Changing Dimensions of India’s Foreign Policy after 2014: Has There been a Radical Shift?

Social networking website Twitter was taken aback with excitement on 4 January 2022 as India’s Union Minister for Law and Justice Mr. Kiren Rijiju tweeted three images of India’s armed forces unfurling the Indian national flag. At first glance, these images would look rather inconspicuous and could possibly even seem to be regular images – the caption on this tweet, however, would go on to reveal a new Indian foreign policy that unlike a few years ago was more open and informative, and not one of cloak and daggers only. The place in question where the images were taken was Galwan valley, a site in India’s eastern Ladakh region that saw conflict between armed forces of the People’s Republic of China and Indian troops in 2020, post which the radical shift in India’s foreign policy after 2014 was visible to analysts and academicians. In most cases, scholars say that shifts in foreign policy, in and of themselves, do not happen in a short span and are the result of years of alliances being formed and relations being built. This article seeks to take into consideration if India’s foreign policy has undergone a radical shift post 2014 and seeks to understand the same from recent examples of India’s foreign policy while dealing with its immediate neighbours. By dealing with recent examples of India’s responses to geo-political events such as India and Pakistan’s standoff, the Galwan Valley standoff with China, India and Sri Lanka engaging on a new oil farm project, and India’s modernising of its armed forces to sustain itself in a neighbourhood that has not so friendly neighbours, this article seeks to delve into recent events to understand if there has been a change from India’s traditional foreign policy approach and seeks to find justification from the same through recent instances of the policy on display.