This is an archive article published on February 19, 2024

Opinion Express View on India’s foreign policy: Non-West, not anti-West

Modi government shows self-assurance while leaving room open for closer ties with the US and Europe

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Rejecting the division of the world into “rigid blocs”, Blinken said the US “may have different collections and coalitions of countries that bring certain experiences and capacities” in dealing with different challenges.

By: Editorial

February 19, 2024 07:00 AM IST First published on: Feb 19, 2024 at 07:00 AM IST

Participating in a panel discussion at the annual Munich Security Conference over the weekend, along with the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and the German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, the External Affairs Minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has offered a new template to think through India’s relationship with the West and how it is different from other members of the BRICS forum that India founded with China and Russia. He was responding to a question about India’s apparent freedom to choose between multiple partners, including the US, Europe and Russia and the implicit assumption that the BRICS forum dominated by Beijing and Moscow was “anti-Western”. Affirming the distinction “between being non-West and anti-West”, Jaishankar said he would “characterise India as a country which is non-West but which has an extremely strong relation with the Western countries, getting better by the days”. He added that that definition might not apply to other members of the BRICS.

While Russia and China might want to mobilise the BRICS against the West, Jaishankar said India had no interest in such an agenda. At the same time, he insisted that Delhi sees value in the BRICS as a non-Western forum that has had considerable value in reshaping global governance in the 21st century. Although many in the West are dismayed by Delhi’s close ties to Russia and BRICS, Secretary Blinken had no reason to quarrel with Jaishankar’s formulation. He endorsed Jaishankar’s case for “flexibility” in international relations and underlined the importance of “variable geometry” in the current global context.

Blinken added that the relationship between the US and India is now “the strongest it’s ever been”, and it “makes no difference that India happens to be a leading member of BRICS”. He also highlighted the wide-ranging international collaboration between Delhi and Washington, including in the Quadrilateral Security Forum, along with Canberra and Tokyo.

This new comfort level at the highest political level in Delhi and Washington with the apparent geopolitical contradictions does not always filter down to Delhi’s foreign policy discourse that has long defined India’s international relations in anti-Western terms. The anti-imperial left and the nativist right in India, as well as the centrist Congress party and the national security establishment, have long operated on the assumption that the contradictions between India and the US are irreconcilable.

The Narendra Modi government has transcended this paradigm by engaging the US with greater self-assurance and building a strategic partnership with Washington that is deeper and broader than ever before. The decline of the left in India and the weakening of the Congress removed much of the traditional resistance to India’s productive engagement with the US and Europe. However, there is residual anti-western sentiment among the rising conservative nationalists. In framing India as “non-West” but not “anti-West”, the Modi government consolidates the support of the Hindu right for its foreign policy while leaving much room open for closer ties with the US and Europe.