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The world order is ‘complicated’. Can Indian foreign policy navigate ‘situationships’? As a strategic framework, values-based realism recognises that cooperation and compromise work in tandem, such that to cooperate, states must make difficult compromises from time to time. A pragmatic reaction to a fracturing world, values-based realism seeks to approach the emerging geopolitical configurations not without values, but besides them, such that national interests – like border security, maritime lanes, and counter-terrorism – can be separated from normative metrics (eg freedom, rights, etc) during issue-specific engagements. In other words, values-based realism suggests that to be realistic is to value that all states are not alike and may not even want to be. Accordingly, to limit cooperation because of lack of convergence around identified norms – which is what a liberal, rules-based international order promoted –actually risks further fragmentation, especially when states in general can no longer feasibly or viably enforce norms. India’s historical footprint might suggest it will not be well-positioned to navigate such a world. For decades, New Delhi leaned heavily on the moral rhetoric of Non-Alignment and Third World solidarity, later embracing the rules-based international order through normative frameworks like vishwaguru (teacher to the world) and vasudhaiva kutumbakam (the world is one family). Yet, this global posturing has always coexisted with a parallel, pragmatic reality. When observed through its immediate neighborhood practice rather than its global rhetoric, India has acted less as an idealistic bystander and more as a seasoned practitioner of what may be understood as issue-centric realism. Neighbourhood dilemmas One of the most enduring challenges for Indian foreign policy has been how to approach its relations with “problematic” regimes. These are regimes that are not merely ideologically opposed to India in terms of their governance structures (eg military dictatorships or ultra-conservative movements that see New Delhi as an adversary), but also because they are seen as posing systemic challenges to the traditional global norms. To add to these, they tend to create even more dilemmas when they happen to exist next door. Whether it has been the military takeover of Myanmar in 1962, or the dominance of an ideologically dissimilar government in Bangladesh through the 1980s, or having a fundamentalist Taliban in charge of Afghanistan in the 1990s, India has frequently found itself having to choose between its idealist mottos and realist interests. The consensus view of such historical struggles suggests a tactic of total disengagement is not necessarily effective for New Delhi, since it allows regional rivals to fill the strategic vacuum. For India, this lesson was painfully underscored in Kabul, where diplomatic absence ceded vital ground to regional competitors from the 1990s up until the departure of the US in 2021. In the past, India’s moral compunctions frequently dominated its rhetorical output, especially in a world seen as being governed by rules and ideals. Yet outside of its total isolation of the Taliban in the 1990s, India’s actual practice has long leaned toward pragmatism, comfortably engaging with the Myanmar junta or increasingly autocratic regimes in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka when national security dictated it. In a similar spirit, the current technical engagement with Afghanistan signals a shift from moral insularity to strategic presence. The most visible manifestation of this approach has been India’s decision to prioritise counter-terrorism and regional influence, taking a more nuanced approach that balances Indian national interests with sustainable benefits for the people of Afghanistan. This is not an endorsement of the Taliban’s internal policies, but a pragmatic recognition that a diplomatic vacuum only cedes ground to regional rivals like Pakistan and China. By maintaining a technical footprint, New Delhi, hence, seeks to ensure that it remains a stakeholder in the Afghan narrative, choosing a seat at the table instead of being a principled but passive observer in the wings. What is genuinely new here is not the transactional impulse itself, but its open endorsement by Indian thinkers and policymakers as a legitimate, open tool for securing national interests over ideological norms. A similar recalibration can be seen unfolding in Dhaka. For over a decade, India’s Bangladesh policy was tethered almost exclusively to the Awami League, creating a binary outreach that was severely tested in a momentous people-led political upheaval in 2024. This single-party tether was not exclusively moral – as India’s support for Hasina, despite her tight-fisted control over Bangladesh, showed – but a hyper-securitised, interest-based association. The overthrow of the long-allied Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League government has forced a rethink of this “Awami-versus-the-rest” strategy. By untethering its approach from the Awami League, India is making efforts to protect its hard-earned connectivity and security goals from the volatility of internal political shifts, acknowledging that neighborhood first must mean engaging with the neighborhood as it is, not as India wishes it to be. This nuanced approach is not a new intervention but a refinement of India’s long-standing practice of what may be described as an engagement-at-a-distance template, one most consistently applied vis-à-vis Myanmar. Underscoring a specific strategic posture where a state maintains functional, high-level diplomatic and security ties with a regime without offering it moral or ideological endorsement, this template has allowed India to maintain a robust, if uneasy, relationship with the Myanmar junta, driven by the imperatives of a neighborhood-first policy and the need to secure its restive northeast borders. Whether through the strategic bind of being tolerant of the successive military-scripted polls or ignoring Western sanctions to maintain a diplomatic tightrope, New Delhi has long demonstrated that strategic necessity can coexist with moral distance. This Myanmar model of the past (and the present) may well be serving as the silent blueprint for India’s current maneuvers in Kabul and Dhaka. ‘It’s complicated’ The core novelty of this moment is not that India has suddenly discovered realism, but that the global spread of this practice has accelerated international acceptance. Values-based realism represents the systematisation of an assertive, layered doctrine. The emphasis on such sectioning and parsing neither signals fragmentation in the Indian foreign policy nor does it come with a complete abandoning of overarching moral norms and ideals. Instead, it indicates a sophisticated conduct that transcends values-versus-interests dualisms to interact with other geopolitical actors in a multipolar, plural world where cooperation is increasingly becoming transactional and timed, without committing to exclusivity. This logic extends well beyond South Asia: India’s simultaneous engagement with Washington and Moscow – which has long been criticised as opportunistic fence-sitting – operates on this exact template. As the wider world adopts values-based realism, New Delhi’s refusal to choose between vital defense and energy ties and Western strategic partnerships now has an acceptable name, precisely because such issue-based balancing is becoming the global norm. The international order itself has become a collection of structural “it’s complicated” dynamics. As the global rules-based order fragments and ideologies are no longer the primary glue of alliances, India enjoys a distinct experiential advantage. Having spent decades managing non-normative neighbors, New Delhi’s legacy experience with situationships is finally being acknowledged as a standard playbook for a multipolar world. Yet, following a transaction-centric approach can have its own strategic costs. While issue-centric engagement shields India from regional vacuums and preserves tactical flexibility, operating without an overarching umbrella of normative guardrails can affect accountability and transparency in nation-to-nation relations in the long run. Also, as situationships do not require institutional permanence, they can end up demanding constant diplomatic upkeep, which can pressure India to expend significant energy continuously renegotiating bilateral terms on an issue-by-issue basis to prevent ties from slipping. That said, following the template of values-based realism remains an essential bargain in today’s time. The diplomatic friction of managing fluid ties is far less damaging than the structural cost of absence, which historically ceded vital regional ground to India’s rivals. In a fragmented order where multilateral guarantees are increasingly unreliable, this approach ensures India retains the strategic agility to secure its core security and connectivity priorities on its own terms. https://scroll.in/article/1096076/the-world-order-is-complicated-can-indian-foreign-policy-navigate-situationships Back Chayanika Saxena is an independent researcher, working on the intersection of geopolitics and risk management. Her email ID is chayanika.saxena11@gmail.com |
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