ABSTRACT
From global warming to power plays in the Persian Gulf; nuclear non-proliferation to sub-regional cooperation in South Asia; and from the politics of pipelines in inner Asia to defending sea lanes in the Indian Ocean, energy issues have emerged at the very top of India’s foreign policy agenda in recent years. This has resulted in a range of new institutional mechanisms within various ministries and various inter-agency task forces. Barely a decade ago, ‘energy security’ as a notion hardly fi gured in India’s foreign policy discourse. So long as the Indian economy remained a closed one and growth rates remained low, commercial diplomacy was largely alien to India’s foreign policy. To be sure, India was interested in economic aid from the major Western donors as well as global multilateral institutions. The salience of this economic engagement was limited to bridging what used to be called the ‘hard currency gap’ and was largely the province of India’s fi nance ministry rather than of its external affairs ministry. The foreign offi ce was indeed quite active in the debate on the New International Economic Order (NIEO) that was once emblematic of India’s foreign policy that was obsessed with leading the Non-Aligned Movement and burdened by the ideology of ‘third worldism’. The emphasis was on changing terms of trade and reconfi guring norms of international economic cooperation. Although India’s championship of NIEO got much scholarly attention, it had little effect either on its own economy or on the world.
