Nehru’s Non-Alignment To Modi’s Multi-Alignment: How India Rewrote Its Foreign Policy Playbook

Key points

• Nehru’s Non-Alignment To Modi’s Multi-Alignment: How India Rewrote Its Foreign Policy Playbook Published By, Last Updated: June 05, 2026, 08:45 IST The core aim remains strategic autonomy, but the method has changed: India no longer stays away from power centres, it engages them simultaneously.
• Rapid Read Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
• (PTI Photo) India’s foreign policy has always carried one core instinct: the desire to retain independent decision-making in a difficult world.
• Under Jawaharlal Nehru, that instinct took the form of non-alignment, a Cold War-era doctrine that allowed a newly independent India to avoid formally joining either the US-led Western bloc or the Soviet-led communist bloc.
• Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the same instinct has taken a different form.