 Hello everyone. Welcome to another capsule international relations capsule for the Shankar IAS Academy. We have just finished 76 years of independence and we are now in the 77th year. So I thought it would be a good idea to have a quick review of our foreign policy for the last 76 years. Doing it in a few minutes is not easy but it'll be just the salient points. The first thing that I'd like to say is that India has faced many challenges in these 76 years. Sometimes fundamental changes have taken place in global situation but if you look at our performance in these 76 years you will find that India has remained consistent on one thing that we have been non-aligned. The world itself has been questioned, you will see a non-aligned movement ended in 1990 when the Soviet Union collapsed as it has to but I'm talking about the principle. The principle of non-alignment is and was freedom of action and independence in thinking and this has remained so. Of course it had several other features depending on the time of history like for example the colonialism had ended, the imperialism was being questioned so naturally some of the attributes of those times which were common to most of the independent countries which became independent after 1945 and they had these characteristics anti-colonial anti-imperial sentiments but other than that we have never been attached to a particular power or bloc. So Pandit Nairu invented non-alignment because he did not want to be on either side of the bloc, sorry one of the blocs so he began that and there were many occasions when it appeared as though we would have had to relent on this but if you look at the present Prime Minister's policy so from Pandit Nairu to Narendra Modi one thing is certain that we have remained consistent about our non-aligned foreign policy. The word non-aligned is not used these days but strategic autonomy is the word that has been used after the end of the Cold War and now even more interestingly we are now aligning ourselves to what is called the Global South. So in other words what we were doing for the freely independent countries developing countries in 1947 we are doing basically the same thing in 2023 because we have moved in various directions because foreign policy cannot be static it has to be dynamic. So the first thing that we have to note and understand about India's foreign policy is that in spite of all the changes that took place and all the demands and the challenges we faced we have remained unattached. Our foreign minister recently said non-alignment is non-negotiable I'm sure Pandit Nairu would have said the same. So in other words none of these changes in the government and the policy challenges we had has fundamentally affected our position of being independent and taking decisions and so on merits rather than attached to one power or the other. Now the best time India had I would say the period from 1947 to 1962 though we are not economically powerful we were not even self-sufficient in food grains and we had to depend on other countries etc but still that was the period when our foreign policy enjoyed the maximum support around the world because we had become newly independent without a war the non-violence of Mahatma Gandhi was well recognized and we took on the leadership in the UN for decolonization and that was the period and also disarmament and Pandit Nairu became a symbol of world peace and everyone was very appreciative of India's position but this did not last very long because in 1962 the Chinese aggression changed the scene for us because we were very idealistic during the first period and therefore we did not prepare ourselves to defend ourselves against even China because China we considered it a possible friend and we supported China in several fields several areas got China back into the UN etc and therefore we had a very rosy picture of an Asia-African India-China high-five and Asia-African collaboration and thus developed an Asia-African group as it were and also resist certain things like apartheid like protecting Palestinian rights etc but once our weakness as a military power was shown it became very difficult for us to protect our standing and therefore we needed to go and protect ourselves we had to invest we had not invested much in defense we had to start that we had to look for friends who will give us infrastructure other capabilities steel ship manufacturing everything and we had no foreign exchange to find and therefore an splendid opportunity came and Soviet Union was willing to buy our consumer goods and exchange for our for them you know basic industries steel planes very many things even one of the IITs so technology that was available in the Soviet Union which suited us because we didn't have any sophisticated technology and our consumer goods satisfied the requirements of the Soviet Union while the west was too sophisticated to buy our consumer goods so what was a pragmatic decision that is to work closely with the Soviet Union and also follow the the five-year plan that was a copy of the 10-year plan when your resources are less naturally you have to plan it accordingly so an impression was created in the process that we were becoming closer to the Soviet Union and we are moving away from normal but what we need to remember is that at that time even at that time we had not endorsed the Soviet view of the world we had our own view and we had our own position depending on the merit of every every occasion and then of course the Soviet Union collapsed and a new world global situation arose it became a uni polar world with the Soviet United States in the center and everybody including the new Republic of Russia were very keen to build good relations with the United States so we too decided to liberalize our economy these are compulsions to globalize our economy and open our markets after 50 years to western goods and services and in that period which is considered a globalized foreign policy so first the idealistic the second was pragmatic and the third was globalized foreign policy and that started with Prime Minister Nazim Rao in the 1990s and then went on to 2014 of course again many things happened during this period the the Chinese became a China became a nuclear weapon state we did not in 1964 China became a nuclear weapon state we had the technology of that and we wanted to answer that but we decided not to and we waited till 1974 to demonstrate our capability nuclear capability though we did not declare ourselves a nuclear weapon state so that was a major development of the so-called