The tragedy of India’s foreign policy is that in its anxiety to project this country as a major global player, it has neglected its duty to first become a regional power. New Delhi displayed the same stunned disbelief and helplessness at this week’s popular revolt ousting the Nepal government as it did when confronted with eerie replicas of similar outbursts of public anger led by youthful mobs that felled regimes in Bangladesh last year and Sri Lanka in 2022. All three are important neighbours of India, but an increasingly insular intelligence and diplomatic apparatus have in recent years repeatedly been overtaken by the cataclysmic events in our neighbourhood over the past few years.

A regional power is one because its dominant population, economy, and military in the region are not just respected but provide leadership to smaller countries in close proximities by land or water. True, there are perennially hostile neighbours like Pakistan and China, itself a global giant, who would not accept this country’s leadership and, at best, offer conditional cooperation. But there are at least seven other countries that share borders and coastlines with India with which it has palpably failed to have substantive diplomatic heft and political engagement, let alone close people-to-people ties.

Primary importance to the neighbourhood was given by India’s first spymasters, BN Malik, who gave teeth to the country’s fledgling foreign intelligence network after Independence, particularly in the aftermath of the 1962 Chinese debacle, and RN Kao, trained by the former, who........

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