India and Central Asia

Central Asia is the one part of India’s extended neighbourhood that India cannot physically reach. Five republics sit directly north of Afghanistan, hold uranium, gas and critical minerals India needs, and are actively looking for partners who are neither Chinese nor Russian. India has a policy, a summit, a secretariat and a dialogue mechanism for them. What it does not have is a road.

Why the region exists as a region, and why India is outside it

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Central Asia is defined less by what it contains than by what surrounds it. It is the only inhabited region of the world with no coastline anywhere within it, and one of its five states, Uzbekistan, is one of only two doubly landlocked countries on earth — every neighbour it has is itself landlocked. Everything the region sells must cross somebody else’s territory to reach a port.

• The five republics are Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, occupying about four million square kilometres between the Caspian Sea and China’s Xinjiang, with a combined population of roughly 80 million.
  • Kazakhstan alone accounts for the bulk of the landmass and rather more than half the region’s economic output; it is the ninth-largest country in the world by area.
  • Uzbekistan is the demographic centre of gravity, with about 37 million people — close to half the region’s population — and borders all four of the others.
  • Turkmenistan holds gas reserves among the largest in the world and has organised its entire foreign policy around a doctrine of permanent neutrality recognised by the United Nations in 1995.
  • Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are the small, mountainous, water-rich and cash-poor states, dependent on hydropower and on remittances earned abroad.
• The region’s surrounding powers are its defining fact. Russia lies to the north and west, China to the east, Iran and Afghanistan to the south. India lies beyond Afghanistan and beyond Pakistan, and touches none of them.
  • India’s nearest approach is the sliver of territory where Pakistan-occupied Kashmir meets Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor, a strip of Afghan land some tens of kilometres wide separating the subcontinent from Tajikistan.
  • This is why Indian official language places Central Asia in the “extended neighbourhood” rather than the neighbourhood proper — a phrase that concedes the distance while asserting the interest.
• Landlocked geography turns transit into leverage. Whoever controls the routes out controls a large part of the region’s economic life, and the competition among external powers is very largely a competition to build and own those routes.

Five states that nobody in them had asked for

The Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991 and the five Central Asian republics became independent without having sought independence. Their nationalist movements were weak, their elites were Communist Party elites, and their economies were wired into an all-Union system that vanished. Independence arrived as an administrative consequence of events in Moscow, and the first task of every new government was to invent a nation that could plausibly own the state it had inherited.

Borders drawn by an empire that no longer exists

• The republics in their present shape date from 1924-1936 by Soviet national-territorial delimitation, which redrew the map of the former khanates of Khiva and Bukhara and the directly ruled Tsarist territory of Turkestan into five ethnically labelled units.
  • Before delimitation, Central Asian peoples were distributed across political units that cut across ethnicity, and no territorial national identity existed in the modern sense.
  • Delimitation consolidated group identity by giving named ethnic groups control of named territories — it did not follow national identity so much as manufacture it.
• Soviet policy then built the nations it had named. Literary languages were codified and in some cases given written scripts for the first time; schools, publishing houses, newspapers, cinema and theatre were established in the titular languages; indigenous administrative cadres were trained.
  • Economic modernisation, mass literacy, territory and a native bureaucracy together produced, within two generations, five recognisable nationhoods where there had been none.
  • Russian served as the lingua franca but was never the official language of the USSR, and in the countryside — where most Central Asians lived — the vernacular remained dominant and Russian was often poorly known.
• Industrialisation simultaneously made the republics multi-ethnic to a degree they had never been. Russian, Ukrainian and other European settlers arrived with the factories, and skilled industrial work became overwhelmingly Slavic.
  • In Kazakhstan the effect was extreme: at independence Kazakhs were 39.5% of the population against 37.7% Russians, non-Kazakhs made up about 57% of the country and 75.8% of all industrial workers, and Russians were a clear majority in the northern and eastern provinces and even in Almaty.
  • The result was a founding contradiction — titular nationalities consolidating inside states that were more ethnically mixed than ever before.
• The nation-building project was incomplete when the USSR collapsed, and sub-national loyalties resurfaced immediately in the insecurity that followed.
  • Clan and regional networks had survived Soviet modernisation informally and revived quickly; in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan they operate largely as extended-family ties, in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan as territorial and regional blocs.
  • Tajikistan is the case where this became catastrophic: regional cleavage produced a five-year civil war from 1992 to 1997 and left the hardest obstacles to building a coherent state.

