THE foreign policy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is often interpreted through two lenses. One sees India as a pragmatic rising power navigating between the Global North and Global South through multi-alignment. The other reads a more troubling trajectory: a gradual Western gaze that privileges ties with the United States and Europe at the expense of historical solidarities with the developing world.
India has positioned itself as a bridge between the developed and developing worlds. Yet this posture is increasingly contested. What appears as balance to some is read by others as drift—away from postcolonial solidarity and toward transactional proximity with established centres of power.
Under Modi, India’s foreign policy has undergone a significant transformation. It seeks simultaneously to project leadership of the Global South while deepening strategic, technological, and economic integration with the Global North. This dual orientation has produced not synthesis but tension, not coherence but contradiction.
At this historical moment, India’s engagement with platforms like the G7 is not merely a diplomatic routine. It signals a deeper reorientation in global imagination: away from solidarity with the oppressed, toward proximity with power; away from Southern political identity, toward validation within Western institutional space.
India today stands at a civilisational crossroads. Increasingly, it appears to be choosing recognition within dominant structures over leadership outside them.
From Non-Alignment to Neo-Alignment
India’s foreign policy inheritance is rooted in the Non-Aligned Movement, shaped by leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Sukarno. It was a refusal to become an appendage of Cold War blocs and a moral assertion that postcolonial nations would not accept subordination in global hierarchies.
Non-alignment was never perfect, but it carried a foundational idea: sovereignty meant not only territorial independence but also epistemic and political autonomy.
That idea has weakened.
Contemporary Indian foreign policy reflects what can be described as neo-alignment—a flexible but increasingly asymmetrical orientation toward global power centres. It is non-alignment without epistemic independence: adaptive in form, but increasingly tilted toward Western validation while retaining rhetorical commitment to the Global South.
This is visible in repeated engagement with platforms like the G7, where India is not a member but a selectively invited participant. The symbolism matters. The G7 is not a neutral forum; it is an institutional concentration of historical power shaped by colonial extraction and contemporary financial dominance.
The question is not whether India should engage such spaces. The question is why participation within them appears to carry greater political weight than leadership within Southern formations.
The Search for Western Validation
At the heart of India’s contemporary foreign policy lies a deeper structural condition: a postcolonial search for Western validation.
This is not merely a diplomatic preference. It is the continuation of a historical hierarchy in which Western recognition has functioned as a marker of modernity and legitimacy.
India’s positioning increasingly reflects a framework where visibility in Western capitals is equated with strategic success, while leadership within the Global South is treated as secondary.
The danger is not engagement with Western institutions. The danger lies in internalising their gaze as the primary measure of political worth.
BRICS and the Abandoned Possibility
BRICS represents one of the most significant attempts to reshape global economic governance in the twenty-first century. With its expanding membership and institutions such as the New Development Bank, it holds potential to challenge IMF–World Bank structures that have historically embedded dependency and conditionality into the Global South.
At its core, BRICS is not merely a financial arrangement but an embryonic attempt to reconfigure global power.
India occupies a central position within this formation. Yet its engagement reflects hesitation rather than ideological clarity. It oscillates between rhetorical leadership of the Global South and pragmatic alignment with Western economic frameworks.
This ambivalence weakens BRICS itself. Institutions reshape global order not through scale alone, but through political coherence. Without it, they risk becoming parallel structures that mirror existing hierarchies.
The issue is not BRICS as a mechanism, but India’s unresolved positioning within it.
Inclusion in Exclusionary Spaces
India’s continued engagement with forums such as the G7 raises a structural question of global recognition.
The European Union’s engagement with India is shaped by trade and regulatory frameworks that reflect European economic priorities. Negotiations on intellectual property, agriculture, and digital governance consistently reveal asymmetries that privilege European capital.
The United States operates through strategic frameworks tied to security alignment, technology access, and geopolitical positioning. Instruments such as sanctions, export controls, and investment restrictions define the limits of autonomy.
This is not an equal partnership. It is a structured asymmetry.
India’s participation produces visibility but not necessarily agency. Visibility is symbolic inclusion; agency is structural influence.
Dignity, History, and the Unfinished Reckoning
Any meaningful global engagement must begin with historical clarity.
Europe and North America’s wealth and institutional power were not produced in isolation. They were built through colonial extraction, slavery, resource appropriation, and systemic exploitation across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Colonialism was not an aberration but a system of organised domination whose effects persist in financial architecture, debt regimes, and trade hierarchies.
Without confronting this history, claims of equal partnership remain rhetorical.
The treatment of Iran exposes the selective moral grammar of global diplomacy.
Rather than being engaged as a sovereign state with legitimate security concerns and historical grievances, Iran is often framed through a narrow security discourse that legitimises sanctions and isolation.
This produces humanitarian suffering, diplomatic stagnation, and erosion of trust in multilateral systems.
More fundamentally, it reveals asymmetry in global political language. Terms like “terrorism” are selectively deployed, often obscuring structural violence by dominant powers.
Moral language in international politics is not neutral; it reflects power.
And yet, Iran’s sustained resilience under prolonged external pressure demonstrates its strategic endurance within a hostile geopolitical environment. This is likely to contribute to a broader shift toward a more multipolar global order.
In the final analysis, international politics must ultimately be anchored in dignity, sovereignty, and principle—not coercion.
Strategic Dilemma
India’s foreign policy is shaped by a structural contradiction that cannot be resolved through tactical adjustment.
It seeks to represent the Global South while simultaneously pursuing validation within the Global North. It seeks autonomy while operating within institutions shaped by dominant powers. This produces oscillation rather than resolution.
The contradiction is not accidental. It reflects the condition of postcolonial states embedded in a world system still structured by historical asymmetry.
Postcolonial Positioning
India’s foreign policy moment is not merely strategic; it is civilisational.
What is unfolding can be described as a shift from postcolonial nationalism to hierarchical integration, where formal sovereignty coexists with epistemic dependence, and Western recognition remains the implicit measure of global legitimacy. Within this framework, the pursuit of visibility in Western-led institutions is not just diplomacy; it is a structural symptom.
The central question is not whether India is rising. It is whether that rise reproduces the hierarchies it claims to transcend.
True strategic autonomy requires more than multi-alignment. It requires epistemic rupture: a refusal to equate Western recognition with global legitimacy, and a reorientation toward solidarity as principle, not tactic. Until that rupture occurs, India will remain suspended between two worlds—one it claims to lead, and one it continues to seek validation from.
Power will always invite proximity. But postcolonial dignity demands something harder: the ability to define value on its own terms.
India stands not only at a crossroads of foreign policy, but at a crossroads of political imagination itself. And the choice before it is stark: recognition within empire, or relevance beyond it.
____________________
Ranjan Solomon is a writer, researcher and activist based in Goa. He has worked in social movements since he was 19 years of age. The views expressed here are the author’s own and Clarion India does not necessarily share or subscribe to them. He can be contacted at ranjan.solomon@gmail.com
