Since the early 2000s, it has become commonplace to consider India an ‘emerging’ or ‘rising’ power, or actually one of the most important countries in an emerging multipolar world (see, among many others, Cohen, 2002; Pant, 2008; Narlikar, 2010; Kahler, 2013; Pardesi, 2015; Basrur and Sullivan de Estrada, 2017; Plagemann et al, 2020). With its stunning economic growth, India gained increasing international visibility and attention. This was paired with an active foreign policy on the part of New Delhi, with India improving its relations with the USA, expanding its engagement in South–South cooperation, and becoming active in a number of minilateral and multilateral forums such as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa), but also in the G20.

At the same time, with its population of almost 1.4 billion inhabitants (in 2021; see The World Bank, 2022), India is now an indispensable actor for solving all kinds of global problems, from climate change mitigation to global health or disarmament. In global affairs, successive Indian governments have long pursued a surprisingly consistent and coherent foreign policy aimed at increasing India's international status – much in line with the goal outlined by India's founding father Jawaharlal Nehru on the night of the country's independence: that India ‘attain her rightful place in the world’ (Schaffer and Schaffer, 2016: 1; original emphasis). The preferred means for such status-seeking policy had always been that of pursuing an ‘independent’ or ‘autonomous’ foreign policy. During the Cold War, this policy manifested itself in the guise of non-alignment, while in the following decades it was variously labelled by decision makers or observers as ‘strategic autonomy’, ‘non-alignment 2.0’ (Khilnani et al, 2012), ‘multialignment’ (Hall, 2016a) or ‘all-alignment’ (Haidar, 2022a). Regardless of the label used, what the foreign policies of successive Indian governments had in common over the decades was the effort to pursue an independent approach, which did not bind India to one specific alliance (partner) but instead gave it greater flexibility in international politics. Despite the broad ideological differences of successive Indian governments (Destradi and Plagemann, 2023), this approach can be considered a guiding thread in India's foreign policy, which was pursued very consistently.