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Has Trump 2.0 Commandeered India’s Foreign Policy?
Reimagining India’s Role in the New Geo-Political Context
Speakers
When the world shifts, what anchors a nation’s choices?
India’s Tryst With the World: A Foreign Policy Manifesto arrives at a moment of visible churn in India’s external relations. With shifts in United States policy under a second Trump presidency, long-assumed alignments have grown uncertain; prompting rapid recalibrations toward China, renewed invocations of friendship with Russia, and fresh questions about strategic autonomy. The book frames this moment not as disruption alone, but as an opportunity to rethink how India engages the world.
Co-edited by Salman Khurshid and Salil Shetty, the volume sets the stage for a wide-ranging conversation on diplomacy, values, and global responsibility. With Nirupama Rao and Suhasini Haider in conversation and Salil Shetty moderating, the evening reflects on India’s foreign policy record and its evolving role in a post-Trump international order, inviting careful listening, debate, and reflection as the contours of the future come into view.
Bring your questions!
Speakers
Salman Khurshid
Salman Khurshid is a former Union Law Minister and External Affairs Minister. He was also a member of the Congress Working Committee. He previously taught law at Oxford University and is Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
Nirupama Menon Rao
Nirupama Rao is a former Indian Foreign Service officer. She retired as Foreign Secretary to the Government of India, the senior most position in the Foreign Service, being the second woman to occupy the post (2009-2011). She was the first woman spokesperson (2001-02) of the Indian Foreign Office. She served as India’s first woman High Commissioner (Ambassador) to Sri Lanka (2004-2006) and to the People’s Republic of China (2006-2009). She was Ambassador of India to the United States from 2011 to 2013.
In retirement she has been a Senior Visiting Fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute at Brown University where she has taught an undergraduate seniors course on “India in the World” and George Ball Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Ambassador Rao was a Fellow at the India-China Institute of The New School, New York in 2016 and a Public Policy Fellow at The Wilson Center, Washington D.C. in 2018 and 2022.
Suhasini Haidar
Suhasini Haidar is the Diplomatic Editor of The Hindu, regularly writing on Foreign policy issues, and hosts a weekly online show “WorldView with Suhasini Haidar”. Prior to this, she was Foreign Affairs editor and prime time anchor for CNN-IBN (2005-2014), and Correspondent for CNN International’s New Delhi bureau before that.
In 2015, she was the recipient of the most prestigious Indian print journalism ‘Prem Bhatia’ award, and has won a series of awards for her work in Television as well.
Over the course of her 28-year reporting career, Suhasini has covered the most challenging stories & conflicts from the most diverse regions including Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Libya, Lebanon and Syria. In India, she has covered the foreign affairs beat for over a decade and her domestic assignments include political profiles and in-depth reportage from conflict zones including Kashmir, where she was injured in a bomb blast in 2000.
Suhasini earned a Bachelor’s degree at Lady Shriram College in Delhi, and then completed her Masters in Broadcast Journalism at Boston University’s College of Communication, USA. She lives in Delhi with her husband Nadim and her two daughters Ava Mumtaz and Maya Mehr.
