Editorial

India’s foreign policy has transformed radically since New Delhi opened up its economy to the world. The impulse to reach out in many directions has meant that its diplomatic reach is now wider, broader and deeper than ever before. This has also meant that the issues it has to deal with extend to both the tangible and the intangible, with economic survival linked to culture and culture to power, in ways which were not so evident earlier. Of the many new initiatives which this has propelled many have worked well while others have been held up, having ignored local approaches and understandings of development, sustainable growth and modernisation. As policymakers move ahead, the articles in this issue of the India Quarterly provide cautionary tales and make recommendations on how to recalibrate many of these initiatives to the goals of sustainable development for communities at the receiving end of policy. The Gandhi test for economic policy is relevant for foreign policy as well. Policymakers, thus, face the daunting task of balancing security interests with livelihood concerns, the neoliberal focus on commodification with community rights and transnational solutions with national policies, as many of the articles in this issue also point out.

Hence, while one article sees the Act East Policy as a success in that it is now more successful than the earlier Look East Policy in linking India’s North East with South East Asia, a cross-disciplinary study of food security in India’s North East finds that the Act East Policy endangers sustainable food patterns in the region rather than ensuring and increasing access to food. On climate change, we juxtapose a positive assessment of New Delhi’s gains in global climate change policy with a more granular assessment of the need for regional approaches to deal with the damage from global warming and climate change, in this case in the ASEAN but with lessons that can be drawn for South Asia as well. Finally, for a cricket-crazy nation, it is only appropriate that we end with an examination of how cricket can move from ‘a mere sport to a powerful instrument of diplomacy’.