The Fergana Valley: the place where the borders bite

• The Fergana Valley is the demographic heart of Central Asia and the sharpest illustration of what delimitation did. Roughly 22,000 square kilometres, it holds about 16 million people — a fifth of the region — and is divided among Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
• The 1924 boundaries separated communities that had lived intermixed for centuries, leaving a scatter of enclaves and exclaves, contested irrigation systems and roads that cross three international frontiers in fifty kilometres.
• The violence has been recurrent, not exceptional — the Osh riots of 1990 between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, the Andijan killings in Uzbekistan in May 2005, and the 2010 clashes in Osh and Jalal-Abad which killed more than 400 people on official counts and displaced hundreds of thousands.
• Water is the underlying quarrel. The upstream states, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, want to release water in winter for hydropower; the downstream states, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, want it in summer for cotton and wheat. The Soviet system that traded water for fuel across republican lines disappeared with the Soviet Union and nothing has fully replaced it.
• The Kyrgyz-Tajik frontier remained partly undemarcated for three decades and produced lethal fighting in 2021 and 2022 before a delimitation agreement was concluded in 2025 — a genuine regional achievement, and a measure of how long the inherited problem took to settle.

Presidencies, languages and the management of Islam

• Every republic settled into a strong presidency, and in most cases the first president was the last Soviet-era party leader. Elections have been held; competitive politics has not generally followed.
  • Turkmenistan went furthest: its constitution makes Turkmen ethnic origin a requirement for the head of state.
  • Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan require fluency in the state language without restricting the office by ethnicity; Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan add long residency requirements.
  • Tajikistan’s constitution of November 1994 is the least nationally exclusive of the five, recognising Russian as the language of inter-ethnic communication and guaranteeing all nationalities the free use of their mother tongue.

“We, the people of Tajikistan, as an inseparable part of the world community, seeing ourselves as responsible and duty bound to past, present and future generations… affirming the equality of rights and friendship of all nationalities and peoples.”

— Preamble, Constitution of Tajikistan

• Language laws adopted in 1989-90 raised the titular languages to state-language status and were read by Russian speakers as the future basis of job discrimination, since almost no Russians had learned them and the laws made no provision for teaching them.
  • The result was mass emigration: between 1992 and 1996, Central Asia accounted for 59% of all net migration to Russia from the former Soviet republics, and the net transfer of ethnic Russians in 1989-96 amounted to about 1.3 million people, over 14% of those resident in 1989.
  • This was economically damaging, and the governments knew it. Russians were about 8% of Tajikistan’s population but 21% of its specialists with higher education; the equivalent share in Uzbekistan was 17%.
  • Every state therefore softened its position. Deadlines slipped repeatedly; Kyrgyzstan suspended implementation in 1993 and permitted Russian as an official language from 1996; Kazakhstan’s 1995 constitution gave Russian “official” status alongside Kazakh as the state language and pushed the learning deadline to 2006.
• Islam returned as culture faster than as politics. Mosque construction, shrine visitation, demand for mullahs and the observance of life-cycle rituals all revived sharply, having survived the Soviet period as “everyday Islam” inside the family.
  • The ruling elites were secular ex-communists who understood both the strength and the danger of the revival, and were unwilling either to give the states a religious identity or to let clerics build an independent base.
  • Every state moved early to keep Islamic political organisations out of politics, and the region has still not acquired a politically salient Islamic identity — which is not the same as saying radicalisation is absent.
• The economic transition was brutal. New currencies, new banking systems and the collapse of the all-Union supply chain produced severe recession for the first five years after independence, with sharp falls in output, employment and real wages, and a social sector that has never fully recovered.

The five republics were born as the residue of an empire’s internal administration, and the contradictions the Soviet map created — mixed populations inside ethnic states — remain the region’s core political problem.

What India had before 1991, and what it had to rebuild after

India’s connection to Central Asia is old, dense and — until 1991 — never conducted with Central Asian states, because there were none. The relationship was always with whatever imperial structure held the region: the Silk Road polities, the Timurids, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union. Independence in 1991 handed India five sovereign counterparts for the first time in its history, and simultaneously removed the intermediary through which it had known them.

