[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies.]

India’s search for international recognition

In the literature on international power hierarchies, some scholars designate India as a rising power that has yet to acquire the status of an agenda-setter – a role typically associated with great powers (Cohen, Citation2001; Malone, Citation2011; Nayar & Paul, Citation2003). In international climate change negotiations, the critical need for meaningful action by India to address climate change, owing to the size of its economy and current level of greenhouse gas emissions, meant India acquired veto-player status (Narlikar, Citation2013, p. 561) in the last decade. This was a clear sign of a rising power. Over the past 10 years, India has advanced an alternative normative climate agenda through various policy initiatives and active participation in climate negotiations, as the growing relative weight solely in material terms would not fulfil India’s objective of great power status (Basrur & de Estrada, Citation2017). As Manjari Chatterjee Miller has highlighted, it was the ideational aspect of a rising power that emerged from material accomplishments and elitists’ aspiration to play an enhanced role in international affairs (Miller, Citation2016).

Historically, since independence, India has always aspired to great power status in international relations. The first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, attempted to construct a discursive agenda for India’s foreign policy that revolved around ideals of decolonisation, disarmament and power politics neutrality (Cohen, Citation2004; Rana, Citation1976), to secure a place in the league of normative powers. He carved out a distinct place for India in the international community by forcefully advocating for human rights, decolonisation, anti-racism, non-alignment to power blocs, and internationalism (Chacko, Citation2012). However, during the late 1960s−1980s, the Indian Government focused on the pressing domestic political and economic issues and security concerns and could not contribute much to designing a global normative political agenda. Following the failure to achieve the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in the 1970s (a claim based on the principles of distributive justice (Narlikar, Citation2003) and afflicted by serious domestic challenges, India became a passive recipient of international norms set by the Western world in trade, security and other international affairs. For the most part, this lasted for the last quarter of the 20th century. Subrata Mitra nicely captured the indecisiveness of India’s foreign policy concerning regional security arrangements and India’s self-perception as a status quo power (Mitra, Citation2003). The Congress-led UPA government made some attempts to develop India as a normative power while designating India as a synthesising power that could guide the Global South to the virtues of democracy, inclusive development and human rights (Baru, Citation2014; Tharoor, Citation2012). However, these efforts were not coherent and lacked a concrete programme of action. Therefore, India could not contribute much to the development of meaningful international norms on the critical issues of international politics.

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In the post-2014 period, Prime Minister Modi expressed his resolve to develop India as a Vishwaguru – a power that has the capacity and volition to craft acceptable behavioural norms for the entire world (de Estrada, Citation2023). Modi found climate change a more convenient international issue to advance India’s role in constructing an alternative normative agenda in international politics for two reasons. First, it was easier for him to invoke Indian ideational assets such as Indic cultural and religious norms to suggest guiding principles for climate action to the world. Second, it suited India’s long-term sustainable development goals as business-as-usual practices were no longer attractive due to the adverse effect of climate change on India (Krishnan et al., Citation2020; Portner et al., Citation2022).

During the early days of his political life, Modi was greatly influenced by Indian culture and history as articulated by Hindu nationalist thinkers such as V.D. Savarkar and M.S. Golwalker. Nevertheless, many of these thinkers’ key ideas on foreign policy did not differ from those outlined by Nehru. India’s intellectual resources, thus, were limited to constructing an alternative normative agenda of foreign policy in the post-Nehruvian period (Metha, Citation2009). Deendayal Upadhyaya, however, has emphasised that ‘Bharatiya Culture’ could provide an alternative to power politics as it taught ‘unity in diversity’. In contrast to the idealism of these Hindu nationalist thinkers, most Hindu nationalist leaders belonging to the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) subscribe to a realist stance on foreign policy issues. The BJP Government’s decision to conduct nuclear tests in 1997 was testament to this. Some analysts, however, have argued that India’s ‘acquisition of hard power is not the same as a proclivity towards the use of force’ (Sullivan, Citation2014, p. 654); instead, it is a matter of self-defence against Pakistan and now China. India has tried to secure its own space and identity, which is distinct from the other powers because ‘major powers may not want to emulate the values of established states but instead may want to maintain distinctive identities’ (Larson & Shevchenko, Citation2010, p. 94). Therefore, the deviation from the self-acquired moral positioning on international issues ‘may be in tactics, rather than values’ (Sullivan, Citation2014, p. 654). Modi, as a member of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing Hindu national paramilitary organisation, subscribed to the same value system. However, from the moment he emerged on the national horizon as an important political figure, Modi made a conscious effort to soften his stance on issues of national and international importance by cultivating values that appealed to the authority of Swami Vivekananda, who discarded narrow nationalism in favour of humanism and universalism (Hall, Citation2017, pp. 127–31; Modi, Citation2011).

Modi’s normative agenda did not purely emerge from an idealistic worldview; instead, it was deeply rooted in realism and a realistic understanding of his domestic constituency and international politics. As Miller and de Estrada have pointed out, ‘search of the Indian print media reveals that the term “pragmatism” is more closely linked with Modi than with his predecessors’ (Miller & de Estrada, Citation2017, p. 32). But they equally have argued that this reading of pragmatism is ‘analytically weak’ and Indian foreign policy under Modi, rather than ‘driven entirely by considerations of power and interest … continues to draw on a domestic set of ideas’ (Miller & de Estrada, Citation2017, p. 28). Modi has not advanced an alternative to the existing international order and remains committed to qualified support of Western norms on democracy, globalisation, international security, and even trade (Adler-Nissen & Zarakol, Citation2021). However, Modi intended to construct an alternative normative agenda for global climate governance. In climate governance, it was convenient for Modi to appeal to the world by invoking ideational assets from the Indic cultural and spiritual traditions because of his training as an RSS member.

Rajnish Saryal is with Panjab University (RC Ludhiana), Chandigarh, India.