Syed Akbaruddin on How India Really Plays the World: Interests Over Doctrine

For most of the 20th century, India's foreign policy was known for being loud, principled, and quick to condemn. Former diplomat Syed Akbaruddin — once the official spokesperson of India's Ministry of External Affairs and its Permanent Representative at the UN — argues that era is over. In a sprawling three-hour conversation with Raj Shamani, he lays out a picture of a country that now engages everyone, commits to almost no one, and judges every move by a single question: does it serve India's interest?

This post condenses a long conversation. The views, framings, and claims are Akbaruddin's.

The Job Changed Because India Changed

Akbaruddin begins with what a diplomat actually does — and how radically it has expanded. In 1986, posted to Egypt with only 500 Indians to look after, his real work was soft power: he describes how the Indian embassy piggybacked on Amitabh Bachchan's enormous stardom, even keeping the actor's picture in the car to smooth over parking tickets. It was a job of observing and interpreting a country back to Delhi.

Today, he says, the diplomat is a "jack-of-all." India's diaspora has exploded — Saudi Arabia alone went from 200,000 to over two million Indians — and remittances have made India the world's largest recipient at $125–130 billion a year. Add trade promotion, investment, security cooperation, and constant signaling of India's positions, and the role now touches nearly every dimension of national life. As he puts it, when India's economy was 15% linked to the world, a diplomat's job was small; now that it's around 50%, the job is everything.

The One Rule: Interests, Not Emotion

If there's a single thread running through the conversation, it's that states act on interest, not sentiment. Diplomats, Akbaruddin says, are "frenemies" who "trust but verify." Even if he told a foreign counterpart something 100% true, they would accept it only if it served their interest — and he would only say it if it served his. There is, he insists, "rarely anything emotional about it."

He extends this to a generational shift he's noticed since retiring to Hyderabad: young Indians don't care about doctrine. They want to know whether foreign policy brings jobs, opens opportunities, and makes visas easier. He considers that entirely fair — "what serves your interest, you will do that."

Pakistan: A Country in the Rearview Mirror

Akbaruddin served in Pakistan during the Kargil conflict and Vajpayee's Lahore outreach, and he describes it as the hardest posting an Indian diplomat can have — constant surveillance, stress on families, and a state he calls a "master in deceit and deception." Its animating ideology, in his reading, is simple: Pakistan believes it cannot succeed if India succeeds.

His strategic conclusion is striking. Pakistan, he says, belongs in India's "rearview mirror" — a security nuisance India must watch, but a country it has decisively outgrown. He rejects the idea that outside powers mediated the recent ceasefire: it is a doctrinal principle that India–Pakistan matters have only two parties. Others passed messages, but "that doesn't make them mediators." The realistic path forward, he argues, isn't front-channel diplomacy, which has failed for 25 years, but deniable back channels — with no formal talks until terror stops.

Small Wins in a Rigged System

Two stories illustrate his philosophy of incremental gains. First, India's election of a judge to the International Court of Justice — the first time a non-permanent UN member defeated a permanent one (the UK). Triggered by the Kulbhushan Jadhav case, India won by courting African and Latin American votes and outworking a system where, he says, the five permanent members simply "scratch each other's back."

Second, the 2019 designation of Masood Azhar as a global terrorist after years of Chinese vetoes. India's breakthrough was procedural: it threatened to force an open vote so China would have to publicly defend its "hidden veto." China, preferring to operate quietly, decided the reputational price was too high. Akbaruddin is honest that such designations don't stop a terrorist from operating — but he argues they win the narrative war, and in diplomacy "small gains add to a big gain." He also explains why Pakistan is never formally branded a "terrorist state": in international law, terrorism is an individual or group crime, and a sovereign state legally cannot be one.

Engaged With Everyone, Entangled With No One

How can India be friends with Iran and Israel, the US and Russia, all at once? Akbaruddin's answer is pure interest arithmetic. Iran is India's gateway to Central Asia through Chabahar, since Pakistan blocks the western land route — but the Gulf carries vastly larger stakes: $200 billion in trade and 10 million Indians. That's why India was more vocal defending the Gulf than Iran when strikes happened, and why it sent Iran humanitarian aid without condemning the attacks on it. He notes 130-plus countries calibrated the same way at the UN. "In crisis," he says, "we have to look out for our interests, not for doctrines."

The price of this posture is real: when India acted against Pakistan, none of its friends — not Russia, not the Gulf, not the US — openly backed it. But Akbaruddin argues India's 70-year position is precisely that it doesn't want the world's help on Pakistan. Its diplomacy after such operations wasn't a request for support; it was preemptive signaling of how India will respond next time.

The Vulnerability Problem — and the US Question

Shamani presses hardest on a genuine tension: India's dependencies have grown, not shrunk — energy on Russia (from ~1% to ~33%), technology on the US, capital on China. Akbaruddin concedes the point but calls it a mid-transition snapshot, like being graded in the middle of an exam. Growth isn't linear; the fix is to build foundations now — solar, nuclear — that reduce dependence later. He's candid that India is scaling in a harder era than China did, with tighter capital flows and rising export barriers everywhere.

On whether the US is effectively India's "boss," he's dismissive. India refused US demands on Ukraine votes, kept negotiating with Iran despite Washington's objections, and declined to join Trump's "board of peace." Great powers, he says, develop "hubris" — the American style is "my way or the highway" — but the unipolar moment is over, and India's own style is to be "hard-headed, but not showing it openly." He cites a US official's line that India used to look like a sand mountain to be crushed, and now looks like solid rock you have to navigate around.

The Real Rival, and the Long Game

For all the talk of Pakistan and America, Akbaruddin is unequivocal about India's defining challenge: China. Beijing sees India's rise as a threat on two fronts — economic, through the "China plus one" shift, and civilizational, because India is the one culture that can rival Chinese soft power. China out-invests India across the neighborhood with deeper pockets, so India must work out a "via media" while ensuring China cannot impede its rise. "If there's one foreign policy challenge," he says, "it is to ensure our growth is not impeded by China."

He closes with a defense of the imperfect global order: the UN exists not to deliver "heaven" but to prevent a descent into "hell," and India wants to reform that order, not overthrow it — because "if you're not on the table, you're on the menu." His verdict on the last decade: financial inclusion and UPI were India's best decision, a genuine global export the world still underestimates, while political polarization was the worst. India's greatest asset, he concludes, is that it can now pick up the phone and reach any decision-maker on earth. The task ahead is to turn that access into leverage — and to fix, at home, the vulnerabilities that still constrain it.

---

Originally published on Raj Shamani. Watch the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5suNXiI1vjQ