Vishwaguru vs Reality: Is India's Foreign Policy Losing Its Balance?

For much of the past decade, India's government has marketed a single word to describe the country's place in the world: Vishwaguru, or “teacher to the world.” It promised a nation that had graduated from post-colonial caution to global leadership, guided everywhere by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India's most travelled head of government. By 2026, that brand is being tested against a harder set of facts: cooking gas prices that have become a household strain, petrol at historic highs, a rupee that has slid to roughly 92.4 to the dollar, and crude oil above $100 a barrel. The gap between the marketing and the material conditions of ordinary Indians has become difficult to paper over, and it raises an uncomfortable question — whether foreign policy has been serving the national interest, or functioning as a costly extension of a domestic political project.

A Break From the Doctrine of Balance

India's diplomatic tradition, from Jawaharlal Nehru's founding role in the Non-Aligned Movement through to the governments of Indira Gandhi and Manmohan Singh, was built around a doctrine of balance rather than ideological alignment — engaging Iran and Israel, Russia and the United States, without becoming captive to any single bloc. That balance is what critics say has eroded. In February 2026, a day before a devastating US-Israel war on Iran began, Modi was in Jerusalem receiving Israel's newly instituted Knesset Medal, one of the country's highest parliamentary honours, and describing Israel as a “fatherland” to India's “motherland.” The framing arrived as human rights groups worldwide were describing Israel's conduct in Gaza in terms as severe as apartheid, after a war that killed thousands of civilians and flattened entire neighbourhoods — a marked departure from India's long-standing support for Palestinian self-determination and a two-state solution. For the ideological ecosystem around the Hindutva movement, the language was not incidental: Israel is frequently held up as a model of a religious homeland, a template that maps neatly onto the idea of a Hindu civilisational state.

The Price of Picking a Side

The costs of that alignment surfaced quickly. India's $120 million investment in Iran's Chabahar Port — its planned gateway to Central Asia bypassing Pakistan — was effectively stranded once the war began. New Delhi's response to the killing of Iran's supreme leader, a major Shia religious authority, in the war's opening days was notably muted, a striking silence given that India is home to nearly 20 million Shia Muslims and had, for decades, maintained careful diplomacy with Tehran precisely to protect those ties. The economic fallout followed just as fast: as the fighting disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel that carries close to a fifth of the world's oil, India's energy security was directly exposed, feeding straight into the fuel queues and currency slide that have become the year's defining domestic story.

Contradictions With Washington

The relationship with the United States tells a similar story of a strategic partnership that looks less like autonomy than accommodation. Even as the government promoted what it called the Modi-Trump “bromance,” Washington imposed 50 percent tariffs on Indian goods in late 2025 over India's continued purchase of Russian oil — only to quietly signal, months later, that India could keep buying it after all. The reversal suggested India was reacting to Washington's cues rather than setting independent terms. The humiliation was not confined to trade: more than 100 Indians were deported from the US in late 2025 in handcuffs and leg chains rather than seats, a scene the government stayed largely silent on, reportedly to avoid complicating the image of its central diplomatic relationship.

Exporting Cronyism Along With Ideology

Beyond ideology, critics argue that Indian foreign policy has increasingly doubled as a vehicle for corporate interests — most visibly those of the Adani Group, which secured major contracts in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in the shadow of prime ministerial visits. The Hindenburg Research report on the conglomerate became the catalyst for a regional pushback: by 2026, Bangladesh moved to scrap its Adani-linked Godda power deal over corruption allegations, and Sri Lanka came under intense domestic pressure to reevaluate its own Adani projects.

A Shrinking Neighbourhood

The erosion is perhaps clearest in India's immediate neighbourhood, long treated as the natural sphere of its influence. Relations with Pakistan remain frozen, with dialogue effectively non-existent. Nepal has repeatedly clashed with India over border disputes and tilted further toward China. Sri Lanka, despite Indian financial support during its economic collapse, has seen Chinese strategic influence keep growing. The Maldives has seen an openly anti-India political campaign gain traction. And even Bangladesh, historically India's closest regional partner, has developed friction over trade, water-sharing, and infrastructure. Across South Asia, the pattern is consistent: China's footprint expanding as India's contracts.

The stakes are just as high further afield, in the Gulf states, where nearly 9 million Indian workers live and send home tens of billions of dollars in remittances every year. That relationship has historically depended on the same doctrine of balance now under strain — and an increasingly ideological foreign policy risks straining the economic lifeline that millions of Indian households depend on.

Style Over Substance

Large diaspora gatherings in cities like Houston and London have often been cited as proof of India's rising global stature, but these were not spontaneous displays of affection — they were, by this account, carefully organised spectacles run through overseas RSS networks, designed primarily for a domestic audience rather than as genuine markers of international standing.

Taken together, the picture is of a foreign policy that has increasingly prioritised symbolism over strategy: medals over energy security, alignment over leverage, and optics over the material interests of citizens. As Indians queue for fuel and watch the rupee fall, the argument goes, the country isn't leading the world so much as being disciplined by it — a harsher teacher than the Vishwaguru brand ever accounted for.