On December 15, 2024, India formally launched India’s World, a new foreign policy magazine aimed at expanding the country’s intellectual footprint in global affairs. The launch event in New Delhi, led by External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar, brought together diplomats, analysts, and policy thinkers to mark the beginning of a platform that seeks to anchor international discourse in India’s strategic and civilizational perspectives. The External Affairs Minister positioned India’s World as a critical initiative to articulate India’s worldview with confidence, coherence, and a sense of global responsibility—reflecting the country’s rising role in a multipolar order.
Read the full transcript of Dr. S. Jaishankar’s remarks below or, Watch the Video here
Remarks by External Affairs Minister, Dr. S. Jaishankar at the Launch of India’s World Magazine
December 15, 2024
Dr. Raja Mohan,
Mr. Happymon Jacob,
Dear friends,
I’m really very pleased to join you today as we release a new platform, in a way, not just a magazine. And I’m glad because, in a way, I see this as an additional forum for debate and argumentation in our country. And I think we need more forums.
Now, when one looks at the public space, I think the question really is what is the utility of such exercises? What is the impact of such exercises? And I want to start with a moment of honesty. And that honesty is that if you look back at the last 25 years, and I grant you I have a vested interest in this statement, but if you look back the last 25 years, in this country, Track 1 has been consistently ahead of Track 2 when it comes to diplomacy, foreign policy, and keeping up with the world. In fact, if you look at many of the big ideas, much of the advocacy of change, I would say really it’s interesting that Track 1 has outpaced Track 2. Which is why today I’m happy with this endeavour, because I do think that this dynamic of Track 1-Track 2, government-think tank, official-academic needs changes in our country. That our public space discourse should not be theological, it should not be polemical. It should not come as a defence of the past versus, a compulsion to move beyond the past. So I hope very much, and certainly I have an advantage over the rest of you, I’ve had a chance to read the magazine. So for me, a platform that signifies realism, which is contemporary, which is ambitious, I think it makes such a platform relevant, and it is in that expectation today that I join Dr. Raja Mohan and his team.
Now, if one reflects on foreign policy, you know, there are four big factors which should cause us to actually ask ourselves what are the changes which are necessary in foreign policy.
One, and I happened, by coincidence to speak about it yesterday. For many, many years, we had what someone else very pithily summed up as the Nehru Development Model. That was a book which was yesterday released by Dr. Arvind Panagariya. Now, the Nehru Foreign Development Model produced a Nehru Foreign Policy. I mean, it was obvious. And it wasn’t just what was happening in our country. There was an international landscape in the 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s, which was bipolar. Then there was a unipolar landscape. And both those landscapes have also changed. On top of it, we have seen, particularly the last 25 years, a very intense globalization, a strong interdependence between countries.
So, in a way, the relationship and the behaviour of states towards each other has also changed. And finally, if one looks at the impact of technology, technology on foreign policy, technology on state capability, technology actually on our daily existence, that too has changed. So, if the domestic model has changed, if the landscape has changed, if the behavioural pattern of states have changed, and if the tools of foreign policy have changed, how can foreign policy remain the same? So, my point to you today is, when we speak about changing foreign policy, if there is talk of a post-Nehruvian construct, it should not be treated as a political attack. I mean, it didn’t require Narendra Modi to do it. Narasimha Rao started it. So, I think we need to be grounded. We need to be realistic. We need to be practical in this country. And the foreign policy discourse within Track 2 and between Track 2 and Track 1 would certainly improve if we move in that direction.
Now, of course, when you say, ok, things are going to change, that then begs a different question. So, do we defend? Do we manage? Do we advance? Do we do all of the same? And then there is another question, which is one which Raj raised, which today, if our GDP is what it is, if our external exposure is what it is, how ambitious should we be? What is it we are really aiming for? And what should be the timing of what we do? You know, when do we raise our heads to what degree on what issue? I think that’s also a very important concern. So, my point to you is, just like the economic debates and the economic model of this country became more open, I think foreign policy debates, foreign policy thinking of this country also has to keep pace with what is happening in the country and needs to be more open.
