On June 15, 2020, a nasty brawl broke out between Indian and Chinese forces along their disputed border in the region of Ladakh. It was the deadliest India-China clash in 45 years. 

Twenty Indian soldiers died in the fracas – which featured fisticuffs and pushing and shoving that resulted in soldiers falling to their deaths into an icy river. India-China relations plunged to their lowest point since a 1962 war. 

The tragedy also amplified the threat that China, New Delhi’s biggest strategic rival, poses to India along its northern border. It even 

 that India would take steps to formally align itself with the United States, in order to jointly tackle a shared China threat that has fueled the expansion of U.S.-India security cooperation over the last decade.

New Delhi quickly put the kibosh on such notions. Several weeks after the border clash, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar proclaimed that 

“we were never part of an alliance system and we will never be.” 

He argued that the current world order actually creates more space for “middle powers” like India to assert their independence and flexibility in world affairs.

Jaishankar’s comments underscored the continued vitality of a longstanding foreign policy principle: Avoid alliances and other arrangements that limit New Delhi’s foreign policy agency. India prefers to act on its own terms, using channels and tools of its own choosing to balance autonomy and multilateralism.

 “[W]e were never part of an alliance system and we will never be.” 

Selectivity about treaties is a key part of India’s approach. Agreements perceived as binding or entangling are off limits. Those that advance its flexibility are fair game.

As India expands its role on the world stage, it will increasingly look at treaties as an opportunity rather than a constraint – so long as they don’t cross any red lines. But can being choosy also close off opportunities that India would like to pursue? 

In its first few decades following independence, India was a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) – a group of developing and post-colonial countries that refused to join the American and Soviet camps. 

In the Cold War, however, India did occasionally pick sides. The nation signed a 

Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation

 with the Soviets in 1971— an agreement that helped India acquire the arms to fight a war against Pakistan that same year.

Yet even that agreement was drafted carefully to ensure the treaty didn’t tie New Delhi down. Article 1 stipulates that “each Party shall respect the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of the other party and refrain from interfering in the other’s internal affairs.”

The NAM struggled to retain relevance in the post-Cold War era, and India’s foreign policy experienced a major shift away from some of its principles in the early 1990s. New Delhi initiated economic liberalization reforms, and began to pursue international diplomacy with greater rigor and intensity. 

One result is that India has become more active in international organizations, from BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to the Heart of Asia Istanbul Process. It also has deepened its relations with major powers in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Three of New Delhi’s closest partners today are America, Australia, and Japan, who together comprise a grouping of powerful rivals of China: the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. 

to encompass greater involvement in global climate negotiations. In the past, New Delhi resisted environmental agreements that obliged developing countries to cut carbon emissions, and argued that such measures imperiled its economic development. They were also unfair, in India’s view, because developed countries were able to industrialize and develop with no such obligations. 

In more recent years, however, India appears to have read the writing on the wall about the worsening threat of climate change, and has grown more receptive to mitigation obligations. The current government in New Delhi is a big proponent of global climate treaties.

Still, old habits die hard, and the NAM’s ideals live on in India, albeit with new branding as “strategic autonomy.” New Delhi continues to eschew formal alliances as it plays careful diplomatic balancing games. India places a premium on pursuing good relations with both sides of rival pairings – the United States and Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the Israelis and the Palestinians, among others. Until last year’s clash, India also enjoyed a robust trade relationship with China, despite their strategic competition and disputed border.

India also likes to talk the walk of strategic autonomy, going to great rhetorical lengths to underscore its independence, and to push back against any perception of reliance on other states. 

Examples are easy to find. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government sought to attract major Western manufacturing companies to participate in co-production arrangements to strengthen India’s manufacturing sector, New Delhi first called it a 

 policy. More recently, officials explicitly called the effort a way to 

Even when dozens of countries sent India relief supplies to help it tackle a devastating COVID-19 surge this past spring, the framing of autonomy persisted. New Delhi 

 not as assistance, but as a means of strengthening partnerships. 

 in that outlines the nitty-gritty of treaty formulation within the Indian interagency process. The External Affairs Ministry (EAM)’s Legal and Treaties Division vets initial drafts before they move forward. Representatives from this division join all high-level delegations that go abroad to negotiate treaties. 

Most significantly, treaties go directly through India’s Cabinet—and are neither discussed nor approved by Parliament, perhaps to avoid politicizing them. Legislators do, however, weigh in on proposed changes to existing treaties. 

. It’s searchable by year, type, and country. For a government bureaucracy often faulted for poor record keeping, the database’s meticulousness is striking. It’s also quite up to date, with the most recent treaties – concluded just days earlier – appearing at the top of search results.

There are nearly 3,400 treaties in the EAM database – and the divide between the non-aligned era and India’s growing global engagement is stark. Nearly 2,900 agreements have been concluded since 1991, compared to fewer than 700 in the pre-1991 era. India has inked more than 1,600 treaties since 2010 alone.

India’s treaties encompass commerce, cultural relations, and defense, as well as education, health, international law, and science and technology. The broad commonality that links these thousands of disparate agreements is that each one helps India advance its goal or interest without involving compromises to its independence or autonomy. 

For instance, India’s bilateral investment and free trade agreements seek to strengthen its economy, and boost diplomatic relations. New Delhi’s strategy isn’t complicated. It aims for commercial accords that enable it to export more than it imports. When that doesn’t happen, India works to renegotiate them. 

Defense treaties help New Delhi boost its military capacities as it pursues military modernization, but remains hamstrung by outdated military equipment and subpar defense procurement and manufacturing capacities. India’s most recent defense treaties entail more arms sales, technology transfers, and intelligence sharing.

