Abstract: The global outlook of India as we sit south of the Himalayas and astride the Indian Ocean is very different from the view from the United States or Europe and their preoccupations with the Russian misadventure in Ukraine. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is stressing the oneness of the world, as India prepares to host the G-20 in September. For India, the greatest challenges that humanity faces are climate change, terrorism and pandemics and these can be fought only by all nations working together. There’s a complex network of interconnections in the world today and India feels it has the right to work with everyone. It also sees the western outlook on Russia’s violations of human rights in Ukraine as myopic and hypocritical since Washington and Europe have done the same in Iraq for instance.
India is positioning itself as the heartland of the global south, a bridging presence that stands for multilateralism. Developing countries like India are intent on addressing their development needs – whether in infrastructure or health care or education. As the world’s largest country in terms of population and a rapidly growing economy, India has the potential to spread growth and foster dialogue across the world. India is neither pro-Russian nor pro-American it is pro-Indian. India sees itself as an independent pole of global power. Furthermore, India would like to see fundamental reforms to major international organizations like the UN Security Council and the IMF so that they are more representative of the global South. India also has a very active developmental assistance program for countries of the global South including the distribution of vaccines, lines of credit, educational and training programmes. disaster relief and humanitarian aid.
The world today is quite complicated place and the deepening estrangement between China and the United States makes the future very uncertain. The growing confederacy between China and Russia is another fixture on the global scene. Contention between China and the United States over Taiwan creates its own turbulence. In the post-cold war era, we have also seen the growing strength of Democratic India with an economy that is today the fastest growing in the world. It is quite clear that the geopolitics of the 21st century is defined by multi alignments and multipolarity, and not just bipolarity or a simply defined alliance system. Countries like India are increasingly asserting their sovereign freedom to juggle with an array of alignments that help deter their adversaries and secure their security and development needs and priorities.
About the Speaker: Nirupama Rao is a former Indian Foreign Service officer. She retired as Foreign Secretary to the Government of India, being the second woman to occupy the post (2009-2011). She was the first woman spokesperson (2001-02) of the Indian foreign office. She served as India's first woman High Commissioner (Ambassador) to Sri Lanka (2004-2006) and to the People's Republic of China (2006-2009). She was Ambassador of India to the United States from 2011 to 2013. In retirement she taught at Brown and Columbia Universities. Her book entitled "The Fractured Himalaya: India Tibet China, 1949 to 1962" was published by Penguin India in October 2021.
She is a Global Policy Fellow of the Wilson Center, Washington D.C. She was a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow from 2015-2016. She is a member of the Advisory Council of the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore, on the Board of the Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations (ICRIER), and a Council Member of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. She has an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Pondicherry University, India.
She is a staunch believer in the power of social media as an advocacy platform for policy and currently has over 1.3 million followers on Twitter.
Ambassador Rao has received several awards recognizing her contributions in public service including the K.P.S Menon Memorial Award, the Sree Chithira Thirunal Award, the Vanitha Ratna Award of the Government of Kerala and the Citizen Extraordinaire Award of Rotary International. She is also the recipient of the Fellowship of Peace Award of the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Center in Washington D.C.
Ambassador Rao is a Founder-Trustee of The South Asian Symphony Foundation (SASF) (www.symphonyofsouthasia.org) - a not-for-profit Trust which is dedicated to promoting mutual understanding through music in South Asia.