MILAN VAISHNAV, CAROLINE MALLORY
INTRODUCTION
One of the most obvious yet understudied trends in India over the past decade has been the emergence of foreign policy as a domestic political issue. In the past, scholars and close observers have viewed foreign policy as principally an elite preoccupation—fodder for cocktail parties, parlor room gossip, and think tank seminars in urban metros like Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. Foreign policy was deemed too complex, too abstract, and too distant from the aam aadmi (common man), who was more concerned with meeting basic needs than with the Indian prime minister’s equation with their Chinese counterpart or India’s status in multilateral forums.
But today, as one surveys the political landscape in India, foreign policy seems to have descended from its rarified perch. Conversations about India’s role in the world can be heard on street corners, at the dinner table, and around the proverbial water cooler. While elites might still dominate the production of foreign policy, its consumption has been democratized.
The downward penetration of foreign policy is evident in big ways and small. Campaign posters in cities and towns across the country hail India’s presidency of the G20. India’s external affairs minister is eagerly sought out by his party’s regional bosses to speak to rank-and-file members about India’s standing in the world. Even the political opposition has had to sit up and take notice. Although opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s frequent overseas forays might provoke social media derision, his party, the Indian National Congress (hereafter the Congress Party), has recognized that it, too, must articulate the role it envisions for India abroad. Indeed, the party’s 2024 general election manifesto contains multiple pages on foreign policy, defense, and internal security.
As Indian voters prepare to go to the polls in April–June, foreign policy is certain to be a hallmark of the campaign as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seeks to use its decade-long track record to consolidate its hold over the electorate. The rising domestic currency of foreign policy must be understood as part and parcel of India’s broader quest to become a key player in an increasingly multipolar world order. The salience of foreign policy to ordinary Indians is driven by a mix of structural geopolitical shifts, the ideological moorings of the ruling BJP, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unique political credibility. While the available evidence suggests that the elevation of foreign policy is paying rich political dividends, the full range of consequences remains unclear.
RISING POWERS AND THE QUEST FOR STATUS
In discussions about domestic politics across all parts of the democratic world, social status and the practice of “status-seeking” are increasingly at the heart of political analysis. Social identity theory holds that an individual’s or group’s assessment of their own self-worth is inextricably linked to how others in society view their group’s status. For instance, the last several decades of India’s political development have been shaped by the so-called silent revolution of Dalits and backward castes. After independence, these historically disadvantaged groups spent decades fighting for—and eventually winning—greater social, economic, and political representation. Of course, the pursuit from below of a politics of dignity was met with resistance from those situated higher in the social hierarchy, who were eager to prevent the erosion of their own social status since their preeminence could no longer be taken for granted. The friction that emerged between those seeking to improve their status and those wishing to hold on to their privileged position often resulted in violence, disorder, and a renegotiation of social norms, a process that continues to unfold today in certain pockets of the country.
In a very different political environment, the United States, appeals to status continue to be a hallmark of domestic political competition. Former president Donald Trump’s surprising election victory in 2016 was powered, at least in part, by rising status anxiety among the White working class. Many people associated with Trump’s movement have raised fears about maintaining a supposedly American identity amid a rapidly changing and diversifying population. Some conservatives, in turn, charge liberal progressives with championing the status concerns of racial and ethnic minorities in a manner that borders on reverse discrimination.
Status-seeking behavior has now become entrenched in understanding individuals and groups in domestic politics in diverse polities, but a compelling logic extends these dynamics to states in international relations. Rohan Mukherjee explains that rising powers like India care deeply about their position in the global hierarchy of states. As in domestic affairs, achieving a higher “status” has both instrumental and expressive value. In the world of international relations, states pursue a higher status for themselves to facilitate entry into valued economic networks, key multilateral forums and standard-settings bodies, and beneficial strategic partnerships. Status can also imbue rising powers with what Mukherjee calls “symbolic equality,” which is manifested through norms, customs, and institutions that treat rising powers as co-equals at the global high table. These states want to be treated with the respect they believe their growing clout accords.