pragmatic period and so we wanted you know in all our these are the non-aligned movement statements there was this consistency opposition to certain evils of the society but at the same time remaining faithful to our our declaration of non-aligned so from non-alignment to strategic autonomy to the percent moves to unite the global south I think the policy is all the same it is with due respect to all the countries non-intervention internal affairs but certainly protecting our interests so it was a dynamic foreign policy and it has continued to be so and that I suppose this will continue because we have shown that we are not going to be attached to any particular block two occasions when our non-alignment was challenged and people even said that we were moving away from it first in 1971 that period when we signed a treaty of peace friendship and cooperation the Soviet Union because that treaty said that a threat to one of the two countries will be considered as the threat to the other had a flavor of a kind of a block because when you have a treaty like that which becomes a defense treaty then it appeared to be uh or moving away from but Mrs Gandhi was very clear and that time said this was a matter of importance for us the Chinese threat was already there and then we had this Pakistan threat and Bangladesh trying to liberate itself and they had no friends to support them so in that process it was necessary to get the help of a powerful state not that the Soviet Union fought the war for us but they gave us the cover by sending the submarines to the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal so on the one hand we had the American flotilla threatening to come to the Bay of Bengal to stop us from interfering intervening in Bangladesh but our defense was number one but they had already captured some places Indian territory on the western front and secondly about 10 million refugees came into India from Bangladesh and they had to be sent back and then naturally also our support for the principle of liberalization liberation of of the country so that was the time when there was a lot of criticism even within India that we have abandoned but again it was true that we sought their moral and political support and it took a long time for the rest of to fall in line but Bangladesh was recognized by several countries by the time that after a few years we returned all the soldiers to Pakistan and the Simlai agreement began a new process of the relationship did not succeed and the Pakistan situation remains unfortunately in the same place and in 1992-2014 also we had several changes we established diplomatic relations with Israel our cooperation with the Soviet with the United States increased and the next time that there was a question was in sign the nuclear deal with the United States again some people criticized saying that this is giving up a non-alignment but it was a very vital interest for us in order to get rid of this problem of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty which we had refused to sign because it is discriminatory so we had to find a way so United States agreed to treat India as a technically developed responsible country even though we had not signed the NPT and that suited us on that occasion and the left parties left the Monsignor government in protest but that decision turned out to be right we stopped becoming an outcast in the nuclear world we could import nuclear material for our electricity production so this was also which was considered a deviation turned out to be good from our perspective of course we could not get into these nuclear suppliers group and such groups which we thought we would be able to although we didn't get that and it did not fulfill the promise of a nuclear trade with the United States did not get fulfilled but this was a new era in our relations with the United States which was the only country only superpower and so we have a very cooperative relationship and even Russia was at that time trying to be as friendly as possible to the United States and we carried the non-aligned group with us in this and there was much appreciation and whatever problems there were we were together with the non-aligned countries and if you look at the latest you know declaration of the non-aligned moment meeting was held in Venezuela you will find the reflections of the same thought that Pondiniari was creative so it has become universally acceptable that while remaining unattached to any of the particular blocks we could cooperate among ourselves where I've been several groups have been formed breaks and various other things even Russia you know even Russia India and China happened to come into the same group and so it was a matter of somewhat loosely called multi-alignment I wouldn't say multi-alignment but multi-cooperation and basically whoever suspected our view and whoever was willing to join with us we made these groups which helped us to develop our own relations not only with these countries but also our internal development and then came a big change into 2014 when Mr. Narendra Modi took over as prime minister he spelled out clearly India's priorities are he said that the security it is development it is neighborhood as well as the diaspora so very clear again non-aligned position but our priority of course was to get security from wherever we can and also development assistance and development cooperation so by then of course our technology had developed much and the Indian diaspora began to influence the world so our standing in the world at considerably recent by the time Mr. Modi became prime minister and he refused to remain on the on the edges of the world and he said that he was not going to stand on the side of the ocean and walk watch the world as it develops but he said I would want to get into that I like to walk into it and be part of it and try to influence the world developments and that is why it is called an assertive policy but whatever we did during his first time traveled to 52 countries and if you look at them we'll find that it was all within the policy of a strategic autonomy as well as friendship with other countries regardless of their political color or the kind of governments they have so we looked at them from our perspective to develop our industries to develop our trade and since we had liberated trade and we had reached 11 percent growth at that period and it was a very good time to deal with the issues and Mr. Modi's foreign policy is considered more assertive but he again followed the same kind of approach