Institutions of Indian Foreign Policy Making: The Executive Core

No single institution and no single person holds exclusive authority over India’s foreign policy. Several actors — a ministry, a council, a cabinet, an office attached to the head of government, a uniformed establishment and a set of agencies that do not legally exist — together build the consensus from which policy emerges, and which of them dominates has varied by period and by issue. Across seven decades, however, the centre of gravity has moved in one direction only: towards the Prime Minister and the office that serves him.

The constitutional and legal foundation

India’s foreign-policy machinery rests on a constitutional design that is unusually permissive towards the executive. The Constitution assigns external relations wholly to the Union, vests the executive power in the President to be exercised on ministerial advice, and — crucially — imposes no requirement that any treaty be approved by the legislature before it binds the country. The result is that almost every question of institutional design in Indian foreign policy is a question about how the executive organises itself, not about how it is checked.

The Union List

• Entries 10 to 21 of the Union List (List I, Seventh Schedule) place the entire external domain beyond the reach of the states.
  • Entry 10 — foreign affairs, drafted as a residuary sweep: all matters which bring the Union into relation with any foreign country.
  • Entry 11 — diplomatic, consular and trade representation, the constitutional basis of the missions network and of the service that staffs it.
  • Entry 12 — the United Nations Organisation; Entry 13 — participation in international conferences, associations and other bodies, and the implementing of decisions taken there.
  • Entry 14 — treaties and agreements with foreign countries, and implementing them. This is the single most consequential entry in the list, and it says nothing about parliamentary consent.
  • Entry 15 — war and peace; Entry 16 — foreign jurisdiction; Entry 17 — citizenship, naturalisation and aliens; Entry 18 — extradition.
  • Entry 19 — admission into, and emigration from, India, including passports and visas; Entry 20 — pilgrimages to places outside India; Entry 21 — piracy and crimes committed on the high seas or in the air.
• Read together, these entries mean that foreign policy is a Union subject without qualification.
  • States have no constitutional entry point of their own, which is why their growing external activity has to be handled administratively rather than as a matter of right. (The federal dimension is developed in the companion note on Parliament, the states and the judiciary.)

The executive power and the treaty power

Provision	What it establishes	Practical consequence
Article 53	Executive power of the Union vested in the President, exercised directly or through subordinate officers	The President accredits and receives ambassadors and treaties are concluded in his name — a formal, not a deciding, role
Article 74	A Council of Ministers with the Prime Minister at the head to aid and advise the President, and that advice is binding	Real foreign-policy authority sits with the political executive, and within it with the Prime Minister
Article 73	Union executive power is co-extensive with Parliament’s legislative power	Because Parliament can legislate on Entry 14, the executive can make treaties without any enabling statute — this is the constitutional source of the treaty power
Article 253	Parliament may legislate for the whole or any part of India to implement any treaty, agreement or convention	Treaty-making is executive and unconstrained; treaty-implementation is parliamentary wherever domestic law must change
Article 246 with List I	Entries 10–21 as above	Exclusive Union competence over the entire external field
Article 77	Business of the Union to be allocated among ministers by rules made by the President	The basis of the Allocation of Business Rules and the Transaction of Business Rules
Article 51	Directive Principle: promotion of international peace and security, respect for international law and treaty obligations, settlement of disputes by arbitration	A non-justiciable statement of purpose rather than an operative constraint

• Article 51 is the Constitution’s only declaration of foreign-policy purpose, and it is deliberately hortatory: it directs the state to endeavour, not to obey. Its philosophical lineage — Gandhian internationalism, the anti-colonial inheritance and the later articulation of Panchsheel — is taken up in the companion note on the determinants of Indian foreign policy.
• The gap between Article 73 and Article 253 is the hinge of the whole system.
  • The executive may sign and ratify anything; but where a treaty requires a change in Indian law, Parliament must legislate, and until it does the treaty binds India internationally while doing nothing domestically.
  • India therefore follows a broadly dualist approach to international law alongside a monist executive practice in treaty-making.

The Allocation of Business Rules and the Transaction of Business Rules

• The Government of India (Allocation of Business) Rules, 1961, made under Article 77(3), are the instrument that actually gives the Ministry of External Affairs its subject matter. The Constitution creates no ministry; a rule does.
  • The MEA’s entry assigns it external affairs and all matters which bring India into relation with any foreign country, along with passports and visas, consular functions, diplomatic and consular representation, and the conduct of relations with international organisations.
  • Other external-facing subjects sit elsewhere by the same rules: trade negotiations with Commerce, international financial institutions with Finance, defence cooperation with Defence — which is where the coordination problem is born, in a rulebook rather than in a design failure.
• The Government of India (Transaction of Business) Rules, 1961 structure how decisions are actually taken: which matters must go to the Cabinet, which may be disposed of by a minister, which require inter-ministerial consultation, and how Cabinet Committees operate as the Cabinet for their assigned subjects.
  • It is under these rules that the Cabinet Committee on Security exercises the Cabinet’s authority on defence and strategic questions without the full Cabinet ever meeting on them.
  • It is also under these rules that the Cabinet Secretariat circulates papers, records decisions and monitors implementation — the coordinating spine of the executive.

The absent check

The single structural fact that most distinguishes Indian foreign-policy making from the American is the absence of any equivalent of the United States Senate’s advice-and-consent power over treaties. It is a design choice inherited from Westminster and reinforced by the fusion of executive and legislature, and it is why every section that follows is about how the executive organises itself.

• An Indian government may conclude, sign and ratify an international agreement without a vote, and may commit forces without formal legislative authorisation.
• Parliament’s guaranteed entry points are only the implementing legislation, the budget, and the ordinary mechanisms of question, debate and committee scrutiny.
• (The parliamentary side of that argument — the Standing Committee on External Affairs, budgetary control, and the episodes where the legislature did bite — belongs to the companion note on Parliament, the states and the judiciary.)

