Recent Developments in Indian Foreign Policy

The organising shift of the last decade is conceptual before it is geographical: India stopped describing itself as a balancing power and started acting as a shaping one, and the Indo-Pacific is where that claim is being tested.

This is chapter 53 of the PSIR Optional Notes, from the part on India and the World in the Paper II syllabus. The complete book is a free download.

From Asia-Pacific to Indo-Pacific

The 2024 paper asked for the rationale behind the replacement, which is a question about strategic geography.

What Asia-Pacific meant. A construct centred on the Pacific rim and its economies, in which the organising institutions were APEC and the American alliance system, and in which the Indian Ocean was a separate theatre. India was peripheral to it, and was not an APEC member.

Why the reconception. The reasons are material before they are political.

• Trade and energy flows run continuously from the Gulf through the Indian Ocean and the Malacca Strait to East Asia. Treating the two oceans as separate theatres does not correspond to how goods and energy actually move.
• China’s expanding footprint spans both: the Belt and Road’s maritime component, port development across the Indian Ocean littoral, and a permanent naval presence west of Malacca. A power operating across both oceans cannot be met in one.
• India’s own position. The reconception places India at the centre of a single system rather than at the western end of someone else’s, which is precisely why India adopted the term.
• Alliance architecture. It creates a rationale for cooperation among states, India, Japan, Australia, France, that are not bound by a common alliance but share concerns.
• Analytical accuracy. Sea lines of communication, chokepoints and maritime domain awareness are indivisible across the two oceans.

India’s version. Announced at the Shangri-La Dialogue in June 2018, and its distinctive features should be stated because they differ from the American formulation: the region runs from the shores of Africa to the Americas; it is inclusive, meaning open to all states including China; ASEAN centrality is affirmed; it is not directed against any country; it is not a strategy or a club of limited members; and it rests on a rules-based order, freedom of navigation, connectivity and sustainable development.

The Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative, announced at the East Asia Summit in 2019, organises this into seven pillars, maritime security, maritime ecology, maritime resources, capacity building and resource sharing, disaster risk reduction and management, science and technology and academic cooperation, and trade connectivity and maritime transport, with different partners leading each. SAGAR, announced in Mauritius in 2015, is the Indian Ocean framework: safeguarding India’s interests, deepening security cooperation with littoral states, collective action against threats, sustainable development, and engagement with extra-regional powers on the basis of shared interests.

The Quad and minilateralism

The Quad. Originating in the 2004 tsunami core group, formalised briefly in 2007 and lapsing after Australia’s withdrawal, revived at official level in 2017, raised to foreign minister level in 2019 and to leader level in March 2021.

Its character is the examinable point. It is not an alliance: there is no mutual defence obligation, no secretariat and no treaty. Its declared agenda is functional, vaccine manufacturing and delivery, critical and emerging technology, climate, infrastructure, cyber, space, counter-terrorism, and the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness, which provides near-real-time tracking data to partners across the region. The Malabar naval exercise, which now includes all four, is the military expression, but it is conducted outside the Quad’s formal framework.

India’s approach: participation without alliance commitment, insistence that the Quad is not directed against any country, and resistance to its militarisation, which distinguishes India’s position from Australia’s and Japan’s.

Other minilaterals. I2U2 with Israel, the UAE and the United States (2022), focused on food security, water, energy and technology; the India-France-UAE trilateral (2022) and the India-France-Australia trilateral; IPEF, whose supply chain, clean economy and fair economy pillars India joined while declining the trade pillar; the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative with Japan and Australia; and, on the other side of the ledger, continued membership of BRICS, now expanded, and the SCO, which India joined in 2017 and chaired in 2023.

The pattern is deliberate: India participates in formats with overlapping and sometimes opposed memberships, which is multi-alignment in operation.

Connectivity

The 2025 paper’s question about guaranteeing greater connectivity with the rest of the world points to a set of projects that should be known with their status.

