Globalisation poses two challenges for India’s foreign policy. The first is how it can be best conducted to help the country list itself with the outside world, with the world economy, and with major powers. It has created challenges as well as opportunities. A challenge of foreign policy is to take maximum advantage of these opportunities. This calls for efforts to find expanded access to foreign funds for investment and enhancing the competitiveness of the economy by importing frontier area technologies. Performance of diplomats should be judged by the extent to which they have facilitated the nation availing these opportunities. For the first time, India felt the need to face the challenges in the 15th conference of the Non-Aligned Movement held in July 2009. While specifying the causes and consequences of this crisis, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said at the NAM Summit, “The benefits and burdens of globalisation were so unfairly distributed, it would be even harder for the developing economies to cope with the crisis. And if the aftermath of the crisis is not carefully managed, and if the abundance of liquidity leads to a revival of speculative activities, we may well see a period of prolonged stagnation.” He further added that the continuing slowdown would force more and more people from those nations back into poverty, bringing down levels of nutrition, health and education. Globally, recession has strengthened protectionism in markets of the developed countries, drastically reducing exports of the developing nations and choking credit and capital flow to the third world. Evidently, the developing nations are the worst sufferers of this recession, and they immediately need greater resources. Loans and further steps need to be taken to ensure foreign investment for development of their infrastructure so that they may properly address social disaffection and enjoy fruits of development. Globalisation also casts a dark shadow on the entire social fabric. There are several new forms of terrorism and insurgent activities. Proper multilateral negotiations among likeminded nations, and stern action against terrorists are also an urgent task for India’s foreign policy. India is amongst the nations most severely affected by acts of terrorism including state terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism and Naxalism. To defeat the terrorists, the government has to proclaim that no individual or group can ever harm the nation’s security. All political parties should have a unanimous opinion about national security and integrity. India’s foreign policy initiatives in 2018 were kicked off with a grand reaching out to 10 ASEAN members There is also a NAM-related challenge before the foreign policy makers: how to accelerate NAM’s pace, make it more efficient and powerful to sort out problems of member states and to successfully face the critical situation of power politics at international level. India has proved its strength economic, political and strategic. Now it has to boost the moral of NAM and make it more pertinent as a political ideology in global politics. And India’s case is the best exemplar of this global shift. In the changed circumstances, New Delhi is reshaping its approach to major partnerships in the global order. Though sections of the Indian establishment still remain wedded to non-alignment, New Delhi is showing signs of pursuing strategic autonomy separately from non-alignment under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This separation has been overdue in India’s foreign policy. The country stands to benefit from leveraging partnerships rather than shunning them. Today, India is charting a new territory in its foreign policy, predicated on the belief that rather than proclaiming non-alignment as an end in itself, India needs deeper engagement with its friends and partners if it is to develop leverage in its dealings with its adversaries and competitors. Much like India, other countries are recognising the diminishing returns to being part of the non-alignment movement in an age when the binaries of east and west, north and south are losing salience. Modi’s foreign policy is mainly centred on creating a good neighbourhood policy, improving trade and commerce and para-diplomacy. During election rallies, he did not spell out any foreign policy initiatives except mentioning the Bangladeshi immigrants and giving asylum to any Hindus if they so desired. He, time and again, said that he was the first PM to have been born after independence. Apart from that, nothing much is known about his foreign policy. In order to have a good neighbourhood and to achieve his development agenda, Modi feels that peace and tranquillity should prevail in South Asia. Hence, he started visiting immediate neighbours, Buthan, Nepal and Bangladesh and the Southeast Asian nations. He had a successful tour of the neighbouring nations except Pakistan. Throughout his last tenure, he stressed trade and commerce, development and investment with all nations, except with some important global powers with whom India has strategic partnerships. He has positioned India in such a way that she is looked upon as one of the important powerful nations in the world. Modi’s foreign policy is centred on economic considerations and development. He firmly believes that once India frees itself from clutches of poverty and economic dependance, the rest will follow automatically. Hence, his stress on trade, commerce, investment, and development. In terms of steering the country’s foreign policy, Prime Minister Modi has declined to be another fading leader of another developing nation or a non-emerging economy. His stint since mid-2014, saw a rejuvenated PMO – pulling the foreign policy engine room with a series of new and innovative measures. The year 2018 was crucial in such endeavours. Some of the efforts fetched in dividends. India’s foreign policy initiatives in 2018 kicked off with a grand reaching out to 10 ASEAN members when New Delhi hosted the ASEAN-India Commemorative Summit coinciding with the Republic Day. Adding to the symbolic importance, a commemorative postage stamp was released. The Delhi Declaration sought to encourage the early completion of the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway Project, and extend this Trilateral Highway to Cambodia, Laos, PDR and Vietnam. The mega extravaganza also sought to explore the possibility of cooperation in alliance building and partnership between ASEAN and India in integration of ASEAN community and implementation of the ASEAN Community Vision 2025. In interaction with experts, a senior MEA official denied the charge that India’s growing proximity with Russia and the United States could easily drag Pakistan into the ‘lap’ of China. He said, “Pakistan is already sitting on the lap of China.” In this context, the source, however, maintained without ambiguity: “Irrespective of whatever the impact on Pakistan, we have to develop relations with all the major players.” The source had insisted that the Modi government’s policy is to “be close to all countries”, going beyond the spirit of the NAM. When someone asked whether the government’s policy is neo-non alignment, his answer was very simple. He said it was not non-alignment as non-alignment means equal distance from all; the current government wishes to stay close to all countries.” The Modi-led dispensation has been firm about ‘taking independent decisions in India’s national interests’. This could be measured from Indian government’s association with France vis-a-vis the Rafale aircraft deal, and India’s defence ties with Russia despite US objections. India’s growing role in the Indo-Pacific in association with Japan and the US, ostensibly to counter Chinese hegemony, got a boost this year. A major push during 2018 was Prime Minister Modi’s maiden informal summit with China’s President Xi Jinping in April, and with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin at his summer beach house in Sochi in May. To conclude, there is no ambiguity on the part of the present dispensation to clearly underline that New Delhi desires to make it very clear that India has a ‘strong relationship’ with all its major partners. The writer is a professor of political science