“Europe converges, America drifts: Inside Delhi’s diplomatic reset”, Firstpost, 06 Oct 2026.
“External Affairs Minister (EAM) Subrahmanyam Jaishankar begins The India Way, his 2020 book examining New Delhi’s “strategies for an uncertain world”, with a reference to Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khiladi. The film, depicting “two Indian nawabs engrossed in a chess game while the British East India Company steadily took over their wealthy kingdom of Awadh”, highlighted, as Jaishankar writes, “the Indian self-absorption” amid gathering threats, chaos and turmoil.
Elaborating on this, the EAM asks the country to shed what he calls the “Panipat Syndrome” — a term coined by the late Jasjit Singh, one of Bharat’s leading military strategists, to describe the tendency of Indian leaders to respond to challenges only after they have become too large to control and too late to contain. “This default option of playing defence reflects a mindset that does not comprehend external events well, leave alone appreciate their implications”, Jaishankar adds.
Bharat’s foreign policy, particularly over the past few years, offers something of a Jaishankar masterclass in shedding some of that Syndrome. And nowhere is the shift more revealing than in New Delhi’s changing equations with Brussels and Washington, DC. Between 2022 and 2024, Europe was the principal Western target of Jaishankar’s rhetorical fire. He attacked its claims to moral exceptionalism, its double standards over Ukraine, its assumption that European security concerns were automatically global concerns, and its reluctance to accord Delhi’s security anxieties the same importance………….”
Read the full article at Firstpost.