• IMEC, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, announced at the New Delhi G20 in September 2023 with India, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the EU, France, Germany, Italy and the United States. Two corridors, eastern from India to the Gulf and northern from the Gulf to Europe, combining shipping, rail, electricity and data cables. Its implementation has been affected by the conflict in West Asia since October 2023.
• INSTC, the International North-South Transport Corridor, agreed in 2000 by India, Iran and Russia, running through Iran to Central Asia, Russia and Europe. Its value is distance and time saving relative to the Suez route; its obstacles are sanctions, infrastructure gaps and the Rasht-Astara rail link.
• Chabahar, India’s port investment in Iran, which provides access to Afghanistan and Central Asia bypassing Pakistan, and a long-term operating agreement concluded in 2024.
• Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project through Myanmar, linking Kolkata to Sittwe by sea and onward to Mizoram, delayed by the situation in Rakhine.
• India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway, delayed by conflict in Myanmar.
• BBIN motor vehicles agreement (2015), which Bhutan has not ratified, operating among the other three.

The analytical point: India’s connectivity agenda is an alternative to the Belt and Road rather than a competitor to it in scale, and its distinguishing claims are consultation, transparency, debt sustainability and respect for sovereignty, which is a direct contrast drawn deliberately. Its weakness is execution: nearly every project above is behind schedule, and most delays are caused by conditions in third countries rather than by Indian capacity.

Positions on recent crises

Ukraine. Covered in Chapter 48.

Afghanistan. The 2023 paper asked what steps India has taken since the Taliban takeover of August 2021. India evacuated its mission, then re-established a technical team in Kabul in June 2022; it has continued humanitarian assistance including wheat consignments delivered through Iran and Pakistan, medicines, vaccines and earthquake relief; it has maintained development stakes and engaged in official-level contacts without according recognition; and it has pressed, through the Moscow Format and the Delhi Regional Security Dialogue of 2021, for an inclusive government, the protection of women and minorities, and assurance that Afghan territory will not be used for terrorism. India’s interests are counter-terrorism, connectivity through Chabahar, and preventing exclusive Pakistani or Chinese influence. Its constraint is that engagement without recognition limits what can be delivered.

West Asia. Covered in Chapter 52.

Myanmar. The 2023 and 2024 papers both engaged this. Since the coup of February 2021 India has maintained engagement with the military authorities while calling for a return to democracy and the release of detainees, a position criticised as accommodation and defended on the grounds of a 1,600-kilometre border, insurgent sanctuaries, the Kaladan project and the need to avoid ceding the field to China. The 2024 decision to end the Free Movement Regime, which had permitted border residents to travel sixteen kilometres either side without documents, and to fence the border, was justified by security and demographic concerns and has been opposed by Mizoram and Nagaland because the boundary divides the Chin-Kuki-Mizo and Naga communities, which is exactly the ethno-political complication the 2024 question named.

The vision of world order

India’s articulated vision has four elements, and the 2025 paper’s phrase about an alternative universality belongs to the fourth.

• Reformed multilateralism. Institutions that reflect present rather than 1945 realities: Security Council expansion, IMF quota reform, WTO restoration, and a greater Southern voice.
• Multipolarity, including in Asia. The formulation matters: India argues not merely for a multipolar world but for a multipolar Asia, which is a proposition about China.
• Strategic autonomy through plurality of partnerships rather than through abstention.
• An alternative universality. The claim that India offers a model of order grounded in civilisational pluralism, democratic practice without Western tutelage, and development without conditionality, and that universality can be built from many traditions rather than exported from one. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, adopted as the G20 theme, is its rhetorical form; digital public infrastructure offered as a shared good is its practical form.

The critical assessment an answer should offer: the vision is coherent and increasingly resourced, but it depends on capability India is still building, on a neighbourhood that has not consistently cooperated, and on holding together partnerships whose own relations are deteriorating. Its strongest asset is that no other state currently occupies the position of a large democracy speaking for the South without belonging to a bloc.

Read the rest. This chapter is one of 58 in the complete PSIR Optional Notes, covering Paper I and Paper II in full — free to download.

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