At first sight, 2023 was a breakout year of sorts for Indian diplomacy.

On September 9-10^th, New Delhi chaired the G20 Leaders’ Summit for the first time and showcasing its bridge-building skills, marshalled a consensus among the major powers on the Russia-Ukraine language in the leaders’ declaration. The G20 finance ministers’ and foreign ministers’ meetings earlier in the year had produced only a chair’s summary; as such, there were understandable fears that a leaders’ declaration might not be issued for the first time since the inauguration of the G20 framework. In the event, India’s successful hosting drew praise from the United States and Russia alike.

Earlier in June, Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid his second state visit to the United States, where he joined a rarefied list of world leaders who have addressed a joint sitting of Congress on more than one occasion (Modi’s earlier visit and address to Congress was in 2016). Prior to the visit, the U.S. and India finalized a Defense Industrial Cooperation Roadmap and during the visit, an agreement was signed to enable the transfer of General Electric’s advanced F-414 engine technology for manufacture in India. Going one better, during his state visit to France to commemorate Bastille Day the following month, Modi and President Macron agreed to pursue joint development and local manufacture of combat aircraft engines in India. Earlier in the year, the national security advisors of the U.S. and India had held an inaugural meeting of their Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies (iCET), which spans the range from defense technology cooperation to semiconductor supply chains to space and next-generation telecommunications.

In May, Narendra Modi paid a first visit by an Indian prime minister to Papua New Guinea and co-chaired the Forum for India-Pacific Islands Cooperation (FIPIC). The forum was scheduled, interestingly, back-to-back with Washington’s hosting of its own U.S.-Pacific Islands Forum in Port Moresby, and at FIPIC Modi reaffirmed New Delhi’s participation alongside the U.S., Japan and Australia in a telecommunications network modernization project in Palau. In August, the former service chiefs of India’s army, navy and air force attended an Indo-Pacific security conference in Taipei for the first time, as part of a study commissioned by India’s top military commander six weeks earlier to examine New Delhi’s role during a full-blown Taiwan contingency. The study was itself prompted by discreet American inquiries on the role and contributions by India in the event of a war in the Taiwan Strait.

In July, Prime Minister Modi chaired the Heads of State Summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) for the first time, consolidating India’s strategically autonomous positioning in global international relations. In a dozen or so votes at the United Nations in 2022 and 2023 on the Ukraine conflict, New Delhi has abstained from condemning Russia despite acute pressure from its Western partners to do so. It even participated in a weeklong multinational military drill hosted by Moscow in 2022.

The following month in Johannesburg, India along with its BRICS partners welcomed six new members as part of the grouping’s first major expansion. Of the six new members, Mr. Modi played host or paid a state visit to three of them – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt – in 2023, reinforcing a genuine foreign policy innovation of his premiership so far: a re-equilibration of strategic equities in the Middle East in favor of the major Sunni Arab Gulf monarchies, along with a qualitative deepening of ties with Israel. To this end, New Delhi bucked its voting trend on the Israel-Palestine issue at the UN General Assembly in October, abstaining on a resolution that otherwise commanded a significant majority (120 to 14, with 45 states abstaining) which called for a humanitarian truce between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. In 2023, New Delhi also burnished its credentials with the ‘Global South’, hosting a ‘Voice of Global South Summit’ in January and championing the developing country cause as an invited guest at the G7 Hiroshima Summit.  

To be clear, the Modi government compiled a less flattering list of accomplishments too. In September, Indian government operatives were credibly linked to the extraterritorial killing of a militant Khalistani Sikh activist on Canadian soil – surely, a new low in New Delhi’s use of power in international relations. In October, a Qatari court sentenced eight retired Indian navalmen, some of them decorated, to the death penalty for espionage activities on behalf of Israel. Although contracted in their private capacities to supervise the induction of Italian stealth submarines into the Qatari Emiri Naval Force (QENF), it is hard to believe that the Government of India’s fingerprints were not present. Also, in October, Mr. Modi paid a visit to a disputed border village on the India-Nepal boundary, a rare prime ministerial outing to a piece of real estate in dispute that is not the norm in Indian or international diplomacy. And earlier in July, the Modi government trashed a Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) order on a preliminary award pertaining to the Pakistan v. India Indus Water Treaty proceedings in language eerily similar to that reserved for the Philippines v. China South China Sea tribunal by Beijing.

Be that as it may, the bold brush strokes of India’s foreign policy in 2023 eclipsed the few indiscretions committed. On closer scrutiny though, the brush strokes are much less than they appear to be (aside from the government’s transformative Middle East outreach).

India’s decision to abstain on the Ukraine-related votes at the UN General Assembly had less to do with its decades-long friendship with Moscow or some abstract attachment to multipolarity and more to do with its realist interest in limiting Moscow’s strategic overdependence on Beijing. Reluctant acquiescence of this assessment as well as carveouts from the punishing extraterritorial sanctions was obtained from Washington on the implicit premise that New Delhi’s anti-China posture in the Indo-Pacific region would be preserved.

