How Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar is reshaping India's place in the world

We have a litany of  "Jaishankar-isms" - some home truths, others policy statements, some grand sweeps of geopolitics, others snarky, disarmingly delivered. Do you want to push back against western pressure on Russia? There are some choice remarks of our foreign minister you can rattle off, some which I heard quoted back at me at the recent Munich Security Conference. Can you conflate India’s diplomatic choices today with its civilisational culture? Certainly, when you consider that the most adroit diplomats of the ancient world may well have been Lord Krishna and Hanuman.

But beneath his sharp policy acumen lies a deeper commitment to reshaping India’s place in the world, blending ancient wisdom with modern diplomacy.

TRUSTED LIEUTENANT

Jaishankar, I have argued earlier, has been Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s most inspired pick. He reflects a blend of academic rigour, extensive field experience, and a forward-looking approach to India’s foreign policy challenges, making him a key figure in contemporary international diplomacy. Despite a long career in diplomacy, Jaishankar has built a reputation for avoiding the frills of the diplomatic job, diving straight into the issue at hand.

When Jaishankar took on the mantle of foreign minister, he could not have anticipated that a pandemic, a conflict with China and a Russia-Ukraine war would turn the world on its head. It fell on him to help steer India through probably the toughest period in its history-keeping India’s interests foremost, while negotiating a world that suddenly looked very different. One of Jaishankar’s oldest friends Ashley Tellis, a senior fellow and inaugural chair at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says, “He is both incredibly intelligent and perceptive-able to read situations astutely to find opportunities to advance India’s interests. And he has a great sense of humour that is simply disarming in even the trickiest of circumstances.”

Whether it was keeping supply chains open for India’s pharmaceutical industry and its vaccine production, or ensuring that Indian vaccines reached 66 countries in dire need-India’s foreign policy pirouetted into action. India sent hydroxychloroquine to far ends of the world, made certain the food corridor to the Gulf states remained active through the global lockdown. When Paraguay was told by China that it would get Chinese vaccines if they gave up their relationship with Taiwan, India took their call and despatched vaccines to a remote corner of the world.

NAVIGATING CHAOS

The India-China conflict of 2020 had a very different flavour. It fell to Jaishankar and his ministry to negotiate our way through the unprecedented conflict.

India lost 20 men in a most unusual clash in Galwan and had to craft a response that went beyond the military. As foreign secretary, Jaishankar had dealt with the Doklam crisis of 2017. As minister, Jaishankar was confronted with the fact that not only did China’s actions destroy three decades of careful diplomacy, but that as neighbours India needed to deal with the China challenge very differently. Patient diplomacy was the answer, and India became an early adopter of the “decoupling from China” argument, restricting investment and refusing China access to Indian data. On the other hand, he worked hard to normalise relations with a disengagement at the points of conflict while reopening channels of communication.

Jaishankar’s great gift has turned out to be his unique ability to bring convergence to almost irreconcilable notions. India and the US are charting a future together as technology partners, even as both sides differed on their approach to Russia and the Ukraine war. India has kept the Russia relationship alive and continued to buy Russian oil in the teeth of western criticism and pressure.

After the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, India has maintained a very nuanced stand - as Jaishankar explained, “there are different dimensions, different elements to this. Number one, we must be clear that what happened on October 7th was terrorism. No caveats, no justification, no explanation. It was terrorism. Number two, as Israel responds, it is important that Israel should have been very mindful of civilian casualties, that it has an obligation to observe international humanitarian law. Number three, the return of hostages is imperative. Number four, there is a need for a humanitarian corridor, a sustainable humanitarian corridor to provide relief. And eventually, there has to be a permanent fix, a long-term fix, otherwise we’re going to see a recurrence. India has long believed in a two-state solution; we have maintained that position for many decades. Today, many more countries in the world feel not just that a two-state solution is necessary, but it is more urgent”.

Indian diplomacy has traditionally excelled in walking diplomatic tightropes, but as the stakes for India have grown and the world has become more complex, this has required a different level of dexterity.

But as he said in Europe in 2024, "I don’t want you to even inadvertently give the impression that we are purely and unsentimentally transactional. We are not. We get along with people. We believe in things, we share things, we agree on some things. But there are times when you’re located in different places, have different levels of development, different experiences – all of that gets into it. So, life is complicated. Life is differentiated. And I think it’s very important today not to reduce the entire complexity of our world into very sweeping propositions. I think that era is today behind us.”

BUILDING ALLYSHIP

Since 2019, Jaishankar has concentrated on building relationships with several unrelated powers - Europe, the UK, Australia, Indonesia and the Gulf Arab states. Building resilient partnerships is seen as important as building resilient supply chains. That needed a kind of global vision and a sense of India’s manifest destiny. In many ways Jaishankar sees India’s rise as not merely inevitable, but also transformative. As India assumes a larger role on the world stage, it is expected to lead by example in areas such as sustainable development, peacekeeping, and ethical governance.

He believes India should now navigate difficult streams and seek opportunities among seeming chaos. The multipolar world, he has said, is upon us, and it provides India a unique opening to create a space for itself at the global high table.

Rather than seeking unilateral dominance, he emphasises that India’s growth contributes to a more balanced global power structure. By engaging constructively with nations across the spectrum, India aims to address global challenges-from climate change to security threats-through collective action.

WIELDING CULTURAL SOFT POWER

Jaishankar stresses that India’s rise is founded on democratic values, economic resilience, and cultural richness. He believes that this approach serves as a model for how emerging powers can develop without resorting to conflict. The two books Jaishankar wrote as foreign minister focus on explaining the modern world through the cultural lens of Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. It’s a key tenet of the Modi government and Jaishankar has been its most articulate spokesman. In many ways, Jaishankar explains Modi to the world. That’s no small feat.

Tarun Das, former director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry and someone who has worked with Jaishankar for decades, says, “The external affairs minister is strategic, clear and direct in his diplomacy for India. Today, he commands respect for being the finest foreign minister in the world earning global admiration for India’s engagement.”

Endowed with a distinct sense of humour and irony, Jaishankar has used it to be devastating, whether to tell off journalists on buying Russian oil ("Europe buys in an afternoon what we buy in a month") or push back against his political opposition in Parliament. In an era of growing political polarisation, Jaishankar can reach across the aisle. Among his ministerial colleagues the joke goes like this: "Jaishankar ji has no interest in anyone else’s portfolio. No one else wants his.” It’s a tribute to his domain expertise, but equally a tribute to the fact that Jaishankar may have transcended what others see as political ambition.

He said some time ago: "Being foreign secretary was the limit of my ambition, I never dreamt of becoming foreign minister. I’m not sure any PM, other than Mr Modi would have made me minister."

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