Anil Trigunayat
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the UAE and key European nations showcases India’s expanding role in shaping a multipolar global order
After the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, the only leader to have bridged a huge high-level deficit of exchanges and visits from Africa to the Americas, Europe and Asia is Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Today, diplomacy is mostly conducted at the highest level and also in a rather personalised manner. This becomes increasingly important at this time, when global churn of a unique kind is disrupting the whole gamut of the international order.
Post-World War II, early on, India’s diplomacy had also focused on being a part of the international order by being a founding member of global governance initiatives, from the United Nations to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), by remaining pragmatically non-aligned in a balance of power defined by rival blocs led by the US and the Soviet Union — while broadly benefiting across the Cold War divide.
Currently also, the global situation demands proactive strategic autonomy with multi-alignment, which is being pursued despite occasional criticism of hedging. But we have to be realists in this highly protectionist and unilateral power-syndrome-driven world led by great powers, if there are any left to be called ‘great’. India today, due to its very credentials, has become a major vector and part of the emergent structures, even if divergent and often seen on the opposite end, including BRICS and the QUAD, whose summits New Delhi is expected to hold this year.
India is part of the powerful G7 and G20 groups apart from a plethora of trilaterals and minilaterals and FTAs and CEPAs. It stands for multipolarity and multilateralism and humanity in an inclusive manner. It has launched several international initiatives while following a sane and value-based foreign policy, which include the International Solar Alliance (ISA), Global Biofuels Alliance (GBA), Big Cat Alliance, Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI), which have indeed added to the heft.
New Delhi has also developed dozens of strategic partnerships with countries across the world. Ironically, it also impinges on and induces a critical challenge when strategic partners become adversaries, as in the ongoing West Asian war or, for that matter, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, where our strategic partners are on the opposite end of the spectrum. It makes the task of diplomacy even more difficult as expectations collide and reduce the strategic space.
But Indian leadership so far has played the game very effectively, keeping fully engaged with all actors and stakeholders in the region and beyond. Strategic patience, strategic silence and quiet diplomacy are also an integral part of the strategic outreach to minimise the adverse impact on one’s national interest.
The Prime Minister will be visiting the UAE, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Italy (May 15-20, 2026). All these are India’s important strategic partners. In the West Asian region, the UAE has a special significance given excellent leader-to-leader, people-to-people and business-to-business connections. They are part of I2U2, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), BRICS and several trilaterals, one of which, India-France-UAE, has just had a meeting.
This would be the eighth visit of PM Modi to the UAE. In fact, the UAE was the first country the Prime Minister visited after taking over. Even during the G20 it was a special invitee. It is the first country with which India signed a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), which has turned out to be a model and rewarding agreement. Not being bound by the OPEC diktat, the energy partnership can expand even further.
India is also hosting the BRICS Summit, and around the same time a foreign ministers’ meeting is taking place in New Delhi, especially at a time when the region is mired in the Iran-US-Israel war impacting West Asia, India and the world. This would also be a short return visit after Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s few hours’ visit two months ago when defence and security cooperation was further underscored.
PM Modi’s visits to the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway are equally significant, as Europe is engaged in reasserting its identity in the wake of rupture and trust deficit in the transatlantic alliance. New Delhi and The Hague have exponentially developed defence, security, innovation, green hydrogen, semiconductors and a strategic partnership on water. The Netherlands is one of India’s largest trade destinations in Europe, with bilateral trade worth $27.8 billion (2024-25), and India’s fourth-largest investor with cumulative FDI of $55.6 billion.
The relationship with Sweden and other Nordic and Baltic countries has come a long way since the 2000s, when India was treated as a nuclear pariah and shunned. Later, Sweden supported India in its membership of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) and extended full support to India’s bid for its pending membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).
Innovation and trade have emerged as the key drivers, as Sweden remains a great innovation hub where industry and academia are in real sync and the ‘garage culture’ drives R&D and innovation. Collaboration in green transition, AI, emerging technologies, start-ups, resilient supply chains, defence, space, climate action and people-to-people ties is the highlight.
The two Prime Ministers will also address the European Round Table for Industry, a leading pan-European business leaders’ forum, along with Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission. These are win-win partnerships in this era of tech dominance.
Following that, the Prime Minister will pay an official visit for the 3rd India-Nordic Summit and bilateral engagements. This will be the first visit of Prime Minister Modi to Norway and will mark the first prime ministerial visit from India to Norway in 43 years. A gap will be filled. This will be the third Indo-Nordic Summit, which will continue to explore collaboration in technology and innovation, e-mobility, AI, green transition and renewable energy, sustainability, blue economy, defence, space and the Arctic. The visit will also provide an impetus to India’s bilateral trade ($19 billion in 2024) and investment ties with Nordic countries as well as help build resilient supply chains following the India-EU Free Trade Agreement and India-EFTA TEPA.
India’s special Mediterranean strategic partner and special friend, Italy, will host PM Modi in the last leg of the visit. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was in India for the G20 Summit and met PM Modi several times. In fact, PM Modi also wrote a preface for her book, I Am Giorgia, underscoring “shared civilisational instincts, such as the defence of heritage, the strength of community, and the celebration of femininity as a guiding force”.
As per the Ministry of External Affairs, the visit takes place against the backdrop of strong momentum in bilateral ties, with both sides proactively implementing the Joint Strategic Action Plan 2025-2029, a comprehensive roadmap for cooperation in various sectors, including bilateral trade, which reached $16.77 billion in 2025; boosting investment, which has recorded a cumulative FDI of $3.66 billion (April 2000-September 2025); defence and security; clean energy; innovation; science and technology; and people-to-people ties. Italy is also very keen on IMEC, especially the provision for and inclusion of its strategic port of Trieste.
As far as bilateral relationships are concerned, these will no doubt be reinforced, and new strategic direction will be given by the visit and high-level interactions. However, interestingly again, our strategic partners in Europe are at war or at loggerheads and on opposing sides, especially with regard to Israel and Russia and between Europe and the US on the issues of the Palestine and Gaza war and the Russia-Ukraine war as well as the US-Iran-Israel war. Wading through such complexity will require the resolve of Indian strategic autonomy and diplomacy.
About the Author
Anil Trigunayat, is a former Indian Ambassador to Jordan, Libya and Malta, and currently heads the West Asia Experts Group at Vivekananda International Foundation.
This article was first published in The as PM Modi’s UAE-Europe visit signals India’s quest for strategic autonomy on 15th May 2026.
Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.
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Acknowledgement:
This article was posted by Aananya Atri, a Research and Editorial Intern at IMPRI.