The Constitution gives the executive an unconditional treaty power and gives Parliament only the task of implementing what the executive has already agreed.

The Prime Minister and the Prime Minister’s Office

• The Prime Minister has been the decisive actor in Indian foreign policy since 1947, almost without exception.
  • Every significant foreign-policy and national-security decision requires prime ministerial approval before implementation, whichever ministry originates it.
  • The pattern holds across coalition governments and single-party majorities alike: P.V. Narasimha Rao ran the opening to Israel and the Look East turn from his own office; Vajpayee took the Pokhran II decision within a very small circle; Manmohan Singh personally owned the civil nuclear agreement against resistance inside his own coalition.
  • The formulation that best captures it is that on every major external question, the decision stops at the Prime Minister’s door.

Nehru and the fusion of the two offices

• Jawaharlal Nehru held the External Affairs portfolio himself for seventeen years, from 1947 until his death in 1964 — the founding fact of India’s foreign-policy institutions.
  • Fusing the two offices meant that the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, not the ministry, became the centre of foreign-policy decision-making from the outset; the MEA grew up as a staff organisation for a Prime Minister rather than as an autonomous department of state.
  • It also meant that personal judgement substituted for institutional process in the first two decades — an arrangement that worked while the judgement was good and was exposed when it was not.
  • The consequence outlasted the man. Even after the portfolios separated, the expectation that the Prime Minister personally conducts the most important relationships had already hardened into practice.

From Secretariat to PMO

• The office has grown steadily in authority under every incumbent, and the growth has been institutional rather than merely personal.
  • Under Nehru and Shastri it was the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, headed by a Joint Secretary and modest in size, though already central because of the portfolio fusion.
  • Under Indira Gandhi the post of Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister was created and the Secretariat became a genuine power centre — P.N. Haksar’s tenure around the 1971 war is the standard illustration of an office out-weighing a ministry.
  • It was renamed the Prime Minister’s Office in 1977 under Morarji Desai, a change of name intended to signal a reduction of its authority which in practice reduced nothing.
  • Since then the PMO has coordinated the Cabinet, the Cabinet Committees and the Council of Ministers, resolving interdepartmental obstruction in both domestic and external policy — and has frequently bypassed all three where speed or secrecy was preferred.

Composition and working method

• The PMO’s authority is strikingly disproportionate to its size — a few dozen officers at senior level, against ministries of thousands.
  • The Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, currently P.K. Mishra, is its head and the government’s most senior civil servant in practice if not in protocol.
  • The National Security Adviser sits within the PMO structure, which is what makes the NSA an extension of prime ministerial authority rather than an independent adviser.
  • Below them sit Additional and Joint Secretaries handling assigned subject areas, an Additional Principal Secretary, and specialised units for grievances, project monitoring and appointments.
  • Its instruments are the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet, control over the flow of files to the Prime Minister, and direct access — none of which appear in any statute.
• The PMO has no independent capacity to draft, negotiate or implement. It has no missions, no desk officers, no legal division, no consular machinery. It directs; it cannot execute. This is the fact that decides the PMO–MEA question below.

Summit and personal diplomacy

• Summit diplomacy is the mechanism through which prime ministerial dominance has deepened, because it moves the decisive conversation to a level only the head of government can occupy.
  • The multilateral summit calendar — G20, BRICS, SCO, East Asia Summit, Quad Leaders’ Summit, COP, the Voice of the Global South Summit — is attended by heads of government, so the ministry can prepare a position but cannot hold the meeting.
  • The informal-summit format with China at Wuhan (2018) and Mamallapuram (2019) deliberately stripped away agenda, delegation and communiqué in favour of leader-to-leader conversation — the purest form of the shift, and one that leaves the ministry with little to record.
  • Personal rapport as a diplomatic instrument has been used consciously: named leader-level formats, repeated bilateral visits, and the practice of addressing diaspora audiences abroad as an adjunct to the state visit.
  • The tempo itself matters. A Prime Minister travelling several dozen times a term, meeting counterparts many times a year, accumulates relationships that no institution can transfer to a successor.
• The Prime Minister also controls appointments of Ambassadors and High Commissioners, though the formal letter of appointment is issued by the President as Head of State — a division that captures the wider pattern of formal presidential authority over substantive prime ministerial decision.

The Ministry of External Affairs and the PMO: displacement or fusion?

The proposition that the MEA is losing importance as the PMO rises is a real argument with real evidence behind it, and it is worth testing rather than asserting. The evidence runs in both directions, and the honest conclusion is neither that the ministry has been hollowed out nor that nothing has changed.

The case that the PMO has displaced the MEA	The case against
The NSA has become the principal negotiator on the most sensitive files — the China boundary question, Pakistan back-channels, Afghanistan, and key Gulf relationships — displacing the Foreign Secretary from files that were once hers	The NSA sits within the PMO but works through the ministry: the drafting, legal vetting, record-keeping and follow-through are all the MEA’s
Decision has concentrated in a small circle around the Prime Minister; major initiatives are announced from the PMO and the ministry is left to operationalise them	The MEA has expanded institutionally — new functional divisions, new missions, a larger budget in absolute terms, and a wider remit than at any earlier point
Non-career figures have been appointed to key external roles, and the ministry’s monopoly on foreign-policy expertise has been broken	S. Jaishankar’s elevation in 2019 from Foreign Secretary to Cabinet-rank External Affairs Minister put a career diplomat at the political apex — the strongest single counter-example
The Prime Minister personally owns major relationships, so counterparts route around the ministry to reach him	The PMO has no executive capacity of its own — no missions, no negotiators, no implementation machinery; it can only direct the ministry
There are documented instances of the ministry learning of decisions late, particularly on neighbourhood initiatives announced at leader level	PMO centrality is a constant, not a change — it has been true since Nehru fused the portfolios in 1947, so it cannot describe a recent decline