The long connection

• Trade came first. The overland routes through the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs carried Indian textiles, indigo, spices and precious stones north and brought back horses, silver, fruit and Central Asian silk. Multani and Shikarpuri merchant networks operated in Bukhara, Samarkand and Astrakhan into the nineteenth century.
• Buddhism travelled the same roads. The monastic complexes of Fayaz Tepa and Kara Tepa near Termez in southern Uzbekistan, and the Buddhist material at Ajina Tepa in Tajikistan, are the physical record of an Indic religious world that extended deep into the Amu Darya basin — a fact modern Indian diplomacy has been careful to reactivate.
• The Timurid and Mughal link is the sharpest historical claim India has in the region. Babur was born at Andijan in the Fergana Valley, was driven out of Samarkand, and founded the Mughal empire in India as a displaced Central Asian prince who never stopped regarding Transoxiana as home.
  • Mughal architecture, court Persian, the charbagh garden, miniature painting and the administrative vocabulary of North India all carry a Central Asian inheritance that is still visible.
  • Sufi orders — Naqshbandi, Qadiri, Chishti — moved in both directions, and the shared devotional culture is a real, if diffuse, asset.
• The Soviet period gave India a relationship conducted entirely through Moscow. Indian films, Hindi and Urdu teaching, cultural delegations, technical training and trade all reached Central Asia within the framework of Indo-Soviet friendship, not as bilateral ties.
  • Tashkent carries the strongest single Indian memory in the region — the 1966 India-Pakistan agreement was signed there, and Lal Bahadur Shastri died in the city on 11 January 1966; a memorial to him remains a fixed point of Indian prime ministerial itineraries.
  • Hindi cinema’s popularity across the region is not a diplomatic talking point but an observable social fact, and remains one of the few forms of Indian presence that predates the embassies.

The discontinuity of 1991

• India recognised all five republics and opened missions in 1992-94, having to construct five bilateral relationships from almost nothing: no trade data, no treaty framework, no institutional memory of dealing with them as states, and no route.
• The 1990s were dominated by Afghanistan, not by Central Asia. India’s practical engagement with the region in that decade was largely a function of its support for the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, conducted with Russian and Iranian cooperation and using Tajik territory.
  • India ran a field hospital at Farkhor in southern Tajikistan near the Afghan border to treat Northern Alliance fighters; the commander Ahmad Shah Massoud was flown there after the attack that killed him in September 2001.
  • This was an Afghanistan policy that used Central Asia, not a Central Asia policy — a distinction that matters, because much of India’s regional engagement has since kept that character.
• The economic content stayed close to zero through the 1990s and 2000s, which is why the policy architecture built after 2012 has always run ahead of the substance beneath it.

The access problem, which is the whole policy

Every distinctive feature of India’s Central Asia policy is a response to one fact: there is no route. Understanding this is the difference between reading Indian policy as underperformance and reading it as a rational response to a constraint India cannot lift by itself.

• Pakistan denies transit, and has done so consistently. The land route from Amritsar through Lahore, Peshawar and the Khyber Pass to Kabul and onward to Termez is the historical route and the only short one.
  • The Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement permits Afghan goods to reach India but not Indian goods to travel the other way, an asymmetry Pakistan has maintained deliberately as leverage.
  • Pakistan has occasionally allowed one-off humanitarian consignments — Indian wheat to Afghanistan in 2021-22 moved by road under a specific dispensation — which demonstrates that the closure is a policy choice rather than a physical impossibility.
• Afghanistan is the alternative route, and is not usable. Even where Kabul has been willing, the security situation, the absence of insurance markets, and since 2021 the recognition question have made sustained commercial transit impossible.
  • Afghanistan appears in this note only as the blocked corridor and the source of security spillover; India’s policy towards the Taliban administration is a separate subject.
  • The Pakistan-Afghanistan fighting that began in October 2025 and escalated through 2026 has made the corridor less usable still.
• Chabahar is India’s engineered answer to the Pakistan blockage. As the India-Iran project and as a United States sanctions problem it belongs to India’s Iran policy; here it matters only as the route to Central Asia that does not touch Pakistani soil.
  • The design is straightforward: Indian cargo sails from Kandla or Mumbai to Chabahar on Iran’s Makran coast, moves by road through Milak and Zaranj to Delaram on Afghanistan’s ring road, or northwards through Iran to the Turkmen border at Sarakhs and Incheh Borun.
  • India Ports Global signed a ten-year contract in May 2024 to operate the Shahid Beheshti terminal, with about US$120 million of equipment and a US$250 million credit line — the first long-term Indian operating agreement at a foreign port.
  • By 2025 Chabahar had moved roughly 2.5 million tonnes of wheat and 2,000 tonnes of pulses to Afghanistan, which is a real humanitarian record and a very small commercial one.
• The INSTC is the second answer, and the more ambitious one. A 7,200-km multimodal corridor agreed by India, Iran and Russia in 2000 and operational in fragments since, it runs from Indian ports to Bandar Abbas or Chabahar, north through Iran, and then either through Azerbaijan and Russia or eastward into Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
  • Studies commissioned by Indian freight forwarders put it at roughly 30% cheaper and 40% shorter than the Suez route to Russia and Northern Europe.
  • Its eastern branch is the one that matters for Central Asia, and India has pressed for Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to be brought fully into the corridor’s membership.
  • Its weakest link has always been rail: the missing Rasht-Astara section in northern Iran, requiring hundreds of kilometres of track, tunnels and bridges, has been promised for two decades and is still not complete.

