India’s international profile has changed considerably since 2014, marked by a rising diplomatic footprint, a deliberately balanced approach to major-power rivalries, and a handful of genuinely difficult episodes that have tested key relationships. This article surveys the record.
A Rising Diplomatic Profile
India’s most visible institutional achievement of this period was hosting the G20 presidency in 2023, covered in detail in our earlier article on that summit, during which the African Union was admitted as a permanent G20 member. Alongside this, India has deepened its engagement with the Quad grouping, alongside the United States, Japan, and Australia, a strategic partnership focused substantially on countering China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
The Russia-Ukraine Balancing Act
Perhaps no single foreign policy stance has drawn as much international attention as India’s position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. India has continued purchasing significant volumes of discounted Russian oil despite Western sanctions and diplomatic pressure to reduce that trade, a position the government has defended as serving India’s own energy security and economic interests. This stance has drawn criticism from Western governments who view it as undercutting the sanctions regime against Russia, while others, including some foreign policy analysts, have framed it more sympathetically as a legitimate exercise of India’s long-standing doctrine of “strategic autonomy,” continuing a broader tradition of non-alignment that predates Modi’s government by decades but that his administration has actively continued and, in some analyses, further leaned into rather than abandoning under Western pressure.
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Deepening Ties with the United States
Alongside the Russia relationship, India-US ties have deepened substantially during this period, including expanded defence cooperation and technology partnerships such as the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, known as iCET, aimed at joint cooperation on semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and defence technology. This deepening relationship has coexisted, sometimes uneasily, with India’s continued Russia ties, illustrating the genuinely multi-directional nature of India’s foreign policy approach under Modi rather than a clean alignment with any single major power bloc.
The Diplomatic Crises
Not every aspect of this period has gone smoothly. Relations with Canada were severely strained following the 2023 killing of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia, with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly alleging potential Indian government involvement, allegations India firmly rejected as “absurd,” according to coverage by Global News, leading to the two countries expelling each other’s diplomats as the dispute escalated, according to PBS News and CBS News’s reporting. A separate case in the United States involved allegations of a foiled assassination plot targeting Sikh separatist figure Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, with Deccan Herald reporting that US officials had expressed general satisfaction with India’s cooperation in the resulting investigation, a notably different tone from the more openly adversarial Canada dispute. Both episodes drew international attention to concerns about India’s human rights record and the treatment of separatist movements abroad.
Economic Diplomacy and the “China Plus One” Opportunity
India has also positioned itself as an alternative manufacturing hub for global companies looking to diversify supply chains away from China, a strategy commonly referred to as “China plus one.” This positioning has been supported by the Production-Linked Incentive schemes covered in our earlier article on Modi’s economic legacy, aimed specifically at attracting electronics and other manufacturing investment that might otherwise have gone to China.
Why India’s Approach Doesn’t Fit a Simple Label
India’s foreign policy under Modi resists easy categorisation as either fully aligned with the West or genuinely non-aligned in the older Cold War sense. Analysis published by the Diplomat, titled “Strategic Autonomy or a Pro-US Tilt? India’s Foreign Policy Under Pressure,” captures this tension directly, noting that India has increasingly had to balance its historical instinct toward strategic autonomy against growing practical and economic incentives to align more closely with the United States and its allies, a balancing act that has become more, not less, complicated as global tensions have intensified across this period.
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The China Relationship Specifically
Alongside these other relationships, India’s ties with China have remained a persistent point of tension throughout this period, shaped substantially by an unresolved border dispute along the Line of Actual Control that saw a serious military clash in the Galwan Valley in June 2020, the most significant such confrontation between the two countries in decades. This border tension has coexisted uneasily with continued, substantial trade between the two countries, illustrating a pattern common across several of India’s key relationships during this period: significant economic interdependence persisting alongside genuine and sometimes serious strategic friction, rather than either side taking the more clean-break approach a straightforward adversarial relationship might imply.
How This Legacy Is Likely to Be Assessed Going Forward
Assessing Modi’s full foreign policy legacy will likely depend considerably on how several currently unresolved situations eventually play out, including the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine war and its long-term effect on India-Russia ties, the durability of the India-US relationship through changes in American leadership, and whether the diplomatic strain with Canada and the United States over the Sikh separatist allegations is fully resolved or continues to periodically resurface, meaning a truly complete assessment remains, in a genuine sense, still being written.
Bottom Line
Modi’s decade in office has raised India’s diplomatic profile considerably, through the G20 presidency and deepened Quad and US ties, while maintaining a deliberately balanced, sometimes controversial stance on Russia that has drawn both Western criticism and praise for strategic independence, a record further complicated by serious diplomatic crises with Canada and the United States over Sikh separatist assassination allegations that have tested India’s global standing in ways the more straightforwardly positive G20 and economic diplomacy achievements have not.
Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available government statements and news reports listed below. It is written for general informational purposes and does not represent an official statement from the Government of India or the Ministry of External Affairs.
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