To be sure, India’s quest for status recognition is not novel. Prime ministers from Jawaharlal Nehru to Manmohan Singh have pronounced India’s civilizational exceptionalism and argued for India’s inclusion in exclusive clubs as befits one of the world’s great powers. But there is a palpable feeling that something qualitatively different is afoot with the Modi government. The present government has expressed not only its desire for India to transition from a “balancing” power into a “leading” one” but also the idea that this status transition has partly been achieved. To support its claim, it points to the fact that India is currently the world’s fastest-growing major economy, boasts the world’s largest population, and is a much-sought-after partner for both the advanced industrialized world and the Global South.
Previous Indian prime ministers have supported the concept of “polyvocality”—the notion that international order should be shaped by a range of voices representing the interests of both the developed and the developing world. The Modi government has gone even further—arguing for a global order based on the principle of multipolarity in which India serves as one of the principal poles. This shift in thinking appears to resonate with a wide swath of Indians, who wield aspirations for India domestically that are matched by their desires for the country to project power internationally.
FROM ELITES TO THE MASSES
Scholars have historically conceived of two categories of policy issues in India. As Ashutosh Varshney famously argued, there has been a traditional separation in India between “elite” issues and “mass” issues.” Elite issues are those that hold little resonance for the common person. Rather, they are discussed, debated, and decided by a small slice of elites who exercise issue ownership and enjoy wide freedom of maneuver. Questions of foreign policy, national defense, and international trade fall into this category. On the opposite end of the spectrum sit “mass” issues that directly affect the average Indian’s daily existence. This category consists of a wide variety of issues such as inflation/price rise, jobs, and welfare distribution.
The sharp bifurcation between “elite” and “mass” issues has now broken down. Starting in 2019, Indian voters began to regularly speak about how Modi had put India on the map, implying that his leadership helped the country leap from backwater to marquee status. As one expert put it, “The message which has gone out is that India has really emerged very strong in the world. And it’s only because of Modi.” Put another way, there was a widely held belief that India had long been viewed as a big country but not a particularly important one. Today, the sense emanating from many ordinary Indians is that India is seen as both big and important.
More systematic evidence also supports this contention. In a May 2023 nationally representative survey of Indians conducted by the Lokniti Programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), in conjunction with NDTV, 63 percent of respondents reported that India’s global status had risen since Modi assumed office in 2014. The same poll found that most Indians believed the country had progressed in furthering its cultural capital, its status as a world leader, and its attraction as a destination for foreign investment during Modi’s tenure (see figure 1).
The February 2024 India Today Mood of the Nation poll found that 19 percent of survey respondents believed that Modi would be most remembered for “raising India’s global stature.” This response was second only to the construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, a Hindu temple being built on the site of a fifteenth-century Islamic mosque that had been demolished by BJP-affiliated activists in 1992 (selected by a whopping 42 percent of respondents, perhaps an artifact of the timing of the survey as the new temple was inaugurated in January 2024).
Yet the blurring lines between “elite” and “mass” issues has remained underrecognized, due partly to difficulties of measurement. In a standard public opinion survey like the ones regularly fielded on the eves of elections, it is hard to discern the impact of foreign policy on domestic political choices. In most surveys, voters are presented with a list of issues that shape their vote choice on election day and are asked to select which is the “most important.” It is not surprising that traditionally “mass” issues like development, inflation, or jobs and livelihoods regularly top the list. Indeed, Lokniti-CSDS national election surveys since 2009 have consistently shown that voters identify economic-related concerns as their foremost preoccupation when voting.
However, this does not mean foreign policy is unimportant domestically. In some instances, foreign policy’s impact can be directly observed. In February 2019, just two months before voting began in the general election, terrorists attacked a convoy of Indian paramilitary forces in Pulwama, Kashmir, kicking off a brief, high-stakes standoff between India and Pakistan. The Pulwama attacks, and the Modi government’s subsequent airstrikes on terror training camps in Balakot, Pakistan, helped create a nationalist fervor that the BJP enthusiastically exploited, a task made easier by jingoistic media and social media echo chambers.
According to polling data from the Indo-Asian News Service and CVoter, satisfaction with the BJP central government had a 15-percentage-point bump in the weeks following the attacks in Pulwama and Balakot before partially reverting (see figure 2). A Lokniti-CSDS survey found that roughly 80 percent of voters in the 2019 general election had heard of the Balakot airstrike—46 percent of whom favored Modi’s reelection, compared to 32 percent among those unaware of India’s retaliatory strikes.
