Impact of Covid-19 on India's Foreign Policy

The second wave of COVID-19 has affected India in an unprecedented manner making a major shift in foreign policy in 17 years. India has now started accepting aids from foreign nations for the first time since 2004 tsunami as the country suffers a massive shortage of oxygen, drugs and medical equipment’s due to the pandemic.

This surely has affected India global image alongside as the country suffers from a struggling economy, increasing in political violence making the government more susceptible to external criticism after all as India just cannot say “yes” to foreign aids and “no” to criticism.

1. ·        Regional Dominance – The surrounding neighbours of India is hungry for development assistance and political autonomy and India has traditionally maintained dominance in the region through various channel like material aid, political influence and historical ties. This will steadily decrease as India himself has been now dependent on foreign aids assistance.
2. ·        Domestic Politics – With the distress economy, increasing unemployment, decreasing foreign direct investments and fall in industrial production the common man has suffered the most during the covid. So, the government prime focus will be the recovery of its people first and followed by economy making foreign policy stay in status quo for a while.
3. ·        India China relation – India now will be less aggressive to China comparatively to the earlier year. All though no official aid from China has been accepted but a lot of private organisation has ordered huge amount of oxygen concentrators and cylinder from China.
4. ·        India US relation – The assistance from the US comes with a clause that will be affecting India dominance specifically in the Indo- Pacific region. As India won’t be able to make any ambitious military spending and modernisation plan and its ability to project power and contribute to the growth of the Quad will be uncertain.

Way forward

Post this pandemic will prompt India and its neighbours ‘regional health multilateralism’ to promote mutual assistance and joint action on health emergencies such as this. An organisation like SAARC will be more effectively bringing regional opportunities for cooperation and has already seen some small beginnings initiative during the first wave of the pandemic.