India has adopted multi-alignment to fulfill its core values and interests in International relations. Discuss. (2026, 15 Marks)
Multi-alignment is the simultaneous cultivation of partnerships with rival powers, each limited to particular issues and none carrying an alliance obligation. Ian Hall (“Multialignment and Indian Foreign Policy under Narendra Modi”, 2016) traces it to the mid-2000s; S. Jaishankar gave it its official grammar of “convergences and issue-based arrangements” (2019). It serves India’s interests well, but its values only selectively.
The values and interests at stake
- Values: strategic autonomy (decisional freedom without an external veto), sovereign equality and peaceful coexistence from Panchsheel (1954), a reformed multipolar order, and solidarity with the Global South, summed up in the G20 motto “One Earth, One Family, One Future” (2023).
- Interests: security against two nuclear-armed neighbours, energy, technology and capital for development, and status.
How multi-alignment serves them
- Autonomy through plurality. Under bipolarity autonomy meant staying out of blocs; in a looser system it means being inside many. India hosted the Quad foreign ministers in May 2026 and the BRICS summit in September 2026, where Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping agreed to seek a “fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable” boundary settlement. Each partner tolerates India’s other ties because demanding exclusivity could push India towards a rival, a logic Kenneth N. Waltz‘s account of polarity (1979) explains.
- Security and technology. The foundational agreements with Washington and the TRUST technology initiative build capability against China, while Russia keeps a largely Russian-origin arsenal supplied. Jaishankar’s The India Way (2020) states the method: “engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia, bring Japan into play”.
- Energy. India absorbed a US penalty tariff over Russian crude from August 2025 until the interim understanding of February 2026, and when the Hormuz crisis struck in March 2026 it drew on its “41-plus suppliers”.
- Reformed multilateralism. The African Union’s G20 seat (2023) and the BRICS New Delhi Declaration (September 2026), critical of unilateral tariffs and sanctions, carry India’s normative agenda across camps.
- Peace diplomacy. On Ukraine, abstentions (most recently in February 2026) and Modi’s “today’s era is not an era of war” (2022) keep India able to talk to both sides.
The limits
- Values thin out. Read through Kanti Bajpai‘s schools of Indian strategic thought (2014), multi-alignment keeps the Nehruvian refusal of alliance but runs on a neoliberal priority for growth and a hyperrealist premium on capability. Positions on Gaza are muted to protect partnerships.
- Partner tolerance is not India’s to control. US sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, binding from November 2025, cut Indian purchases of Russian crude to a multi-year low, and the US Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act (September 2026) authorises tariffs of up to 100 per cent on such buyers.
- No guarantee, some cost. Galwan (2020) showed that partnerships bring support but no obligation, and partners read India as opportunistic.
Conclusion
Multi-alignment fulfils India’s interests and its master value, autonomy, better than any alternative in a loose multipolar order; it serves the older normative values only where they coincide with interest. Its durability rests on India’s weight: the larger India grows, the costlier it becomes for any power to demand exclusivity.