• The better description is fusion rather than displacement: a PMO that sets direction and an MEA that supplies capacity, operating as a single machine with two ends.
  • The relationship’s success depends on the degree of coordination between the two, which is why periods of friction produce visibly worse outcomes than periods of alignment.
  • What has genuinely changed is not the ministry’s importance but its autonomy — it retains its functions while losing discretion over which questions it decides for itself.
• The real question is a capacity question, not a turf question. An increasingly ambitious PMO generates far more demand for negotiation, drafting, follow-up and implementation than an under-resourced ministry of roughly a thousand career diplomats can service — and it is that mismatch, not any institutional rivalry, that constrains Indian diplomacy.

The PMO has not taken the ministry’s work away from it; it has multiplied the work and left the ministry the same establishment with which to do it.

The Ministry of External Affairs

• The MEA is the pivotal executing institution of India’s external relations, empowered by the Allocation of Business Rules with planning, formulating and managing India’s relations with other countries so as to protect and promote the national interest.
• It is not, and was never designed to be, the sole author of policy. The right analytical description is the foreign-policy secretariat: it receives inputs from many sources, analyses them, channels options upward to the political leadership, and then implements what is decided at that apex level.
  • Getting this framing right matters, because most criticism of the ministry attacks it for failing at a role — originating strategy — that the system never allocated to it.
  • What the ministry monopolises is negotiation, representation, drafting and implementation — functions no other body in the Indian state can perform.

Where the ministry’s inputs come from

• Diplomatic missions abroad are the primary source: embassies in most capitals, high commissions in Commonwealth countries, permanent missions to the United Nations and other multilateral bodies, and consulates for consular and commercial work.
• Other ministries, departments and agencies feed in on their own subjects — Commerce on trade, Finance on the international financial institutions, Defence on military cooperation, the intelligence agencies on assessment.
• Think tanks and research bodies, of which the two closest to government are the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), supported by the MEA itself, and the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA), supported by the Ministry of Defence.
• Industry associations — CII, FICCI and ASSOCHAM — supply commercial intelligence and are used as instruments of economic diplomacy in return.
• Universities, academic institutions and individual subject specialists, whose influence is real but episodic. (The wider ecosystem of think tanks, media and business as informal foreign-policy actors is the subject of the companion note on non-state influences.)

The divisional structure

• The ministry is organised on two axes at once, which is the standard design for a foreign office.
  • Territorial divisions handle relations with a defined region or group of countries and are the ministry’s line function — the desks that run the bilateral relationships.
  • Functional divisions handle a subject across all regions, and it is here that the ministry has visibly restructured itself as new issues have arrived.
• The functionally significant divisions, and why each exists:
  • Counter-Terrorism Division — coordination on terrorist designations, extradition, mutual legal assistance and India’s positions in multilateral counter-terrorism forums.
  • Cyber Diplomacy Division — internet governance, cyber norms, data and the security dimension of digital technology, a subject that did not exist as diplomacy a generation ago.
  • E-Governance and Information Technology Division — the ministry’s own digital delivery, including the systems behind passport and consular services.
  • Economic Diplomacy Division — the promotion of trade, investment and Indian business abroad through the missions.
  • Multilateral Economic Relations (MER) Division — India’s positions in the WTO, the G20 and the international economic institutions.
  • Disarmament and International Security Affairs (D&ISA) Division — non-proliferation, export controls, the multilateral disarmament machinery, and India’s candidature for the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the associated regimes.
  • Development Partnership Administration (DPA) — created in 2012 to consolidate India’s aid, lines of credit, grant projects and capacity-building programmes, which had previously been scattered across territorial divisions.
  • States Division — the interface with state governments on their external engagement, a division whose creation is itself evidence of how far sub-national activity has grown. (Paradiplomacy proper belongs to the companion note on Parliament, the states and the judiciary.)
  • Policy Planning and Research Division — the ministry’s in-house long-term thinking function, and one whose small size and limited influence are a standing criticism.
  • External Publicity Division and the Public Diplomacy Division — dissemination of India’s positions and engagement with foreign publics; the latter, together with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, is treated in depth in the companion note on soft power and public diplomacy.
• The proliferation of functional divisions is the ministry’s real institutional history over the last two decades — not a change in its constitutional position, but a steady widening of what counts as diplomacy.

Consular, passport and diaspora work

• The MEA is the primary department for all passport, visa and consular matters, and this is a much larger share of its actual workload and staffing than any account centred on grand strategy would suggest.
  • It pilots passport and visa policy, issues passports through the Passport Seva programme and its network of Passport Seva Kendras, and provides consular services to Indian nationals at home and abroad.
  • The External Affairs Minister is the principal authority for visas to foreign nationals coming to India for tourism, business, study or medical treatment.
  • Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) cards are issued largely through the missions abroad to eligible persons of Indian origin.
  • All diaspora questions, including the safety and security of Indian nationals abroad, sit within the ministry’s policy remit.
• This matters analytically, not just descriptively.
  • A ministry of roughly a thousand career officers that must also run a mass citizen-services operation for a diaspora of about 35 million people spends a large share of its scarce professional attention on transactional work.
  • That burden is a substantial part of the capacity problem and is rarely counted when the capacity problem is discussed.

Evacuation and crisis response

• Repeated crises have made large-scale evacuation of Indian nationals an operational capability the ministry has built deliberately, and it is now one of the most visible things the ministry does.

