Compulsions and Constraints before India's Foreign Policy

Although the present leadership in India clearly supports a multipolar world order, the US’s unparalleled ascendance with its self-obsessed approach in international relations has gravely hurt the national interests of poor and developing nations clubbed as the Third World, including India.

- Prof. Sudhanshu Tripathi

This inevitably discourages the consolidation of global and regional institutions of multipolarity and also hurts the solemn spirit of multilateral negotiations, leading to much loss for Third World nations.

Against this backdrop, India’s national development goals need freedom of decision-making and independent actions to be pursued by its foreign policy, characterised by the doctrine of nonalignment, so as to procure and preserve its national interests and discourage alignment of nations into rival blocs. This would consolidate the spirit of multipolarity in international relations and ensure India’s active participation in all multilateral instruments promoting peace, progress, and security across the world.

While the changing world today often poses considerable challenges, or even threats, to the very survival of a state due to one reason or the other, given the structural compulsions and constraints of international relations—as pointed out by a great realist of our times, John Mearsheimer—India’s ancient moral traditions and rich cultural heritage, characterized by peace, love, tolerance, nonviolence, justice, and freedom, altogether manifesting Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam and Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinah, always underscore its magnificent policy of humanism and globalism. This is for the welfare of the entire humanity while upholding strategic autonomy with respect to the country’s independent foreign policy, particularly marked by the policy of nonalignment.