India,officially the Republic of India,has full diplomatic relations with 201 states,including Palestine,the Holy See,and Niue. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) is the government agency responsible for the conduct of foreign relations of India. With the world's third largest military expenditure,second largest armed force,fifth largest economy by GDP nominal rates and third largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity,India is a prominent regional power and a rising superpower.
The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence are the Chinese government's foreign relations principles first mentioned in the 1954 Sino-Indian Agreement. Also known as Panchsheel,these principles were subsequently adopted in a number of resolutions and statements,including the preamble to the Constitution of the People's Republic of China.
China and India have historically maintained peaceful relations for thousands of years of recorded history,but the harmony of their relationship has varied in modern times,after the Chinese Communist Party's victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949,and especially post the Annexation of Tibet by the People's Republic of China. The two nations have sought economic cooperation with each other,while frequent border disputes and economic nationalism in both countries are major points of contention.
Krishnaswamy Subrahmanyam was a prominent international strategic affairs analyst,journalist and former Indian civil servant. Considered a proponent of Realpolitik,Subrahmanyam was an influential voice in Indian security affairs for a long time. He was most often referred to as the doyen of India's strategic affairs community,and as the premier ideological champion of India's nuclear deterrent. His son S Jaishankar was appointed India's External Affairs Minister in 2019.
Shivshankar Menon is an Indian diplomat,who served as National Security Adviser of India under Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh. He had previously served as the Foreign Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs. Prior to that he was Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan,and Sri Lanka and ambassador to China and Israel. He is currently Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress. He is also Visiting Professor of International Relations at Ashoka University.
Relations between India and the United States date back to India's independence movement and have continued well after independence from the United Kingdom in 1947. Currently,India and the United States enjoy close relations and have deepened collaboration on issues such as counterterrorism and countering Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific.
The Indo–Soviet Treaty of Peace,Friendship and Cooperation was a treaty signed between India and the Soviet Union in August 1971 that specified mutual strategic cooperation. This was a significant deviation from India's previous position of non-alignment during the Cold War and was a factor in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war.
The String of Pearls is a geopolitical hypothesis proposed by United States political researchers in 2004. The term refers to the network of Chinese military and commercial facilities and relationships along its sea lines of communication,which extend from the Chinese mainland to Port Sudan in the Horn of Africa. The sea lines run through several major maritime choke points such as the Strait of Mandeb,the Strait of Malacca,the Strait of Hormuz,and the Lombok Strait as well as other strategic maritime centres in Pakistan,Sri Lanka,Bangladesh,the Maldives,and Somalia.
India and the Soviet Union had cooperative and friendly relations. During the Cold War (1947–1991),India did not chose sides between the Capitalist Bloc and the Communist Bloc and was a leading country of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Relations ended in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD),commonly known as the Quad,is a strategic security dialogue between Australia,India,Japan and the United States that is maintained by talks between member countries. The dialogue was initiated in 2007 by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe,with the support of Australian Prime Minister John Howard,Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. The dialogue was paralleled by joint military exercises of an unprecedented scale,titled Exercise Malabar. The diplomatic and military arrangement was widely viewed as a response to increased Chinese economic and military power.
Subrahmanyam Jaishankar is an Indian diplomat and politician serving as the Minister of External Affairs of the Government of India since 30 May 2019. He is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party and a Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha since 5 July 2019. He previously served as the Foreign Secretary from January 2015 to January 2018. He became the second ever diplomat to be appointed as India's External Affairs minister,after Natwar Singh.