Operation	Year	Theatre
Kuwait airlift	1990	Evacuation of over 170,000 Indians from Kuwait and Iraq — still among the largest civilian airlifts ever conducted
Operation Raahat	2015	Yemen; Indians and several thousand foreign nationals evacuated by air and sea
Vande Bharat Mission	2020–22	Global, during the COVID-19 pandemic; the largest repatriation exercise India has run
Operation Ganga	2022	Ukraine, after the Russian invasion, largely through neighbouring countries’ borders
Operation Kaveri	2023	Sudan, during the civil conflict, via Port Sudan and Jeddah
Operation Ajay	2023	Israel, after the outbreak of the Gaza conflict
Operation Sindhu	2025	Iran and Israel during the June hostilities; over 4,400 Indians flown home in nineteen special flights

• The pattern in these operations is instructive: they are executed by the missions with the armed forces and civil aviation, coordinated from a crisis cell in the ministry, and directed politically from the PMO — a compact illustration of how the whole machine actually works together.
• They are also the ministry’s most reliable source of domestic political credit, which has consequences for how resources inside it are prioritised.

The Indian Foreign Service and the capacity problem

The size of the Indian Foreign Service is the central institutional fact, and almost every other weakness in the system can be traced back to it. A state with a permanent seat ambition, a two-front security problem, a global diaspora and a trade agenda spanning several continents runs its external relations on a professional cadre smaller than that of several middle powers.

• Origins and structure.
  • The service was constituted on 9 October 1946, before independence, out of the Indian Political Service and the diplomatic branch of the colonial administration.
  • IFS(A) is the diplomatic cadre, recruited through the Civil Services Examination, running from Third Secretary to Foreign Secretary.
  • IFS(B) comprises the general, stenographic and cypher cadres recruited separately, which staff the chanceries and consular sections and without which no mission functions.
  • Training runs through the Sushma Swaraj Institute of Foreign Service in New Delhi, with language training, attachments and a compulsory foreign language for each officer.
• The numbers, stated precisely.
  • 954 IFS officers as of 1 December 2025, of whom 263 are women and 200 belong to Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe categories, as stated in a written reply to the Lok Sabha on 13 December 2025.
  • The sanctioned strength of the IFS(A) cadre is about 1,177, with the IFS(B) cadres several times larger; the two figures count different things — in-position officers against sanctioned posts — and the gap between them is itself the vacancy problem.
  • The working figure is therefore roughly a thousand career diplomats, and annual intake through the examination has historically run in the thirties.
• The comparison that makes the point. India runs more than 200 diplomatic missions and posts abroad on this establishment.

Country	Approximate professional/foreign-service strength	Posts abroad
India	~1,000 career IFS(A) officers	200+
United States	~14,000 Foreign Service employees, plus civil service and locally engaged staff	~270
China	5,000+ diplomats and support personnel	~274
United Kingdom	~17,500 staff in the diplomatic service and its development arm	~280

• The comparison is not exact — the services count different categories — but the order of magnitude is not in dispute, and it is an order of magnitude, not a margin.

The budget

• The MEA’s allocation for 2026-27 is ₹22,118 crore, against ₹20,516 crore in 2025-26 — an increase of nearly 8% in nominal terms.
• As a share of central government expenditure it is roughly 0.41%, essentially unchanged year on year and down from about 0.69% in 2017-18. The ministry ranks around twenty-third among Union ministries by allocation.
  • Measured against national income, India spends about 0.06% of GDP on external affairs, against several times that in comparable states.
  • The Standing Committee on External Affairs has repeatedly described the allocation as inadequate to India’s stature and has recommended an increase of at least 20%, identifying human resources, mission operations and diplomatic real estate as the areas of urgent need.
• The composition of the budget matters more than its size. The largest single head is the Overseas Development Partnership vertical at ₹6,997 crore — over 31% of the ministry’s budget.
  • Neighbourhood assistance dominates it: Bhutan ₹2,288.56 crore, Nepal ₹800 crore, Maldives and Mauritius ₹550 crore each, Sri Lanka ₹400 crore, Afghanistan ₹150 crore and Bangladesh ₹60 crore in 2026-27.
  • The implication is uncomfortable: a third of the foreign ministry’s money is development assistance rather than diplomatic capacity. The line that is described as underfunding diplomacy is in part a transfer of aid through a diplomatic budget head.

The consequences of thin capacity

• Multilateral bandwidth is the first casualty. Trade, climate, digital governance and disarmament negotiations run in parallel across several cities and demand sustained technical presence; a small service cannot field specialist teams in all of them simultaneously.
• Generalists cover too many files. An officer may run a bilateral desk, a functional subject and a consular load at once, which produces competence spread thin rather than expertise concentrated.
• Policy planning is structurally weak. The Policy Planning and Research Division is small and its output has limited traction against the pull of daily operations — an institution that plans is the first thing an overstretched ministry sacrifices.
• Institutional memory is thin. Frequent rotation, limited archival and research support and the absence of a strong doctrinal tradition mean that positions are often rebuilt rather than inherited.
• The ambition-capacity gap is the summary charge: a state pursuing a global role cannot service it on this establishment, and each new initiative — a new mission, a new plurilateral, a new corridor — is added to the same officers.

The reform debate

• Expansion of intake is the obvious remedy and the most contested. Successive committees have urged a substantially larger cadre; the counter is that absorption capacity is limited — training, housing, supervision and career progression all constrain how fast a small service can grow without diluting quality.
• Lateral entry and domain expertise — economists, trade lawyers, technologists and area specialists brought in at senior levels — is argued for on the ground that modern diplomacy is increasingly technical. The ministry has experimented with contractual and consultant appointments rather than structural lateral entry.
• Specialisation against the generalist tradition is the underlying question. Dedicated economic and technology tracks would build depth, at the cost of the rotational versatility on which a small service depends.
• The quality argument is the serious counterpoint: Indian diplomats are widely held to punch above their establishment, delivering outcomes — the 2023 G20 consensus declaration among them — that larger services would struggle to match. But this is an argument about efficiency under constraint, not a reason to keep the constraint.

