Determinants of Indian Foreign Policy

Foreign policy, in concrete terms, is a combination of principles, interests and objectives through which a state conducts its relations in international affairs. It never emerges from a vacuum: it is guided by geography a state did not choose, a history it cannot discard, an economy it must work with and a society it must answer to. What makes the Indian case interesting is not that determinants exist but that there are so many, pulling so hard in different directions.

Why India’s determinants are unusually cross-pressured

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• India’s foreign policy is shaped by an unusually large number of determinants, and most of them cross-pressure one another. A state with a small number of aligned determinants produces a policy that looks consistent; India’s produce a policy that looks improvised from outside and continuous from inside.
  • The continental frontier pulls attention north while the maritime position pulls it south; the energy import bill pulls towards West Asia and Russia while the technology and capital requirement pulls towards the United States and Europe.
  • The anti-colonial inheritance disposes India against alignment; the China-Pakistan threat disposes it towards partnership. Neither has ever fully defeated the other, which is why strategic autonomy — the retention of decisional freedom rather than distance from everyone — has been the durable compromise.
  • A plural society rewards accommodation abroad; an electorate that punishes territorial concession forecloses accommodation on precisely the two questions that matter most.
• Determinants are best read as pressures, not as causes. Each raises or lowers the cost of a choice; none dictates the choice.
  • It is also why the analytically useful question is never which factors matter — nearly all of them do — but which factor prevailed when they conflicted, and why.
• Determinants are conventionally divided into internal — geography, history, strategic culture, philosophical inheritance, social structure, domestic politics, economic capacity and leadership — and external: systemic structure, great-power behaviour, the neighbourhood, the international economic and technology order, institutions and norms, and transnational actors.
  • The division is a filing convenience rather than a theoretical claim. The most consequential determinants operate across the boundary — the neighbourhood is external in form and domestic in effect, and the diaspora is a social fact at home and a lobby abroad.

Geography as the permanent determinant

Geography is the one determinant that does not change. Regimes, economies, ideologies and leaders all turn over; the Himalaya, the peninsula and the neighbours remain. This is why geography appears in every phase of Indian foreign policy, and why the same physical facts have been read as a shield in one decade and a liability in the next.

The physical inheritance

• India is a subcontinental peninsula with a continental frontier to the north and a maritime frontier on three sides, and its foreign policy has never been able to choose between the two.
  • The Himalaya and the ranges continuing east formed a formidable barrier that made land invasion difficult and left large parts of the subcontinent insulated for long stretches of recorded history.
  • The 7,500-kilometre coastline on the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean gives India the longest coastline of any littoral state in the northern Indian Ocean, and most of India’s foreign trade by volume moves through those waters.
  • The peninsular projection places India astride the sea lanes running from the Gulf and the Red Sea to the Malacca Strait and East Asia — the route on which a very large share of world energy and container traffic travels.
• The asymmetry between the two frontiers is the founding fact of Indian strategic history. India was hard to invade by land and easy to reach by sea, and colonial rule arrived by sea — through the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French and finally the English East India Company.
• Location fixes the identity of the neighbours, and neighbours are not chosen. India shares land borders with Pakistan, China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, and a maritime boundary with Sri Lanka and the Maldives; at the other extreme, sheer distance kept engagement with Latin America thin until air links, trade finance and energy interests made it affordable.
  • Two of those neighbours are nuclear-armed adversaries who are also strategic partners of each other, a configuration no other major power faces on its own landmass.

The maritime argument and the case against continental fixation

• K.M. Panikkar produced the classic statement that India’s future is determined by the sea, and aimed his critique at an inherited continental fixation — a strategic imagination formed by the frontier policies of the Raj and by the memory of invasions through the north-west, which underweighted the ocean that had actually delivered foreign rule.
• Happymon Jacob has restated the argument in contemporary form: New Delhi’s near-exclusive focus on the continental sphere since independence has not delivered secure borders, healthy relations with neighbours, or deterrence stability against its adversaries.
  • His prescription is a shift in the grand-strategic centre of gravity from the continental to the maritime sphere, where India’s relative advantages are greatest and where the competition is over presence and access rather than over occupied ground.
• The counter-case is serious and should not be waved away.
  • Land borders are where sovereignty is actually contested. Casualties, territorial loss and crises have occurred on the land frontier, not at sea; a state cannot deprioritise the theatre in which it is being tested.
  • The two are complements, not alternatives. The Indian Ocean is an arena for imposing costs on a continental adversary whose own energy and trade lifelines run through it, which makes maritime capability part of the continental answer.
  • The policy expression of the maritime turn — the Indo-Pacific framing, the net-security-provider role and the associated partnerships — is developed in the companion note on strategic autonomy and multi-alignment.

The three structural challenges India’s geography poses

• Indeterminate borders. South Asia was a single civilisational and administrative space, and the partition of that space into sovereign states left boundaries that were drawn hastily, incompletely or not at all.
  • The Radcliffe Line was published after the transfer of power and cut through districts, river systems and communities; the McMahon Line was never accepted by China; Aksai Chin was mapped inconsistently and possessed unilaterally.
• Encirclement by unfriendly or contested neighbours. India’s reach is limited less by its capabilities than by the fact that its capabilities must first cross a crowded and often hostile neighbourhood.
  • Overland access to Central Asia runs through Pakistan and is therefore closed, which is why India has had to buy its continental connectivity by sea — through Chabahar and the International North-South Transport Corridor — at much greater cost.
• Asymmetry of size and power with every neighbour. India accounts for the overwhelming majority of South Asia’s territory, population and economic output, and shares a border with each of its neighbours while most of them do not border one another.
  • This produces a permanent trust deficit. Smaller neighbours experience Indian primacy as hegemony however benignly it is intended, because the capability to coerce exists whether or not the intention does.
  • It also creates a standing external opening: any extra-regional power seeking leverage has a ready constituency, which is why Chinese infrastructure finance found willing partners in Sri Lanka, Nepal and the Maldives.
  • India’s answer has been non-reciprocal generosity — unilateral concessions without expecting equivalence, and a development-assistance budget weighted heavily towards the neighbourhood.

