Context

• Indian diplomacy once celebrated for its moral leadership in the post-colonial world, it now faces a far more fractured international landscape marked by shifting alliances, transactional politics, and the decline of multilateralism.
• The challenge for India’s foreign policy establishment lies not merely in adjusting to these changes but in fundamentally reimagining the principles that have long guided its engagement with the world.
• Under these circumstances, it is important to highlight the growing mismatch between India’s traditional diplomatic mindset and the dynamic realities of twenty-first-century geopolitics.

The Erosion of Multilateralism and India’s Diplomatic Inertia

• The advent of Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States marked a global shift away from the collaborative multilateral order that had underpinned much of the post-Cold War era.
• In this new environment of unilateralism and transactional diplomacy, countries were compelled to display flexibility and pragmatism to protect their interests.
• India, however, appears to have struggled to adjust. Its foreign policy remains tethered to the moral idealism of the Nehruvian era, when solidarity, non-alignment, and principled neutrality were viable strategies.
• Today, such approaches have left India ill-equipped to operate a friendless world.
• The resulting trust deficit, both regionally and globally, has raised concerns about India’s diminishing relevance as a geopolitical actor.

Challenges for India’s Foreign Policy

• Diminishing Geopolitical Relevance in West Asia
  • Nowhere is India’s diplomatic marginalisation more visible than in West Asia, a region of vital strategic and energy importance. Two key developments underscore this reality.
  • First, India’s exclusion from the peace process that ended the Gaza conflict revealed a stark decline in its regional influence.
  • The process was orchestrated by the United States under Trump, with support from Türkiye, Egypt, and Qatar, countries that, notably, have shown varying degrees of hostility toward India.
  • Second, India compounded its absence by sending only a low-level delegation to the reconciliation celebrations that followed the peace agreement, even as most world leaders attended.
  • These episodes symbolise not merely diplomatic oversight but a deeper structural decline in India’s ability to project influence in a region where it once held considerable sway.
• Neighbourhood Turbulence and Strategic Myopia
  • From the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier to Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, India’s influence appears to be waning.
  • The internal instability in Pakistan, particularly the Taliban’s re-emergence and its cross-border implications, poses a significant threat to regional stability.
  • Yet, India’s apparent satisfaction in viewing Taliban attacks on Pakistan as retributive justice is described as dangerously shortsighted. 

India and China: A Fragile Peace

• India’s relations with China form perhaps the most complex and consequential dimension of its foreign policy.
• While recent diplomatic gestures have created an appearance of reconciliation, a so-called India-China bromance, these developments merely gloss over unresolved border tensions and structural rivalries.
• The decision to treat the 2020 Galwan clash as a mere blip reflects a worrying readiness to downplay China’s assertiveness for the sake of superficial stability.
• India’s failure to grasp the subtleties of Chinese strategic thinking has historically placed it at a disadvantage.
• Under President Xi Jinping, China’s diplomacy has become more overtly hegemonic and less conciliatory than under earlier leaders like Deng Xiaoping or Hu Jintao.

The Way Forward: The Need for Strategic Renewal

• The cumulative picture is one of drift and disconnection. India’s diplomatic machinery, steeped in outdated traditions, appears unable to respond to the rapid reconfiguration of power around it.
• There is an urgent need for India to rediscover its strategic imagination, to move beyond rhetorical assertions of strategic autonomy and translate its economic strength into geopolitical relevance.
• For India, this vigilance must take the form of a more nuanced, pragmatic, and regionally sensitive foreign policy that recognises emerging power centres and shifting alliances.
• At the same time, India must remain conscious of its civilisational identity.

Conclusion

• Current developments paint a sobering picture of India’s current foreign policy landscape: one marked by inertia, declining regional influence, and missed opportunities in a rapidly changing world.
• Yet, it also carries an implicit note of optimism, that India’s future remains secure if it can revitalise its diplomatic vision and adapt to new realities.
• The path forward lies not in nostalgia for the moral diplomacy of the mid-twentieth century but in crafting a twenty-first-century foreign policy grounded in strategic clarity, cultural confidence, and a willingness to engage with complexity.