A foreign service of a thousand officers is not a small detail of administration; it is the single hardest limit on what Indian foreign policy can attempt.

The National Security Council system

• The National Security Council (NSC) is the apex body advising the government on national security, foreign policy and defence, though the final decisions rest with the Prime Minister and the Cabinet.
• Over the past two decades it has become an important stakeholder in shaping foreign and security policy — less as a deliberating council than through the office and the secretariat attached to it.

Origins

• The idea long preceded the institution. A national security council was proposed at intervals from the 1960s onwards, and a short-lived body was set up in 1990 and lapsed.
• The NSC as it exists was constituted in November 1998 under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, in the months after Pokhran II, on the recommendation of a task force on national security appointed by the government.
• The gap it was meant to fill was structural, not personnel.
  • India had no standing forum in which military, diplomatic, intelligence and economic assessments were brought together before a decision, so crisis responses were assembled ad hoc.
  • It was intended to enable strategic rather than reactive decision-making, ending the pattern of knee-jerk response to events.
  • It was also meant to be a bridge between civil and military planning, in a system where the two had been kept deliberately apart since independence.
• The Kargil conflict of 1999 and the Kargil Review Committee that followed accelerated the build-out of the surrounding machinery, particularly the National Security Council Secretariat.

Composition of the Council

• The Council is chaired by the Prime Minister and brings together the political and official apex of the security establishment.
  • The Ministers of External Affairs, Defence, Home Affairs and Finance — the same four who sit on the Cabinet Committee on Security, which is one reason the two bodies blur into each other.
  • The National Security Adviser, who is also Secretary to the Council, the Additional NSA and the Deputy NSAs.
  • The Chief of Defence Staff, whose inclusion after 2019 is the formal end of the exclusion of uniformed advice from the apex forum.
  • The Vice-Chairman of NITI Aayog, reflecting the economic dimension of security.
  • Others are invited as the subject requires — service chiefs, intelligence heads, or the secretaries of concerned ministries.
• The Council is a three-tier organisation, and the tiers do genuinely different work.

Tier	Level	Function
National Security Council	Political	Apex deliberation; chaired by the Prime Minister; meets rarely
Strategic Policy Group	Official	The top decision-making body at official level; chaired by the NSA since 2018; principal coordination mechanism
National Security Advisory Board	Non-official	Long-term analysis and outside perspective; no operational role
Joint Intelligence Committee	Official	Inter-agency intelligence assessment, as distinct from collection

The Strategic Policy Group

• The Strategic Policy Group (SPG) is the principal coordination mechanism of the NSC system and its top decision-making body at the official level.
  • Its remit is the formulation and implementation of India’s strategic policies, including long-term military doctrine, and the continuous review of the national and international security environment so that emerging threats can be addressed before they mature.
  • Its membership is drawn from the apex of the permanent government.
  • The Cabinet Secretary, the Foreign, Defence, Home and Finance Secretaries, the Chief of Defence Staff and the three service chiefs.
  • The heads of R&AW and the Intelligence Bureau, the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, the head of the DRDO and the Secretary of the Department of Space.
  • The Governor of the Reserve Bank of India — an inclusion that marks how far economic questions are now treated as security questions.
• The chairmanship changed in 2018, and the change is analytically important. The SPG was reconstituted in October 2018 with the National Security Adviser as chairman, replacing the Cabinet Secretary who had chaired it since its creation, with the Vice-Chairman of NITI Aayog as deputy chairman.
  • Under the earlier arrangement the SPG sat within the regular civil-service hierarchy, coordinated by the head of the permanent bureaucracy and answerable through it.
  • Under the present arrangement it is chaired by an appointee of the Prime Minister holding no departmental responsibility, which sharpens coordination and simultaneously moves the whole apparatus further inside the PMO.
  • This single change explains much of the NSA’s transformation from coordinator to commanding figure.

The National Security Advisory Board

• The National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) is the system’s only institutional channel for expertise from outside government.
  • Its members are academics, scientists, retired diplomats, retired service officers, former intelligence officials and administrative experts, appointed for fixed terms.
  • Its function is long-term analysis and perspective on national security and development — not operational advice, and not crisis management.
• Its single most significant output is the draft nuclear doctrine of 1999, which the Board prepared and which set out no first use, credible minimum deterrence and civilian control of the arsenal — the framework subsequently adopted, with modifications, as India’s operational doctrine in 2003.
• The Board was reconstituted on 30 April 2025 with fifteen members, chaired by the former R&AW chief Alok Joshi.
  • Its membership spans the services and the diplomatic and intelligence establishments — among them Ambassador B. Venkatesh Varma, Pankaj Saran, A.B. Mathur, Bimal Patel, Air Marshal P.M. Sinha, Lt Gen A.K. Singh, Vice Admiral P.S. Cheema and Rear Admiral Monty Khanna.
  • The timing is worth noting: the reconstitution came days after the Pahalgam attack of 22 April 2025 and immediately before the operations that followed.
• The Board’s record is the clearest evidence of weak institutionalisation in the whole system.
  • It has lapsed or lain dormant for extended periods between reconstitutions, and its advice has frequently gone unused.
  • Its revival has tended to follow crises rather than run continuously, which is the opposite of what a long-term analytical body is for.