Examining security agreements with Washington provides a window into India’s goals. These pacts allow for closer operational cooperation with the U.S. military – including arrangements that 

enable the U.S. military to refuel at Indian facilities

. But India will not ink any defense agreement that entails joint operations (including joint naval patrols) outside of joint training exercises. New Delhi also eschews agreements with a collective defense clause requiring India and its treaty partner(s) to come to each other’s aid in the event of an attack upon one of them. 

Soft power is at the heart of India’s cultural agreements. One of its newest international treaties, inked in June, entails 

a partnership between India’s national yoga ministry and the Saudi Arabian sports ministry

 that focuses on cooperation “to study traditional systems of yoga.” 

New Delhi sees soft power, as exemplified by yoga, Bollywood, and cuisine, among other things, as a key vehicle for boosting its global influence. But it also plays an important public relations role at a moment when many international observers and the global media have sharply criticized the Modi administration for crackdowns on rights and freedoms and for its botched response to its COVID surge this spring.

New Delhi has also signed treaties focused on cyber security, climate change, public health, piracy, and other global concerns. India pursues these agreements to better position itself to tackle these challenges at home, but also to project itself as a responsible global actor, willing and able to cooperate bilaterally and multilaterally to address the world’s greatest shared threats. 

We’re likely to see many more of these types of treaty in the future, as New Delhi ramps up efforts to gain a more prominent position at the global roundtable. Samir Saran, a noted Indian strategic analyst, has articulated 

India’s vision of its role in the world

, and how it seeks to transform this vision into action:

For the first time since the end of the Second World War, a nation state that is wary of hegemonic tendencies and identifies itself with the equitable governance of the global commons is in a position to shape the international order. India…has sustained a unique democratic ethos and a foreign policy that is defined not only by national interest but also by solidarity with the developing world. As a leading power, India must look beyond raw indexes of economic, political and military might, and craft a consensus that is consistent with its ancient and historic view of the world.

Saran argues that India can increase its power by capitalizing on its economic strength, leading from the front on developing world causes, and positioning itself as a top global player in debates and negotiations on shared challenges such as climate change. He adds that “India’s non-interventionist and multilateral approach” – key principles of the NAM today – “is well suited to support and sustain global governance in a multipolar world: the new reality of this century.”

This formulation offers a crystal ball of sorts to forecast India’s future treaty priorities. New Delhi will continue to seek out agreements around free trade and investment, but environmental protection, public health, human development, and migration will also come into sharp focus. 

Indeed, the watchwords underpinning India’s most recent treaties suggest keen awareness of a global to-do list that includes innovation, digitization, cyber security, health, disaster management, sustainable urban development, wildlife conservation, and transboundary water management.

As we’ve seen, India avoids treaties with alliance-like features. But the exigencies of strategic autonomy also require it to subject any potential treaty to an array of strict criteria. Will the agreement constrain our freedom of action? What impact might it have on our economic, political, and security interests? 

The result is a high degree of selectivity in making treaties. But is there an argument that New Delhi is too selective? Choosing not to agree sometimes comes back to haunt India, and its interests can suffer when it declines agreements that don’t match its preferred posture. 

the 1951 UN Refugee Convention – or its 1967 Protocol

. Signatories pledge not to repatriate refugees to places deemed unsafe, and vow not to repatriate any refugee against her or his will. India’s decision not to join is notable, given that 

the country currently hosts several hundred thousand refugees

 and is located in a region with extensive cross-border migration. Additionally, three quarters of the world’s countries have signed the Convention or its Protocols.

India has never clearly stated why it opted out, but 

experts believe it is a combination of factors

. First, there are concerns about the burdens long-term refugees place on Indian resources and infrastructure, as well as fears about affecting the nation’s demographic balance. 

But practical considerations and even history also play a role. India has long housed refugees on its own, with no outside assistance, and thus believes it has no need to sign a treaty. There is also lingering anger at the UNHCR (the UN’s Refugee Agency) for its actions during the 1971 India-Pakistan war.

Yet India’s absence from the convention has had several deleterious effects. First, it undermines New Delhi’s goals of promoting developing world causes and showcasing its commitment to working multilaterally to strengthen global norms. (In this case, protecting refugees). 

Additionally, India risks reputational damage during any refugee crises in which it is involved. In 2017, hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas fled violence in bordering Myanmar. 

New Delhi worried that some of these refugees were Islamic militants, and Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh said that as a non-signatory to the convention, 

his nation would not be violating international law

 if it deported Rohingya refugees on its soil. His observation was legally sound. But from a moral perspective, it made New Delhi look heartless.

Agreements on nuclear weapons have been another challenge for India’s treaty policies. New Delhi never signed 

 – the landmark accord meant to curb the spread of nuclear weapons. Today, India is one of only four nations – the others are Israel, Pakistan, and South Sudan – not to have joined the agreement. 

India rejected the treaty because it forbade non-nuclear states from going nuclear – and India didn’t want to be so constrained. Four years after the NPT entered into force, India tested its first nuclear device. It became a formal nuclear weapons state in 1998.

In subsequent years, India came to view the NPT as fundamentally unfair. The NPT permitted states to join if they produced any nuclear device before January 1967, or if they were non-nuclear states. The five nuclear weapons states currently in the NPT have committed to pursue nuclear disarmament, but there are no specific timeframes for them to do so. However, any state – such as India – that acquired nuclear weapons after January 1967 must dismantle them before joining the treaty. This is a non-starter for India.

India’s absence from the NPT didn’t stop Washington – despite considerable opposition from nonproliferation hawks on Capitol Hill –from concluding 

 in 2008. The accord enabled India to engage in civil nuclear trade with the United States, and it also helped New Delhi make the case for being a responsible nuclear player, even without being an NPT signatory.