Landlocked and sea-dependent neighbours

• Nepal and Bhutan are landlocked and reach the sea through India, which makes transit a structural feature of those relationships rather than an ordinary trade question. Dependence generates leverage, and leverage generates resentment: geographic dependence is an asset that depreciates when used, purchasing compliance in the short run and driving hedging in the long run.
  • The 1989 transit and trade impasse and the 2015 border blockade — whether attributed to Indian policy or to protest by Madhesi groups on the Indian side of the frontier — both hardened Nepali opinion and gave Kathmandu a standing argument for diversification.

Resource geography

• Hydrocarbon dependence is the single most powerful resource determinant. India’s crude oil import dependence reached a record 88.7% in 2025-26, with domestic output continuing to decline from ageing fields.
  • This is the material foundation of the West Asia relationship — the Gulf supplies the crude, hosts the largest concentration of Indian workers and sends the largest flow of remittances, which makes stability in the region a first-order Indian interest rather than a distant concern.
  • It also explains the durability of the Iran relationship through successive rounds of sanctions, and India’s insistence on being consulted rather than instructed about where it buys energy. The contrast that proves the point is the United States after shale: as American dependence on West Asian crude fell, so did the intensity of American engagement with the region’s security.
• Transboundary rivers make water a determinant on both flanks.
  • On the western flank, the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 survived three wars and was long cited as the model of durable riparian cooperation.
    • India placed it in abeyance in April 2025 after the Pahalgam attack, converting a technical arrangement into an instrument of coercive diplomacy.
    • A Court of Arbitration award of 31 August 2026 held that the treaty remains fully in force and that India’s abeyance does not suspend it; India rejected both the ruling and the tribunal’s competence, and the treaty remains suspended in practice.
  • On the eastern flank, India is the lower riparian to China on the Brahmaputra and the Sutlej, which reverses the asymmetry entirely: hydrological data sharing depends on Chinese goodwill, and large upstream projects on the Yarlung Tsangpo are a standing Indian concern.
• Critical minerals are the emerging version of the same logic. The materials that decide competitiveness in batteries, electronics, defence electronics and clean energy are concentrated in a handful of jurisdictions, and China dominates the processing stage almost everywhere.
  • The National Critical Mineral Mission and the pursuit of overseas mineral assets and processing partnerships have made minerals a standing item in bilateral negotiation with Australia, Africa, Latin America and Central Asia.

History, the freedom movement and the colonial inheritance

• The colonial experience is the deepest single source of Indian foreign policy’s founding orientation, because it supplied not merely a grievance but a theory of how the international system works.
  • From that reading followed a durable suspicion of Western hegemony, and a distinct and more specific suspicion of alliance itself: alliances were the instrument through which great powers converted junior partners into instruments.
  • The founding orientation that followed — non-alignment, anti-colonialism, anti-racialism, non-violence and disarmament advocacy — was therefore not a set of separate preferences but one position stated five ways.
• History constrains but does not determine. France and Germany were the archetypal enemies of the first half of the twentieth century and became the joint authors of European integration in the second; where other determinants align, historical antagonism can be overridden, which is the standing argument against treating hostility in South Asia as permanent.

The pre-independence origins of Indian foreign policy

• India had a foreign policy before it had a state, which is why the question of pre-independence origins is a substantive one rather than an antiquarian curiosity.
  • The Indian National Congress established a Foreign Department in the 1920s and began issuing positions on international questions on which it had no capacity to act — the practice of a government-in-waiting rehearsing its worldview.
  • Congress passed resolutions on the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, on the Spanish Civil War, on Japanese aggression in China — to which it sent a medical mission — and on Palestine, opposing the partition of the territory. Each position located India on the anti-imperial side of a European quarrel.
  • Jawaharlal Nehru was the principal author of this worldview, developing it in his writing and through his participation in the League against Imperialism at Brussels in 1927, where the connection between Indian freedom and the freedom of other colonised peoples was made explicit.
  • The Interim Government from September 1946 gave the positions institutional form: Nehru held the external affairs portfolio, and India took a public stand against the treatment of Indians in South Africa before it was formally independent, raising the matter at the United Nations in 1946.
  • The Asian Relations Conference of March 1947, convened five months before independence, was the first assembly of Asian nationalist movements and states — and a statement that India intended a role beyond its own decolonisation.

Appadorai and Fontera on the national movement’s imprint

• A. Appadorai identified a two-fold impact of the Indian national movement on the foreign policy of independent India.
  • First, support for the freedom of dependent peoples elsewhere — a commitment India acted on at the United Nations over Indonesia, Indo-China, Algeria, Namibia and the Portuguese territories, and institutionalised through its championing of decolonisation as a General Assembly agenda.
  • Second, opposition to racial discrimination of every kind — most conspicuously in the sustained campaign against apartheid in South Africa, which India raised at the very first session of the General Assembly and pursued through trade sanctions and diplomatic rupture long before such measures were fashionable.
• Richard M. Fontera argued that anti-colonialism functioned as the basic organising principle of Indian foreign policy rather than as one commitment among several.
  • His sharper observation is about perception: India tended to read international problems through a pro-colonial and anti-colonial division of the world, sorting new questions into an existing template.