However, foreign policy crises like the 2019 Pulwama attacks and the subsequent Balakot retaliation are relatively infrequent, and their timing is unpredictable, meaning that drawing clean inferences based on timely public opinion data may not always be possible. Crises aside, foreign policy is more likely to factor into the intangible “hawa”—the mythical “wind” or buzz that captures public sentiment around Indian elections. In this way, the perceived gains that an incumbent makes in the foreign policy domain may not necessarily be strongly reflected in polling data compared to known, make-or-break Election Day issues. Nonetheless, such gains can further an impression of achievement for the incumbent, aiding in the creation of a feel-good sentiment as voters cast their ballots. By the same token, perceived foreign policy losses could contribute to a general sentiment of negativity around a ruling party.
WHY IS FOREIGN POLICY EMERGING NOW?
Arguably, there are two sets of factors that explain why foreign policy is emerging as a domestic political issue at this juncture in India’s history.
The first set includes structural factors related to the changing nature of international order. For starters, the United States’ unipolar moment following the end of the Cold War has arguably come to an end. Hobbled by deep domestic political divisions and reeling from a series of prolonged foreign interventions, America’s ability to shape global order is increasingly called into doubt. China, fueled by a booming economy (until recently) and a desire to expand its geopolitical footprint, has emerged as a clear strategic competitor to the once hegemonic United States. Russian revanchism under President Vladimir Putin has also grown, exhibited by its brazen invasion of Ukraine and desire to inflict costs on the Western alliance.
The fragmentation of the international order has created space for India to flex its foreign policy muscles. China’s increased assertiveness has become a principal preoccupation of Western leaders who, in turn, have accelerated their courtship of India, which has turned more receptive in the aftermath of Chinese border incursions in 2020. Although India failed to unequivocally condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, its Western partners nevertheless seized the moment to try and wean India off Russian defense imports by casting doubt on Moscow’s reliability. Amid this churning, India has sought to exploit the growing number of cleavages in the international system to pursue its realist interests, skillfully playing adversaries off one another. India’s growing economy, increased relevance in multilateral negotiations devoted to tackling global and transnational challenges, and strategic geography have made it an indispensable partner to nearly all the great powers.
But the emergence of foreign policy as a domestic concern goes beyond structure alone. The current government’s unique worldview represents a second critical factor. The BJP government has seized upon the foreign policy domain as a crucial pillar of its ambition, striving that India under Modi’s leadership reclaim its historical role as a civilizational power. The prime minister has proposed that he and his government are leading India out of “twelve centuries of slavery” marked by repeated foreign invasions and the ignominy of colonial rule. Instead, this thinking goes, his government is ushering in a new era of “Amrit Kaal” (a Vedic concept about the gates of pleasure opening to the world). Such grand thinking shows his conviction that India inhabits a geopolitical sweet spot today. As External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar has put it, “The world is actually today getting ready for us. It is we who have to make that effort to prepare for a bigger role . . . with a sense of historical and ivilizational responsibility.”
According to proponents of this view, the Modi government’s ambitious agenda for India stands in sharp contrast to the fecklessness of the opposition. The Congress Party regime of Manmohan Singh was perceived as unwilling to exercise power globally in ways that maximized India’s own interests. Modi himself has explicitly painted this contrast, denouncing previous Congress Party governments’ exercise of what they called “strategic restraint” in the face of terrorist attacks. As the prime minister recently remarked at an election rally in Bihar, “Even a small country (Pakistan) which reported a shortage of flour would be bold enough to launch a terrorist attack on us, and the Congress government would just take up the complaint with another country.”
Modi’s unique mix of personal popularity, ambition, and marketing savvy has convinced many Indians that his leadership is an intrinsic part of India’s revival, at home and abroad. And his ability to market his government’s achievements is second to none.
