2025 looks like a promising year for India’s foreign policy

With less than a fortnight to go before the first dawn of 2025, it is an exciting, if challenging, prospect to predict the contours of India’s foreign policy in the new year.

Amidst the public abstraction with China and the obsession with the United States — also to a lesser extent with Russia — almost no one took notice of an important guide to the future by external affairs minister S Jaishankar last weekend.

He put a premium on relations with Canada. This sharply contrasts with the current state of relations between India and Canada, which touched its lowest point in recent times with the decimation of diplomatic presence in each other’s capitals and cities with their consulates.

Canada figured in Jaishankar’s policy speech as he looked ahead at 2025 and beyond, arguing that at the current stage of India’s growth, this country’s crucial partners ought to be the “major resource powers of the world.” He mentioned Canada because the north American nation is hugely rich is in diverse resources, for which there will be demand in India if it is to grow between six to eight percent annually in the coming decades. It is safe, therefore, to predict that the worst is behind us in India-Canada ties, which are set to improve in the new year.

The resignation of Canada’s deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland could be a catalyst in this process. For long, she has been considered as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s heir apparent. This has largely been lost sight of in the current murky atmosphere of India-Canada ties. The joyful emphasis in India has been on how Freeland’s resignation is one more nail on Trudeau’s political coffin which is being assembled. But that is only part of the story.

Freeland may well be in the Opposition, as its leader perhaps, after the next elections in Canada, which her Liberal Party is predicted to lose. But in whatever political role, Freeland will be an asset in the uplift of Canada’s ties with India. She will be the very opposite of what Trudeau has been. Freeland has been advocating that by being good Sikhs and by being good Indians, they will be even better Canadians. Few Trudeau acolytes would have said this when the Liberal Party leadership has been trying to use militant Sikhs as fodder for votes.

To view Bangladesh solely through and Indian foreign policy prism or to dwell too much on India-China border disengagement in 2025 is to miss the forest for the trees.

New institutional structures are likely to be put place in the new year to bring the foundations of India’s external affairs equal to nations with celebrated diplomatic traditions. Recently, Jaishankar lamented that the Track II process in India has woefully fallen behind.

He wants the country’s non-government strategic community to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and catch up — even overtake — Track I. This will not be easy because opposition to the idea will come from within the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) itself.

Ahead of the new year, with the MEA’s support, strategic thinker C Raja Mohan and a team of academicians have launched a bi-monthly magazine, India’s World. Its vision, in the long-term, is to grow into an Indian version of Foreign Affairs, the century-plus-old journal of the US Council of Foreign Relations or International Affairs, its Russian counterpart, which began publication in 1922. Jaishankar launched the magazine, hoping that “this as an additional forum for debate and argumentation in our country. And I think we need more forums.”

Another change envisaged in external affairs in the new year is the growth of India as an international conference superpower. The idea had a small beginning in 2016 when the MEA and the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) began the Raisina Dialogue as a small talking shop. This Dialogue now matches similar conclaves abroad. A global economic dialogue and a technology summit were also started, but the Covid-19 pandemic intervened. In 2025, building on the lessons learned at last year’s G20 Summit in New Delhi, India’s conference diplomacy will be expanded to surpass the record of similar events worldwide.

India recently became home to two multilateral organisations — the International Solar Alliance and the Global Biofuels Alliance. Long ago, New Delhi lost the race to be a United Nations city to Bangkok and Nairobi on the Afro-Asian map. The recent successes in wooing two global alliances to be headquartered in the National Capital Territory (NCT) has given the MEA confidence that a hat-trick may be possible in 2025.

(K P Nayar has extensively covered West Asia and reported from Washington as a foreign correspondent for 15 years.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.