Jaishankar: Modi's foreign policy defender, within and outside country

New Delhi: Narendra Modi and Subrahmanyam Jaishankar first met in November 2011. The ace diplomat was New Delhi’s envoy to Beijing when the then-chief minister of Gujarat was on a tour to China. That they took an immediate liking for each other came out in the public domain on January 28, 2015, nearly eight months after Modi became the prime minister.

Barack Obama, the then-president of the United States, had just returned to Washington after attending the Republic Day ceremony of India as the chief guest.

Modi’s external affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj, called Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh to her office late in the evening and told her that she would have to step aside, because the prime minister was keen to replace her with Jaishankar, then New Delhi’s envoy to the US.

Singh resigned that night, although her tenure would have come to an end only eight months later.

Jaishankar, who had come to New Delhi for the US president’s visit, took over as India’s top diplomat the next morning, although he would have retired from the Indian Foreign Service just two days later.

His appointment as the foreign secretary was perceived to be a reward for arranging Modi’s tour to Washington and New York in September 2014 – a visit that spectacularly ended his pariah status for the US, which had once denied him a visa over the 2002 Gujarat riots.  

Jaishankar’s diplomatic career ended on January 28, 2018, after he completed not only the normal two-year-long tenure as the foreign secretary but also an extension of a year. He, however, returned to the government on May 30, 2019, this time as the external affairs minister, elbowing out Swaraj. The alumnus of St Stephen’s College and Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi thus became the second career diplomat after K Natwar Singh to reach the helm of the Ministry of External Affairs.

Manmohan’s first choice

Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, also wanted to reward Jaishankar, the son of the much-respected ‘guru’ of strategic affairs K Subrahmanyam, with an out-of-turn promotion to the office of the foreign secretary, in recognition of his role in clinching the landmark India-US civil nuclear cooperation agreement. But the move was stalled by the top brass of the Congress in August 2013.

After Singh passed away in December 2024, Jaishankar paid tribute to the former prime minister, acknowledging his role in steering “strategic corrections” to the foreign policy of India.

In the last six years since his plunge into politics, Jaishankar – now in his second term both as the external affairs minister and a BJP member in the Rajya Sabha – has been steadfastly loyal to Modi.

Intellectual edge

He not only sharply countered every criticism by the Congress and other opposition parties against the BJP-led government in the foreign policy domain, but also added an intellectual edge to the saffron party’s blame-it-all-on-Nehru campaign, particularly on issues related to India’s complex relations with Pakistan and China.

He defended the Modi government when the Congress accused the prime minister of failing to protect India’s territory from aggressive actions by China in eastern Ladakh.

He alleged that India had lost vast swathes of its land to China in 1962 when Nehru headed the government. In response to the Congress’ criticism over New Delhi’s allegedly inadequate response to incursion by the People’s Liberation Army, he explained the rationale of India, being a smaller economy when compared to China, avoiding a confrontation with the neighbour across the Himalayas.

Jaishankar’s statement about New Delhi informing Islamabad about the launch of Operation Sindoor “at the start” of India’s military strikes on terrorist camps in Pakistan and Pak-occupied Kashmir (PoK) earlier this month prompted Congress heavyweight and Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, to question who had authorised informing the neighbouring country about the military offensive.

The MEA tacitly accused Gandhi of misrepresenting facts, clarifying that India had informed Pakistan about ‘Operation Sindoor’ when the military offensive was already in its early phase, not before it started.

Earlier, when Gandhi alleged that Jaishankar visited Washington in December 2024 to secure an invitation for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the US, the external affairs minister hit back, saying the statements of the opposition leader was hurting India’s national interests.

Jaishankar also came under criticism for failing to adequately respond to China’s growing footprint in India’s  neighbourhood. He argued a policy of “staying on the right side of the weapon” to avoid being hit.

However, India’s move to start negotiations for a trade deal with the US could not save it from Trump’s tariff tirade. The US president’s repeated claims about brokering a ceasefire between India and Pakistan also exposed the disconnect between New Delhi and Washington.

Bashing the West

In countless speaking events and interviews, the external affairs minister has tried to expose the hypocrisy of the West when India drew flak from the United States and Europe for continuing to buy crude oil from Russia after the Ukraine war.

Jaishankar pointed out how the US had, in the past, denied India access to advanced technology and military hardware, and had rather chosen to arm the adversaries of India.

“When we look at the world, we look for partners, we don’t look for preachers,” he recently said, building on his argument that “national interests” would shape the contours of the foreign policy of India.