Modi and the Reinvention of Indian Foreign Policy

Description

Narendra Modi's energetic personal diplomacy and promise to make India a 'leading power', made soon after his landslide election victory in May 2014, surprised many analysts. Most had predicted that his government would concentrate on domestic issues, on the growth and development demanded by Indian voters, and that he lacked necessary experience in international relations. Instead, Modi's time in office saw a concerted attempt to reinvent Indian foreign policy by replacing inherited understandings of its place in the world with one drawn largely from Hindu nationalist ideology. This book explores the drivers of this reinvention, arguing it arose from a combination of elite conviction and electoral calculation, and the impact it had on India's international relations under Modi.

Ian Hall is Professor in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University, Australia.

"This is essential reading. Ian Hall brilliantly links the domestic imperatives driving current Indian foreign policy to the challenges India faces in a rapidly changing world." Katharine Adeney, University of Nottingham "Hall tells the story of an ambitious leader's efforts to reinvent himself as much as his country's foreign policy and demonstrates that this project of reinvention has clear constraints and costs for India both at home and abroad." Kate Sullivan de Estrada, University of Oxford. "This insightful book, in charting Modi's endeavour to transform Indian foreign policy and politics in his own image, underlines the perennial dialectic between ideational and structural forces in international politics." Rajesh Basrur, University of Oxford and Nanyang Technological University