The inherited territorial and institutional legacies

• The boundary questions with both major adversaries are British legacies. The Radcliffe award, the McMahon Line, the unadministered status of Aksai Chin and the ambiguous position of the princely states were all products of imperial administration, and independent India inherited them as live disputes.
  • The Raj’s strategic frontier policy — buffer states, tributary relationships with Himalayan kingdoms, forward posts and a claimed sphere across the northern Indian Ocean — was inherited more or less intact, and the special relationships with Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim were originally imperial arrangements re-signed by a republic.
• The Raj also bequeathed an Indian Ocean and Gulf presence. British India ran the Gulf residencies, the rupee circulated in Gulf ports, and Indian troops and administrators served across the western Indian Ocean.

The 1962 defeat as a determinant in its own right

• The war with China in 1962 did more to shape subsequent Indian strategic thinking than any doctrine did. It functions as a historical determinant, not merely a historical event.
  • It discredited the idealist reading of Asian solidarity and showed what capability-free diplomacy could not achieve.
  • It produced a decade of military reconstruction — the expansion of the army, the raising of mountain divisions, the beginning of a serious defence-industrial effort, and a defence budget that has never returned to its 1950s share.

Strategic culture

Culture is the set of behaviours, beliefs, values and symbols developed, retained and handed on across generations. Strategic culture applies that idea to state behaviour on questions treated as strategic — an attempt to integrate a country’s cumulative historical memory and its self-understanding into the explanation of its security and foreign policy. Whether India possesses one is among the most argued questions in the field.

The concept and where it sits

• Jack Snyder coined the term in work on Soviet nuclear thinking, arguing that a state’s approach to force is not deduced afresh from circumstances but inherited as a set of assumptions about what force is for.
• The theoretical placement matters. Constructivists give strategic culture particular weight, since it is the kind of shared understanding they hold to constitute interests; realists treat it as epiphenomenal, a description of the rhetoric accompanying behaviour that capability and threat already explain.
• The literature is described in three generations: the first treated culture as the explanation of a state’s strategic behaviour; the second read strategic discourse as elite legitimation rather than intention; the third, associated with Alastair Iain Johnston, tried to make the concept testable by deriving ranked strategic preferences from a state’s canonical texts.

Kanti Bajpai’s account and the three Indian schools

• Kanti Bajpai analyses strategic culture in two parts.
  • The central strategic paradigm is the layer of basic assumptions about how orderly or disorderly the world fundamentally is — whether conflict is a permanent condition, a soluble problem, or a symptom of something else.
  • The grand strategy is what follows from that paradigm: the ordering of means, the weight given to force, diplomacy and economics, and the choice of partners.
• The sources of a state’s strategic culture are its history, its geography, its national culture and its politics — which is why strategic culture is best treated not as a rival to the other determinants in this note but as the channel through which several of them reach policy.
• Bajpai’s most useful contribution is his identification of three competing schools of Indian strategic thought, which coexist rather than succeed one another and which map cleanly onto positions still taken in Indian debate.

• All three schools are live in current argument. Dialogue with China after border incidents and the value placed on multilateral norm-setting are recognisably Nehruvian; the claim that trade, investment and technology partnerships are now the substance of foreign policy is neoliberal in this specific sense; the claim that deterrence requires a demonstrated willingness to strike is hyperrealist.

Tanham’s thesis

• George Tanham concluded in his interpretative essay on Indian strategic thought that Indians lack formal and systematic strategic planning and therefore lack a strategic culture capable of supporting the country’s political ambitions.
  • His account of the causes was cultural and historical: Indian values, the cultural and social diversity of the country, the recent historical legacy of subordination, and non-alignment as a state policy had between them stymied the growth of strategic thought.
  • His warning was operational as much as conceptual: a state without systematic strategic planning would produce sub-optimal responses to challenges on multiple fronts, precisely the situation India faces.

The rebuttals

• The first and strongest rebuttal is that Tanham’s conception of strategic culture is a Western one.
  • It privileges military strength and formal doctrinal planning as the markers of strategic seriousness, and treats their absence as an absence of thought rather than as a different theory of how security is produced.
  • It thereby discounts diplomatic, economic and non-violent approaches to security as though they were evasions of strategy rather than instances of it — a striking omission in the case of a state that won its independence by a strategy of that kind.
• The second rebuttal: India possesses one of the world’s earliest systematic statements of strategic thought. The Arthashastra is a codified treatment of statecraft, intelligence, alliance, war and the management of neighbours, and it long predates the European texts by which the field measures itself.
  • Henry Kissinger, in World Order, credited Kautilya with a dispassionate clarity about how to protect the interests of the state while neutralising, subverting and conquering its neighbours — an assessment that places the text in the first rank of realist writing rather than in a museum of antiquities.
• The third rebuttal comes from S. Jaishankar, who in The India Way, in the chapter on Krishna’s choice, reads not the Arthashastra but the Mahabharata as the distillation of Indian statecraft.
  • The Arthashastra is clinical, a manual of prescriptions abstracted from circumstance. The Mahabharata is a working narrative of tactical compromise, balance of power, alliance-building and diplomacy, in which every actor negotiates the gap between principle and necessity — and is therefore a text about ethics and power together rather than about either separately.