The Joint Intelligence Committee and the NSC Secretariat

• The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) performs intelligence assessment as distinct from intelligence collection — the analytical layer that turns agency reporting into a single national picture.
  • It receives inputs from the Intelligence Bureau, R&AW and the Directorates of Military, Naval and Air Intelligence.
  • It is tasked with inter-agency coordination and analysis, and is chaired by a senior officer of the Cabinet Secretariat, usually of Additional Secretary rank, with representation from the MEA, Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Home Affairs and the agencies.
  • It can task the agencies to collect against specific requirements arising from government demand, which makes it a directing body and not merely a receiving one.
• The standing question is what remains of it. The National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS), built out after 1998 and expanded steadily since, has absorbed much of the assessment function.
  • The NSCS is headed by the NSA and organised in verticals covering strategic planning, internal affairs, intelligence and technology, and military affairs, with Deputy NSAs drawn from the foreign service, the police service and the armed forces, a Military Adviser and a National Maritime Security Coordinator.
  • An Additional NSA post was activated in 2024, a further sign of the secretariat’s growth.
  • The result is a duplication that has never been resolved: two assessment structures, one under the Cabinet Secretariat and one under the NSA, with the second steadily displacing the first.

The National Security Adviser

• The office that has actually grown is not the Council but the Adviser. Created alongside the NSC in 1998, the NSA was conceived as a coordinator of the security establishment and has become the government’s most senior security interlocutor and, on the hardest files, its principal negotiator.
  • Brajesh Mishra, the first NSA, held the post together with Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, fusing security advice with the machinery of the PMO from the very beginning.
  • The two posts were separated after 2004, but the NSA remained inside the PMO structure and retained direct access.
  • Ajit Doval, NSA since 2014 and reappointed in 2024, holds the post with Cabinet rank and chairs the Strategic Policy Group — a concentration of authority no previous incumbent had.
  • The NSA now handles the Special Representatives dialogue on the China boundary question, back-channel contacts with Pakistan, Afghanistan policy and key Gulf relationships, in each case work that would once have been the Foreign Secretary’s.
• The constitutional objection is a serious one.
  • The NSA holds an office of very great power that is not created by statute, not accountable to Parliament, and not subject to any confirmation process.
  • The incumbent is appointed by the Prime Minister, serves at pleasure, answers to no committee, and can be neither questioned nor summoned.

Assessment: what the Council has and has not achieved

The question the NSC is really asked is whether it has changed how India decides. The fair answer is that it has changed the machinery around the decision far more than the decision itself.

What the NSC has delivered	Where it has fallen short
Institutionalised strategic thinking — a standing structure for assessment rather than assembly of a response after each crisis	No statutory backing, unlike the American National Security Council created by the National Security Act of 1947; it exists by executive order and can be reshaped or ignored at will
A forum for departmental and expert input, drawing ministries, services, agencies and outside specialists into a common frame	It meets irregularly, and Council-level meetings chaired by the Prime Minister are rare — the tier that gives the body its name is the tier that functions least
Assistance to the Prime Minister in taking security decisions with better-organised information	It is overshadowed by the Cabinet Committee on Security, where the consequential decisions are actually taken, and by the NSA personally, who has absorbed much of its purpose
A bridge between civil and military planning, reinforced by the Chief of Defence Staff’s inclusion	The NSAB’s advice has often gone unused, and the Board has been allowed to lapse between reconstitutions
Support to the National Command Authority with intelligence and advice on the nuclear question	Inter-ministerial coordination — the problem it was created to solve — remains the recurrent weakness

• The case that the NSC needs legislative backing rests on accountability: a body of this consequence operating purely on executive authority has, as the criticism runs, arbitrary independence without an accountability check. A statutory charter would fix its composition, mandate a meeting cycle and create a reporting obligation.
• India has never published a national security strategy, which is the most striking omission in the whole apparatus; no other major power organises its security establishment around an unwritten set of priorities.
  • Successive drafts have been prepared within the NSCS without being issued.
  • The counter-argument, made from inside the establishment, is that a written strategy sacrifices flexibility and telegraphs intent.
• The reform agenda that follows is therefore fairly settled in outline: a statutory basis, a mandated meeting cycle, a published strategy, a continuously functioning advisory board, and some form of parliamentary oversight. Almost none of it has been acted on.
• The setting makes the stakes plain: two adversarial neighbours, a persistent external terrorism threat, and internal challenges from left-wing extremism to radicalisation and economic offences — a combination that requires exactly the standing, integrated assessment the NSC was designed to supply.

The Cabinet and the Cabinet Committee on Security

• The Cabinet is the constitutionally supreme decision-making body of the government and formally determines the course of India’s external relations by giving directions to the ministries.
  • Cabinet ministers are the Prime Minister’s most trusted colleagues, and their advice weighs most heavily in crisis, when the circle of decision narrows to a handful of people.
  • Measures to strengthen external security are settled in consultation between the Ministries of Home Affairs, Defence and External Affairs; questions of foreign trade and investment between Commerce and Industry, Finance and External Affairs.
• The Cabinet works through committees, whose function is to examine the activities of the ministries in their subject and issue policy directives to them. Under the Transaction of Business Rules a committee’s decision is the Cabinet’s decision.

The Cabinet Committee on Security

• The Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) is the apex decision body on defence, security and strategic matters, and in practice the body where the most consequential external decisions are actually taken.
  • Its members are the Prime Minister, who chairs it, and the Ministers of Home Affairs, Defence, External Affairs and Finance — a deliberately small group.
  • It decides on major defence acquisitions, on the deployment and use of force, on the response to security crises, and on questions with implications for India’s strategic posture.
  • It clears senior appointments in the security establishment, including the service chiefs, the heads of the intelligence agencies and the Chief of Defence Staff.
  • Its decisions after the Pahalgam attack in April 2025 — and the authorisation of the operations that followed — are the clearest recent illustration of where such decisions are made.
• The CCS, not the Cabinet, is the real apex. The full Cabinet is typically informed rather than consulted on security questions, and cabinet government in foreign policy is therefore largely formal; the substantive locus is the CCS above and the PMO around it.

