India’s Self-Inflicted Foreign Policy Challenges in 2020 - The Diplomat, 4 January 2020

In my column for The Diplomat last week, India’s Self-Inflicted Foreign Policy Challenges in 2020, I looked at India's foreign policy challenges for 2020. Sadly, many of them have been the government's own making. Hence, I argue that while the Modi government secured some notable gains during its time in office thus far, challenges lie ahead this year and beyond.

Since becoming prime minister in 2014, Narendra Modi has paid significant attention to India’s foreign relations. Though there could be some quibbles about how much he managed to achieve, there is little doubt that his focus at least led to greater energy and push in India’s foreign policy, even if Modi’s foreign policy has not witnessed any significant shifts.

But since his re-election last summer, India’s foreign policy challenges have been growing. And while the reasons for this may be varied, some of it is because of the BJP government’s own mistakes.

For the full essay, click here.



In his first term, Modi was able to undertake significant strategic outreach to the United States, Japan, and Australia. The revival of the Quad is a great indicator of the pragmatism in India’s diplomacy today. Despite some setbacks in between, India also managed to consolidate its position in two important Indian Ocean countries – Sri Lanka and Maldives. Modi can also be credited with a more effective outreach to Southeast Asia, with its Act East Policy.

But there are also growing difficulties. Managing China, India’s most serious challenge, has seen some success but it remains a major and continuing problem. India’s more active role in the Quad in its second avatar is a positive sign. Despite the occasional wavering in India’s Indo-Pacific policy, elevating the Quad to foreign ministerial level deliberations shows the willingness of all the four Quad members to acknowledge the reality of the China problem and the need for the four to work toward strategic coordination.

But there are serious problems with India’s hard capacity to manage the China problem. General V.P. Malik, the former chief of Indian Army Staff, said during the Kargil war that “we will fight with what we have,” but such an approach while facing a much a larger and strong force in China will be dangerous for India. For all the loud rhetoric on national security, the Modi government’s defense budget allocation has been abysmal. Year after year, it has driven down the defense budget, which now has the lowest allocation since the period before the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

Even within this allocation, much of it is spent on salaries and pension, leaving very little for capital expenditure, thus leaving procurement issues unresolved. All three Indian services have significant gaps and this is going to test India’s ability to defend successfully against China. The Indian focus appears to be on diplomacy to deal with China, but depending on one toll alone could be dangerous.

Another major challenge is the neighborhood, and the problems here are compounded due to India’s internal developments. Today, India’s neighborhood policy is facing serious challenges, in part because of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC). Together, they have had a particularly negative impact on India’s relations with Afghanistan and Bangladesh. With the CAA targeting three Islamic neighbors – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan – India’s neighborhood diplomacy suddenly faces new problems.

Relations with Bangladesh had improved significantly under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina but the CAA and the NRC have put the Bangladeshi government in a difficult position. Relations with Afghanistan, another friendly neighbor, are affected also. Moreover, the CAA is seen both as specifically targeting Muslims and as equating Indian citizenship with Hinduism, raising eyebrows across the world. Even India’s partners are questioning its credentials as a multicultural, pluralist society. India did enjoy certain soft power benefit as the world’s largest democracy, with diverse cultures and religions co-existing in a stable political system, but that image has been tarnished by the recent developments.

Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and even External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar can ignore the global concerns by saying these are internal matters of India. But the reality is that India’s moral standing has taken a hit and it will need significant efforts on the part of the Modi government to demonstrate that India is still a multicultural and secular democracy.

Modi did make a smart choice in getting Jaishankar to head the foreign ministry. Jaishankar, a former foreign secretary, is well-respected around the world, and is known to have been an important reason for many of Modi’s foreign policy successes in his first term. But it is unclear if an experienced technocrat like Jaishankar can weather the storms created by poor domestic political decisions. Jaishankar was successful to a large extent in assuaging the fears around the developments in Jammu and Kashmir, after Article 370 was revoked in early July. His extensive engagements in the United States, speaking in nearly a dozen think tanks, as well as other media interviews, helped stem the damage.

But India’s outreach has been poor after the CAA. Jaishankar’s cancellation of meetings with U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) because the delegation included Ms. Pramila Jayapal, for instance, has angered Democrats in the United States to the point where Jayapal now has another 10 legislators co-sponsoring her resolution in the Congress, seeking a return to normalcy in Kashmir at the earliest. It is not clear that India still enjoys the kind of bipartisan support in the U.S. as it did in the last 15 years.