Kautilya’s apparatus, stated properly

• The Saptanga theory sets out seven constituent elements of the state — the ruler, the ministers, the territory and people, the fortified capital, the treasury, the army and the ally.
  • The ruler is the nabhi, the navel or hub of the wheel in which the other elements are the spokes: not the whole of the state’s power but the point through which it is organised and directed.
  • The practical claim is that a capable ruler can convert unfavourable elements into favourable ones, while a weak one leaves even favourable elements unusable — an early and unusually clear statement of leadership as an independent variable.
• The Mandala theory models the state’s environment as concentric circles of interest. The immediate neighbour is structurally a rival because contiguity creates friction; the neighbour beyond that neighbour is therefore a natural ally.
• The Shadgunya, or six-fold policy, is a menu of postures rather than a doctrine of aggression.
  • Sandhi, peace or treaty, when one is weaker; vigraha, open hostility, when one is stronger; asana, watchful inaction, when neither side can gain.
  • Yana, preparation for or march to war, when advantage is building; samshraya, seeking the shelter of a stronger power, when survival is at stake; dvaidhibhava, the dual policy of peace with one power while pursuing hostility against another.
  • The organising insight is that the correct posture is a function of relative power, reassessed continuously, and that a state which cannot change posture as its position changes will be caught in the wrong one.
• The four upayas are the graduated instruments of persuasion: sama, conciliation; dana, gifts or inducement; bheda, dissension sown among adversaries; and danda, force. The ordering is deliberate — force is the last instrument, not the first, and the tradition is accordingly less bellicose than its reputation.

Weighing the debate

• The strongest criticism of the debate is that it is a proxy argument. Claims about the presence or absence of a strategic culture routinely serve as coded claims about India’s strategic potential, which the debate then either inflates or undercuts.
• The contemporary institutional record makes the strong version of Tanham’s claim harder to sustain than it was in 1992.
  • India has a published nuclear doctrine with no-first-use and credible minimum deterrence; an Indian Maritime Doctrine and maritime security strategy; a Joint Doctrine of the Indian Armed Forces; a National Security Council with an advisory board and a strategic policy group; and a Chief of Defence Staff with a Department of Military Affairs.
  • What is genuinely absent is a published national security strategy of the kind most comparable powers issue, and the deliberative machinery for long-range planning remains thin relative to the size of the agenda.
• The defensible conclusion is neither Tanham’s nor his sharpest critics’. India has a strategic tradition of real depth and a strategic culture in the descriptive sense — recognisable, patterned preferences about force, autonomy and restraint. What it has lacked is the institutional machinery that converts tradition into planning, and that gap has narrowed considerably without closing.

Philosophical and civilisational foundations

• The inheritance of an ancient civilisation supplied independent India with a vocabulary before it supplied it with a policy, and that vocabulary has proved persistent across governments of very different temper.
  • Panchsheel, Kautilya’s mandala, vasudhaiva kutumbakam and the dharmashastra tradition of righteous conduct have all served as organising language for external conduct; what is contested is whether the vocabulary describes the policy or decorates it.

Panchsheel

• The five principles of peaceful coexistence were set out in the preamble to the 1954 agreement with China on trade and intercourse with the Tibet region: mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity; mutual non-aggression; mutual non-interference in internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful coexistence.
  • They were elevated at the Bandung Conference of 1955, where a version of them was absorbed into the ten principles adopted by the Afro-Asian states, and they subsequently supplied much of the normative content of non-alignment.
• The standard criticism must be stated honestly. The agreement in whose preamble the principles appear conceded Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, removed the buffer that had separated the two states, and settled nothing about the boundary; war followed eight years later.

The civilisational idiom in current use

• Vasudhaiva kutumbakam — “the world is one family” — has moved from ornament to official framing, supplying the theme of India’s G20 presidency in 2023, “One Earth, One Family, One Future”, and recurring in statements on climate, vaccine supply and development partnership.
• Whether the vocabulary does real work is contested. It distinguishes Indian offers, resonates with states that resent being lectured, and framed a presidency that secured a consensus declaration despite the Ukraine split and admitted the African Union; against that, the substance of policy on trade, energy, borders and defence is indistinguishable from that of any interest-maximising state.
  • The reasonable judgement is that civilisational vocabulary is a positioning instrument rather than a constraint: it shapes how India’s choices are received, but has never been seen to prevent one.

The constitutional statement

• Article 51 of the Directive Principles is the constitutional statement of a foreign-policy orientation, and it is unusual for a constitution to contain one at all.

“The State shall endeavour to — (a) promote international peace and security; (b) maintain just and honourable relations between nations; (c) foster respect for international law and treaty obligations in the dealings of organised peoples with one another; and (d) encourage settlement of international disputes by arbitration.”

Constitution of India, Article 51

• A non-justiciable directive still matters, for three reasons.
  • It is an interpretive anchor: courts have used Article 51 with Article 253 to read international obligations into domestic law where no statute conflicts, most consequentially in environmental and human-rights jurisprudence.
  • Together with the Preamble’s declaration of sovereignty it captures the central tension of Indian external conduct — a commitment to international law and arbitration alongside an insistence that sovereignty and territorial integrity are not negotiable. The rejection of third-party jurisdiction over Kashmir, and over the Indus dispute, follows from the second half of that pairing.