And for that, it’s important to have an integrated outlook, which is why I was very pleased that this opening issue of this magazine starts with some thoughts about grand strategy that are offered by Dr. Rajamohan. So let’s talk a little bit about grand strategy. If today our aspiration at home is to become a Viksit Bharat, surely there must be a foreign policy for Viksit Bharat. And that foreign policy, in a way, I would say, we had about a decade ago, suggested the need for India to start thinking of moving towards a leading power. How to be more ambitious? How to plan ahead? Now, some of it is also about positioning. A country will move ahead if it has, in a sense, the most friends, the least problems, the best relationships, the minimal baggage. And in that positioning, I think this concept of Vishwa Bandhu came about, which is a country which, in a way, is friends to all, or nearly all, you can say, friends to the maximum. And if you have friends to a maximum, obviously your positioning is optimal, your problems, common sense would tell you, are minimal. And in that kind of situation, I think we have to also take into account the landscape. Because the global landscape, for a variety of reasons, and I’ll talk about it a little bit, has also become very volatile, it’s become very turbulent, it’s very uncertain. So, here you have a picture of an India which is growing. Raj put some numbers on it, which will have a foreign policy which will reflect that growth, which will respond to all the changes that we are talking about in the world, between countries, within countries, which will look at issues like technology, which will look at how the global order itself is changing. So, the task which is cut out for us, because Viksit Bharat means India’s rise. So, how does India rise amidst uncertainty? And this is a big task. Because generally rising powers like predictability, like stability, they value it more than anything else. But if the reality of the world is going to be something very different, we cannot not rise. We have to continue to rise. We just have to plan it for a very difficult circumstance in which the world is going to be.
So, how do you do that? As I said, by some mixture of offense, of defense, of hedging, of prudence, of joining in rebalancing, of participating in globalization, or to be more accurate, re-globalization, hopefully on different terms, of taking advantage of interdependence, which is also a point made, I think, in different articles in that magazine, of accelerating multipolarity and of utilizing for our benefit fully the impact of technology. Now, in the grand strategy essay, which Dr. Rajamohan has begun this volume with, he has, in a sense, spelt out four elements. One, the importance of working with the West. Two, the need for strategic autonomy. Three, the requirement to expand multipolarity. And fourth, the importance of the non-Western world, including the Global South. I agree, but I think perhaps a few more elements, or in a sense, a certain set of concepts need to give that flesh and practicality on the ground.
And I were to present to you a conceptual sense of Indian foreign policy today, I would first invite you to look at the world in concentric circles. So you have a neighborhood, first, you can say, a SAGAR in the oceans, the Act East and Indo-Pacific to the East, the Gulf and the whole Link West and the IMEC to the West, leading all the way up to Eurasia and to Europe. The second is, of course, the world stage. A world stage where, increasingly, we are a player of consequence, a player to whom others turn to, even if we are bashful at times, and where, therefore, to get the best out of that, we need to have a multi-vector foreign policy. We need to look at an identity of interest with other middle and upper middle powers. We need to focus and play regional contradictions to our benefit, obviously. And we need to create sets of balances whose aggregate actually favors India’s rise. But there is a third aspect to it, as a concept. And that is a kind of a grand strategy which looks over the horizon. Because if we are to be a leading power one day, if we are to have a strategy that is truly grand, then one has to not plan for today or tomorrow, but for the next generation, maybe even beyond that. And if you look at many of our initiatives in the last decade, the focus on Latin America, the reach out to the CARICOM, the interest in the Pacific Islands, the involvement with new connectivity initiatives, I would suggest to you that this is an India that is actually planning at least a generation ahead, trying to expand its footprint, however lightly, but it will be a beginning, and beginnings, at the end of the day, are the start of processes.
So I think to the elements which he has added, I think if we visualize the world in a much more focused way, in a much more actionable way, if we learn to play the world stage more adeptly, which is not without its risks and its anxieties, and if we actually look over the horizon, I think you have the makings here of what would be, in a sense, a multi-generational foreign policy. Now what are the key issues that such a foreign policy would look at? And I think in all frankness, I mean, they are a mix of the old and new, the issues that we have historically confronted, many of them have not gone away. We have yet to secure our borders, we are still combating terrorism on a very serious scale, so there are the hangovers of the past. There are the requirements of the present. We have already, again, I would say, moved to a foreign policy which is much more directly tasked to advance national development. If you actually look at all the joint communiques, what the foreign policy apparatus puts out, you would actually see, in the last 10 years, much greater stress on economic diplomacy. When prime ministers or even foreign ministers go out, there is much more about technology, capital, best practices, collaborations, investments. These actually occupy a much larger space in terms of what we do with other countries. And in that sense, I think we have taken some valuable lessons from other countries in Southeast Asia and East Asia, I think, who were doing it much longer than we were doing.
