While Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin held high-stakes strategic deliberations in Beijing, and Pakistan actively negotiated a peace deal within the Gulf region, Prime Minister Narendra Modi engaged in giving toffees to his Italian counterpart and making frivolous social media reels while running away from questions from foreign journalists. This stark contrast illustrates a deep structural gap between New Delhi's narrative of global leadership and its actual diplomatic output. Instead of participating in core geopolitical realignment, the Modi regime has substituted hard strategy with superficial content creation, heralding an unmistakable retreat from effective international engagement to a public relations exercise for its core supporters that yields no tangible strategic returns.
An example of the structural contraction of India's global footprint is the indefinite deferment of the India-Africa Forum Summit. While India possessed the capacity to organise this event virtually to maintain institutional continuity with African nations, it chose to let the engagement lapse entirely. This deferment occurred at a moment when other global powers are actively intensifying their diplomatic outreach to the continent. Similarly, the recent BRICS meetings exposed New Delhi's diminishing capacity to influence multilateral outcomes. BRICS members could not issue a joint statement, a failure that underscores India's inability to steer consensus among various countries.
Despite yesterday’s meeting of its foreign ministers, the Quad, once considered the lynchpin of India's Indo-Pacific strategy, has lost strategic priority and significance. In his second term, Trump has not uttered the word, Quad, even once. The Modi government is still hanging on to the idea of Quad but after Trump’s Beijing visit, it is clear that Washington no longer views New Delhi as an indispensable regional partner. The Trump administration also either ignores, bypasses or hurts India’s interests while dealing with other countries in South Asia.
West Asia, where Pakistan has emerged as an indispensable actor, further demonstrates India’s lack of strategic acuity. Modi undertook high-profile visits to Israel and the United Arab Emirates oblivious to a period of intense regional activity marked by Iran’s geopolitical ascendance. These visits did not produce any tangible diplomatic leverage and have led to India going missing from regional conversations. New Delhi will be forced to play by the rules made by Pakistan, China and others.
This is part of larger problem. The articulations by the external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar and Modi’s decisions since 2014 have led the international community to increasingly view India as an opportunistic actor focused exclusively on short-term benefits. The absence of a stable, principled position on critical international issues has wrecked New Delhi's credibility. The most visible evidence is in the Modi government's approach towards terrorism in Afghanistan. For two decades, Modi targeted Pakistan for maintaining a dual policy of distinguishing between the ‘good Taliban’ and the ‘bad Taliban’. But his government too now treats the ruling regime as the ‘good Taliban’. The same incongruity is visible in the case of territorial integrity of Ukraine under Russian attack, or the sovereignty of national leadership when the United States of America kidnapped the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, in a decapitation strike. If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything — the dictum applies perfectly to the Modi regime, as it has fallen in global standing.
The erosion of India's international status is directly linked to its domestic economic performance. When Modi became prime minister, India was universally seen as a geoeconomic peer to China. New Delhi no longer commands comparisons with Beijing and has instead chosen to pitch its economic and strategic performance against Pakistan and Bangladesh. Even there, the numbers are not flattering. In the year after the military clash with Pakistan, the Indian rupee has lost about 12% of its value against the Pakistani rupee and around 10% against the Bangladeshi taka. Despite witnessing a popular uprising and an interim administration, Bangladesh has surpassed India this year in terms of per capita income.
Modi and his ministers frequently claimed that the country was on a certain path to becoming the third-largest economy in the world. Data from the International Monetary Fund show an opposite trajectory as India has fallen to being the sixth-largest economy. The claims of being the fastest-growing large economy in the world are equally dubious. When calculated in dollar terms, the GDP growth rate has entered negative territory. It is no surprise that the financial analyst, Ruchir Sharma, noted that international investors have ceased discussing India as a destination for capital deployment. Even the staunch Modi-supporting economist, Surjit Bhalla, has categorised the country as a “Fragile Two” economy alongside Turkey, much worse than the "Fragile Five" tag during the taper tantrum crisis of 2013. S.C. Garg, who served as the finance secretary till 2019, has bluntly stated that after 12 years, Modi has made India the most vulnerable economy in the world.
The external and macroeconomic crises are mirrored by a broader collapse of institutional governance under Modi. The aviation sector suffers from chronic disruptions in both airport infrastructure and commercial airline operations. The Modi government has failed to resolve the crisis in Manipur, demonstrating a lack of political will and poor leadership. There have been paper leaks with the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test and systemic integrity failures with the Central Board of Secondary Education examinations. The world’s top 50 hottest cities are in India, while hazardous pollution levels continue across the country. In an area as critical as national security, military modernisation projects have stalled and higher defence reforms remain jammed due to political laxity.
The infusion of Hindutva in governance has aggravated the situation. Soft-power assets like democratic liberalism, religious freedom and institutional reliability have collapsed under a supremacist ideology. As the Modi government recently learnt in Norway, diplomacy is easier when domestic policy coheres with professed values. That gap is now unbridgeable.
More worryingly, the Indian elite either deny these plummeting trends or downplay them as temporary setbacks that will correct soon automatically. Reversing the slide demands honesty about these failures. Today’s unfortunate reality is that India is not merely absent from the high table making major international decisions, it has become irrelevant to them. And if you are not at the table, you are on the menu. There cannot be a bigger disaster for Indians as Modi celebrates 12 years as prime minister.
Sushant Singh is lecturer at Yale University