Ashoka against Kautilya, and the Gandhian inheritance

• Commentators frequently contrast two idioms available within the same tradition. Nehru’s foreign policy drew on Buddhism and Ashoka — renunciation of conquest, moral influence, the cultural diplomacy of the Buddhist connection with Asia. The idiom associated with the present period draws instead on Kautilya and Chandragupta — statecraft, capability, and the management of neighbours by calculation.
• From the same inheritance came a preference for the middle way. The maxim ati sarvatra varjayet — avoid excess in all things — is a fair description of a foreign policy that has repeatedly declined the extremes of alliance and isolation, of confrontation and accommodation.
• The Gandhian inheritance of non-violence and satyagraha was rooted in the older moral tradition of the Vedas and the epics, and it reached foreign policy through a specific conviction of Gandhi’s: that India’s freedom was bound up with the freedom of the other colonised peoples of Asia and Africa.
  • How much survived into state practice is the honest question. India’s Pakistan policy in the first months of independence, including the release of the withheld cash balances, owed a great deal to Gandhi’s insistence even though he held no office.
  • Against that, the accession of Junagadh and Hyderabad, the action in Goa in 1961, the intervention of 1971 and the nuclear programme are not Gandhian outcomes, and no government has claimed they were.
  • The defensible summary is that Gandhian ethics survived as a preference for restraint, and as a vocabulary of legitimation, not as a rule of conduct — a moral tradition metabolised into a disposition rather than a doctrine.
• The claim that classical Indian practice was isolationist deserves a caveat. A strand in the classical literature treats war beyond the subcontinent as illegitimate, asserting a self-limiting sphere; but the same corpus contains the ambition of the chakravartin, the universal ruler.
  • What can be said without strain is that the tradition supplied resources for both restraint and expansion, and that independent India selected the restraint — a choice made in 1947, not inherited automatically from antiquity.

Social structure and national identity

India’s social structure is not a background condition to its foreign policy; it is one of the mechanisms through which foreign policy is made. A state that must continuously negotiate difference internally acquires both a disposition towards accommodation and a set of domestic constituencies with direct stakes in particular external relationships.

Pluralism as a disposition

• India is heterogeneous by every axis that usually divides states — religion, language, caste, region, ethnicity — and it has held together as a democracy while remaining so.
  • The argument that follows is that a polity whose ordinary business is the accommodation of difference is disposed to accommodate externally as well, preferring negotiated middle positions to exclusive commitments.
  • The same plurality is the raw material of India’s soft power — yoga, ayurveda, cinema, a free press and a religiously diverse society — developed in the companion note on soft power and public diplomacy.

The mechanisms by which social structure reaches policy

• Cross-border ethnic and linguistic kinship is the most direct mechanism, because it converts a foreign question into a domestic one.
  • Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu. The affinity between Tamils in India and Sri Lanka has conditioned Indian policy continuously — through the training and support of Tamil militant groups, the 1987 accord and the deployment of the Indian Peace Keeping Force, and later through India’s positions in the UN Human Rights Council, where votes against Sri Lanka in 2012 and 2013 followed pressure from Tamil parties whose support the government required.
  • Nepal and the Madhes. The Madhesi population of the Tarai shares language, kinship and marriage ties across the border, and Indian concern about their representation in Nepal’s 2015 constitution became the proximate issue in the border obstruction that followed — an episode that damaged the relationship and pushed Kathmandu towards Beijing.
  • Bangladesh and Bengal. Shared language and a shared partition history make migration, minorities and river-sharing simultaneously bilateral and electoral questions in West Bengal and Assam, which is why citizenship policy has direct diplomatic consequences.
  • Myanmar and the north-east. Communities straddle the frontier in Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland, which is why insurgency, refugee flows and the free-movement regime along that border are handled as internal security questions with a foreign policy attached.
• Religious composition shapes the West Asia relationship. India’s Muslim population is among the largest in the world, which has historically given Indian governments a domestic reason to attend to Palestinian, Gulf and Iranian sensibilities.
  • It is the standard explanation for the long delay in normalising relations with Israel, which was recognised in 1950 but received full diplomatic relations only in 1992.
  • The contemporary position is a de-hyphenated one: a deep security and technology relationship with Israel alongside a restated commitment to a negotiated two-state outcome and a very large economic and labour relationship with the Gulf states.
• Caste and social justice reach foreign policy chiefly through the international human-rights machinery. India has consistently resisted attempts to have caste discrimination treated as a form of racial discrimination in international fora, most prominently around the 2001 World Conference against Racism at Durban.
  • The Indian position is legal rather than dismissive: caste is a form of discrimination based on descent that the Constitution prohibits and that Indian law addresses, but it is not race, and admitting the equation would internationalise a matter of domestic constitutional competence.
• The diaspora is a social fact with foreign-policy consequences — around 35.4 million overseas Indians on the government’s own count, and record remittances of $135.46 billion in 2024-25, the largest inflow received by any country. Its use as an instrument of policy is treated in the companion note on the diaspora.

The honest critiques

• Indian foreign policy is produced by a narrow social elite. The making of external policy has always been concentrated in a small, metropolitan, English-educated stratum, and the professional stream that staffs it has been slow to reflect the society it represents.
  • The parliamentary figures make the point precisely: an Indian Foreign Service of 954 officers as of December 2025, of whom 263 are women and 200 belong to Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe categories.
• Indian foreign policy is not notably feminist, which is true of South Asian states generally and reflects the patriarchal structure of the societies producing it.
  • The record is genuinely mixed rather than simply poor. India deployed the first all-female formed police unit in United Nations peacekeeping, to Liberia in 2007, has sent female engagement teams to subsequent missions, and has supported the uniformed gender parity strategy.
  • Against that, India has not adopted a national action plan on women, peace and security, has resisted framings that would treat internal conflicts as falling within that agenda, and does not carry a gender lens into its trade, security or development negotiations in any systematic way.

