ABSTRACT
From its relations in South Asia and with the world’s great powers to its diplomacy on the global stage, India’s international affairs are undergoing a significant reconfiguration. Driven by an evolution in its domestic identity, as dictated by the Hindutva-centric policies of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the values and practices underpinning this worldview are being exported into the delivery of New Delhi’s various bilateral and regional relations. This export is now having an impact across India’s economic, military, cultural and institutional interactions. As this volume’s Chapters have all made increasingly evident, the environment within which India’s international relations are being enacted is also experiencing substantial changes. This variation includes shifting regional power balances, most apparently with China and Pakistan but also regarding how other great powers – most notably in the guise of France, Russia, Japan and the United States (US) – are altering their policies towards India, South Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific region. Such changes have influenced New Delhi’s new, more assertive diplomatic style from the use of ‘paradiplomacy’, and exporting its values through the Indian diaspora, to opening up new areas of influence, most notably in the Indo-Pacific. Together with the injection of clear BJP and Hindutva-orientated foreign policy interests, these factors are influencing how India now responds to major global emergencies, as we have seen concerning climate change, foreign aid and the Covid-19 pandemic. More tellingly, despite these evolutions, it is New Delhi’s pursuit of heightened international influence and status that remains as the guiding hallmark of Global India.
