International Affairs Expert and Dean, SIS, JNU, Prof Amitabh Mattoo, In Written Responses, Explains The Significance Of PM Modi’s Three-nation Tour; Says India’s credibility has been earned on consistency rather than grand rhetoric
PM Modi begins his three-nation tour shortly. How important are India’s ties with Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand? Where does the ‘Look East’ policy figure in India’s foreign policy priorities?
Ans: These are not three separate bilateral agendas. They are chapters of the same story: of India returning to the Indo-Pacific as a resident power, not a visitor.
Indonesia controls the sea lanes through which much of India’s trade to the east transits; but it is also a civilizational neighbour — where parts of the Ramayana are still danced in Yogyakarta, and the world’s largest Muslim-majority country has Sanskrit in its national motto. Australia is, in my opinion, India’s most consequential new relationship of the last 20 years. I say that as someone who started the Australia India Institute in Melbourne when the relationship amounted to little more than cricket, curry and the Commonwealth — and was sadly defined, beyond that, by attacks on Indian students. Today that same relationship includes defence exercises, maritime domain awareness, critical minerals, education and technology. Few transformations of Indian diplomacy have been so rapid or so profound.
New Zealand, for too long treated as the backstop to Australia, deserves a relationship that recognizes its own strengths: a values-based Pacific democracy with a growing Indian community, and real complementarities in agriculture, education and sport.
India’s Look East Policy that started under Narasimha Rao in the early 1990s was born of economics. Modi’s Act East is a statement of strategic intent — and he has given India’s eastern turn its muscle, coherence and, of course, his own personal style. No Indian Prime Minister has put more of his own political capital into the Indo-Pacific. And the direction of travel now is unmistakable: India’s future will be decided, in large measure, in the waters to its east. Kautilya would have understood the logic immediately. The mandala has been reloaded onto the seas.
It will be the first Indian PM’s visit to New Zealand in four decades. How significant is this milestone?
Ans: Rajiv Gandhi was the last Indian Prime Minister to visit New Zealand, in 1986. Think of how much has changed since then. India was then a closed economy of modest size, focused mainly on its neighbourhood; today it is one of the world’s largest economies, and its voice is indispensable in every serious conversation about the global order. The Indian community in New Zealand used to be a small trading community. Today it is one of that country’s fastest-growing communities, present in its universities, its hospitals and public life.
Having lived many years across the Tasman Sea, I have watched New Zealand’s attitude to India evolve from polite distance to genuine courtship — in trade negotiations, in education partnerships, even in a shared anxiety about the militarisation of the Pacific region. Forty years without a visit from an Indian Prime Minister sent an inadvertent signal: that Wellington did not matter to Delhi. Prime Minister Modi corrects that perception. And it is very much in character. He has gone where Indian Prime Ministers stopped going — to Fiji, to Mongolia, to the Gulf monarchies — and harvested the strategic dividends of showing up. Symbolism in diplomacy is never just symbolic. It is the grammar through which nations read each other’s intentions, and few Indian leaders read that grammar as fluently as Mr Modi.
Apart from Defence, critical minerals, Indian expat groups are important especially in the context of New Zealand, Australia. How important are they in India’s foreign policy priorities?
Ans: Allow me to answer that question from personal experience first. When I moved to Melbourne to start the Australia India Institute, the Indian diaspora in Australia was a few hundred thousand strong. Today, it is close to a million — the fastest-growing large migrant community in the country — and it has transformed the texture of the relationship. Diwali in Federation Square, Indian-origin MPs in Parliament House, Hindi classes in suburban schools: these are not the returns on sentiment. These are strategic ballast. Governments come and go; the diaspora remains. Ministers open doors and communities ensure they stay open. The diaspora is neither a vote bank abroad nor a remittance machine. It is a civilizational bridge — and increasingly a strategic one. Prime Minister Modi understood that earlier than most in our political class. The stadium-packed journeys from Sydney to Houston were not spectacle for its own sake: they were a conscious effort to bring the diaspora from the margins of our diplomacy into its very centre.
Critical minerals are another pillar, where the complementarity could not be more providential. Australia has some of the world’s largest reserves of lithium and rare earths; India has the scale, the market and the ambition to build clean-energy and semiconductor manufacturing capabilities. The contests of the 21st century will be fought not just over sea lanes but over supply chains — and no credible Indian strategy towards technological self-reliance can afford to ignore Canberra. The hard work now is to convert memoranda of understanding into mining licences.