New Delhi never signed the 1970 nuclear nonproliferation treaty – the landmark accord meant to curb the spread of nuclear weapons. 

However, India’s non-NPT status badly hurts New Delhi’s chances of achieving one of its top foreign policy goals – membership in the 

, a prestigious global club of 48 nations that regulates global nuclear trade and aims to reduce proliferation risks. Membership in nonproliferation treaties is 

a basic prerequisite for acceptance into the NSG

. In fact, it was India’s initial nuclear test, in 1974, as a non-signatory of the NPT, which helped inspire the launch of the NSG. 

Trade is another area in which India’s template for treaties may frustrate its ambitions. Take the case of the

 Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)

, a 15-member Asian trade bloc finalized in 2020. 

The RCEP has massive economic potential; 

, it could add $209 billion annually to world incomes, and $500 billion to global trade, by 2030. While India was involved in the initial negotiations for the deal, it backed out because of resistance from key constituencies, including Indian companies and farmers.

Yet New Delhi’s penchant for economic deals that tip the scales in India’s favor meant it also was concerned about establishing trade deficits with nearly all RCEP countries. It also feared RCEP would create a flood of cheap goods from China into Indian markets.

India’s decision on RCEP made sense for domestic political and economic reasons, but it also deprives New Delhi of multiple geopolitical opportunities in Asia. 

Rejecting RCEP also cuts against another core Indian foreign policy goal – shoring up relations with countries to its east, especially states in the Association of South East Asian (ASEAN). This effort is meant to compensate for India’s non-membership in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), a partnership of 21 Pacific Rim states that includes most ASEAN states. 

Choosing not to agree sometimes comes back to haunt India, and its interests can suffer when it declines agreements that don’t match its preferred posture. 

As I wrote with my Wilson Center colleague Shihoko Goto in 2019

: “Saying no to RCEP is a missed opportunity to strengthen relations with the very ASEAN states that New Delhi seeks to cultivate – and it deprives India of access to key supply lines in Southeast Asia.”

Ditching RCEP also hurts India’s goal of playing a more active role in Asia’s new and emerging economic architecture and enhancing its role on the world stage. Indeed, the selectivity can be puzzling. India is already the second-largest shareholder in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, for instance. 

New Delhi’s high degree of selectivity has sometimes worked against its interests. But the trendlines are clear:  There has been a major shift in how India has pursued treaties – and foreign policy on the whole – over the last 30 years. 

Through the end of the 1980s, India was focused inward, with emphasis on import substitution policies and a foreign policy framed through a lens of advocacy for self-determination and anti-imperialism. It averaged barely 10 new treaties a year.

But in the post-1991 era, despite the lingering legacy of nonalignment, India has become a major global player – ramping up relations with major powers, playing leading roles in regional organizations, and receiving guest invitations to attend events with the world’s most prestigious clubs, such as a recent G-7 summit in London. Over the last decade, it has averaged more than 155 new treaties per annum.

In this sense, India’s pursuit of treaties has become a bellwether of its broader foreign policy trajectory. It also highlights the successes of strategic autonomy: Despite everything, New Delhi has maintained the flexibility and independence to secure an increasing number of treaties on a variety of subjects, and with a range of bilateral and multilateral partners. 

 is senior associate for South Asia and Asia Program deputy director at the Wilson Center. He is grateful for the research assistance of Asia Program interns 

Cover photograph: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi offers closing remarks at the final session of the National Workshop on Make in India in December 2014. (Prime Minister's Office, Government of India, under 

1024px-PM_Modi COVER.jpg

India’s selective approach to treaties maximizes its global autonomy. But does New Delhi miss out on opportunities? 

Pacts and Impacts

It’s no easy task navigating through heavy fog in the dead of night. But on one memorable occasion in New Delhi, my driver wasn’t going to be stopped.

It was 3 a.m. as we careened out of Indira Gandhi International Airport and onto the highway leading to my downtown hotel. The fog was so thick that our headlights barely illuminated the vehicles in front of us. Yet my driver kept plowing ahead, even though he wasn’t very sure where he was going.

India’s foreign policy is on the same kind of path. The country is moving away from the nonalignment doctrine it followed during the Cold War, but it doesn’t know what should take its place. The contours of a new worldview are emerging, but remnants of the old one linger, reflecting an uncertainty about India’s proper role abroad that is tied to the country’s complicated situation at home.

In April 1955, the Indonesian city of Bandung hosted a one-week conference for leaders from India and other Asian and African states — described by African-American writer and activist Richard Wright, who attended the event, as “the despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed” — in which they condemned the Cold War and railed against the West. The conference inspired the launch of the Non-Aligned Movement, and India, led by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, was a founding member. The bloc opposed alliances between its members and the major powers, emphasizing the pursuit of neutral and independent paths. Over the next few decades, India’s relations with the West frayed, and its economy languished — a consequence of protectionism and other inward-looking economic policies it embraced after becoming independent in 1947.

By the summer of 1991, India had reached a point of economic desperation. Wasteful fiscal policies had nearly exhausted the country’s foreign exchange reserves, obliging New Delhi to dispatch nearly 50 tons of gold to the Bank of England to serve as collateral for a loan. The Economist later likened the transaction to “an indigent household pawning the family jewels.”

It was a humiliating moment that validated a view rapidly solidifying among top government officials, most notably an Oxford-educated finance minister named Manmohan Singh: The status quo was no longer tenable. So India changed course. Singh drew up historic reforms that liberalized the economy and opened India up to the world.

