Neighbourhood First: Modi 2.0’s Top Foreign Policy Priority

There’s one thing to be said about Prime Minister Narendra Modi — he does exactly as he says. He and his close advisors have been stressing the primacy of the neighbourhood, and the recent flypasts of the prime minister and his erudite foreign minister to Maldives, Sri Lanka and Bhutan gives more substance to a policy that has been pretty much continuous since 2014.

There’s no more taking these countries for granted as Delhi’s ‘backyard’. That’s all changed.

A look at the Joint Statement with Maldives indicates a bag of goodies worthy of a Santa Claus. This includes not only the training of a cricket team that the Maldivians will cheer, but also a slew of measures designed to tie Malé securely to India’s security concerns in the Indo-Pacific. The coastal security radar system is back on track, after it was vetoed by the earlier government.

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