2026: both routes degraded at once by two different wars

This is the single most important thing to say about India’s Central Asia policy in its present condition, and it is not a coincidence of framing but a genuine simultaneity. The two corridors India built to bypass Pakistan run through Iran, and the Iranian corridor has been degraded from two directions at once — by sanctions and war on Iran itself, and by the war in Ukraine at the corridor’s northern end.

• The United States revoked the Chabahar sanctions exemption on 16 September 2025. A six-month conditional waiver expired on 26 April 2026 and was not renewed.
• A 25% American secondary tariff on Iran’s trading partners was imposed on 13 January 2026, naming India among others — the corridor had an economic prologue before it had a military one.
• The Union Budget of 1 February 2026 carried no Chabahar allocation, for the first time in nearly a decade, the previous line having been about ₹100 crore. India nonetheless paid its US$120 million equipment commitment in February 2026, which says a good deal about intent surviving capacity.
• The war on Iran that began on 28 February 2026 closed the Strait of Hormuz for extended periods, and by August 2026 daily transits had fallen to single figures against about a hundred before. The narrative of that war belongs elsewhere; its consequence here is that the sea leg of both corridors became unreliable at the same moment as the land leg lost its legal cover.
• The northern branch of the INSTC runs into Russia and is constrained by sanctions, insurance refusal and payment difficulty arising from the Ukraine war. Its southern and eastern legs run through Iran.
• By April 2026 India was exploring a temporary transfer of its Chabahar free-zone stake to Iranian partners pending sanctions relief — a holding action, not a policy.

India’s Central Asia policy is a connectivity policy without working connectivity, and in 2026 two unrelated wars degraded both of its corridors at once.

The policy architecture India has built

India’s institutional response to the region has been steady, well-designed on paper, and chronically under-resourced. Three layers matter: a stated policy from 2012, a foreign-ministers’ dialogue from 2019, and a leaders’ summit from 2022.

Connect Central Asia, 2012

• Announced by Minister of State for External Affairs E. Ahamed at the first India-Central Asia Dialogue in Bishkek on 12 June 2012, the policy was India’s first attempt to state a comprehensive regional approach rather than five separate bilateral ones.
• Its elements were deliberately broad, and are worth listing because the gap between them and delivery is the substance of the argument about this relationship:
  • Political engagement through regular high-level visits and leader-level contact in bilateral and multilateral settings.
  • Strategic and security cooperation — military training, joint research, counter-terrorism coordination and close consultation on Afghanistan.
  • Multilateral engagement through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Eurasian institutions, with a Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement proposed as the trade instrument.
  • Energy and natural resources, alongside agricultural cooperation on Central Asia’s cultivable land.
  • Medical cooperation, including civil hospitals and clinics in the region.
  • Higher education, including support for a Central Asian University at Bishkek.
  • A Central Asian e-network for tele-education and telemedicine, hubbed in India.
  • Construction and steel, land connectivity through a reactivated INSTC, Indian banking presence, improved air links and tourism, and youth, scholar and academic exchange.

“Central Asian e-network with its hub in India, to deliver tele-education and tele-medicine connectivity.” — E. Ahamed

• The policy’s authorship is significant. It was announced by a Minister of State, not the Prime Minister or the External Affairs Minister, and it was not accompanied by a budget line. The vocabulary was regional; the funding was ministerial.
• The one genuine leader-level moment came in July 2015, when the Prime Minister visited all five republics in a single tour — the first Indian leader to do so — and signed agreements across every capital. That tour, not the 2012 statement, is when the policy acquired political weight.

The India-Central Asia Dialogue, from 2019

• The mechanism operates at foreign-minister level and has met four times. The record is thin enough to list in full.

• The US$1 billion line of credit announced in 2020 is the largest single Indian financial commitment to the region. Its disbursement has been slow, and it is directed mainly at infrastructure, energy, agricultural modernisation and renewables in the smaller economies.
• The fourth Dialogue in June 2025 is the most substantive of the four. It endorsed use of the Shahid Beheshti terminal at Chabahar for Central Asian trade, supported bringing Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan fully into the INSTC, created working groups on banking and digital payments and on healthcare, and committed India to helping build Digital Public Infrastructure in the region on the India Stack model.
• All five foreign ministers reiterated support for India’s permanent membership of a reformed UN Security Council — a consistent regional position and one of the few places where India’s numbers are unambiguously good.