Economic growth, trade, and investment first inched up, then soared. By the turn of the millennium, the country’s successes had come into sharp focus: The economy was growing rapidly, civil society was flourishing, free media were expanding, and a surging information technology sector (filled with upstart firms of global reach such as Infosys, Wipro, and Tata Consultancy Services) was taking the world by storm. When most of the world’s major economies were devastated by the 2008–09 financial crisis, Indian policymakers proudly noted that India barely paused, and in 2010 its economy grew by more than nine percent, according to the World Bank.

These accomplishments sent New Delhi’s branding gurus into overdrive, spawning jaunty slogans such as “Incredible India” and “India Shining.” The achievements also reinforced the long-standing sense of exceptionalism embedded in many Indian minds: Blessed with economic growth, a vibrant democracy, relative stability, and a respected image abroad, India, they believe, is destined to occupy a unique moral position in the world and to play a large role in improving it.

History is one obvious source of Indian exceptionalism. The subcontinent is home to one of the world’s oldest and most accomplished civilizations. Another source is pride in India’s rich variety of traditions — nonviolent, democratic, tolerant, secular — and their coexistence within a large Hindu-majority state brimming with ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity. This exceptionalism shows itself in what Americans often see as Indians’ tendency to view foreign affairs in moral terms.

As early as the 1930s, a young Nehru — the Indian independence leader who once wrote to his father that “greatness is being thrust on me” — was imploring colonized India to look beyond its own plight and help “free the [world’s] people from the chains of imperialism and capitalism.” Decades later, when Finance Minister Singh was attempting to convince Parliament of the need for economic liberalization, he proclaimed that “no power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come,” intimating that the moment had arrived for India to become a global economic power.

India’s leaders today want a stronger global voice, and they want to help establish new rules and norms for the management of world affairs. “India should aim not just at being powerful,” according to NonAlignment 2.0, a much-discussed strategic blueprint published earlier this year. “It should set new standards for what the powerful must do.” This bold statement should not be taken lightly. NonAlignment 2.0 was written by eight highly influential Indians — including the head of a major New Delhi think tank, the editor in chief of The Hindu newspaper, a former foreign secretary, and a prominent entrepreneur previously with Infosys. New Delhi covets prime spots in international institutions and at negotiating tables, and always has its eyes on the ultimate prize: a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council. This desire to join the world’s heavyweights represents a sea change from the Cold War era, when India identified with the downtrodden.

India’s approach to the major powers has also changed, at least in part. Alarmed by China’s economic successes, its close ties to Islamabad, and its growing presence in the Indian Ocean region — Chinese ports and facilities have sprung up in Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Bangladesh — New Delhi sometimes give the impression of wanting to side against its eastern neighbor. It is modernizing its military and strengthening its armed presence in disputed frontier areas. (India and China fought a border war in 1962.) Some Indian hawks recommend that India seize Chinese territory if Beijing encroaches on disputed lands, and urge India to increase its maritime power to forestall China’s push into the Indian Ocean region.

India has a strong military. With about 1.3 million active personnel, it boasts the third-largest armed forces in the world. Land power has always been the chief source of Indian military strength — only Russia’s army has more land-based weaponry. The Indian air force is well equipped, and the government continues to strengthen it. Between 2007 and 2011, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, India was the world’s largest arms importer — and fighter aircraft constituted some of the main acquisitions. Naval power is a more complicated story. India has the world’s fifth-largest fleet, and it has demonstrated its effectiveness by staging tsunami relief operations in South Asia and humanitarian evacuations from Lebanon during the Hezbollah-Israel conflict of 2006. Though the navy is undermanned and lacks sufficient firepower and aircraft carriers to project power much beyond Indian waters, naval modernization is well under way.

Not long ago, a prominent Indian security analyst told me that India and China could one day go to war over natural resources in the Bay of Bengal, off India’s eastern coast (where major new reserves of natural gas were discovered in 2002). Other observers worry about hostilities over unresolved border disputes or water supplies. Yet it’s not just the prospect of war that, for many Indians, justifies a hard line on China — it’s also the broader fear that China’s rise threatens India’s own ascent.

For some in New Delhi, this anxiety is so acute that China is becoming a bigger source of concern than Pakistan, with which India has fought three wars. India certainly worries about Pakistan’s instability, nuclear policies, and sponsorship of extremist proxies in Afghanistan, as well as the virulently anti-India militant groups based on Pakistani soil. Indians often describe the 2008 attacks on Mumbai by one of these organizations, Lashkar-e-Taiba, as their 9/11. The terrorist shootings and bombings killed more than 160. Yet many Indian officials believe that Islamabad is too bogged down by internal crises to pose an existential threat. If Pakistan were to collapse, a scholar at an Indian government-funded research organization told me last year, almost nonchalantly, then “we just need to make sure it doesn’t bring us down with it.”

In other quarters, India is promoting the very alliance politics it once rejected. Last year, it signed a strategic agreement with Afghanistan. In 2007, it reached a similar understanding with Japan — the two powers drawn together by mutual concern about China. Even the U.S.-India relationship has warmed considerably, as evidenced by a robust arms trade, joint military exercises, and a controversial 2008 civil nuclear accord that gave India access to nuclear fuel and technology even though it hasn’t signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

During the Cold War, the U.S.-India relationship was so strained that New Delhi, unhappy about Washington’s support for Pakistan and fearful that the United States was a new incarnation of colonial Britain, once signed a treaty of friendship with Moscow. The change began with the 1991 economic reforms, which impressed the American business community and prompted it to push for better bilateral relations (with a strong assist from the growing Indian-American community). Another catalyst was the end of the Cold War, which enabled the two capitals to bond over the shared goal of promoting democracy and open markets abroad. And the 9/11 attacks gave the United States and India common cause in the vigorous pursuit of effective counterterrorism policies.

