Source: Asia Maior | Published: 2026-05-09
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: china, election, india, policy
Indian Foreign Policy toward the US, China, and Russia under Modi: Rhetoric and Reality (2014-2025) Michelguglielmo Torri Post Views: 3 Short URL: https://www.asiamaior.org/?p=2588 Available also in pdf – Download Pdf
The election of Narendra Modi in 2014 is widely portrayed as a watershed moment for Indian foreign policy. This article challenges that narrative, arguing that the core parameters guiding India’s relations with the US, China, and Russia under Modi – namely its structural imperatives, constraints, and strategic calculations – exhibit a substantial continuity with the framework established well before his ascent. Indeed, the article locates the true watershed for India’s international alignments and strategic outlook in the 2005-2008 period. It demonstrates that Modi’s most significant innovation, a more confrontational approach to China, proved both limited in scope and ultimately subject to the same constraints that shaped the policies of his predecessors. In its relations with Russia and the US, continuity remained the leitmotif, even as new tensions and opportunities emerged.
Furthermore, the article contends that this underlying continuity and the limited results of Modi’s policies have been effectively obscured by a powerful narrative presenting his leadership as revolutionary and his foreign policy as finally establishing India as a major world power. This narrative was forcefully reinforced by India’s position of benign neutrality toward Russia during the war in Ukraine, a stance that elicited no concrete adverse reaction from the United States and its key allies. This was depicted as proof of India’s ability to forge its own position on major international issues, free from subordination to any great power. This article posits, however, that counterintuitively, much of India’s apparent strength is rooted in its structural weakness. Accordingly, Washington’s unexpected tolerance during the Ukraine crisis is better explained by recognizing that India’s supposedly independent stance was exercised within a geopolitical space defined by overriding US interests.
Keywords – India’s foreign policy; India-China relations; India-US relations; India-Russia relations; Narendra Modi; India’s strategic autonomy.
1. Introduction
The rise of Narendra Modi to the office of Prime Minister in 2014 was heralded by his supporters, much of the Indian media, and a significant segment of the international commentariat as a decisive break with the foreign policy traditions of his predecessors. Modi was depicted as a transformative leader, an all-powerful demiurge who reimagined India’s place in the world, recalibrated its great power alignments, and restored a sense of national purpose to its diplomacy. This narrative found fertile ground in a decade marked by China’s rise, Russia’s resurgence and confrontation with the West, and the United States’ geopolitical pivot to Asia.
Yet, as this article will demonstrate, the reality of Indian foreign policy under Modi is different. The strategic architecture within which it evolved was not a product of his vision but rather the outcome of a deepening US-India relationship initiated by Washington in the mid-2000s. The period between 2005 and 2008 – marked by the strengthening of India-US military cooperation and, more importantly, the Indo-US Civil Nuclear Agreement – constituted the real watershed. This agreement represented a Copernican overturning of Washington’s approach to New Delhi’s nuclear ambitions and set parameters that have continued to shape policy choices not only during the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government but under Modi as well. These parameters included an increasing military and, to a lesser extent, economic closeness between New Delhi and Washington; a corresponding rise in tensions with Beijing, which Indian policymakers managed to keep under control until Modi’s premiership; and a declining, yet still crucial, military connection with Moscow. Despite a massive increase in sophisticated arms imports from the US after 2005, the bulk of the weapons and systems used by the Indian armed forces remained of Soviet or Russian origin.
This article is divided into two major parts. The first analyzes the evolution of India’s relations with the US, China, and Russia prior to Modi’s assumption of office in 2014, focusing on the reconfiguration that occurred between 2005 and 2008. The second, and longer part, assesses the continuities and changes in these relationships under Modi. The article argues that the caesura widely attributed to Modi exists largely at the rhetorical level. It further asserts that the successes which a quasi-hegemonic narrative has ascribed to India’s foreign policy under Modi are limited or non-existent. By mid-2025, any claim that India’s international position has strengthened compared to what it was on the eve of Modi’s rise to power (26 May 2014) can only be met with the utmost scepticism.
2.1. Indian foreign policy up to 2005
Following the substantial failure of its foreign policy based on attempted leadership of the so-called Third World – a failure sanctioned by the 1962 war with China – and after a period of isolation, India’s foreign policy between 1971 and 1991 was squarely based on the 20-year Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation signed in 1971 [Government of India 1971]. This pact anchored New Delhi in a privileged relationship with Moscow, providing diplomatic cover, economic partnership, and an enduring arms supply. The treaty was renewed for a further 20 years in the summer of 1991. However, a few weeks later, the anti-Gorbachev coup d’état precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union and the radical decline of Russian power under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999). Although the Indo-Russian relationship did not cease, it became largely irrelevant as a strategic buttress for India’s international position. As a consequence, New Delhi, faced with the disappearance of its principal patron, recalibrated toward the United States, seeking political protection, economic integration, and recognition as a rising power [Torri 2023b, pp. 149-150; 152-153].
