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Abstract
Since the 1990’s, India’s foreign policy has gone through a metamorphosis in tune with the changing global scenario. The disintegration of USSR, demise of the bipolar world and domestic economic problems prompted India to reassess its foreign policy and adjust its foreign relations of the earlier decades. Serious domestic and international problems compelled India to reorganize its foreign policy on the basis of more pragmatic considerations. In today’s era of globalization, it has improved its relations with United States and other western countries, established relations with Israel and embraced multilateralism, to solve its major problems on the economic front. This is in sharp contrast to the earlier era of rigid bipolarity and East-West rivalry, which was marked by ambiguity among Indian foreign policy makers with regard to transnational cooperative arrangements. Since the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union, multilateralism has gained renewed salience in international relations as well as in Indian foreign policy. According to IR theory, multilateralism involves justice, obligations and a sort of international rule of law. For Keohane multilateralism is ‘the practice of co-coordinating national policies in groups of three or more states, through ad hoc arrangements or by means of institutions’ (1). Since 1990’s, India has actively engaged itself in several multilateral forum like ASEM (Asia-Europe Meeting), BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-sect oral Technical and Economic Cooperation), G-8-05, G-20, IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa), IOR-ARC (Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation), ACD (Asia Cooperation Dialogue), etc. India’s active participation in the formation of Brazil, Russia, and India and China (BRIC) forum with these emerging powers shows its willingness for multilateral cooperative arrangements to solve shared problems and challenges of globalization.