Federal diversity as a source of pressure

• India’s diversity is territorially organised, which means social difference reaches foreign policy through states with governments, electorates and interests of their own.
  • Border states carry an intensity of interest in the adjacent country that the Union does not — West Bengal on the Teesta, Tamil Nadu on Sri Lanka, Punjab on the western border’s trade, Assam and Tripura on Bangladesh, the north-eastern states on Myanmar.
  • The result is that the Union government negotiates externally while managing a second negotiation at home with the states whose consent or acquiescence the agreement requires — the classic two-level game, with the twist that the domestic level is territorial.
• The institutional side of this — states as diplomatic actors and the constitutional questions they raise — belongs to the companion note on Parliament, the states and paradiplomacy. Diversity here is a source of pressure, not the channel that processes it.

Domestic politics as determinant

• No foreign policy that lacks domestic consensus succeeds, because implementation requires resources, legislation and political durability that a contested policy cannot command.
• C. Raja Mohan noted that one reason non-alignment was adopted was that it was the one external posture capable of commanding consensus across a political spectrum running from the communist left to the Hindu right.
  • This is a determinant argument of the strongest kind: the policy is explained not by what was optimal internationally but by what was coalitionally available domestically.

Coalition politics

• From 1989 to 2014 no single party held a majority in the Lok Sabha, and for a quarter-century foreign policy was made by governments dependent on partners with regional or ideological agendas of their own.

• The claim that coalitions narrowed foreign policy choice rests on these four episodes.
• The counter-argument is equally serious. Coalitions broadened consultation, forced governments to explain themselves, and did not in fact prevent the boldest decisions of the period.
  • The nuclear tests of May 1998 were taken by a coalition government within weeks of taking office; the Lahore bus initiative followed within a year; the Kargil conflict was managed by the same government; and the civil nuclear agreement, the largest strategic realignment since 1971, was completed under a coalition that staked its survival on it.
  • Coalition constraint therefore looks less like a general brake and more like a selective one, biting hard where a partner had a specific local stake and hardly at all elsewhere.
• Whether the constraint lifted after 2014 is a genuine question. Single-party majority government removed the veto players, and the most visible consequences have been in decisions that coalitions had avoided.
  • The Land Boundary Agreement was carried through, and the Indus Waters Treaty was placed in abeyance — both decisions that a coalition would have found much harder to assemble.
  • Yet the Teesta agreement remains unsigned, because West Bengal’s objection is a state’s objection rather than a coalition partner’s; and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership was declined in 2019 under pressure from farmers, dairy cooperatives and domestic industry that no parliamentary arithmetic could soften.
  • The conclusion is that the constraint changed shape rather than disappearing: what was once exercised through coalition partners is now exercised through federal units, organised producer interests and public opinion directly.

Public opinion and electoral politics

• Public opinion functions as an asymmetric constraint in Indian foreign policy — decisive on a small number of questions and close to irrelevant on the rest.
  • It is most consequential on Pakistan and China, where opinion is informed, intense and electorally mobilised.
• The post-1962 hardening against China is the founding case. Popular disapproval of the government’s China policy after the defeat made accommodation politically impossible for a generation, and the relationship was only reopened by Rajiv Gandhi’s visit in 1988, which required a leader with the standing to absorb the criticism.
• The Tamil Nadu case shows opinion producing policy directly. Sympathy for Sri Lankan Tamils, expressed through state politics, pushed India towards the ethnic conflict, produced the 1987 accord and the deployment of the peacekeeping force, and later shaped India’s multilateral votes.
• Vote-bank politics forecloses territorial settlement. China has, since the early 1960s, held open a package in which it would drop its claim in the eastern sector in return for Indian acceptance of its position in Aksai Chin.
  • The exchange has been assessed as reasonable by a succession of Indian analysts and has been unacceptable to every Indian government, because no government can survive being seen to cede territory.
  • Parliament’s unanimous resolution of 1962 committing India to recover every inch of occupied territory converted a negotiating position into a binding domestic commitment, and it has never been revisited.
• The contemporary version is the compression of response time. Television and social media now transmit an incident to a national audience within minutes and generate an expectation of response within hours.
  • Operation Sindoor in May 2025 is the clearest recent illustration of a decision taken in an environment where the domestic audience’s expectation of retaliation was itself part of the strategic problem; the operation’s doctrinal significance is developed in the companion note on the current phase.

The economy as determinant

The economy is the determinant that has changed most. In 1947 India was a capital-scarce, food-deficit economy that needed aid and technology and had little to offer in exchange; today it is among the world’s largest economies — sixth by nominal output on the IMF’s April 2026 projections, and fourth again by 2027 on the same projections — a market others compete to enter. Almost every other determinant has been re-weighted by that change.

Capability at independence and the shape it gave policy

• Limited economic capability itself pushed India towards a non-military, non-aligned orientation. A state that cannot afford a serious military cannot make credible alliance commitments, and one that needs development finance from both blocs has an interest in being courted by both.
  • Non-alignment was therefore, among other things, an economically rational posture: it maximised the number of potential donors and technology suppliers while minimising the cost of the security commitments India would have had to make in return.
• A strong economy is the precondition of every other instrument. Military capability, development assistance, concessional lending and the ability to absorb the costs of an independent position are all purchased out of national output — which is why economic weakness in the 1970s and 1980s constrained India’s reach even at the height of its regional assertiveness.
  • The clearest demonstration is the 1991 balance-of-payments crisis, in which a state with three weeks of import cover had to pledge gold and accept conditionality, and discovered that economic vulnerability translates directly into diplomatic vulnerability.

