Managing a Tough Neighbourhood
India tried to stabilise its volatile periphery in 2024; it should play the long and pragmatic game to create more wins in 2025 India’s neighbourhood in 2024 remained in ferment, even as the country tried to steady its bilateral relationships in South Asia. Through the year, India worked to stabilize its periphery: engaging cautiously with […]
Managing a Tough Neighbourhood
India’s neighbourhood policy demands strategic patience, embracing occasional anti-India regimes, navigating Chinese competition, and rejecting zero-sum approaches. A durable framework for regional security and prosperity should prioritize grants over loans, emphasizing economic and security cooperation, connectivity, and humanitarian assistance. Engagement spans energy collaboration, development aid, defence partnerships, disaster relief, cultural exchanges, and infrastructure projects. Encouraging Quad partners like the U.S., Japan, and Australia to join South Asia’s economic initiatives will enhance regional stability, despite occasional differences. Reviving SAARC will offer a more manageable mechanism for dialogue, complementing sub-regional platforms like BIMSTEC and BBIN, while reducing reliance on the China-led SCO.
Three Years of War in Ukraine
Trump understands the deal must be struck directly between the US and Russia—between him and Putin, strongman to strongman. Including other stakeholders in peace talks would delay deals. Putin, dominant on the battlefield, has waited to negotiate with Trump, who will operate in a realist framework rather than invoke a rules-based order. The likely outcome is a ceasefire followed by a peace deal resembling Versailles after WWI or Yalta after WWII—where major powers carved out spheres of influence.
The Ex Who Won’t Go Away
An imprisoned Imran Khan directing street protests is a thorn in Pakistan army’s side. The political instability deepens Islamabad’s ‘polycrisis’. Pakistan’s Qaidi Number 804, its former cricket captain and PM, Imran Khan, gave another ʻfinal callʼ to his PTI cadre for an assault on Islamabad on Nov 24, exhorting his supporters to ‘fight till the […]
Dealing with Pakistan: India’s Western Neighbour is No Longer a Strategic Priority
India’s Pakistan policy has evolved over the last decade, from an attempted rapprochement in 2014-15, to a focus on stringent border management and counterterrorism. Even though India’s primary strategic challenge over the next decade would emanate from the north i.e. China- the country’s most recalcitrant western neighbour will continue to pose a sub-conventional security threat.
Peace À La Kyiv
Narendra Modi is on a bold diplomatic mission in an active war zone in the heart of Europe. His visit is the first in 45 years by an Indian prime minister to Poland and the first to independent Ukraine. Polishing Ties Modi’s predecessors encountered a different Poland—a Soviet satellite following Moscow’s lead. When Nehru (1955), […]
‘Strategic realism’ with ‘economic pragmatism’ — a former diplomat on ‘creative’ economic diplomacy
In fact, the larger framework for economic diplomacy should seek to balance commercial outreach with broader strategic foreign policy aims. Diplomats have moved from promoting trade agreements to more innovative means of dealing with a world in flux. The traditional instruments of promoting investment, exports and tourism have to be supplemented with additional pathways for achieving the national interest.
Why Modi must try & make peace
The planetary turmoil is not new. India has deftly navigated a world where power dynamics have shifted from bipolarity to unipolarity to the current multipolarity of sorts, where India also aspires to be a pole. But the current decade has frontloaded the shocks: a global pandemic; an economic meltdown; wars in Ukraine and Gaza; and the looming threat of another conflict theatre around Taiwan.
Why Modi’s in Moscow
For Delhi, Moscow will remain an important strategic, defence and energy partner. India’s historical investments in the Russia relationship do not just make for a ‘legacy factor’, they are essential to sustain defence preparedness, to ensure an alternate source for energy and technology, and even to serve as a geopolitical hedge in a world between orders.
Hybrid Pakistan
In the aftermath of brazenly rigged elections of 8 February, Pakistan has unveiled a new parliament, government, and cabinet of ministers, in a spectacle carefully choreographed by its military establishment.