Twelve years, one voice: The diplomatic compounding of Modi’s India

On 10 June 2026, Narendra Modi surpassed Jawaharlal Nehru’s tenure to become India’s longest-serving elected prime minister. The milestone is politically significant, but its larger importance lies in the fact that it offers a rare opportunity to assess what 12 years of strategic continuity can achieve in foreign policy.

Most governments operate within short electoral cycles, pursuing immediate gains. But foreign policy is rarely shaped by dramatic breakthroughs but by the cumulative effects of consistency. PM Modi’s tenure demonstrates precisely that.

The defining feature of India’s external engagement since 2014 has been multi-alignment. Critics would often dismiss it as indecision masquerading as strategy. Events have largely proved otherwise. India maintained its defence and energy relationship with Russia even after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, while simultaneously deepening technology-transfer and defence co-production arrangements with the United States.

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It stood alone among major democracies in publicly challenging China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2014, endured four years of Himalayan military brinkmanship following the Galwan Valley clashes of 2020, and then, with the unhurried patience of a state that understood the board better, negotiated a disengagement along the Line of Actual Control in late 2024.

By the time PM Modi met Xi Jinping in Kazan that October, the logic had become impossible to argue with. Even at the height of military tension, bilateral trade between the two countries surged and reached $151.1 billion in FY2025-26, with China overtaking the United States as India’s largest trading partner. Simultaneous rivalry and pragmatic economic interdependence is the texture of great-power management, and calibrating it requires institutional capital that only accumulates over time.

The India-Pakistan military crisis of May 2025 tested the same doctrine under far more acute pressure. India held, and the multi-alignment framework is what gave New Delhi the strategic room to act without permanent rupture with any major power.

From within India’s foreign policy establishment, the framing has been direct: “what we are pursuing is a win-win foreign policy,” partnerships that cut across ideological and regional lines. What they mean, stripped of the diplomatic modesty, is that India will work with you on your terms, provided, and this is important, that those terms do not require India to abandon its own.

The Economy as Argument

There is a tendency in foreign policy circles to treat economic data as noise; everyone appreciates it, lauds it, but treats it as the dull numerics that precede the interesting part about geopolitics and grand strategy. This is a mistake of breathtaking proportions. Economic weight is not the backdrop to foreign policy. It is, in the 21st century, what drives foreign policy.

When Modi assumed power in 2014, India’s economy was the tenth-largest in the world. It now stands on the threshold of the global top four, a $4.15 trillion enterprise growing faster than any other major economy. India’s own year-end review claims the fourth position outright, having overtaken Japan; the IMF’s April 2026 assessment places it sixth. The precise rank is a matter of methodology; the direction of travel is not. Between April 2014 and March 2024, India attracted $667 billion in foreign direct investment, roughly two-thirds of all FDI it had received in the previous 24 years.

As of May 2026, PM Modi has made 100 international trips to 80 countries, nearly double that of his predecessor. But each visit at its core is an economic proposition: here is what India offers, here is what India needs, and here is why, in the economy you are currently navigating, those two facts should matter considerably to you.

There is, however, one figure in this otherwise confident picture that deserves to be read without embellishment. China’s emergence as India’s largest bilateral trading partner in FY2025-26, with total trade reaching $151.1 billion, arrived alongside a record deficit of $112.6 billion, with India exporting $19.47 billion while importing $131.63 billion in return.

This is frequently cited as evidence of a successful post-Galwan diplomatic reset. It is that. It is also a structural dependency, and the honest audit of the Modi era must reckon with the distinct possibility that New Delhi’s most celebrated bilateral rapprochement has, in the same stroke, deepened the very vulnerability it was designed to manage.

The Global South: The Most Patient Play on the Board

If you want to understand what 12 years of consistent foreign policy actually produces, look at what India has built with the Global South, and look carefully, because the most consequential parts are precisely the ones that took the longest.