India has come a long way since that conference in 1955, when (in Wright’s words) “the underdogs of the human race” converged on Bandung to denounce the world order. Yet it hasn’t made a complete break with the past. In many global forums, India’s positions continue to track those of the developing world, conflicting with those of the West. In concert with the other four BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, China, and South Africa), India has resisted the U.S. and EU positions at the Doha global trade talks and pushed back against some Western countries during UN climate negotiations.

It’s also wrong to conclude that India is on a collision course with Beijing. Many Indian diplomats view China as relatively harmless. They believe that its activities in India’s neighborhood are driven more by economic and energy interests than by hegemonic impulses, and can be parried with deft diplomacy. Prime Minister Singh and others call for more trade, people-to-people exchanges, and general rapprochement with China, a stance that has prevailed in official India since Nehru’s time.

As for the United States, relations have improved, but that hardly means that India will align itself with U.S. policy. New Delhi accuses Washington of underemphasizing the bilateral relationship and failing to appreciate India’s rising power. Many Indians believe that the Obama administration cares more about improving ties with Islamabad than about taking the U.S.-India partnership to a new level. The government is also unhappy about an American law that raises U.S. visa fees for skilled foreign workers (including Indian citizens) and legislation that would punish American firms for using Indian call centers.

Even the cornerstone of today’s warmer U.S.-India relationship, the civil nuclear deal, sparks hostility. The accord nearly wasn’t ratified by India’s government, thanks to opposition from anti-American leftists in the ruling coalition who were opposed to a measure that would tie their country more closely to the United States. Indian parliamentarians still have not passed the enabling legislation that U.S. energy firms believe is required if the agreement is to be put into full effect.

New Delhi’s foreign policy is especially fuzzy in regard to the Middle East. In some ways, India’s diplomacy is in tune with the West’s. Relations with Israel, which before the 1990s were nonexistent, are now strong. New Delhi has declared its opposition to a nuclear-armed Iran and supported a UN resolution calling for sanctions against Syria’s brutal government. Because it fears losing access to Iranian oil as a result of U.S. sanctions, it has strengthened ties with Saudi Arabia — Singh made a rare state visit there in 2010. Yet India also refused to support the UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force against Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi and abstained from a General Assembly resolution demanding that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad step down.

Elite views of Indian foreign policy are as fragmented as the policy is inchoate. Understanding this requires taking stock of India’s situation at home, where, for all the achievements, major problems remain. At least 250 million Indians live on less than a dollar a day. There are more desperately poor people in just eight of India’s 28 states than in all of sub-Saharan Africa. Four hundred million people live without electricity. Corruption and communal violence are rife, and the country is beset by dozens of insurgencies — including a low-grade Maoist rebellion extending across more than two-thirds of India’s states.

Some on the left, citing these domestic problems, contend that pursuing a more prominent role abroad — and allocating the necessary resources to support this goal — is foolish and hypocritical. If we can’t tame an insurgency, they ask, how can we dominate the Indian Ocean? How can we be a credible voice for new global norms when our own traditions of secularism and tolerance are undercut by religious and ethnic violence? “India,” the noted historian Ramachandra Guha flatly declared earlier this year, “should not even attempt to become a superpower.”

Some of those with doubts about a more internationalist stance question whether India even has the credentials to become a superpower. Annual economic growth slowed to just under seven percent last year — a strong rate, but still too slow for a poor country. Inflation is rising. Whispers abound that the “growth miracle” is ending. Military modernization is imperiled by a plodding, state-owned defense industry. And India frequently finds itself in the global spotlight for the wrong reasons. The 2010 Commonwealth Games, held in New Delhi, were marred by inefficiency and graft. This summer’s mammoth power outages, which affected more than 600 million people, prompted many to wonder how a nation that can’t provide basic services can ever hope to be a global power.

Superpower skepticism attracts not only left-leaning academics such as Guha, but also the political Left itself — including the influential communist parties that served in the last governing coalition and, until 2011, ruled the state of West Bengal for 34 consecutive years.

However, a second group of Indians — best described as foreign-policy “realists” — says that global engagement can fuel domestic progress. “The success of India’s own internal development will depend decisively on how effectively we manage our global opportunities,” state the authors of NonAlignment 2.0. A new book by Shashi Tharoor, a prominent member of the ruling Congress Party and a former UN diplomat, calls for a “multialignment” policy in which India takes an opportunistic approach to alliances abroad, with a preference for those that help promote development back home.

Predictably, some Indian elites seek a middle ground. For instance, NonAlignment 2.0 calls for continued neutrality. “Both India and the U.S. may be better served by being friends rather than allies,” its authors write. But they also underscore the imperative of global engagement and an open economic order. The eminent journalist Prem Shankar Jha took a different type of hybrid approach this summer, imploring India to “stand by” the UN’s national sovereignty principle and reject resolutions critical of the Syrian government — in effect, calling on India to leverage its newly acquired global stature to uphold the old ideals of nonalignment.

Such balancing acts appeal to many Indians, but they are tough to maintain. Earlier this year, an Israeli diplomat in New Delhi was targeted in a terrorist attack likely carried out by Iran. Not wanting to upset its good relations with Tehran by acknowledging Iranian complicity, but also not wanting to imperil improved ties with Israel by denying Iranian guilt, New Delhi chose to say nothing publicly. This past summer, the Times of India revealed that a New Delhi police investigation had concluded that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard was responsible. Yet India’s government has largely kept quiet.

Indian officials will not always have that luxury. Imagine if India needs to cast a vote in the UN on a U.S. punitive strike on Iran. An abstention or vote against would anger the United States and other members of the clique of powerful nations that India aspires to join. Yet a vote in favor would repudiate the noninterventionism and other principles embraced by India and ingrained in the association of nonaligned states that it helped launch.

