At the launch of “India’s World” in December 2024, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar perceptively pointed out that the deepest changes in Indian foreign policy had come not from electoral changes in 2014 but from 1991, when the then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao embarked on a number of reforms that changed the way India saw the world.
In fact, the turn of the last decade of the 20th century wrought a series of very specific changes to India’s foreign policy outlook, not just in its bent but also in the way it was pitched and covered by journalists. In terms of substance – three major changes marked Indian foreign policy, each spurred by a geopolitical development. It was in the whirl of all changes that I began my journalistic career in 1994, working first for an international television channel (CNN, 1995-2005), then for an Indian television channel (CNN-IBN, 2005-2014) until my present position as the Diplomatic Editor for The Hindu (2014- Present).
The 1990s: A Transcendent Moment
The first was the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union – which opened India’s options up in terms of engaging with the West and diversifying its strategic underpinnings from the Cold War world. This process had actually begun a decade before that, perhaps with U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s visit to India, which paved the way for the Indira Gandhi-Ronald Reagan meeting in Washington and three subsequent visits to the U.S. by PM Rajiv Gandhi, who was keen on military cooperation with the U.S. A corollary was the decision to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel.
Today, briefings are no longer the intimate affairs they once were, where journalists were informed about the government’s thinking on an issue and given context for a decision or a visit – but they make up for substance in terms of the ease of access to official agreements and documents online. With most of the MEA archives being digitised, the good news is that documents from the past can easily be pulled up.
