5 Books That Explain India's Neighbourhood First Policy—and Its Limits

The closest any book has come to examining India's Neighbourhood First Policy by name is this book, edited by Aryaman Bhatnagar and Ritika Passi. This book maps India's bilateral ties with the SAARC members since 2014, after PM Modi. Country by country, it asks the same hard question—what changed after 2014, and what didn't? An honest, granular assessment that holds the policy up to the light.

Edited by Prof Vinod Kumar Singh alongside a panel of policy scholars, this is one of the few books that takes the Neighbourhood First Policy in detail. It examines India's ties with Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and the Maldives through the lens of politics, economics, security, and culture. Dense but rewarding, it asks not just what the policy says, but what it actually delivers and where the gaps remain—essential reading for anyone who wants the full picture.

Written by India's External Affairs Minister, S Jaishankar, The India Way discusses India’s foreign policy, including the Neighbourhood First Policy. According to Jaishankar’s ideology, the policy calls for a "bolder and non-reciprocal approach" to the neighbourhood. He frames South Asia as the foundation on which India's larger global ambitions must be built. Sharp and readable, this book gives policymakers’ views on the policy.

Buy here: The India Way

Edited by Harsh V Pant, one of India's sharpest foreign policy analysts, this book is an audit of how the Neighbourhood First Policy has actually played out on the ground. Each chapter covers one neighbour: the frictions, the progress, the diplomatic capital spent and sometimes lost. Crucially, it goes beyond the familiar China-Pakistan axis to examine the full complexity of India's South Asian relationships and why getting them right remains the nation's most consequential foreign policy challenge.

This S Jaishankar's book picks up where The India Way left off. On the policy, Jaishankar shares his candid insight in the book: "The whole Neighbourhood First thinking developed from the 2014 swearing-in ceremony and his personal experiences." Policy, in other words, is rooted in instinct as much as strategy. Written by the man executing India's diplomacy through its most turbulent years, this one is indispensable.

Buy here: Why Bharat Matters

India's Neighbourhood First Policy, like all policies, is not without its flaws. With shifting global power equations and an increasingly dynamic backyard, it is genuinely hard to assess whether the policy is working—or working fast enough. What matters is understanding where it began, what it has delivered, and where it continues to fall short.

These books do exactly that. Written by diplomats, strategists, and scholars with firsthand knowledge of India's foreign policy, they do not hand you a verdict. They give you the evidence, the context, and the analysis to form your own. Read them, and you will have a far clearer sense of where Indian foreign policy has been and where it is headed.

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