2025: A challenging year for Indian foreign policy

Dr Sudhir Kumar Das

(dasudhirk@gmail.com)

As the Victorian poet Lord Tennyson has said, “The old order changeth, yielding place to new,” and the year 2025 seems like the inflection point of an emerging new world order. The year gone by has, undoubtedly, been a challenging year for the planners of Indian foreign policy. In America Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president, and soon after coming to power, he turned out to be an unpredictable maverick leader. The unexpected hostility of egocentric US President Trump on one hand and the rise of China on the other, compounded by an unstable neighbourhood, made the foreign policy challenges for India more complicated. The mercantilist trade policies of a megalomaniac Trump shook the foundation of globalisation, disrupting international trade and thereby the economies of many countries. His look-inward MAGA policy soon turned out to be an anti-immigration and isolationist one to the exclusion of all other countries— allies as well as adversaries equally. His wrath has been specifically targeted at India and Brazil, the countries that faced an exorbitant punitive tariff of 50% along with the European Union and Canada. A vengeful Trump was not satisfied with the imposition of tariffs alone; he, on a daily basis, wrote humiliating posts in Truth Social belittling these countries. In the recently published National Security Strategy of the US, India has been relegated to the position of a less important partner in the Indo-Pacific, from the exalted position of an important ally to balance China in Asia earlier. 

Trump’s Liberation Day Tariffs in April 2025, designed to browbeat nations to submit to the whims of the US, bracketed India along with Brazil, subjected to 50% tariffs on exports to the US. The punitive US tariffs are claimed, on the surface, to be for buying discounted Russian oil but, in reality, convey the message of American displeasure at India’s strategic autonomy in foreign policy. The staggering US hypocrisy in levying a 50% tariff on India is exposed when America desisted from imposing similar punitive tariffs either on China, the biggest purchaser of Russian energy, or the EU for continuing to buy Russian energy. President Trump claimed credit for bringing about a ceasefire to the conflict between India and Pakistan in May. Pakistan grabbed the opportunity by accepting Trump’s claim and thanked him by nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Egomaniac Trump got perfectly humoured and showered his affection on the self-appointed Field Marshal Asim Munir, the chief architect of the Pahalgam terror attack, by hosting him in the White House. Trump repeatedly called Asim Munir his favourite field marshal, and between June and September, Munir made three visits to the US. During one of his visits, he even threatened India with nuclear retaliation from US soil, and no one from the US administration reprimanded him for this act of bravado. That shows the level of bonhomie Pakistan has cultivated with the US after the May conflict with India. Trump’s bromance with Field Marshal, now Chief of Defence Staff after the 27th Amendment to the country’s constitution, Asim Munir, proved for India that the US is an untrustworthy and transactional ally. He signed a treaty with Pakistan to explore non-existent oil and rare earths from the restive province of Baluchistan. He and the members of his administration, led by the Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent criticized India using the harshest of terms for buying Russian oil, accusing India of financing the Ukraine war, overlooking their own and other European countries’ existing trade with Russia. The US only issued hollow threats to China with high tariffs but kept on extending the deadline, knowing well the leverage China enjoys with regard to the export of critical minerals to the US. As if the imposition of 50% tariffs was not enough, Trump revoked the sanction waiver granted to India for Iran’s Chabahar Port in September. It ended the exemption India was enjoying in using the Chabahar Port to trade with Afghanistan and Central Asia, bypassing Pakistan. The US administration termed it as pressure tactics on Iran but indirectly meant to coerce India to toe the US line in foreign policy. Although a six-month exemption to the sanction has been secured by India, it is of little consequence to serve any long-term solution to India’s problem of regional connectivity. All this US pressure is meant to force India to act as a subservient ally to it, but India has so far defied this coercion.

India launched Operation Sindoor in May in retaliation to the gruesome Pahalgam terror attack on 22nd April, an epoch-making event of the year. This was the first conflict with Pakistan which was initiated by India to avenge the Pakistani involvement in the Pahalgam terror attack. During the conflict China, Türkiye, and Azerbaijan openly supported Pakistan politically and militarily. India sent delegations led by the leaders of the opposition to justify its anti-terror operation against Pakistan. The US remained non-committal to condemn Pakistan outright for cross-border terrorism. India’s rejection of Trump’s mediation claim in the May conflict infuriated him. Pakistan used this small diplomatic friction between India and the US and, by humouring Trump’s ego, created a role for itself. Trump’s jilted-lover-like behaviour towards India eroded the element of trust in Indo-US relations. What irked India is the re-hyphenation of India, the 5th largest economy, with Pakistan, a terror-sponsoring rogue state, by the US administration. A clandestine crypto deal by Trump’s family members with the Pakistani government is said to be the cause of this metamorphosis in the US attitude towards Pakistan.

Two nations in India’s neighbourhood, Bangladesh and Nepal, went through regime changes after popular uprisings against their respective ruling dispensations. In the July-August student movement, what started as an innocuous quota reform movement soon turned violent and forced Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to flee to India. An interim government led by Nobel laureate Professor Mohammad Yunus took charge. Political parties in Bangladesh with vested interests spread calumnies against India and stoked intense anti-India sentiment. Growing Islamist influence in the polity and marginalisation of the minorities point to Bangladesh soon turning into an Islamic country. The interim government is increasingly embracing Pakistan, creating a security threat to India’s eastern borders. India has so far shown utmost restraint in the face of provocation as a mature democracy and has adopted a wait-and-watch policy till the February 2026 elections, which will bring in a new government.

In September 2025 the Gen Z Uprising swept Nepal. The youth there rose against the government corruption, censorship of social media, unemployment, and the elitist politicians. The Prime Minister, K. P. Sharma Oli, fled to take shelter in an army base, and a new interim government came to power headed by former Supreme Court Chief Justice Sushila Karki as the interim Prime Minister with the mandate to conduct general elections by March 2026. Here, too, India is watching the developments closely till the new government comes to power.

After being snubbed by the US, Prime Minister Modi travelled to Tianjin, China, to attend the SCO Summit in August-September. To counter President Trump’s bonhomie with the Pakistani military-diplomatic dispensation, Modi was seen with Russian President Putin and Xi Jinping in a very casual mood. The optics conveyed the message to President Trump that if push comes to shove, India would consider other alternatives. Many geopolitical analysts termed the tripartite meeting as the emergence of a new world order with Russia, India, and China forming one pole of the world to counter America and Europe’s hegemony. A new world order is in the making, and that will be substantially impacted by the geopolitical events of 2025. India is in a precarious position; it cannot altogether embrace the new power centres emerging, nor can it reject wholly the old world friends. English poet Mathew Arnold, in the poem “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, sums up India’s foreign policy dilemma. “Wandering between two worlds, one dead/The other powerless to be born, /With nowhere yet to rest my head/Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.