The most visible single achievement was securing the African Union’s full G20 membership during India’s 2023 presidency. It was an issue that had been unresolved for many years and was only brought to fruition by India’s commitment to the interests of the Global South and its capacity to build the requisite consensus.

The AU represents all 54 African nations. Guiding that declaration required years of accumulated relationships and the convening authority to secure agreement across a summit table where the United States and Russia, then at their most irreconcilable over Ukraine, had found precious little else to agree on. It was not a document that could have been engineered in year one of any government.

India had already earned credibility. The Vaccine Maitri initiative delivered over 300 million doses to more than 100 countries, while the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation programme has provided training and capacity-building to over 160 countries. The International Solar Alliance, which now includes 125 member and signatory countries, even as the United States withdrew under the current Trump administration, has made India the convener of the world’s most consequential clean-energy coalition for developing nations.

Three Voices of the Global South Summits have created a standing institutional channel for amplifying developing-country priorities in forums where those priorities had previously been decorative at best. Bilateral trade between India and Africa reached $93.69 billion in FY2025-26, a 14.39 per cent increase over the previous year, a figure that was barely a fraction of what it was when Modi assumed office. None of this existed in 2014. All of it required sustained leadership to construct.

The Gulf: On the Returns of Personal Investment

There is no better illustration of diplomatic compounding than what India has constructed with the Gulf over the last 12 years. When PM Modi visited the UAE in 2015, it was the first visit by an Indian prime minister in more than three decades. Since then, he has visited the UAE seven times, while President Mohamed bin Zayed

Al Nahyan has made five visits to India, with Modi making a brief eighth visit in May 2026. In that May visit, conducted against the backdrop of a Strait of Hormuz crisis with acute energy-security implications for New Delhi, India and the UAE signed a Strategic Defence Partnership, energy memoranda covering petroleum reserves and LPG supplies, and a Ship Repair Cluster agreement, alongside a commitment of $5 billion in UAE investment into Indian markets.

Bilateral trade has now crossed $101 billion for a second consecutive year, with both sides targeting $200 billion by 2032. The personal rapport between the two leaders has been the foundation of this infrastructure. Agreements of that depth, under pressure, are not improvised. They are drawn from a reservoir of trust built over a decade.

The UAE today is not merely an energy supplier for India; it has emerged as a critical economic and geopolitical partner, with trade, investment, fintech cooperation and diaspora welfare forming the central pillars of the relationship. Saudi Arabia, Oman and Qatar have undergone comparable repositioning. A region once peripheral to Indian strategic thinking is now a critical axis, built by a leader willing to invest personal diplomatic capital in relationships whose electoral returns were, at best, oblique.

The Only Achievement That Outlasts Its Author

There is one final observation, and it is the one that will matter most once the commemorations subside.

According to research published in early 2026 by the National Bureau of Asian Research, a conclusion was reached that is more significant than any individual diplomatic achievement: next-generation Indian political leaders across party lines remain broadly aligned on the importance of strategic autonomy, multi-alignment, and India’s claim to great-power status. The current deterioration in India-US relations has, if anything, reinforced India’s commitment to multi-alignment, which has long been a cornerstone of its foreign policy.

A foreign policy position held for 12 years, tested against China’s aggression, Russia’s invasion, Washington’s tariffs and Islamabad’s hostilities, does not end when its author departs. It becomes doctrine. It becomes an institutional reflex. It becomes, in the most durable sense, the country’s settled position.

Foreign policy does not ask. It compels. Leaders must invest in relationships whose returns arrive slowly, in compounding increments invisible to those who only follow the news cycle. Most leaders lack both the time and the temperament for it. What the 10 June milestone asks us to recognise is that PM Modi has had 12 years of both, and that the foreign policy institution surrounding India today, the alliances maintained, the coalitions assembled, the economic gravity accumulated, the autonomy preserved, was built not by a single stroke of genius but by the far rarer discipline of consistency.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)