India's Foreign Policy Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The order is 2, 3, 4, 1.

1. BRICS Summit hosted by India: September 2021, held virtually.
2. First India-Central Asia Summit: January 2022, held virtually.
3. SCO Summit under India's chairmanship: July 2023, held virtually.
4. BIMSTEC Business Summit in New Delhi: 2024.

Options that begin with the BIMSTEC Business Summit or the SCO Summit have the sequence reversed, and the option 3, 2, 4, 1 puts the Central Asia summit before the 2021 BRICS Summit.

Answer: A

The correct matching is a-2, b-3, c-4, d-1.

• UN Convention against Corruption: India ratified it in 2011.
• Missile Technology Control Regime: India joined in 2016.
• UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: India ratified it in 2007.
• Australia Group: India joined in 2018.

The other options mix the dates. India joined the export-control regimes in the order MTCR (2016), Wassenaar Arrangement (2017) and Australia Group (2018), which rules out pairing the Australia Group with any year but 2018.

Answer: C

X is Nepal.

India and Nepal signed the Treaty of Peace and Friendship in 1950. Kalapani and Limpiyadhura (with Lipulekh) are the disputed areas between the two countries, a dispute revived when Nepal issued a new map in 2020. In November 2023 Nepal registered its first same-sex marriage, the first such registration in South Asia, and Surya Kiran is the joint military exercise of the Indian and Nepalese armies.

Exercises with Sri Lanka (Mitra Shakti), Bhutan and Myanmar have other names, and none of those countries fits the treaty or the border dispute.

Answer: C

The Joint Rivers Commission of 1972 deals with India and Bangladesh.

The Indo-Bangladesh Joint Rivers Commission was set up in 1972, soon after Bangladesh's independence, to manage the 54 rivers the two countries share, especially the Ganga waters at Farakka. It led eventually to the Ganga Water Treaty of 1996.

India and Nepal deal with river issues through the Kosi and Gandak agreements and later bodies, India and Bhutan through hydropower agreements, and India and China only through expert-level hydrological data sharing.

Answer: D

The correct match is i-b, ii-c, iii-d, iv-a.

• Hansa Mehta served on the UN Commission on Human Rights that drafted the Universal Declaration, and is credited with changing 'all men are born free and equal' to 'all human beings'.
• Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit was elected President of the 8th session of the UN General Assembly in 1953, the first woman to hold the post.
• Nagendra Singh was President of the International Court of Justice from 1985 to 1988.
• Vinod Rai, as India's CAG, chaired the UN Panel of External Auditors.

The other options cross at least two of these well-recorded appointments.

Answer: D

Both (A) and (R) are individually true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A).

The 17th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement was held on Margarita Island, Venezuela, in September 2016. India was represented by Vice-President Hamid Ansari, as Prime Minister Modi did not attend.

It is also true that after the Cold War NAM has been expected to concentrate on core global issues such as development, disarmament and terrorism. But that general expectation does not explain who represented India at one summit, so option C is wrong, and A and B are wrong because both statements are true.

Answer: D

The keyed reasons are (i), (iii) and (iv).

India's case for a permanent seat rests on its weight in world affairs: it is a nuclear-weapon power (since the tests of 1974 and 1998), it has one of the world's largest and fastest-growing economies, and it has diplomatic standing among developing countries as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement and the G-77. These are the grounds the key accepts.

Statement (ii), that India has never attacked any country, is not a recognised ground for membership and is itself contested, so the codes including it (A and B) are wrong, and (iii) and (iv) alone leave out the nuclear factor.

Answer: B

The incorrect statement is that India favours both vertical and horizontal proliferation.

India has opposed nuclear proliferation of both kinds, the growth of existing arsenals (vertical) and the spread to new states (horizontal), while arguing that only universal disarmament can end the problem.

The other statements describe India's policy: it regards the NPT as discriminatory, dividing the world into nuclear 'haves' and 'have-nots', and has never signed it; it calls for total, time-bound nuclear disarmament; and it has opposed a South Asian nuclear-weapon-free zone, because its security concerns extend beyond the region.

Answer: B

The keyed main theme is (ii) and (iii) only.

The UN General Assembly's Declaration of the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace (Resolution 2832, 1971), sponsored by Sri Lanka, declared the Indian Ocean a zone of peace and called on the great powers to halt the escalation and expansion of their military presence there, conceived in the context of great power rivalry, and to remove their bases.

It did not seek to eliminate the presence of the regional states themselves, so (i) is wrong, and it did not declare the ocean a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the formal sense, so the codes including (iv) go beyond the Declaration's central theme.

Answer: B

The keyed answer is quest for energy security (option B).

India's Look East Policy, begun under Narasimha Rao in 1991, aimed at economic integration with South-East Asia after the Cold War and the 1991 balance-of-payments crisis. Access to trade, investment and resources, including oil and gas, is commonly listed among its motives, and that is the incentive among these options that fits an economic policy.

Weapons purchases (A) and dominating the Indian Ocean (D) were not aims of the policy. Countering China is sometimes mentioned as a strategic by-product (C), but a 'China-Pak axis' is not a standard stated aim of Look East. I could not find a source that settles the question between B and C, so this explanation follows the key and the economic reading of the policy.