The economic model as an alignment cue

• The organisation of an economy signals to other states what kind of partner it is likely to be, and India’s model has twice functioned as an alignment signal.
  • The planned, public-sector-led, import-substituting model adopted after independence made the Soviet Union the natural partner: it supplied steel plants, heavy machinery, oil exploration and defence equipment on rupee terms, financed through counter-trade that suited a foreign-exchange-scarce economy.
• The 1991 reforms reversed the cue, and did so in the direction complex interdependence predicts: liberalisation, currency convertibility on the current account and the opening to foreign investment made India legible to Western capital, multiplied the stakeholders in each relationship, and the deepening of the relationship with the United States followed the change in the model rather than preceding it.
  • The transition itself, as a turning point in the evolution of policy, is treated in the companion note on continuity and change.

Energy as a standing determinant

• Import dependence in energy is the most persistent economic constraint on Indian diplomatic freedom, at a record 88.7% of crude requirement in 2025-26.
  • It anchors the West Asia relationship, sustains engagement with Iran through repeated rounds of sanctions, and makes the security of the Gulf and the sea lanes from it a first-order Indian interest.
• The Russian oil question after 2022 is the sharpest recent case. Discounted Russian crude rose from a negligible share to roughly a third of India’s imports, and India defended the purchases as a legitimate response to price rather than an endorsement of the war.
  • The constraint arrived through sanctions rather than through diplomacy: American measures against Rosneft and Lukoil in November 2025 pushed the Russian share below a quarter for the first time in two years, with volumes falling to about 1.0-1.2 million barrels a day early in 2026; a limited American waiver in March 2026 then permitted renewed purchases and the share partially recovered.
• The February 2026 trade understanding with the United States cut tariffs on Indian goods from 50% to 18%, removing the punitive tranche imposed over Russian oil purchases.
  • President Trump stated that India had agreed to stop buying Russian oil.
  • The Indian government’s own statement did not mention Russian oil, and Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said only that the arrangement protected sensitive sectors including agriculture and dairy.
  • The asymmetry between the two characterisations has not been resolved, and it is analytically the most revealing feature of the episode: an energy determinant strong enough that the government would not concede in public what its partner claimed it had conceded in private.

Is Indian foreign policy shaped by a neoliberal outlook?

• The claim to be assessed is that Indian foreign policy is now organised around market access, investment, technology and competitiveness rather than around solidarity or normative leadership. Stated as a claim about determinants, it is that economic interest has displaced ideological commitment as the variable that predicts Indian behaviour.
• The evidence for the claim is substantial.
  • A wave of trade agreements after two decades of caution: the EFTA trade and economic partnership in force from October 2025 with a large investment commitment attached; the United Kingdom agreement signed in July 2025 and in force from 15 July 2026; the European Union agreement concluded in January 2026; Oman in December 2025; New Zealand in April 2026 — alongside the existing arrangements with the UAE and Australia.
  • The reorientation of specific relationships towards their economic content — China, where trade kept growing through a decade of border crisis; Japan, built on infrastructure finance, high-speed rail and dedicated industrial corridors; and the Central Asian republics, courted through the India-Central Asia Dialogue for uranium, hydrocarbons and critical minerals despite the absence of overland access.
• The counter-evidence is equally substantial.
  • India walked away from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in 2019 rather than accept exposure to Chinese manufactured imports and a dairy opening — the largest trade agreement available to it, declined on protective grounds.
  • Agriculture and dairy have been protected in every negotiation, including the 2026 understanding with the United States, which is not the behaviour of a state whose policy is organised around market access.
  • Data localisation, public procurement preference and domestic-content requirements are all departures from the liberal template, and the manufacturing strategy since 2020 has raised tariffs rather than lowered them.
  • The Global South and development-partnership commitment has grown, not shrunk: the Overseas Development Partnership head is the largest single line in the external affairs budget at ₹6,997 crore in 2026-27, over 31% of the ministry’s allocation, and the Voice of the Global South summits have institutionalised a solidarity claim.
• The judgement. Economic interest has clearly become the principal organising determinant of India’s external engagement, in the sense that it now explains more of India’s bilateral behaviour than any other single factor. But the outlook is not neoliberal in the doctrinal sense.
  • What has emerged is closer to economic nationalism conducted through open-economy instruments: India uses trade agreements, investment competition and technology partnership to build national capability, and abandons the liberal instrument the moment it threatens a protected constituency.
  • The correct formulation is therefore that economic interest has displaced ideology as the driver, without liberalism displacing the state as the agent — a distinction the neoliberal label obscures.

• Capability enables everything else, and buys less than it appears to. Being among the world’s five or six largest economies by nominal output — sixth on the IMF’s April 2026 projections after a base-year revision and rupee depreciation, with fourth place projected to return in 2027 — gives India convening power, a market others must consider and the resources for a serious military.
  • What it does not buy is per capita capacity, a technology base independent of others, or immunity from the export-control instruments larger economies wield — which is why economic determinants shape the tempo of Indian foreign policy more than they settle its direction.