and during Mr. Manmohan Singh's time we had to got close to the United States in many ways but because of the signing of the nuclear deal but Mr. Modi who was refused visa by the United Swaps for many years he had no hesitation in building a new development with the United States and we had a very good equation with President Obama he visited India twice and it led to a new understanding on the what is now called Indo-Pacific it was Asia-Pacific at that time but the world shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific in the 21st century and therefore it was necessary for us to work closely with the democratic countries in the region and that is why the Quad was formed because the Quad was not a military bloc though the other three countries were likely to be a military bloc because they are all in any case aligned with each other Australia, United States and Japan but we even at that time remained rather adamant that we are not going to turn it into a military bloc and that is why some Western countries got together as a orcas Australia, US and UK and so on so they found that Quad will not become a military bloc and therefore they created another group in order to take care of the military aspects and we maintained that and in 2020 when China you know moved into the territory across the line of control it was a real threat we did not know why they did that as we are not known why the Chinese have done so various things in the past except to teach us a lesson as they always say but 2020 was a big challenge because they occupied several positions and for the first time after 62 or not two incidents after that lives were lost even though there was no shooting but very cruelly our soldiers were killed by the Chinese and we retaliated and that was a landmark and at that time our relationship with the United States paid us paid off well and President Trump supported us fully even though no intervention but also strengthening our contracts getting necessary equipment the France sold as they expedited the sale of fighter aircraft which we had bought from them and the Russians also agreed to speed up the delivery of the cells that we had ordered them so that all we did but we did not join any of the groups that did not declare war or anything of that kind we were negotiating since then and in fact we were negotiating even yesterday on the Republic Day but the point is that the Chinese have not fully withdrawn from all the posts they have occupied but more seriously they have abandoned or disowned many of the treaties that we have signed with Chinese like 1988 one 1993 or peace and tranquility on the Chinese border all these were abandoned and therefore our relationship with China is at a crucial time because we do not know what their intentions are they are expansionist and they have threatened the whole of east the sea in the notion all these areas and they are threatening to attack Taiwan if necessary to take it back to the to China so it's a threatening mode and therefore we are not very sure as to whether we are safe and therefore we have built our defense capabilities and we have built up friendships various countries we have tried to decouple Chinese goods, Chinese trade and also try to reduce our dependence on China for various things like 250,000 etc so all these had its impact and China blows hot and cold but really there is no progress in getting them out of the line of control the other side of the line of control and that remains an issue and therefore all these issues keep coming up with China but we have managed fairly well and of course we cannot forget the the four major calamities that hit the world during that period and that because we had a 9-11 attack which changed the whole scenery about nuclear capability and relative strength of major powers because even if you have all the capacity to destroy the world you know 10 or 9 people could humiliate you and cause major disaster and that of course got a little bit of improvement in in the security relationship and also terrorism was outlawed in many ways though we do not have a convention yet but some progress was made that was a good aspect of 9-11 but there are some still continues Afghanistan was lost in the process all this happened then there was the economic crisis which we recommend more and simply had a big role in resolving it and we also remained a little bit aloof from problems that to be here though they persist then of course the pandemic was the biggest disaster that ever struck the world and the world was not united because of China United Nations could do nothing not even call a meeting on the security council unlike when other big disasters occurred and completely neutralized through the United Nations so each country had to go on its own but India was the first to call a meeting of Sark the nursery meeting of G-20 to think about some about cooperation because the things were getting back to us and we did what we can in terms of supplies and looking at ourselves and so on so by and large the world has recovered from it but there is no guarantee that this is final and so it has left its wounds and to add to all this totally unexpected move by Russia into Ukraine everybody thought it would be a short war a few days Russia will overrun cocaine but that has been proved false now we are nearing the second anniversary of the war which has affected the entire global situation everything food, gas, communications everything it's not the same world at all and every day that the war continues we are moving towards a disaster of some kind poverty and lack of food energy and various so the whole world is now focused on somehow resolving it and as it has happened we have become the president of G-20 at this time and now even though we have done a lot in terms of promoting SDGs and various other things under the G-20 rubric now the real test of G-20 is whether it will be able to resolve or at least have a unanimous resolution adopted in India but the signs are rather pessimistic because both Russia and the NATO believe that they can win the war which is a foolish concept nobody can win a war in the present situation but nobody is going towards the negotiating table as we have advised them Prime Minister told and put in the face of the whole world that this is not the time for war and we should move towards negotiations but both sides are guilty in this carrying on the war and we hope that we'll be able to help in this process and then finally what happened was even though the Americans and others kept asking us to join the