Protecting strategic interests focus of foreign policy: PM

New Delhi: 'India First' is the focus of the government's foreign policy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said. "It is about protecting India's strategic interests, it is to ensure that India marches forward in achieving economic prosperity by leaps and bounds and reaches the position which it is destined to reach," he said at his first town hall meeting in the country on Saturday.
Modi's remarks, which went largely unremarked, is significant. Addressing a question frequently put about India's shifting orientation from non-alignment to a pro-US position, Modi said, "The world has changed, everybody is inter-dependent. Nobody is in any camp, everybody is connected to everyone else. On some issues they work together, some issues they are ahead but still have to work together. We need to understand this granularity in detail." Many foreign policy experts have raised doubts about what they see as a "shift" by India towards a more robust lining up with the US.
Modi's remarks should be set in the context of India's engagement in the next couple of weeks with both China and the US. Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi will be in New Delhi for talks, the first high-level interaction after bilateral discord on NSG and South China Sea.
Later this month, US secretary of state John Kerry and commerce secretary Penny Pritzker will hold the last strategic and commercial dialogue of the Obama administration with India.
The last couple of years have been rich pickings for India-US relations. India would want to cement some of the gains and forward movement achieved in the past couple of years.