Leadership as determinant

• Leadership is the determinant that operates fastest, because a change of leader can alter the reading of every other determinant without any of them having changed.
  • Kautilya’s Saptanga placed the ruler at the hub for exactly this reason.
  • Alexander and Juliette George made the modern version of the argument — that a leader’s personality and belief system filter the information reaching them and shape which options appear available.
  • The head of government also plays a two-level game, negotiating simultaneously with foreign counterparts and with the domestic audience whose ratification any agreement requires.
• Nehru held the external affairs portfolio himself alongside the premiership, and the fusion gave his personal worldview an unusually direct route into policy.
  • His liberal internationalism is visible in referring Kashmir to the United Nations, in leading the newly decolonised world through non-alignment, in recognising the People’s Republic early and supporting its claim to the Chinese seat at the Security Council.
• Indira Gandhi supplied the realist correction in person. The 1971 intervention in the Bangladesh liberation war was executed against visible American resistance, preceded by the treaty of peace, friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union that neutralised the diplomatic risk, and followed by the advance of the nuclear programme.
• Rajiv Gandhi’s unorthodoxy produced both the period’s largest failure and its most durable innovation. The Sri Lanka intervention was a strategic misjudgement that cost Indian lives and ultimately his own; the 1988 visit to Beijing established that the boundary question could be separated from the rest of the relationship, which made three decades of trade and dialogue possible.
• Two doctrines named for their authors state the liberal position in operational form.
  • The Gujral Doctrine held that India should extend non-reciprocal accommodation to smaller South Asian neighbours — asking nothing in return, since asymmetry means equivalence is impossible — and that no South Asian state should permit its territory to be used against another.
  • The Manmohan Doctrine held that India’s external policy should be subordinated to its development requirement: growth needs an open economy and a peaceful periphery, so the purpose of diplomacy is to secure the conditions for growth, including through settlement with Pakistan and integration with the global economy.
• Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee were the decision-makers on the two reorientations that defined the 1990s. Rao carried through liberalisation and its external corollaries — relations with Israel, engagement with ASEAN through the Look East policy, and the opening to the United States. Vajpayee took the nuclear decision in 1998 and then managed its diplomatic recovery.
• Harsh V. Pant’s account of the present is the standard one: the Prime Minister has become India’s own ambassador, selling the country and inviting investment in person, perceived as willing to move beyond settled dogmas, using soft power strategically for the first time and engaging the diaspora deliberately.
  • Pant’s own qualification is the important part: the underlying forces shaping Indian foreign policy have not altered radically, and leadership infuses dynamism within them rather than replacing them.
• The framing that names the shift is Jaishankar’s — India aspiring to be a leading power rather than merely a balancing one — and it is the formulation Harsh V. Pant uses to characterise the post-2014 period.
• The analytically right closing note is a caution. Leadership matters, and institutions should not be undermined in the course of exercising it.
  • A personalised foreign policy is fast, coherent and capable of decisions institutions would deliberate away — and it does not transfer. Relationships built on rapport depreciate when either principal leaves, and choices made without institutional deliberation leave no record for successors to work from.

External determinants as they bear on India

• Systemic structure sets the range of available choices, and India has operated within three configurations.
  • Bipolarity created a market for uncommitted states, which is what made non-alignment a viable posture rather than a gesture.
  • Unipolarity after 1991 removed that market and forced adjustment: India had to build a relationship with the sole remaining superpower without the leverage that a second suitor had provided.
  • Emergent multipolarity has restored plural suitors, which is what makes issue-based partnership possible; the concept is developed in the companion note on strategic autonomy and multi-alignment.
• The China-Pakistan alignment is the single most consequential external determinant of Indian foreign policy.
  • It converts what would otherwise be two manageable bilateral problems into a two-front problem, in which any Indian concentration against one adversary creates an opening for the other.
  • Its historical form was the American-Chinese-Pakistani alignment that consolidated around 1971 and made the Soviet relationship indispensable; its contemporary form is Chinese material support, the economic corridor through territory India claims, and diplomatic protection of Pakistan-based designations at the Security Council.
• Great-power behaviour has repeatedly opened and closed Indian options.
  • American arms supplies to Pakistan from the mid-1950s convinced India that alliance systems import external rivalries into South Asia.
  • The Sino-Soviet split made the Soviet Union a reliable partner against China, and the Soviet collapse removed that guarantee overnight.
  • Sino-American competition now supplies India with partners, technology access and capital it could not otherwise obtain, at the price of being read as a participant in a contest it does not wish to be defined by.
• The international economic and technology order constrains what a developing economy can attempt.
  • Technology-denial regimes after the 1974 test — the Nuclear Suppliers Group was created in response to it — and again after 1998, restricted access to dual-use technology for a quarter-century.
  • The long campaign for their reversal culminated in the 2008 waiver and membership of the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Wassenaar Arrangement and the Australia Group, with the Nuclear Suppliers Group still outstanding.
• The neighbourhood is a permanent external determinant that behaves like a domestic one. India’s global ambitions are, on the standard criticism, hostage to its regional record: a power that cannot secure acquiescence in its own region has difficulty being credited with more than regional weight.

Weighing the determinants

• A list of determinants explains everything and therefore predicts nothing. Every factor named here can be shown to have influenced some Indian decision, which is precisely why the interesting question is about weight rather than membership.
• The most defensible ordering is that geography and history set the frame, while economy and leadership set the tempo.
  • Geography and history are constant and constraining. They fix the adversaries, the frontier, the sea lanes and the founding suspicions, and no government has been able to legislate around them. They explain the continuities.
  • Economy and leadership are variable and enabling. They determine how much of the frame a given government can act on and how fast. They explain the changes.
  • Domestic politics and social structure are the filter. They rarely originate a policy, but they determine which of the available policies can survive being adopted — which is why they show up most clearly as vetoes.
  • External structure is the permissive condition. It does not tell India what to want; it determines whether what India wants is currently obtainable.

• The one determinant that has changed most is economic capacity; the one that has changed least is geography. Between them they explain the paradox with which this note began — an Indian foreign policy that looks discontinuous in its instruments and remarkably continuous in its objectives.
• The objective that survives all of them is the retention of decisional freedom. Every determinant discussed here has, at different moments, been marshalled in its defence: geography made dependence dangerous, history made alliance suspect, social structure made external commitment domestically costly, and economic growth has now made autonomy affordable in a way it was not before.