The frenetic pace of activity around India’s presidency of the G20—consisting of more than 200 events in more than sixty cities—demonstrated the Modi government’s desire to communicate its foreign policy achievements to the masses. India’s G20 logo, which creatively incorporated the BJP’s signature lotus flower, was slapped on everything from major archeological sites to standardized tests. Posters and billboards hailing India’s presidency plastered flyovers, train stations, and major thoroughfares, and many Indians viewed this milestone as a coronation rather than the country’s routine turn assuming an annually rotating leadership position. This physical marketing onslaught was paired with digital mobilization, fueled by deepening smartphone penetration and the plummeting cost of data. “Why shouldn’t G20 be used for domestic politics?” thundered Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah. “If G20 has come to the country during Modiji’s time . . . then Modiji must get credit.”
REAPING POLITICAL REWARDS
The effort to harness India’s foreign policy status for domestic political purposes is especially noteworthy because of the clear evidence that it has consolidated domestic support for the current government.
According to the 2023 Pew Global Attitudes Survey, nearly seven in ten Indians believed that their country’s global influence was getting stronger (see figure 3). Furthermore, eight in ten Indians had a favorable opinion of Modi’s performance as prime minister (with 55 percent holding a “very favorable” view). Not surprisingly, respondents who were supporters of the ruling BJP alliance were especially bullish on India’s global prospects, with 77 percent reporting the country’s influence as increasing. Even among those who did not support the Modi government, six in ten agreed with the notion that India’s status had risen.
Indians hold especially positive views about their country’s role in their neighborhood. In a nationally representative 2022 survey conducted by CVoter and the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), 33 percent of Indian respondents reported that India wielded the most influence in Asia, with the United States a distant second at fifteen percent and China a hair below at fourteen percent (see figure 4).
A more recent domestic survey of young, urban Indians, conducted by YouGov in partnership with CPR and Mint, found very high levels of public satisfaction with the Modi government, including on foreign policy matters. For instance, 70 percent of respondents were satisfied with India’s conduct as host of the G20, and a roughly equivalent share maintained a favorable view of the government’s efforts to protect the country from terrorist attacks. Even on the issue of Chinese incursions along the country’s disputed northern border, six in ten respondents were satisfied with the way the government had handled the ongoing dispute.
Interestingly, foreigners were less impressed by India’s role in the world and Modi’s leadership. The Pew survey found that, in nineteen countries across the developed and developing world, a median of 28 percent believed India’s global influence had grown while 48 percent believed it had stayed the same. Across a smaller sample of a dozen countries, a median of 37 percent held a positive view of Modi (albeit with large numbers expressing no opinion).
LINGERING QUESTIONS
The newfound domestic resonance of foreign policy is a striking development in a country where such matters were long out of sight and, hence, out of mind for most Indian voters. But the transition of foreign policy from an elite to mass issue also raises pertinent questions about the implications of this development for domestic politics.
THE LIMITS OF ACCOUNTABILITY
In 2018, scholars Vipin Narang and Paul Staniland argued that there are certain conditions under which foreign policy might resonate politically in a democracy like India. They posited that two factors play a determining role: clarity of responsibility and issue salience. On the first consideration, the ability of domestic audiences to apply credit or blame to political leaders for the conduct of foreign policy hinges, in part, on their ability to identify a clear chain of responsibility. For instance, when a coalition government is in power, it might be hard for ordinary voters to know which party or leader is responsible for a given policy success or blunder.
In single-party-majority governments, especially those helmed by a charismatic leader who holds a tight grip on the reins of power, voters have a much easier job. But domestic attention is also conditional on a second factor: the nature of the foreign policy issue at hand. The intricacies of a free-trade agreement, for instance, might be less resonant than how a government responds to a terrorist attack. Taking these two dimensions together, foreign policy is expected to have the greatest domestic import when both clarity of responsibility and issue salience are at their highest.
China’s 2020 incursions into India would seem to satisfy both conditions. Chinese forces crossed the Line of Actual Control (LAC) into India, infringing on and ultimately occupying territory previously controlled by India. China’s moves were brazen, condemned by India and many of the country’s partners, and validated by third-party satellite imagery. And they took place less than a year after the Modi government won reelection with a resounding mandate, increasing the BJP’s parliamentary seat tally despite five years of incumbency.
