Indian Politics & Policy Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 10

Tone Shift: India’s Dominant Foreign Policy Aims Under Modi
er and saying what we say to each other.”
16 In order to trace and structure its
ideational account of international relations,
constructivism largely focuses
upon norms—“a particular set of interests
and preferences” 17 —that are socially
constructed and constantly contested
through elite narratives. Such a basis
is especially useful for explaining how
foreign policy evolves across different
political parties and leaders, which is
our analytical goal concerning whether
the Modi regime has impacted—or
not—upon India’s core foreign policy
aims. As our study largely relates to ideational
aspirations, rather than material
measures, it is therefore a suitable analytical
vehicle.
In order to show “how discourse
... (provides) empirical evidence for the
operation of norms,” 18 the analysis of
various speeches, policy documents,
and scholarly works acts as a core examination
tool for constructivists.
From their theoretical standpoint, language
creates and describes reality, as
“social facts depend, by way of collective
understanding and discourse, on
the attachment of collective knowledge
to physical reality.” 19 It is from this basis
that the reason “language is so important
to constructivist analysis is that
speech binds together is and ought,” 20
which is especially important concerning
the unveiling the aims of Modi’s
foreign policy. As such, it is how often
certain ideas and phrases occur and
re-occur in the discourse surrounding
a particular issue that determines the
dominant narratives pertinent to that
issue, whereby “political rhetoric—or
persuasive discourse—is a mechanism
for generating collective understandings”
21 concerning what is said, reported
on, written about, and analyzed.
Processes of repetition, frequency, and
reiteration all serve to operationalize
and unveil these dominant discursive
and language practices, which for this
study will result in deriving the prevailing
aims (here also described as norms
and preferences) underpinning India’s
foreign policy under the current NDA.
Using a constructivist-oriented
approach and an emphasis on discourse
will identify the major narratives constructing,
underpinning, and delineating
the dominant aims of the Modi-led
NDA concerning Indian foreign policy.
The value of this approach and emphasis
is apparent concerning the three
targeted key aspects of India’s foreign
policy behaviour under Modi—great
power recognition, a multipolar world
order, and the Act East policy—all of
which are innately ideational in that
they concern particular visions of how
India ought to be perceived and ought to
behave within the international sphere.
Reviewing the discourses present in
the literature evaluating—and primary
documents depicting—the Modi-led
BJP, it is this triumvirate that has been
the most frequent and evident so far. It
is also for this reason that our analysis
is inherently focused away from analyzing
New Delhi’s South Asian relations
(especially with Pakistan), myriad linkages
with West Asia, or India’s connectivity
initiatives in Africa. An emphasis
away from these areas is because none
of them directly fall within the three
key aims of the Modi regime regarding
India’s global position (to be a great
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