The Jaishankar Doctrine Through Speeches
Decode External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar's speeches and books as the primary source for Indian grand strategy — multi-alignment, Bharat vocabulary, and signaling craft.
The Architect and His Texts
Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, External Affairs Minister since 31 May 2019, is the first career Foreign Service officer (IFS 1977) to hold the portfolio. His public corpus — speeches at Raisina Dialogue, addresses to the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), Munich Security Conference interventions, and two books, The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (HarperCollins, 2020) and Why Bharat Matters (Rupa, 2024) — constitutes the most systematic articulation of Indian grand strategy since K. Subrahmanyam's writings of the 1970s. Reading him is not optional for India-watchers; it is the primary source.
The doctrine rests on five propositions Jaishankar repeats with deliberate consistency. First, the world has entered a phase of "multipolarity and re-globalization" in which the post-1945 order is exhausted. Second, India must practice strategic autonomy — a term he prefers to non-alignment — engaging multiple powers simultaneously without bloc commitments. Third, national interest, not ideology, determines partnerships; he stated at the Bratislava GLOBSEC forum on 3 June 2022 that "Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe's problems are the world's problems but the world's problems are not Europe's problems." Fourth, India's civilizational identity (Bharat) supplies the legitimating vocabulary, displacing Nehruvian internationalism. Fifth, the Indo-Pacific is the central theater, with the Quad as its institutional anchor.
From Non-Alignment to Multi-Alignment
Jaishankar's most cited reformulation appeared in The India Way: India should "engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia, bring Japan into play, draw neighbours in, extend the neighbourhood, and expand traditional constituencies of support." This eight-vector formula replaced the binary Cold War posture with a portfolio approach. The practical test came after 24 February 2022: India abstained on UN Security Council Resolution drafts condemning Russia (UNSC vote of 25 February 2022, and General Assembly ES-11/1 of 2 March 2022), continued purchasing discounted Russian Urals crude — imports rising from roughly 2% of Indian crude in early 2022 to over 35% by mid-2023 — while simultaneously deepening the iCET (Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology) launched with Washington on 31 January 2023 and hosting the G20 Summit (9–10 September 2023) where the African Union was admitted as a permanent member.
Jaishankar defends this as situational rationality, not opportunism. At the GLOBSEC interaction (June 2022) he observed that India's per capita energy consumption gives it a different calculus than European states. At Raisina Dialogue 2023 (2 March 2023), confronted by Norwegian Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt on Russia ties, he replied that Europe had purchased six times more Russian fossil fuels than India since the invasion. The rhetorical technique — deflecting moral framing through comparative data — is now a Jaishankar signature.
Civilizational Vocabulary
Why Bharat Matters (January 2024) marks a shift register. Where The India Way was written in the lexicon of structural realism, the second book deploys the Ramayana as analytical frame, treating Hanuman's mission to Lanka as a case study in expeditionary diplomacy. This is not ornamental. It signals the Modi government's effort to indigenize foreign-policy discourse, paralleling the renaming of Rajpath to Kartavya Path (8 September 2022) and the inscription "Bharat" on the G20 Presidency nameplate. For foreign desks, the vocabulary matters: Jaishankar's references to Vishwa Mitra (friend to the world), Vishwa Bandhu (kin to the world), and Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family — the G20 2023 motto) are not platitudes but doctrinal markers replacing the earlier Panchsheel lexicon.