Description
During the pandemic, the Indian State emerged as a champion of international cooperation. Interestingly, this cooperation for India was organised along a spectrum of logics - from mobilising and providing pandemic aid and calls for greater cooperation in formulating global health policies to newer security groupings that acknowledged the changing dynamic in its neighbourhood. Newer groupings like the Quadilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) emerged even as older groupings like the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) were reactivated for different purposes. Given the proliferation of logics of multilateralism that India is already subscribed to, for instance its membership of the BRICS grouping as well as the threat and inadequacy of multilateralism itself as a concept, analysis of these reactivations, negotiations and inventions bear weight and promise insights in understanding India as an international actor. In this direction it would be inportant to take into consideration: What are the contours of Indian multilateralism in a post-pandemic world ? How does India define its South-South cooperation and principles of cautious prudence in an increasingly convulated and dense multilateral space ? What are India's hopes for multilateralism in the post-pandemic world order ?