This comes on top of Modi’s statement, “Ab ki baar Trump Sarkar,” which has not gone down well with Democrats. It would have been better for Modi to not poke his head into the internal politics of another country. The U.S. relationship is absolutely critical in managing the China issue and it will be a challenge to get it back to even keel, especially if a Democrat wins the White House in November.

It is unclear how the India-Japan relationship has been affected. The annual summit, originally slated to take place in Guwahati in December 2019, was postponed because of CAA-related protests. This has been an annual feature for more than a decade and it is possibly the first time that the summit meeting has been skipped.

India’s democracy and stability plays at least a supporting role in India’s partnerships, and even uncertainty can hurt these relations. While India has faced many external difficulties in the past, they have rarely been the result of domestic politics. Handling these new challenges could be much more difficult than the Indian government assumes.

Is the Washington Consensus on US-India Relations Fraying? - The Diplomat, 1 January 2020

In my first column for The Diplomat for 2020, I looked at the U.S.-India relations, and I argue that recent developments (within India) have raised questions about the future of bipartisan support for U.S.-India relations.

U.S.-India relations have improved over the last two decades, partly due to the strong political consensus in Washington supporting this trend. Both Democrats and Republicans have put aside other differences when it came to India, and, even when different parties controlled them, both the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government have supported strengthening the relationship.

Recent developments, however, have cast a shadow on the extent of that support and how it might shape up moving forward. Scrutiny on some domestic developments in India has raised some questions about U.S. support for India and the future shape of the bilateral relationship.

Of particular note are the recent Indian actions regarding Indian citizenship and identity issues, such as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which have not gone down well, either in India or in the United States.

For the full essay, click here.



The negative Western media attention on India has been generally dismissed by senior Indian officials as biased. The home minister, Amit Shah, blamed Indian opposition parties for raising human rights concerns. Commenting on the human rights situation in Jammu and Kashmir in September, Shah said, “To those who are asking questions about human rights, I want to ask have they ever thought about the human rights of the widows or children of the 41,800 people killed in J&K so far.” Ashok Malik, a respected journalist and former media advisor to the Indian president, categorized the negative publicity as “a familiar assortment of New York/London-based know-alls, fringe left activists, Pakistani state agents masquerading as aggrieved neutrals, and freelance self-determinists representing nothing but their bylines.”

The CAA and NRC, against the backdrop of the Article 370 developments, have compounded the negative international perception of India. The Indian foreign minister’s decision to cancel an important interaction at the U.S. Capitol may create new problems. Jaishankar had requested a meeting with the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) on the sidelines of the second India-U.S. two-plus-two dialogue in Washington. But upon learning that Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who is not a member of the Committee, would also be present at the HFAC meeting, Jaishankar cancelled the interaction, saying “I have no interest in meeting” the Indian-American congresswoman. Instead, he insisted he would only meet with “people who are objective and open to discussion but not the people who already made up their minds.”

Jayapal, a Democrat, has been an outspoken critic of India’s actions in Kashmir. More importantly, she was introducing a resolution on Kashmir in the House of Representatives, calling for all the communications restrictions imposed by the Indian government to be removed at the earliest. By cancelling the meeting, India appears to have made the issue worse for itself because the resolution saw 10 additional sponsors right after the minister’s snub to Jayapal.

A wiser decision would have been for India to have proceeded with the meeting and explain the situation, even if it was a difficult case to make. This was what Jaishankar had done while on a visit to Washington after the Article 370 developments, by which India managed to pacify at least some of the critics. Cancelling the meeting, on the other hand, clearly created the impression that India did not have a convincing story to tell.

This action has upped the ante and possibly angered Democratic lawmakers in the United States. Should a Democratic candidate win in the 2020 US presidential election, India may have a lot of making-up to do. Even if a Democrat does not win the presidency and Trump gets a second term, India will still need support from Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

In the last couple of decades, India has generally enjoyed bipartisan support in Washington, D.C., and this was most evident during the U.S-India nuclear deal. Despite a few nonproliferation hardliners in the U.S. Congress, President George W. Bush was able to muster sufficient support for India because both Democrats and Republicans wanted to build a closer strategic partnership. Since then, India has worked hard to keep its support bipartisan. Doing so ensured that even in the very difficult and partisan political environment in Washington, relations with India was one of the few issues on which there was a broad consensus in the U.S. Congress, making for steady legislative support to executive efforts deepen the relationship.

It would be a shame if India managed to fritter away that bipartisan support. India will have to work much harder in Washington if it can count on only the support of one party or smaller segments of both.