The seven parliamentary delegations comprising fifty-odd MPs and senior officials have returned to India after visiting thirty-odd countries to mobilise international opinion in the wake of Operation Sindoor. Three of these seven delegations were headed by parliamentarians from non-NDA parties, parties that are dubbed anti-national by the Modi government almost day in and day out. The BJP does not have any Muslim MP and spews hate-filled venom against Muslim MPs on the floor of India's parliament, but the delegations also included some Muslim members from different parties. Surely there has been no change of heart in the Modi regime's approach to opposition MPs or the decorum of parliamentary democracy. It was only India’s acute isolation in the international arena which forced the regime to field multiparty parliamentary delegations in an effort to protect the Prime Minister and his senior cabinet colleagues from facing international embarrassment.

The Parliamentary delegations were not met with any enthusiasm by world leaders. The delegations mostly did not even have any exchange with foreign ministers or important current representatives of the host countries. Their meetings remained by and large confined to former leaders, Indian diaspora members and some think-tank representatives. Media interactions too had little coverage in prominent newspapers or media networks. In other words, the visits hardly had any impact on international perceptions regarding the post-Pahalgam developments. Notably, the delegations did not visit any country in South Asia. An important country like Canada, currently president of G7 and host of the 2025 G7 summit, was also conspicuously missing in the list of countries visited, with the Modi government perhaps fearing that questions would be raised about India’s suspected role in the 2023 murder of Harjit Singh Nijjar.

Contrary to the Modi government's campaign for putting Pakistan back on the grey list of FATF - which would mean increased monitoring of Pakistan for any possible funding of terrorism by the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental organization founded by the G7 to combat money laundering - Pakistan has secured substantial foreign loans in the recent past without any terror-related monitoring. These include $1 billion from the IMF, $800 million package from the ADB and a $40 billion partnership framework with the World Bank. During this period, itself, Pakistan has been made the chair of the UN Security Council Taliban Sanctions Committee and vice-chair of the Counter Terrorism Committee. With Trump now repeatedly claiming to have brokered the ceasefire between India and Pakistan, and the world keeping the two nuclear-powered neighbours in the same bracket, the Modi government’s  foreign policy has clearly failed achieve its stated objective of isolating Pakistan.

Ever since Modi's ascent to power in Delhi in 2014, we have been told that India has now acquired a prominent profile in the international arena. Modi has been India's most widely travelled Prime Minister. The regime has been using terms like Vishwaguru (teacher of the world) or Vishwamitra (friend of the world) to describe India's role or stature in the world. This claim is however quite hollow. In reality, the government is trying to leverage India’s population as cheap labour and its territory and resources as ‘cheap nature’ for multinational corporate capital, to gain traction in the international arena, a strategy which can only make India a cog in the wheel of global supply chains. This partially explains Modi’s repeated genuflection to Donald Trump – from giving him a completely unwarranted role in brokering a “ceasefire” with Pakistan, to allowing Indian migrants to be handcuffed and deported back to India.

For the Modi government, foreign policy has been more about India's domestic political consumption and promotion of the Modi cult than any real engagement with international affairs. The big Modi events organised during his foreign trips have been attended mostly by hired crowds and diaspora members mobilised by the RSS or overseas BJP network, with very little involvement of opinion makers, students or common citizens of concerned countries. A key focus of Modi's foreign visits has been to secure contracts for his corporate friends especially the Adani group. Most of these contracts have been unpopular locally, and with the Adani group being exposed and even prosecuted for its shady corporate governance many of these contracts are now being scrapped. This has taken a heavy toll on the credibility of India's foreign policy.

The most perilous flaw of the Modi era foreign policy has been India's increasing dependence on and identification with the US-Israel axis which has made India increasingly isolated in Asia. India could have used her role in the BRICS as a countervailing force to enhance India's foreign policy autonomy, but now things have reached a stage where the US openly threatens India that it must sever its ties with BRICS. The US is now even forcing India to limit its trade with China and Russia, and rely increasingly on the US for its defense purchases. For the US and Israel, India is not just a lucrative market but is being fast reduced to the status of almost a vassal state to serve their strategic goals in Asia. Willing to integrate itself with the neo-imperial world order, India stands isolated from the vast majority of countries which have been systematically pushed to the margins of the deeply unequal global economic order.

The last-minute invite for India to attend the G7 summit in Canada as an observer should be seen as a reality check for India's actual status in the international arena. The government’s Hindu supremacist offensive and increasing attacks on dissent have resulted in India’s decline in many global comparative indices. The complete alienation of Sikh as well as Muslim diasporas from the Modi regime was likely another factor which compelled Canada to issue a statement justifying its last-minute invitation to India. Canada’s reference to India as the fifth largest economy and most populous nation occupying a central position in several supply chains makes it clear that Canada recognises only India's objective economic significance and not India's current diplomatic role in the international arena.

Like India's Constitution, Indian foreign policy was also shaped by India's protracted freedom movement. A country which won freedom after suffering from centuries of colonial plunder and subjugation naturally identified itself with national liberation struggles and anti-imperialist causes across the world. The support for Palestine against Zionist occupation or the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa constituted a natural moral compass of India's foreign policy. Non-alignment with global superpowers and friendship with other post-colonial countries were also strategically crucial to strengthening India’s national sovereignty and building genuine international economic cooperation. Today in the Modi era, India's foreign policy is being stripped of that moral and strategic core and threatens to seriously compromise India’s sovereignty. The fight for an independent foreign policy is intimately connected with the ongoing battle for the defence of the secular democratic character of India's republic and the inclusive anti-imperialist core of India's nationalism.