bloc or at least turn the quad into a nuclear alliance we have resisted it completely but the good thing is that in spite of that like the United States agreed to you know change our nuclear position by signing the nuclear deal the United States again came forward to sign a number of agreements which would give us the kind of equipment and machinery that they would normally not give it to non-allies so they have a non-nato alliance system we are not even part of that but without any change in our policy of strategic autonomy we have been able to sign a number of agreements which will transform the relationship with the United States and democracies in general so people believe that this is the beginning of a new world order in which democracies and autocracies might be in confrontation with each other or at least they may get together eventually that kind of expectation is there and we have taken the lead by agreeing to accept some of the conditions of allied countries but there again our position is very clear we are not allowing United States to decay to us on human rights and democracy etc we have stood very firm but it is of course the China factor which has prompted the United States to come closer to us under any circumstances and that may be the reason why the Chinese has suddenly become quite reasonable in the next few positions so in other words as the prime minister spoke at the ramparts of the red fort yesterday we have a very optimistic picture because he started out with Manipur which is a big issue even today and he was he talked about it first as an internal problem which we have to deal with the one the base of the principles that we have valued and the constitution and on the global front he also said that in the next five years India would become the third biggest economy because Germany and Japan are on the fringes so Germany and Japan are not doing so well and therefore we are and we are doing well so it's quite possible that we may overtake Germany and Japan and become the third GDP growth third powerful country in the world that he has promised and he's also promised to come back next year to the to the red fort which was his optimism about his own election prospects so that optimism I think we can share on this occasion even when we are talking about foreign policy we have managed to deal with all these crises in a reasonably efficient manner and I suppose the predictor go to the prime minister himself his foreign minister and their entire external affairs ministry because Indian diplomacy has come of age and we can now stand up to anyone in the world for what we consider the same time we will of course be friendly and close to the other countries so this is the shortest way I can present to you the picture of foreign policy in the last 76 years and it's full of optimism and full of hope that we won't want to next year and if the war ends nothing like it otherwise we have to learn to be resilient people are finding solutions even if the war continues but either way I think we are very optimistic no that's an obvious question the answer is also very obvious if the cold war had continued we'd have remained in the same position as before but once the cold war ended naturally we were able to re-enjust our position and we have done very well so certainly it is monthly alignment was possible because the cold war ended the rigid situation of the military blocks relaxed and so we were able to deal with countries in the middle like France like Germany like Japan and all the or not very hardcore NATO countries and our expectation was that in fact we may be able to have a have a poll of our own with some of these countries as our partners but the big change that took place was Russia signing an agreement with China which had changed that situation so Russia will not be around with us to support us as they used to do in the past that's a big change and therefore we have to find our way and the prime minister's visit to France so not to visit to the United States indicated that we are not putting all the eggs in the US basket we also have other options France has been much more generous and much more genuine in their support for India and therefore we have all these options certainly yes the answer is yes that it is the end of the cold war which enabled us to have the so-called multi-alignment I don't like that phrase really we are not multi-alignment means you are aligned to all of them it's not so we are friendly to them and the position is more or less the same yes we are the leaders particularly since G20 has happened at this time and we are a president of it we are used every opportunity to promote global peace and interests of the developing countries in orbit for a global south and that'll be the constitution and that'll be the situation that we'll be facing in the next few years that will be one of the leaders of the global south and there is recognition that this is becoming a strong influence in the world and people will listen increasingly because cooperation is acquired in major issues like the pandemic, the climate change, the war these are all issues on which we need to have very quick movement to save the world and the global south's voice is being heard and I don't know whether they're abiding by it but they do respect and that is what we will try in G20 summit how to push them to peace by voice in the voice of the south well I'm not a constitution expert but we know about the article 370 we know about citizenship act and those all seem to have settled on and now of course the question is of many poor people are accusing the central government and the state government for you know creating more trouble than solving them and it has become an acceptable situation so the government had to move in very strictly and very strongly and things seem to be improving but it is not the end prime minister himself did not claim that the problem has ended he said we need to work much harder in order to know this in fact it has to be within the constitution order we do and therefore that is what we will do in any case I think our home minister said at some stage that many people from Myanmar had intruded into Manipur and have caused havoc there on one side of the other this is not fully established but as you know Myanmar is in a very tough situation continuing their you know despotic treatment of their people and any amount of sanctions and other actions by the western powers do not seem to have made any impact on them and they declared that Aung San Suu Kyi is free but she's immediately