Contemporary Indian grand strategic practices are a study in paradoxes, as the nation carefully navigates an unstable international system. It attempts to utilise global instability, and leverage contradictions to advance its ambitious, interest-driven foreign policy agenda.
Much like its overall grand strategic approach, these paradoxes in India’s practices are revealing, shining a light on the country’s underlying directions and broad foreign policy goals.
Three elements of India’s approach stand out. First, multi-alignment has emerged as a central tenet, gradually replacing the earlier policy of non-alignment, which served as the country’s grand strategic pivot for several decades after independence. The second feature is India’s new geo-economic approach, highlighted by its determined pursuit of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and technological partnerships with a range of foreign partners. Finally, India’s grand strategy is also deeply characterised by an interest-based outlook, emphasising pragmatic and dynamic engagement with the international system, free from dogmatic ideologies or moralising rhetoric.
Yet within these ideas live a series of paradoxes, which this essay examines. I recognize that no grand strategy is free from paradoxes; indeed, the grander the strategy–the more contradictions it tends to have given the almost unavoidable tension between praxis and strategy.
And yet, it is essential to acknowledge and understand these paradoxes as the country grapples with the challenges of tailoring a grand strategy for itself. I refer to them as paradoxes. Because, while they may appear contradictory, they are, in my assessment, not merely contradictions—they are, for the most part, plain facts that are sometimes unavoidable.