Back on that foggy New Delhi night, my intrepid driver somehow managed to find his way to my hotel. India needs to hope that its quest for a foreign-policy strategy has a similarly happy resolution, and soon. Washington has announced a “pivot” toward Asia, the Indian Ocean is fast becoming one of the world’s most important geostrategic areas, and two of the biggest story lines in world politics are unfolding in India’s neighborhood — the withdrawal of coalition forces from Afghanistan and China’s continued rise.

The world is coming to India, and it will need to know where New Delhi stands.

 is the South Asia associate at the Wilson Center. He is the editor of 

India’s Contemporary Security Challenges

The Global Farms Race: Land Grabs, Agricultural Investment, and the Scramble for Food Security

President_Barack_Obama_with_Prime_Minister_Manmohan_Singh_2009-11-24(2).jpg

India stands poised to create a new role for itself on the world stage. Indians don't agree on what that role should be.

India's Foreign Policy Fog

It’s tempting to be hopeful about Afghanistan these days.

The nation recently enjoyed an Election Day for the ages. About 60 percent of the voting population — roughly the same percentage as turned out in the last U.S. presidential election — ignored Taliban threats and ventured out to vote.

This defiance was perfectly predictable. Even as attacks were convulsing Kabul in the weeks before the election, Afghans were insisting the violence would galvanize them. The zeitgeist was captured in a political cartoon widely circulated on social media in the country; it depicted a burka-clad woman extending a purple ink-stained middle finger at a Taliban fighter.

Weeks later, the Election Day images still resonate: women waiting patiently in long lines, small children leading their blind fathers into voting stations, and, above all, happy people.

In a nation long afflicted by war and hardship, the smiles were a welcome and heartwarming sight. Yet there’s another side to this story.

. Things could have been much worse. And the upshot is that Afghanistan will soon have new leadership with a fresh mandate to focus on bringing some badly needed stability to the country.

True. Yet let’s be realistic: Afghanistan’s many problems — from corruption and ethnic tensions to militancy and deep poverty — remain firmly in place, and the sources of Afghanistan’s instability — many of them external to Afghanistan — won’t magically disappear, no matter how dogged the country’s new leaders. The Taliban’s sanctuaries in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal regions remain strong. And with international troops on their way out of Afghanistan, neighboring militants are on their way in.

 in preparation for battle. The Pakistani Taliban, already an able accomplice to Afghan Taliban assaults, 

. And not to be forgotten, in Afghanistan’s more tranquil northern and western regions, Central Asian jihadists are 

To be sure, the capacities of Afghanistan’s military have strengthened significantly in recent years, and they deserve credit for averting numerous attacks on Election Day. Yet this is a force that 

 to hold territory, conduct intelligence, and undertake air transport. And it still grapples with more basic problems like illiteracy, drug abuse, and desertions.

Even so, here’s where the narrative of hope reemerges: with a new leader in place, Afghanistan will finally sign a bilateral security agreement with Washington that allows for a residual international force in the country after 2014. Such a force will ease the Afghans’ burden, and make a major contribution to stabilization.

Yes, a residual force would provide invaluable training and assistance to Afghan soldiers, and, more importantly, it would give a psychological boost to Afghan security forces prone to demoralization and uncertain about the international community’s long-term commitment. But a post-2014 international presence is no silver bullet for Afghanistan’s instability; it would be a modest non-combat force with no ability (or mandate) to defeat an insurgency that a much larger combat force was unable to defeat during 13 long years of fighting.

We can hope that Afghanistan’s new leadership will take immediate, emphatic steps to tackle the country’s greatest challenges: the troubled economy and deeply ingrained corruption. Both are exploited by the Taliban recruiters who court poor Afghans with promises of a paycheck while depicting themselves as a clean, just alternative to the government. 

For Kabul, tackling these issues would make more sense as a way to rein in the insurgency than would seeking peace talks; with international troops leaving Afghanistan, the Taliban has little incentive to step off the battlefield. 

So will Afghanistan’s next government be up for such tasks? 

. The new administration couldn’t possibly be any worse than its predecessor. Afghanistan’s next president, whether he is Abdullah Abdullah or Ashraf Ghani, will be a globally respected statesman with strong anti-Taliban credentials. 

True enough, but we’d be wise to consider how Afghanistan got to this point.

Years ago, a new Afghan president took power. He had been a prominent member of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, and worked closely with U.S. special forces when international troops entered Afghanistan in October 2001. The U.S. president called him 

. Three former American presidents attended his inauguration. He wowed audiences and interlocutors with his charm, impeccable manners, and fluent English. He could seemingly do no wrong.

At the end of the day, it’s fine to be hopeful about Afghanistan’s future. But we also need to be realistic.

 is the Wilson Center’s senior program associate for South Asia. Follow him on Twitter 

 or reach him at michael.kugelman@wilsoncenter.org

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Despite our best efforts at optimism, Afghanistan is in for a rough ride in the months ahead. 

Afghanistan’s Illusion of Hope

Global alliances are undergoing profound changes with traditional coalitions increasingly taking a back seat to both formal and informal partnerships. To better understand the impact of these shifts, we look to India, a country that has long maintained a policy of avoiding formal alliances, even as it has leveraged emerging alliances and looser partnerships to bolster its economy, strengthen bilateral relationships, and secure its footing on a global stage. To explore these issues further, we turn to 

, a Wilson Center global fellow who previously served as India's foreign secretary and as Indian ambassador to the US and China. She speaks with Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Center's South Asia Institute. 

Hello from the Wilson Center in Washington, DC. I'm Michael Kugelman, Director of the Wilson Center South Asia Institute. It's a great pleasure to welcome you to this multimedia feature as part of the 

's winter 2024 issue, which explores the state of global alliances.