The other committees and the Cabinet Secretariat

• The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) takes decisions with substantial external consequence — investment approvals, trade-related measures, and the economic content of external agreements.
• No cabinet committee deals exclusively with foreign affairs, which is itself revealing: external policy is handled as a dimension of security and of economics rather than as a subject in its own right.
  • The External Affairs Minister sits on both the Committee on Security and the Committee on Economic Affairs, which is how the ministry’s perspective enters decisions taken elsewhere.
• The Cabinet Secretariat, headed by the Cabinet Secretary, services all of this — circulating papers, securing inter-ministerial consultation, recording decisions and monitoring implementation.
  • The Cabinet Secretary remains the senior-most civil servant and the formal coordinator of the permanent government.
  • On security matters, however, the shift of the Strategic Policy Group’s chairmanship to the NSA in 2018 moved a substantial part of that coordinating role out of the Secretariat.

The armed forces, the Chief of Defence Staff and the defence establishment

India inherited and then deliberately maintained a sharp civil-military separation, in which the services advised on operations while strategy was settled by civilians without them in the room. That arrangement, defended for decades as a safeguard of civilian supremacy, produced a distinctive institutional weakness: military advice arrived after the political decision rather than before it.

• The traditional exclusion of the services from strategic decision-making is the standing criticism of the Indian system.
  • The service headquarters were attached offices of the Ministry of Defence rather than part of it, so the uniformed leadership sat outside the policy machinery by design.
  • The service chiefs were reportedly not consulted before major decisions — the 1962 border policy and the 1998 nuclear tests are the usual illustrations — and the pattern of finding out afterwards recurred often enough to be structural rather than accidental.
  • The Chiefs of Staff Committee, chaired by the senior-most chief in rotation, provided joint advice in principle but had no permanent head, no staff of its own and no authority over the services.

The Chief of Defence Staff and the Department of Military Affairs

• The post of Chief of Defence Staff was created in 2019, two decades after it was first recommended.
  • The Kargil Review Committee (1999) and the Group of Ministers (2001) that acted on it had both recommended a CDS; the recommendation was blocked for years by inter-service and political resistance, and was revived by the Naresh Chandra Committee (2012) and the Shekatkar Committee (2016).
  • General Bipin Rawat became the first CDS on 31 December 2019; after his death in December 2021 the post was filled by General Anil Chauhan in September 2022, and Lt Gen N.S. Raja Subramani took over as the third CDS on 31 May 2026.
• The Department of Military Affairs (DMA) is the structural change that matters more than the appointment.
  • Created alongside the post, it is a department within the Ministry of Defence headed by the CDS as its ex-officio Secretary — the first time a serving officer has held a secretary-level position inside the ministry.
  • It brought the three service headquarters, the Integrated Defence Staff and the Territorial Army into the ministry, ending the attached-office arrangement.
  • The CDS is Permanent Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, principal military adviser to the Defence Minister on tri-service matters, and exercises authority over the Defence Cyber Agency, the Defence Space Agency and the Armed Forces Special Operations Division.
  • The CDS’s membership of the National Security Council completes the change: uniformed advice is now formally present at the apex.
• Theatre commands are the unfinished part of the reform.
  • The case for reorganising seventeen single-service commands into a small number of integrated theatre commands has been accepted in principle for years.
  • A plan for a Northern (China-facing), Western (Pakistan-facing) and Maritime theatre command was worked through the services and moved to government review in 2026, requiring Cabinet Committee on Security clearance before an implementation that would itself take years.
  • Until it is done, jointness remains an intention rather than an operating structure.

Defence diplomacy

• Defence policy has become an integral part of diplomacy rather than an adjunct to it, and the military is now a foreign-policy instrument in its own right.
  • Defence attachés in the missions, whose numbers were expanded substantially in 2023–24 with new postings in Africa, South-East Asia and the Indian Ocean.
  • Joint exercises as relationship management — Malabar with the Quad partners, Yudh Abhyas with the United States, Indra with Russia, Varuna with France — each of which carries a political signal beyond its military content.
  • Training slots for foreign officers at Indian defence institutions, one of the oldest and most durable forms of influence in the neighbourhood and in Africa.
  • Defence lines of credit and equipment transfers to partner states, and arms exports as a diplomatic tool — the BrahMos contract with the Philippines being the most-cited instance of a capability sale carrying a strategic message.
• Procurement has direct foreign-policy consequences.
  • The Russian legacy in the inventory — air defence, aircraft, submarines and spares — creates a dependence that constrains diplomatic room, most visibly in the sanctions exposure created by major purchases.
  • Diversification towards French, American, Israeli and increasingly domestic sources is a strategic choice as much as a technical one, and indigenisation under the Atmanirbhar programmes is partly an attempt to reduce the diplomatic cost of dependence.

The intelligence agencies

• India’s intelligence structure is functionally complete and legally invisible — a set of powerful organisations, none of which was created by an Act of Parliament.
  • The Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) is the external intelligence agency, created in 1968 by executive order after the failures of the 1962 war with China and the 1965 war with Pakistan exposed the inadequacy of a single combined agency.
    • It reports to the Cabinet Secretariat and, in practice, to the Prime Minister through the NSA.
  • The Intelligence Bureau (IB), the oldest of them, is nominally the internal agency under the Ministry of Home Affairs but retains significant external functions, particularly in the immediate neighbourhood.
  • The Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), established in 2002 on a Group of Ministers recommendation, integrates the Directorates of Military, Naval and Air Intelligence, and provides assessment to the CDS and the Ministry of Defence.
  • The National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), set up in 2004, is the technical intelligence agency, covering signals, imagery, cyber and satellite collection.
  • The service intelligence directorates continue to serve their own commands alongside the DIA.
• Their two contributions to foreign policy are quite different in kind.
  • Assessment — the analytical product that reaches the JIC, the NSCS and the political leadership, and which shapes what decision-makers believe about the world before they decide anything about it.
  • Covert capacity — an instrument of policy in its own right, historically significant in the neighbourhood, and one whose use is never acknowledged and therefore never examined.