This reorientation, initiated by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao (in power 1991-1996), was on the whole successful, although it was complicated by a major obstacle, the nuclear question. India, which had demonstrated its capability to build atomic weapons by carrying out the so-called Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE) of 18 May 1974 – also known as Pokhran-I, from the site of the nuclear explosion – had consistently refused to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In New Delhi’s view, the NPT institutionalized a fundamentally unequal order, recognizing only those countries that had tested nuclear weapons before 1967 as legitimate nuclear powers, while requiring all others to forgo such capability in perpetuity. Accepting the NPT would have meant consigning India to a permanent status of inferiority vis-à-vis the major Western powers and, perhaps more importantly, its regional rival China, which had been an NPT-designated nuclear weapon state since 1964 [Torri 2023b, pp. 152-154; CRS 2022].
India’s refusal to adhere to the NPT and other arms control agreements – in particular the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) – directly clashed with the US position, which aimed to force India to abandon its ambition to be acknowledged as a legitimate nuclear power. In this situation, the Rao government pursued a policy of negotiation with the US, officially aimed at finding a mutually satisfactory solution to the nuclear impasse. In fact, Rao’s strategy was to buy time by conveying the impression that New Delhi was amenable to a solution acceptable to Washington. His real objective, however, was to foster increasingly close and relevant economic ties with the US. The strategy was predicated on the belief that as the bilateral economic relationship grew in importance – powerfully promoted by the neoliberal reforms Rao himself had initiated in the summer of 1991 – Washington would find it increasingly costly to sever ties over the nuclear issue, eventually leading to a de facto acceptance of New Delhi’s unbending stand [Torri 2023b, p. 154].
India’s steadfast position on the nuclear question was justified by both symbolic and practical reasons. Symbolically, the freedom to possess nuclear weapons was regarded as an essential demonstration of India’s ability to implement its own independent policies [Torri 2023b, p. 159]. Practically, Indian policymakers saw nuclear capability as essential for national security, providing a deterrent against both China and Pakistan, especially after China’s nuclear assistance to Pakistan in the 1980s [Warren and Ganguly 2022].
Narasimha Rao’s balancing act, which was continued by the United Front governments (1996-1998), was dramatically altered in May 1998 when the Atal Behari Vajpayee-led government conducted a series of nuclear tests (Pokhran-II), ending decades of ambiguity about India’s status as a nuclear weapons state. Like the first nuclear test of 1974, the 1998 tests were driven primarily by domestic political considerations [Torri 2022, p. 121, fn. 5]. They were, however, justified at the international level as necessary to establish a credible deterrent posture vis-à-vis China. While the tests enjoyed near-unanimous domestic support, they carried a heavy international cost, as the United States and its allies imposed sanctions, cut off technology transfers, and sought to isolate India diplomatically. Relations with China, which had been on a positive trend since 1988, also worsened [Torri 2023b, p. 155].
Over time, however, US sanctions on India were gradually lifted, mainly because of India’s growing economic relevance. Furthermore, India’s decision to immediately align with the George W. Bush-promoted «war on terror» after the 2001 terrorist attacks finally convinced Washington to remove the remaining sanctions [Torri 2023b, pp. 155-156].
As for the relationship with China, New Delhi had immediately started a mending process, which culminated in Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s visit to Beijing in 2003. The economic agreements signed during the visit, together with the mutual decision to de-emphasize the border problem in favour of economic cooperation, restarted a period of positive relations between the two Asian giants [Torri 2022, pp. 121-122; Torri 2023b, pp. 156]. Finally, it must be stressed that Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 2000 marked Russia’s emergence from the state of weakness into which the Yeltsin government had plunged it. The Indo-Russian relationship, which had never stopped but had become hardly relevant, regained importance in parallel with the new growth of Russian power under Putin’s leadership. In particular, Russia resumed its key role as a supplier of weapons and weapon systems to India and as a partner in defence co-production [Dolbaia et al. 2025, pp. 2-4].
2.2. India-US relations: the sea-change of 2005-2008
According to one line of analysis, the 1998 nuclear tests, despite the adverse international reaction, ultimately forced a reassessment in Washington and other capitals regarding the feasibility of containing India’s nuclear ambitions. From this perspective, rather than resulting in lasting isolation, the Pokhran-II tests initiated a process of gradual normalization of India’s status as a legitimate nuclear power. This interpretation holds that high-level dialogues between Indian and US officials, notably the Talbott-Singh talks [Talbott 2024], eventually led to a recognition – tacit at first, and later formalized – that India was an established nuclear weapons state outside the NPT system. This process supposedly culminated in the landmark 2005-2008 US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement.
In reality, while it is undeniable that high-level US-India dia