state and national objectives in alignment — a light touch on investment and trade, a firm one in non-economic matters.
• The risks are real and should not be minimised.
  • Fragmentation — many voices where one is required, and inconsistent commitments across states.
  • Leverage — external actors playing states against the Union, or against each other, in competitive bidding.
  • Protodiplomacy — the concern that external engagement by a border state with an ethnic constituency across the line acquires a political character, which is the reason central governments resist a general permission.
• The judgement on whether federal units are critical has to be calibrated in two directions.
  • They are critical negatively, as veto players. Where an agreement requires state implementation — water, land, agriculture, policing, borders — a state can stop it, and West Bengal did.
  • They are increasingly significant positively on economic engagement, and their summits, offices and mobility arrangements are now a real part of India’s external economic effort.
  • They are not co-authors of foreign policy. No state has shaped India’s position on China, the Indo-Pacific, the great-power balance, nuclear policy or multilateral strategy. The claim that they are critical is true of a defined and largely economic and neighbourhood-facing band of policy, and false outside it.

The accountability deficit and what fills it

The formal position is stark. No ratification vote, no war powers, no confirmation of appointments, no intelligence oversight, deferential courts, no federal consultation requirement and a committee system that reviews without authorising. On paper, almost nobody checks the Indian executive on foreign policy.

• What constrains it instead is a set of informal substitutes, and their common feature is that none of them operates before a decision is taken.
  • Electoral accountability at one remove. Voters rarely decide on foreign policy, but governments anticipate how an external outcome will be read domestically, and that anticipation is a real constraint — visible in the 1962-63 talks and in every subsequent Kashmir negotiation.
  • Coalition arithmetic, when it exists. The single occasion on which a government’s survival turned on external policy arose from a hung Parliament, and the influence disappears with the majority.
  • The states as veto players on agreements requiring their implementation.
  • Media and public opinion, which set a tolerance band for concession that governments do not test.
  • The courts, where an external act touches rights — and increasingly so, as the SHANTI litigation shows.
• Whether that is sufficient depends on what treaties now do. When agreements concerned alliances, boundaries and recognition, an executive prerogative with retrospective legitimation was defensible.
  • Agreements that rewrite tariff schedules, procurement rules, data regimes, intellectual property and labour mobility allocate gains and losses among Indian citizens, and decisions of that kind are what legislatures exist to authorise.
• The informal substitutes are therefore becoming progressively less adequate, not because Parliament has weakened, but because the domestic reach of external commitments has grown while the procedures governing them have not changed since 1950.
• The minimum reform that would close the gap is well understood: a laying-and-scrutiny requirement for signed treaties on the British model, a treaty committee drawn from both Houses, a consultation mechanism with states on agreements touching their subjects, and cleared legislative oversight of the intelligence agencies.
  • None of it would slow a negotiation. All of it has been proposed and none of it enacted.

India’s foreign policy is made democratically in its sources and undemocratically in its procedures — and the gap between the two widens every time a trade agreement reaches further into domestic law.