The most significant initiative made by the Narendra Modi government is the focus on neighbouring countries and major Asian powers coupled with emphasizing on the two decades old Look East policy. Asia being the major focus area of his foreign policy,Modi and his foreign minister chose several Asian countries for their initial bilateral visits. He has made state visits to Bhutan and Nepal and Japan within the first 100 days of his government and also hosted Asian leaders like former Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia,President Xi Jinping of China and Prime Minister Nguyễn Tấn Dũng of Vietnam,apart from inviting SAARC leaders in his inauguration ceremony. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has also made official visits to several Asian capitals like Dhaka,Bangladesh,Kathmandu,Nepal,Naypidaw,Myanmar,Singapore,Hanoi,Vietnam,Manama,Bahrain,Kabul,Afghanistan,Dushanbe,Tajikistan,Malé,Maldives,Abu Dhabi,United Arab Emirates,Seoul,South Korea and Beijing China.
The Middle East region plays a vital role in India's economy as it supplies nearly two-thirds of India's total oil import,bilateral trade is also flourishing in recent years particularly with UAE and other Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Over the years,millions of Indians mostly working class have migrated to the Persian Gulf region looking for jobs and they account for a sizeable share in the total remittances received from abroad. Indian External Affairs Ministry refers the region as West Asia and not as Middle East which is a more popular attribution,particularly in the Western countries.
The History of Indian foreign policy refers to the foreign relations of modern India post-independence,that is the Dominion of India (from 1947 to 1950) and the Republic of India (from 1950 onwards).
In political science,triangular diplomacy is a foreign policy of the United States,developed during the Vietnam War (1955–1975) by Henry Kissinger,as a means to manage relations between the contesting communist powers,the Soviet Union and China. Connecting heavily with the correlating policy of linkage,the policy was intended to exploit the ongoing rivalry between the two Communist powers,as a means to strengthen American hegemony and diplomatic interest.
SAGAR,used as a backronym or reverse acronym which stands for Security and Growth for All in the Region,is a label used by the Prime Minister and Government of India for India's vision and geopolitical framework of maritime cooperation in the Indian Ocean region. Sagar means 'ocean' or 'sea' in multiple Indian languages. Since the first usage of the phrase in 2015 at Port Louis by Prime Minister Narendra Modi the term has been adapted to include more elements such as linkages with the Indo-Pacific region.
The Sino-Nepalese Treaty of Peace and Friendship was an official settlement between the governments of Nepal and China signed on 28 April 1960,which ratified an earlier agreement on the borders separating the neighboring nations from each other. Gerry Van Tronder has argued that this document fitted into an attempt to maintain the image that Beijing was a "powerful but essentially benevolent leader in Asia",following the 1959 Tibetan Uprising. Contemporary Nepali,Chinese and Indian commentators have stressed the importance of the treaty in determining Nepal's relationship with China in the past and present.
Free and Open Indo-Pacific is an umbrella term that encompasses Indo-Pacific-specific strategies of countries with similar interests in the region. The concept,with its origins in Weimar German geopolitics,has been revived since 2006 through Japanese initiatives and American cooperation.
Forward policy,in the context of Sino-Indian border conflict,was a term coined by the Indian Army to refer to an Indian government directive instructing it to establish "forward" posts to reclaim territory occupied by China. Much before India's decision,China had been carrying out its own version of forward policy by militarising its perceived border and by attacking and apprehending any Indian patrols that ventured into it. Later,China cited India's forward policy as the causus belli that initiated the 1962 Sino-Indian War.
The Indo-Abrahamic Alliance sometimes known as The Indo-Abrahamic Block or The Middle East QUAD or The Western QUAD or West Asian QUAD or I2-U2 is a geostrategic term coined by the foreign policy thinker and grand strategist Mohammed Soliman in use for a long essay for the Middle East Institute. The Indo-Abrahamic term refers to the growing convergence of geopolitical interests among India,Israel,and the United Arab Emirates,which will create a regional bloc that would include Egypt and Saudi Arabia and eventually fill in the gap left by a future US withdrawal from the Middle East and represents a counterbalance to Turkey and Iran. The Biden Administration later adopted Soliman's Indo-Abrahamic concept by launching the I2U2 Group in October 2021,which was followed by a leaders-level summit in July 2022.