India is a country that has long maintained a policy of avoiding formal alliances—even as it has leveraged emerging alliances and looser partnerships to bolster its economy, strengthen bilateral relationships, and secure its footing on a global stage. To explore these issues further, we turn to Nirupama Rao, a Wilson Center global fellow who previously served as India's Foreign Secretary and as Indian Ambassador to the US and China. Welcome, Ambassador Rao, and thank you for being part of this important conversation.

Thank you very much, Michael. It's wonderful to reconnect with you and friends from the Wilson Center, and I send you warm greetings from Bangalore, India. Thank you so much for including me in this interview.

. So let's get right to it. I'll start with our first question for you and that is that India has long embraced a policy of strategic autonomy. So can you explain what this is—how it defines India's approach to alliances and why India has pursued this policy?

Michael, India is quite unique in terms of the choices it makes on foreign policy. And that uniqueness, I believe, derives from a geography of continental proportions and our peninsular region, which abuts two seas and an ocean; our northern region, which borders the fastnesses of Central Asia in the north; our western regions facing west Asia; and our northeast being a gateway to Southeast Asia. It derives from the diverse makeup of our population, which is also, in numbers, as you're aware, the largest in the world. Our workforce has a steadily growing presence in many important global economies, and their safety and security are a constant concern. Then there are our significant economic and commercial interests. We are the fifth largest economy in the world, with steadily advancing trading and commercial interests globally.

India is a non-allied country, and it has not engaged in alliance relationships with any country. It's a policy that translates into 

, and I use the word in the Sanskrit language, 

, or a friend to the world, whose approach to global issues is based on reason, on logic, and the desire to build bridges.

We have paramount concerns to ensure our national security in what is a very troubled neighborhood, particularly when you consider our relations with two of our neighbors, China and Pakistan, who remain closely allied to each other. Now, the term strategic autonomy is used by several countries today to describe the sovereign decisions they make in the field of foreign policy. For India, strategic autonomy has signified—and we've mentioned this on a number of occasions—decisional autonomy: the exercise of the independent right to take sovereign decisions predicated on the national interest, keeping always in mind our security concerns, the safety and the security of our citizens, our focus on national development, both social and economic, our rapid race to become a developed country in the next two and a half decades, and to be a unifying voice of reason and resilience in a world that is increasingly driven with fragmentation and fear. It's often stated that India is on no one's side but its own, that it marches to the beat of its own drum. For a country of our size and proportions, that is only to be expected.

Now, such strategic autonomy has meant that India has built strategic partnerships with several countries and that it has friends and partners across various geographies. Strategic autonomy has also meant that India is a non-allied country—I use the word 

—and it has not engaged in alliance relationships with any country. It's a policy that, in Prime Minister Modi's words, translates into 

, or a friend to the world, whose approach to global issues is based on reason, on logic, and the desire to build bridges (rather than destroy them), and to infuse multilateralism with the essence of what it's meant to be, providing voice and representation to the Global South, and building a more equitable and balanced world order.

Strategic autonomy for India also means that we will seek to build issue-based coalitions to defend our interests, whether against terrorism, on the subject of climate change, on energy, on food security, and in the defense of our territorial integrity and our democracy, and also that we support a rules-based global order. I also believe that strategic autonomy is best suited for a country that desires leading power status as it steers course on the choppy global seas that mark a polarized world today.

Thank you for that. Really interesting. Now let's dig into that a bit more with this next question I'm going to ask you. When talking about emerging and more flexible types of partnerships, few countries have engaged in them more than India, which is, as you know, part of BRICS, the Indo-Pacific Quad, I2U2, which is a newer Quad that also includes Israel and the UAE, the SCO, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Trilateral Commission, just to name a few. So why do you think that India has chosen this particular approach?

Yeah, that's an interesting question. In my estimation, this approach stems directly from our policy of strategic autonomy and our independent approach to building partnerships, whether bilateral or plurilateral, to advance our strategic, our security, our economic, and development interests.

These arrangements allow India both flexibility, as well as maneuvering capacity, in a complex global environment. They enable India to safeguard its interests and those of its people. And most importantly they allow India to retain independence of action in very difficult circumstances.

India is not the only country to follow such an approach today.

For the developed world and the Global North, I believe there is a need to hear the many voices that inhabit the global garden. Each of the organizations you just mentioned [plays] an important part in highlighting and advancing specific sets of concerns, whether economic, regional, or security-related, or sometimes a combination of all these. A country like India is particularly keen on sharing the fruits of our own development experience, as in digital technology and infrastructure, for instance, with our friends in the Global South. And this was an aspect, I think, that found a lot of salience and emphasis in the recently concluded G20 summit in New Delhi, as you well know.

Another example is that an organization like the Quad provides a crucial forum of shared interests across various sectors for its member countries, all of them democracies—the United States, India, Japan, and Australia—in the Indo-Pacific, in such fields as developing supply chain resilience, disaster resistance, resistant infrastructure, maritime domain awareness and security, the safety of sea lanes of communication, and building regional support for a rules-based international order. India's membership in many of these groupings is a factor of the voice, the reputational weight, and the value it brings to any discussion or forum that advances the global public good in concrete ways.

I think that one of the points you made about how India might be a leader in this strategic autonomy policy—you see this being pursued by so many other countries in the Global South, particularly those that had been in the non-aligned movement. I think that's a very important point to make.

Michael, you saw at the G20 summit the fact that we were able to achieve consensus on the outcome document—especially on the issue of Ukraine. I think it was a measure of the kind of value that India is able to bring to these discussions, largely because of the credibility it enjoys on both sides of the spectrum. It's not a question of taking sides one way or the other, but a question of the kind of content that India is able to bring to the discussion and the ability to bridge divides—which I think is most important.

