India’s Rising Global Influence Demands an Indigenous Theoretical and Conceptual Framework for International Relations

India’s accelerating international influence underscores the need for an indigenous theoretical architecture in international relations that is conceptually rigorous and empirically tractable. This paper synthesizes civilizational foundations, strategic multi-alignment, developmental realpolitik, and societal-networked power into a unified paradigm that explains India’s behaviour in a multiplex world order. First, it theorizes civilizational strategic culture rooted in plural constitutionalism, dharmic ethics, and long-run political economy as a source of legitimacy, restraint, and preference formation. Second, it formalizes multi-alignment as a rational equilibrium for hedging and issue-specific coalitioning, specifying conditions for minilateralism, forum shifting, and variable-geometry partnerships across security, technology, climate, and trade regimes. Third, it endogenizes domestic transformation, industrial policy, digital public infrastructure, energy transition, and human-capital upgrading as drivers of external bargaining power and standards-shaping capacity. Fourth, it conceptualizes societal power as a distributed capability encompassing diaspora networks, multilingual cultural industries, standards entrepreneurship, and platformed state capacity, with measurable effects on agenda-setting and norm diffusion. Fifth, it advances normative pluralism as a rule-making stance that prioritizes interoperable standards, equity in access to growth corridors, and contextual universals over rigid harmonization. The framework yields falsifiable implications for coalition patterns, supply-chain repositioning, and standards diplomacy, and proposes a mixed-methods research design process tracing, network analysis, input–output/GVC analytics, and text-as-data to evaluate scope conditions and external validity. By integrating civilizational continuities with contemporary geoeconomic and security statecraft, the paper offers a portable, Indigenous paradigm capable of guiding both scholarly inquiry and policy design across the Global South.