arrested on other counts and therefore she is likely to spend all her life in jail and there is no other move towards any kind of a solution even the Americans and others even ASEAN is divided on this issue the ASEAN position some of the countries in ASEAN itself are questioning them and therefore we are in a dilemma because we have been following the ASEAN position and because it is the regional organization and we have recognized the military regime normally we would have remained close to Aung San Suu Kyi but because of our primary interest in in Myanmar to be a friendly country on our border we have made adjustments in our attitude to the military government but there has not been any reciprocity from the military government they have not done anything to make us feel happy and so the situation continues as a big issue and it is quite possible that the since the borders are more or less open and these people are similar looking people so infiltration is possible and there are many Myanmaris who may want to escape from Myanmar and they may use this opportunity to do that because it may be difficult for us to identify them and send them back so that situation may also arrive there are many many people in Myanmar who are stateless and they may use this opportunity to run away to wherever they can you know whether they are by boats or over the across the border in India well you all know it you know I don't have to explain it yet very grievous losses initially with particularly the second wave and imaginable things have happened we've lost lots of lives people are dying on the street wasn't even not even facility to grenade them it is horrible very very bad it was but we developed our own vaccines and even shared with the rest of the world a lot of goodwill we got an account of that and we also managed to control the pandemic to a great extent so there is no guarantee that's over but we have strengthened our health facilities to the extent that we can we were overwhelmed by it like any other country when the most developed countries were all gone by including the United States it was in fact it was the developed countries which suffered the most in terms of casualties and so on even China has repeatedly been affected by it so compared to all that we have not run too badly and we have the capacity to vaccinate people and there was no resistance to vaccines in India except very few people and so it was a successful effort and because it has affected India like all other countries our economy the inflation has gone up our rise rise rise is a big issue we have to face all that is there as Prime Minister not just it but but certainly we have done better than many others and we hope to continue to do so in the future if there is any other indication of another attack of the pandemic I don't think it has as far as I know what I heard was Pakistan army as well reasserted in the sense that Imra Khan has been removed that of course was easy but that is not the issue is the the army itself is not because Pakistan is on the brink of a failed state and they are only borrowing money to pay for the earlier borders there is no other economic activity there trying to get as much money as possible from wherever they can get the Chinese have been keeping keeping them aloft and IMF also but IMF rules are very strict so they will surely have no money for development and this is starving the army also so the latest reports I saw was the army since they don't have resources from the state they are moving to economic activities farming and industries and all that so they're becoming a capitalist unit because they want to survive so with the money they have for fighting wars they are spending it on development activities which is good for Pakistan but that has made them very weak and I do not think that Pakistani army is in any way ready to fight any war in the future and that is what good news for us because the Americans have remained at a distance but at the same time they have recently given money to maintain the aircraft and such things which President Biden has a certain soft corner for Pakistan that has happened but not the kind of full support that they used to get so in a failing state like that unless you have a very strong supporter you cannot survive for long and therefore it is on a brink of disaster according to everyone now the elections will come Nawaz Sharif may come back the army may again control the country because they all know that the Pakistan army runs that state and therefore reassertion is only politically but the and the Shahbaz Sharif has spoken about some talks talks with India he didn't mention the country he said our neighbors are ready to talk but who wants to talk to them unless they give up terrorism and so we are not excited by it but at that time army also maybe for the first time said that we should talk to our neighbors we are the ones who have prevented civilian governments to negotiate and here of course the situation is pretty bad within Pakistan we are resolving it Nepal is not a big issue anymore Nepal is cooperating with us to resolve it and as far as the LAC is concerned the latest news we heard was that yesterday there was some new understanding we don't know how long it will be maintained but there was also you may have heard there was a report that Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Modi talked to each other in Indonesia and the Chinese reported that there was some progress which we denied first but we now also accept that yes there were more things discussed at that time so if that is true and if there is some understanding on a new footing then good for both of us and so it will be helpful for us to have a you know a friendly situation in our neighborhoods but the neighborhood has always been difficult for us and even though we kept saying neighbors first and neighbors became moist in the early years of Mr. Modi's government but hopefully this might help us to move forward yes our policy has been good Sri Lanka has come around Bangladesh we have good relations Nepal is good so it except for Pakistan I do not think that we have any enemies in our neighborhood but they all have complaints and needs and requests to be met but our policy of being firm but fair and reasonable is paying back and the Sark has collapsed but our position of no conversations with them has remained strong and firm and so I come back to my old point that we have remained very firm flexible at the same time in order to meet the challenges of the 21st century thank you very much