Absolutely. In talking about all these partnerships and coalitions and collaborations, is there a specific partnership or a grouping that you feel deserves particular attention in terms of how it has enabled India to achieve its foreign policy goals? Or in terms of how it has posed challenges for India to achieve those goals?

Before I tackle that—a question that's often asked is whether all these different groupings have allowed India to accomplish what traditional alliances have not—I believe that these arrangements allow India both flexibility, as well as maneuvering capacity, in a complex global environment. They enable India to safeguard its interests and those of its people. And most importantly, and I'd like to really underscore this, they allow India to retain independence of action in very difficult circumstances. Our history as a nation has taught us that we have no option but to be the sole guardians of our destiny, our current well-being, and our future progress. And we must be able to make those sovereign choices necessary in this regard. Traditional alliances have never been our choice in all these decades of our existence as an independent republic. However, we've chosen to enter into key, high-yield, multifaceted partnerships with some countries, and our relationship with the United States is a shining example.

Now, going to your question about whether there's a specific partnership or grouping that deserves particular attention, I'll take my last argument forward. I think our partnership with the United States is an example of how democracy, development, demography, and defense have been synchronized between our two countries. Our values as democracies coincide, we share similar goals for the welfare and progress of our peoples, there's a strong human quotient to our relationship—especially with the Indian-American diaspora serving as a bridge—and our defense and security interests are closely aligned (ours and the United States interests, particularly in the Indo -Pacific). And our task— I do not call it a challenge—is to further toughen the sinews of this relationship since it's a force for universal good. That's to answer your question about a specific partnership or grouping that deserves particular attention.

Coalitions of shared interests, rather than alliances, in the traditional definition of the term are best geared to meet the complex challenges we face and may well configure the global security architecture for the future.

And in the same context, I'd say the same would apply to the Quad, especially after our showdown, India's showdown, that is, with China on the northern border in Ladakh in the summer of 2020 and the repercussions that flowed from that military clash—and the fact that India and the United States engaged in a whole range of consultations following those unfortunate events in the summer of 2020, in fact, just as the pandemic also broke upon the world. And flowing from that also, the fact that you saw a kind of reemergence, a rebirth, of the Quad as it were, in the months that followed, and the fact that today the Quad has emerged as an institution, as an organization that has so many areas of common ground between ourselves and the United States, and as I mentioned, fellow democracies like Japan and Australia.

So these groupings, I think, acquire contours that become increasingly important as a result of the global events and situations that often challenge us.

Thank you very much. I think it's really interesting that you cited the US-India relationship as an example of how these types of partnerships could work for India. As you know, there are some critics in the US [who] believe that this relationship could face challenges down the road, given that India doesn't participate in the traditional alliance system. But as you've very nicely laid out, that doesn't necessarily have to be the case—and I think full credit has to be given to both the US and the Indian sides for allowing this partnership to really flourish, you know, using innovative approaches. So, thank you for that.

Do you think that there is a possibility that India's approach might change one day? And if so, what factors could provoke such a policy shift?

Looking at our foreign policy—and I think it applies to the foreign policy of any country in the world today—foreign policy is always forged on the anvil of domestic concerns and the interests of the people in that country. And a country such as India, with aspirations to be a leading power, will naturally have to be very adroit and far-seeing in the choices it makes to defend its national security and its interests. And these are choices, obviously, that have to be India's alone. The world is a very difficult place today and the region in which we are situated as a country (in which India is situated) is a very troubled one, with mounting trust deficits between countries. India's interests are, however, increasingly aligned with our friends among the Western democracies and our sister states in the Global South. A term our foreign minister, Dr. Jaishankar, used recently that we are “southwest” in the choices we make is, I think, quite appropriate.

Coalitions of shared interests, rather than alliances, in the traditional definition of the term are best geared (in my view) to meet the complex challenges we face and may well configure the global security architecture for the future.

Thank you very much. This really is interesting. And I have to say that this context that you provided is invaluable for our 

 readership and viewership and listenership because I think that many observers might look at something such as what happened several years ago. And you had mentioned the Ladakh clash when China and India experienced this incredibly deadly border clash—the deadliest violence between the two since the two went to war in the '60s. And very soon after that clash broke out, as you recall, Dr. Jaishankar (the External Affairs Minister) said that India will never join an alliance system. And I think many in the US were thinking what an interesting time to make that statement when one would think that perhaps there was ever a time when one would expect India to be receptive to the idea of furthering or pursuing some type of alliance with the US, it would be now. And I think that your comments here really provided some very useful context to help us understand why Dr. Jaishankar would have said that when he did.

Before we wrap, do you have any closing thoughts for us?

I'd like to say, Michael, of course, a very big thank you. But also add that we often use the term “alliance” in the context in which we have traditionally understood it. And I think that whole structure of alliances that is so much of a post-World War II—or even post-Congress of Vienna concept—has been altered significantly and radically with all that we see around us, and even since the end of the Cold War and then, of course, the post-Cold War situation that we face today, the emergence of many new countries, growing economies like India, countries such as India which are taking their place as leading powers on the global stage. I think we need a redefinition of all the terms that we've been so familiar with, and I think I would emphasize that perhaps the term 

, are really part of the lexicon for the future, and perhaps the word 

Interesting. Well, on that note, thank you again for being with us, Ambassador Rao. This has been great. And to our audience: I thank you for joining us. And I hope that you take some time to explore the rest of 

Cover image: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

In this multimedia feature, Michael Kugelman and Ambassador Nirupama Rao explore India's use of informal partnerships to further its strategic goals.