India

Indian space policy is undergoing important changes. In the early decades, as a newly independent nation developing its space programme, India was very conscious of the resource constraints and therefore India’s space programme developed with a primary focus on social and economic development of its people.

The confrontation between China and India might seem to be a thing of the past. After violent border skirmishes last June resonated high and wide around the world, SARS-COV-2 and the US presidential campaign diluted most non-China-related news spreading from Asia.

Since early May, amidst the pandemic, thousands of Indian and Chinese troops have been locked in a bitter confrontation, lined up on positions opposite each other’s, in the rugged Himalayan heights of the Ladakh region.

Relations among South Asian countries after 1947 can be characterized as oscillating between Indian attempts to gain greater influence and counter-efforts by its neighbours to resist them. One of their successful counter-strategies has been to play the “China card” vis-à-vis India long before the Belt and Road initiative (BRI) was established.

Despite the unresolved territorial dispute and emerging challenges between the two Asian powers, Sino-Indian economic ties have witnessed significant expansion over the three decades since Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s historic visit to China in 1988.

Although the foreign policies of major powers do not change dramatically with changes in government, India’s foreign policy vision has been evolving rapidly since the Modi government came to power in May 2014. This evolution is only natural for a nation that is rising in the global power hierarchy. External Affairs Minister S.

The clash between China and India along the disputed border in the harsh Himalayan terrain of Galwan Valley on 15 June was the most violent encounter in decades. The high-altitude melee is part of an old dispute between the two nuclear powers over their Himalayan borders, of which there is no mutual recognition. The two governments have different and conflicting ideas about the location of their ‘historic’ borders as well as of the Line of Actual Control, namely a demarcation line created after the 1962 war to supposedly ease tensions.