Explain the major features of India’s foreign policy in the 21st century. (2023, 10 Marks)
The end of the Cold War, liberalisation in 1991 and the 1998 nuclear tests moved India, in C. Raja Mohan’s account in Crossing the Rubicon (2003), from idealism toward realism and from third-world solidarity toward national interest. In a century of ideological, military and economic flux the objective of strategic autonomy has held; its instruments have changed.
Major features
- Multi-alignment: India sits in the Quad with the US, Japan and Australia and in BRICS and the SCO with China and Russia, without alliance commitments. S. Jaishankar calls these “convergences and issue-based arrangements”.
- Diversified great-power ties: a defence and technology partnership with the United States built on the 2008 civil nuclear deal; a continuing Russian relationship, though Russia’s share of India’s arms imports fell from 70% in 2011–15 to 40% in 2021–25 (SIPRI); and rivalry with China managed alongside engagement after Galwan (2020).
- Economic diplomacy as substance: trade agreements with the UAE, Australia, EFTA and the UK, and the India–EU FTA concluded on 27 January 2026, reversed the caution that led India out of RCEP in 2019.
- Wider geography: Look East became Act East (2014); Gulf, African and Latin American outreach expanded through lines of credit and training.
- Maritime and Indo-Pacific turn: SAGAR (2015), MAHASAGAR (2025), the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative and the Navy as a net security provider.
- Neighbourhood First: grids, credit and crisis support, as for Sri Lanka in 2022.
- Reformed multilateralism and the Global South: nearly 300,000 personnel sent to more than 50 UN peacekeeping missions; the G20 presidency (2023) that admitted the African Union; and the BRICS chair, whose New Delhi Declaration (September 2026) demanded IMF, World Bank and WTO reform.
- Norm-building: India-founded bodies such as the International Solar Alliance and CDRI, and climate diplomacy anchored in common but differentiated responsibilities.
- Security activism: force below the nuclear threshold, from the 2016 surgical strikes to Operation Sindoor (2025).
- Soft power and diaspora: yoga, digital public infrastructure and the world’s largest overseas community.
Why these features
A loose, multipolarising order rewards states valuable to several sides; growth gave India the means to be courted; and China’s rise supplied a single organising problem. The common thread is pragmatism: national interest pursued through a portfolio of partnerships, alongside contributions to global public goods.
Conclusion
Twenty-first-century Indian foreign policy is defined less by doctrine than by flexibility: continuity of autonomy, adaptation of means. Its limit is capacity, and the 2025–26 US tariffs showed that great powers can price that flexibility.