And yet, perhaps surprisingly, the combination of clarity of responsibility and issue salience did not lead to serious democratic accountability. To the contrary, the Modi government does not seem to have paid any domestic cost for a foreign policy setback that occurred on its watch and that remains unresolved today. If the ruling party enjoys the gains accrued from perceived foreign policy successes—such as the hosting of the G20 or the June 2023 White House state dinner in Modi’s honor—why does it not suffer any downside from foreign policy losses? This question requires deeper investigation, but, at first glance, there are three potential explanations.
First, popular support for Modi is so considerable that, despite experiencing short-term losses, voters may believe that the prime minister will eventually reverse these setbacks. This argument has an analogy in domestic policy: despite a record of mixed economic growth while in office, many Indian voters believe that Modi’s vision for the country will ultimately result in widespread prosperity, even if the accumulated record to date leaves much to be desired.
A second explanation relates to the information environment. What happens along a contested border that is not clearly demarcated is hard enough for experts to decipher, much less ordinary voters. This murkiness is compounded by the considerable influence the government wields over the media, opening up the possibility of either killing uncomfortable stories or cowing newsrooms into silence. Added to this is the reality that the ruling party has prevented an open debate on the border crisis on the floor of Parliament and blocked the opposition (and, by extension, the public) from scrutinizing its record. Indeed, one outspoken BJP member of Parliament criticized the government for evading an open discussion of the border standoff.
A third explanation could be voters’ limited trust in the opposition. Even if the electorate is concerned about India’s loss of face vis-a-vis China along the LAC, it is possible that they have little faith that the opposition would do a better job handling the crisis. After all, the border conflict is a long-standing dispute that the Congress Party, in its many decades in power, could not resolve in India’s favor. In such circumstances, the incentives to hold the government accountable are muted.
UNINTENDED ELECTORAL CONSEQUENCES
As the domestic salience of foreign policy increases, a second issue pertains to the unintended consequences of nationalist rallying. Consider again the effects of the Pulwama attacks of 2019. On a national scale, the attacks contributed to a rally-around-the-flag effect that undoubtedly bolstered the BJP’s election prospects. The attacks shifted voters’ attention away from quotidian issues like the economy and unemployment—areas where the ruling BJP was on shakier ground—toward issues of national security, where the party’s nationalist credentials gave it a sizable issue advantage.
However, while the attacks seemed to fuel a nationalist rallying at a macro level, the BJP faced greater voter blowback in areas where exposure to the Pulwama losses was greatest (such as the villages and towns the slain soldiers called home). In other words, greater exposure to losses emanating from this particular security crisis tapered the level of rallying in support of the nationalist incumbent. These setbacks had little impact on the overall outcome because the losses were dispersed and highly localized. However, if the Pulwama casualties had been more widespread, then there could have been a greater backlash against the BJP.
RISKS OF FOREIGN POLICY OVERREACH
A third and final question involves the distinct feeling in the corridors of power in New Delhi that, as one reporter summarized, “the world needs India more than India needs the world.” While government officials might not broadcast this from the rooftops, their public and private utterances demonstrate a confidence and self-assurance that aligns with this point of view.
This belief that India’s time has arrived may have encouraged some in government to pursue the targeted assassinations of Sikh separatist leaders Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada, which succeeded, and Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in the United States, which did not. To be clear, official Indian involvement has only been conjectured in both cases, with the former murder under investigation and the latter the subject of an ongoing criminal prosecution. A commonly heard refrain in India is that while there is disputed evidence of the Indian government’s role, if it was involved, it would be a sign of the country’s emerging great power status. Such a reaction implies that India would have achieved the impunity to undertake the kinds of covert operations abroad that have previously been the hallmarks of richer, more established powers like Israel, Russia, and the United States.
Domestically, India’s foreign policy adventurism is likely to help, rather than hurt, the ruling party’s popularity. But it is a strategy laden with risks for India’s relations with international partners. While Canada might be too trivial a player to matter, India’s relationship with the United States is of vital importance. While the U.S. administration betrays no desire to allow these incidents to derail a growing strategic partnership, India’s pursuit of risky foreign escapades that play well at home holds the possibility of souring relations abroad. Good politics, in other words, might not always make for good policy.
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