The oversight vacuum

• No Indian intelligence agency has a statutory charter. R&AW, the IB and the NTRO exist by executive order or administrative instruction, without a founding Act defining their powers, limits or purposes.
• There is no parliamentary oversight committee for intelligence, of the kind that exists in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa. The agencies do not appear before the Standing Committees, and their budgets are not subject to detailed legislative scrutiny.
• Attempts to change this have come only from private members. An Intelligence Services (Powers and Regulation) Bill, seeking a legal charter and a parliamentary oversight mechanism, has been introduced more than once in the Lok Sabha since 2011 and has never been taken up by government.
• The institutional facts are the point here: agencies of great capability, no legislative basis, no external audit of their conduct, and no forum in which their assessments can be tested. (The constitutional argument about parliamentary oversight is developed in the companion note on Parliament, the states and the judiciary.)

The other ministries and the coordination problem

• Foreign policy is now made across a dozen ministries, and the MEA’s share of it has fallen even as its workload has risen. This is a consequence of globalisation, not of institutional decay: as more of domestic policy acquired an external face, more ministries acquired a foreign policy.

Ministry	External function
Commerce and Industry	Trade negotiations and free trade agreements — the WTO, CEPAs and FTAs, market access, and trade remedies; the lead ministry on the entire trade agenda
Finance	The international financial institutions — IMF, World Bank, AIIB, NDB — and sanctions compliance, financial-action standards and currency arrangements
Petroleum and Natural Gas	Energy diplomacy — crude sourcing, overseas equity in oil and gas, and the diplomatic management of supply disruption
Home Affairs	Borders, visas, immigration and neighbouring-country questions; border management with Pakistan, China, Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar
Environment, Forest and Climate Change	Climate negotiations — the UNFCCC, nationally determined contributions, and climate finance
Science and Technology, and MeitY	Technology and data questions — export controls, data governance, semiconductors, digital public infrastructure as an export
Agriculture	The WTO’s agricultural files — public stockholding, subsidies and the special safeguard mechanism, where India’s positions are among its firmest
Defence	Defence cooperation agreements, exercises, exports and procurement relationships

• The structural consequence is a coordination problem the system has not solved.
  • Multiple ministries negotiate internationally on their own subjects, sometimes with positions that have not been reconciled with each other or with the MEA’s.
  • Sequencing failures follow: a trade concession that undercuts a strategic objective, or a security measure with an unconsidered economic cost.
  • This is precisely the problem the NSC was created to address, and its persistence is the strongest evidence that the Council has not done what it was designed to do.
• The National Security Council Secretariat has grown into the coordinating gap rather than the Council filling it.
  • Its verticals reach across ministries, its Deputy NSAs are drawn from different services, and it convenes inter-ministerial work from maritime security to critical technology.
  • The effect is that coordination now happens through an unaccountable secretariat rather than through the Cabinet system — which solves the operational problem while deepening the constitutional one.

The structural features of Indian foreign-policy making

The institutions surveyed here differ enormously in age, size and legal standing, but the pattern they form together is consistent: concentration in the executive, with thin legislative and institutional checks. Five features follow from that pattern, and each carries its own cost.

• Executive-dominated. There is no requirement of ratification for most treaties, no legislative authorisation for the use of force, and no confirmation of appointments. Parliament’s role is real but reactive, and the executive’s freedom of manoeuvre is close to complete.
• Personalised. Authority concentrates in individuals — the Prime Minister, the NSA, occasionally a dominant minister — rather than in offices with institutional memory. Leadership changes therefore matter more in India than in systems with stronger institutional foundations, and relationships built on personal rapport transfer poorly between incumbents.
• Capacity-constrained. Roughly a thousand career diplomats and 0.41% of central expenditure support the external ambitions of the world’s most populous state and one of its five or six largest economies. Every other weakness is aggravated by this one.
• Under-coordinated. A dozen ministries now conduct external relations; the NSC was created to integrate them and has only partly succeeded; and the coordinating work has migrated to a secretariat that answers to no one but the Prime Minister.
• Weakly institutionalised in doctrine. No published national security strategy, no statutory basis for the NSC, no charter for the intelligence agencies, and no white-paper tradition in foreign policy. The system runs on convention and on the judgement of whoever holds office.

The counterpoint

• Against all of that stands a fact that a purely personalised system could not produce: India’s foreign policy has shown remarkable continuity across seven decades, eight parties in office and every variety of coalition.
  • The commitment to strategic autonomy survived the end of non-alignment; the nuclear posture framed in 1999 survived changes of government; the neighbourhood-first orientation and the stance on Kashmir have been continuous across administrations of every complexion.
  • That continuity is evidence of something the formal weaknesses conceal — a permanent establishment, in the ministry and in the services, that supplies coherence which the institutions do not formally guarantee.
• The fair conclusion is therefore double-edged.
  • The system’s institutional design is weak, and its performance has nonetheless been consistent — which means the record depends on the quality of the people inside it rather than on the structures around them.
  • That is a functioning arrangement, but it is not a resilient one, and closing the gap between what these institutions were designed to do and what they actually do is the unfinished business of Indian foreign-policy reform.

A system that works because of who holds office rather than because of how it is built has succeeded so far without becoming safe.