As the world order undergoes cataclysmic changes, India’s thrust remains on a rules-based, principled world order, where Global South’s voice is given its due place, where international organisations are revamped to reflect the new world realities. How does the world see India’s principled foreign policy position?
Ans: There is one lesson I have learnt having watched Indian foreign policy up-close — as a scholar and, briefly, in advisory roles to government — is that India’s credibility has been earned on consistency rather than grand rhetoric. India may be the only major power that can talk to Washington and Moscow, to Tel Aviv and Tehran, to Kyiv and every capital of the Global South in the same week, and still be believed in every capital. This is not fence-sitting. It is the slow accumulation of trust.
The world views India as a bridge — between the Global North and South, between the developing world’s insecurities and the institutions of the developed world. But let us be honest about the bet that India is making. Principle without power amounts to sermonising; power without principle can turn into intimidation. India is betting that it can do both. That it can, at once, grow strong and grow decent. The jury of history will judge. The early signals, I am glad to say, are good.
How do you see the evolving foreign policy of India, say, in last one decade – a) continuity with change, or b) change with continuity, or c) breaking new ground?
Ans: I would describe India’s foreign policy over the last decade as both change and continuity. The foundations of our foreign policy remain what they have been: strategic autonomy, sovereignty and support for a multipolar world order. What has changed is the temper with which India approaches the world — and that change reflects the prime minister’s own unique stamp on Indian foreign policy. Indian diplomacy used to be defensive, risk-averse and allergic to making choices. In the last decade, it has become risk-acceptant, deeply engaged with the world and unembarrassed about clearly stating its interests. Non-alignment as dogma has been replaced by multi-alignment as statecraft — conducted with a verve and personal touch at the highest level that we have not seen in decades past.
I had a ringside view of the beginnings of this change from within, when I part of a Task Force appointed by the PM that looked at the India-US civil nuclear deal negotiations. For the first time, we decided that engaging with power served Indian interests better than standing apart from it. India has since turned that impulse into something close to doctrine. Kautilya’s sadgunya, or the six-fold policy, assumes a state that is agile enough to shift from ally to adversary and vice-versa depending on its interests. India has today found that agility again. And wedded it to a modern ambition.
Considering the West Asia crisis, and how India navigated through the crisis, do you think foreign policy priorities will increasingly be important nationally and domestically – for policy formulation, for instance?
Ans: The line between the domestic and the foreign has blurred, and nowhere is that more true than with West Asia. Almost nine million Indians live and work across the Gulf. Their remittances support families from Kerala to Punjab. Our energy security passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Every crisis in West Asia is therefore also a domestic Indian crisis: it is the price of diesel in Vidarbha; it is the security of the nurse in a Gulf hospital; it is the air ticket of a worker trying to return home. I wrote as much after the US-Iran ceasefire last year. India can no longer approach West Asia as a theatre it merely observes; it is a region we are part of. Foreign policy has ceased to be what happens overseas. It is now integral to our economy, our energy security, our technology choices and the daily lives of millions of Indians. Any government that underestimates this reality will be taught that lesson at the petrol pump well before it is learned at the ballot box.
Is this a fair statement to make: “The incumbent US president has not added to the institutional charisma of the office, through a series of actions, based on his personal choices. The Chinese authorities have, lately, shown an appreciation for the Indian position and priorities. Even then, there is a natural convergence of India’s and US’s interests, especially in view of how China has monopolised global manufacturing, and how the world is increasingly split in two blocs, one led by the US, another by China”.
Ans: If the statement is that India and the US are natural allies while China is our enduring challenge, I would caveat that but not by much. Indian-US convergence is structural, not based on any personal chemistry: it is about shared democratic values, economies that complement each other and a common interest in an Asia that cannot be dominated by any single power. That consensus has survived multiple change of governments in both countries, and will survive more.
Our differences with Washington — whether on trade or visas or tactics — are transactional.
Transactional differences can be negotiated even if the current Trump administration seems insensitive to New Delhi’s concerns. With China, the divergence is structural: a contested border of over 3,000 kilometres, and a fundamental difference of opinion on what order in Asia should look like. It is not something that can be wished away with summitry, but it can and must be managed with summitry. India is not going to become anyone’s ally in the old Cold War sense. Neither did we need to, and that era is anyway long gone. But the principle is clear, and it bears saying: India wants productive relations with every major power. It will not mortgage its autonomy to serve another country’s interests. |