The paring down of the anti-Russia language and issuance thereby of a consensus leaders’ declaration at the G20 summit was less a reflection of New Delhi’s consummate bridge-building skills as much as it was a concession bestowed by the United States and the western powers to project India as a successful G20 host. With Xi Jinping absent in New Delhi, the need to project this contrast was all the more urgent. In the Bali G20 Leaders’ Declaration of November 2022, Moscow had been “condemned” for its “war in Ukraine” and its actions “deplore[d] in the strongest terms” as “aggression” against Kyiv. With Moscow and Beijing opposed to a repetition of the Bali language in the New Delhi Declaration, and with the Modi government staring at the prospect of being the first G20 chair unable to hammer out a consensus communique, the U.S. stepped in and acquiesced to the removal of the references “condemning” Russia and its “aggression” against Ukraine.

Tellingly, the Quad Leaders’ Declaration of May 2023 too had glossed over Moscow’s responsibility in deference to Indian sensitivities, foreshadowing the dispensability of Kyiv in the G20 statement so as to project common cause among major ‘like-minded’ democracies against authoritarian regimes.

The Modi government’s foray into the Pacific Island nations was motivated less by development-related goals and more as a strategic quid pro quo to ‘crowd-in’ its Quad partners in South Asia, and thus help rebalance against growing Chinese influence in the sub-region. The Pacific outreach amounts, in effect, to an exercise in mutual backscratching with New Delhi reciprocating Washington and Tokyo in kind for their active political and economic engagement in South Asia of late. China has been excluded moreover from all relevant India-inspired initiatives or institutional arrangements in Indian Ocean region – be it the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS), the Information Fusion Centre-Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR) or, for the matter, even the International Solar Alliance (ISA). 

A single point agenda – the obsessive need to countervail any advantage that could accrue to China on the Indo-Pacific’s geopolitical canvas – was the common thread that tied together India’s diplomatic strategy in 2023. This anti-China fixation, not unlike neighbor Pakistan’s own anti-India fixation, stems from the loss of effective control and patrolling rights over approximately 1,000 sq. kms of disputed territory on the Ladakh Himalayan frontier to Beijing since 2020. This setback also galvanized a more wholesome embrace of Washington’s regional strategy as well as a readiness to stay in Washington’s good graces – to the extent that India’s cherished maxim of strategic autonomy is practiced at times now at the pleasure of the United States. And vice-versa, Washington flatteringly paid lip service to this Indian quest for autonomy so long as it was framed not so much in support of U.S. policies necessarily as much as it was employed in opposition to China’s regional and global interests.  

Tripped up by its haste to play the multipolar game on the “front foot” 

In November 2019, while delivering the Goenka memorial lecture, India’s external affairs minister S. Jaishankar sketched out New Delhi’s journey from non-alignment to multi-engagement while keeping intact the kernel of non-alignment – that being strategic autonomy. Engaging multiple players in the search for “convergences” was key to maximizing India’s options to widen the strategic space for the country to judge and act on its own self-interest. In a “multipolar world”, he observed, this was “a game best played on the front foot, appreciating that progress on any one front strengthens one’s hand on all others.” Risk-taking was “an inherent aspect” of the process.

A decade earlier, his predecessor Pranab Mukherjee had conveyed a similar message – albeit without introducing the risk-taking factor, when he noted that the simultaneous deepening of India’s relations with all the major power centers had created an upward spiral of improving relations with them. Increased cooperation with one power opened the door to wider room for maneuver with the others. He had cautioned at the time though that the essence of India’s challenge lay in ensuring autonomy of judgement so that no one set of relations would be ranged against or be at the expense of another. In Mr. Jaishankar’s haste to play the multipolar game on the “front foot”, this admonition went unheeded.

The Modi government’s relationship with China has been based not so much on a search for convergences as much as it has been on injecting ‘external balancers’ – the U.S. initially, and the Quad more lately – into the bilateral equation, with a view to rebalance Chinese power as well as raise the geopolitical cost of the latter’s perceived hostility to India’s rise in global affairs. Aligning geopolitically, economically (in the area of critical supply chains) and militarily with the U.S. and its partners in the Indo-Pacific region would elicit a more constructive approach towards India, it was thought.

The outcome has been quite the opposite. Beijing’s stubborn refusal to bend to New Delhi’s will has been informed by two cardinal principles – first, that no amount of pressuring China by standing on the shoulders of third parties will achieve that which can be realized through good neighborly relations in an exclusively bilateral context. And second, that the downside cost of bad relations with China will outweigh the upside benefit of ganging-up with the U.S. and West on China. A willingness to deploy coercive but limited use of force at expedient pressure points along the undefined bilateral frontier, dictated no doubt by local circumstances that the Modi government unwittingly invited, was also key to pressing its case against New Delhi. 

In this combustive test of wills, the political space to maintain an “autonomy of judgment” on major power relations has evaporated in New Delhi, and a key pillar of its multi-aligned policy – the now-mismanaged China relationship – that was intended to facilitate an upward spiral of improving relations and widen the room for strategic maneuver has crumbled. Strategic autonomy has effectively given way to strategic alignment with the U.S. and the West in the Indo-Pacific region – an outcome not entirely of New Delhi’s choosing.   

With India and the United States now entering election season, the outlook for New Delhi’s foreign policy in 2024 is likely to resemble more of the same.

This journal article was originally released in the CSCAP Regional Security Outlook 2024 (page 18-21).