A third issue which we, today, I think I would put that as one of very high priority, which is supply chain reformulations. That the rerouting of supply chains today has both a foreign policy implication, but it also is a great national development opportunity. And that supply chain rerouting, the idea of more resilient, reliable supply chains, it can, in fact, it is already spurring manufacturing in this country, but it is also, in a way, a catalyst for technology growth in India. Talking of which, the digital era, I think, again has a foreign policy requirement of its own. Because the digital era is fundamentally different from the manufacturing era. The kind of hedging that could be done in manufacturing, at the end of the day, products were products. Whereas something digital is not just a product anymore. It is a data emitter. So we have today to build into our economics, but certainly our global partnerships, the sense of trust and transparency as a factor. So often now it is not a question of who is competitively priced. It is also very much an issue of whose products and services you trust. Where would you like your data to be? Where are other people likely to use your data against you? I think these are all concerns which will be important.
Flowing from that, I think there is a new reality, another new reality which is happening, which is a global workplace. That if one looks in terms of Indians working abroad, it is growing in leaps and bounds. In many cases, in individual relationships in the last few years, it has grown by hundreds of thousands. So it is interesting today that the countries where there is a large Indian population are no longer those where it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago. And this is likely to change much faster. As a ballpark figure, there are, I think, about 33-34 million Indian nationals and persons of Indian origin working abroad. So even if one leaves out persons of Indian origin, that still gives us something like 17-18 million people who are working abroad, and I assure you, these numbers are going to go up dramatically in the coming years. In fact, probably the most frequent conversations I have today, particularly with my counterparts and other ministers in developed countries, is actually about mobility. So we are going to see an explosion in mobility because there will be a demand for talent coupled with very sharp demographic deficits in different parts of the world. So that too is a change which is waiting to happen.
Then I mention connectivity. Now, again, we inherited the disrupted connectivity of the colonial times, and really for many decades we have not made a great effort to rebuild or resurrect the pre-colonial connectivity. And that has worked to our disadvantage. So today, if you look, look to the west. I mean, we have the India-Middle East Economic Corridor. Yes, it has challenges right now, but it’s very clear that everybody is very determined to take that forward. There is also the International North-South Transport Corridor, which has a different set of partners. If one looks to the east, you have the trilateral highway, which the ambitious form of it will actually end up somewhere in the Gulf of Tonkin. So when you put all these connectivity initiatives in place, and they do take years sometimes, maybe a decade to realize, actually the world is going to be very, very different. And for India it’s going to be very, very different, because a lot of this connectivity is going to run through India.
And then I would say, if one again looks at the world order, the world order itself no longer encourages fixed point collaborations. Depending on the agenda, you have a different combination of countries. So you can have an India in the QUAD, you can have an India in the BRICS, you can have it in the SCO. We can lead the Global South, we can be present at G7 meetings. So how do you find, how do you actually fashion your foreign policy to maximize your involvement in issues, your presence in different regions, and your shaping of multiple outcomes? So it calls for a different kind of flexibility and nimbleness, in a way. And moving beyond that, I think, again, I come back to the capability point. We are today a country of whom there are greater expectations, a country which actually has greater responsibilities. So the idea of India as a first responder, I can predict will actually get more and more frequent. I mean, pretty much anything in the expanded neighbourhood region, I think there would be an expectation that in some way, India be part of an international response whenever such a thing is warranted.
And finally, of course, because the world is changing, there will be new ideas, there will be new initiatives. We have already seen, I mean, QUAD is a good example; IMEC is an example of another, or the International Solar Alliance, or indeed the I2U2 in the Middle East. So the whole sort of construct, in a way, is going to be more open architecture, more multiple choices, but much deeper involvement, many more complex decisions, in a way. It’s very hard to predict how it’s going to go, but I can tell you how one thing is for sure, that the kind of defensive crouch into which we had, for a variety of reasons, got into, that era is really decisively behind us. I think we have to do very much more with the world. I think it’s for the good of this country that our own progress and development will accelerate with a deeper engagement with the world.
So my sense for a foreign policy ahead would really be to think big, to think long, but to think smart. So that, I hope, are concepts which, in some way or the other, I find reflected in the volume, in the issues to come. Once again, I congratulate all those for whom this labor of love has finally materialized, and really, I must say, I would be your initial public reader, and I can tell you the reader’s response is a very good one.
So, thank you very much.
