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This thesis digs into how Indian foreign policy has shifted since the end of the Cold War, focusing on India's rise in global politics. People usually talk about India as a big new power, but there's more going on beneath the surface. If you look at it through structure-agency theory, you see a push and pull between the limits India faces from the international system and the choices its leaders make at home. India's growing resources and its ideas about how things should be have both tangled together to shape its foreign policy in ways that aren't always straightforward. Ever since independence, India wanted to play a leading role on the world stage, but outside pressures and problems closer to home kept holding it back. Even after 1998, when India's global standing really shot up, the country still found it tough to turn its new advantages into real leadership in South Asia. This study shows that in the post-Cold War world, India's foreign policy is a clear example of how a country's actions abroad grow out of both the world around it and the choices it makes for itself.