The Summit, and the summit that did not happen

• The first India-Central Asia Summit was held virtually, on 27 January 2022 with all five presidents, marking thirty years of diplomatic relations.
  • It was originally intended as a Republic Day visit — all five presidents were to be chief guests in New Delhi in January 2022 — and was converted to a video summit when the Omicron wave made the visit impossible. The most symbolically valuable Indian outreach to the region was thus delivered over a screen.
  • The Delhi Declaration established an India-Central Asia Centre in New Delhi to act as the secretariat, an India-Central Asia Parliamentary Forum, joint working groups on Afghanistan and on Chabahar, and an India-Central Asia Investment Club under the existing Business Council.
  • It committed India to hosting 100 Central Asian young people annually, expanding ITEC training slots and ICCR scholarships, and running professional training for Central Asian diplomats.
  • Culturally it proposed a Dictionary of Common Words, regular culture-ministers’ meetings and a Buddhist exhibition drawing on the shared archaeology.
  • Crucially, the leaders agreed the summit would be biennial, with the next meeting in 2024.
• No second summit has been held. The 2024 date passed; the June 2025 Dialogue recorded an intention to hold it “at a mutually convenient date in 2025”; that date also passed.
• At the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek, 31 August-1 September 2026, India indicated it would host the second summit, with 2027 the date now reported — which would make the interval between the first and second leaders’ meetings five years rather than two.
• This is the single most telling fact in the file. A mechanism that promised to meet every two years and has met once in five is not evidence of bad faith; it is evidence of a relationship that is not generating enough business to justify a leaders’ meeting.

The architecture is genuinely well designed. What it lacks is traffic — institutions cannot substitute for the trade and transit that would give them something to decide.

The five relationships, in proportion

The republics are not interchangeable, and Indian policy has quietly recognised this by concentrating on two of them.

Kazakhstan: the largest economy and the uranium relationship

• Kazakhstan is the region’s economic anchor and India’s largest partner within it, with bilateral trade of over US$1 billion — the largest single share of India’s trade with the five after Uzbekistan.
• The composition is instructive. Kazakhstan sells India uranium, crude oil and steel products; India sells pharmaceuticals, textiles and consumer goods worth a few hundred million dollars. It is a commodity relationship with a small manufactured counter-flow.
• Kazakhstan is the world’s largest uranium producer, holding roughly 14% of global reserves and producing about 25,800 tonnes in 2025, of which the state company Kazatomprom accounted for some 13,500 tonnes — about a fifth of global primary output.
• India and Kazakhstan first contracted for uranium in 2009 and again during the prime ministerial visit to Astana in 2015, which covered 5,000 tonnes over five years.
• In April 2026 the relationship changed scale: a supply agreement between Kazatomprom and India’s Department of Atomic Energy valued at more than US$4 billion was approved by Kazatomprom shareholders — an arrangement described as exceeding half the company’s total book asset value, and among the largest uranium supply contracts in Asia.
• Kazakhstan is also the state that has moved furthest from the Russian orbit. Its multi-vector foreign policy is doctrine, not improvisation, and it has taken care to be simultaneously in the Eurasian Economic Union, deeply engaged with China, courted by Washington, and — since 6 November 2025 — the first Central Asian state to join the Abraham Accords, announced in Washington alongside a summit with the American president.
• The Abraham Accords accession is the point where this article touches India’s West Asia policy. A Central Asian, Muslim-majority, Russia-adjacent state joining an Israeli normalisation framework tells India two things: that the region’s states will take positions that cut across every bloc they belong to, and that the American economic offer in Central Asia now runs through a West Asian instrument.
• TAPI’s absence is Kazakhstan’s absence too: the pipeline that would have linked Indian energy demand to Central Asian supply routes around Kazakhstan entirely, which is one reason the energy relationship has stayed in uranium rather than hydrocarbons.

Uzbekistan: the most active partner

• Uzbekistan has become the busiest of the five relationships, and the August 2026 visit is the clearest recent evidence of where India’s regional effort is actually concentrated.
• The Prime Minister made a state visit to Tashkent on 29-30 August 2026 — his fourth visit to the country — immediately before travelling to the Bishkek summit. The outcomes were substantive by the standards of this relationship:
  • Relations were elevated to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, with a Coordination Council at foreign-minister level created to supervise implementation.
  • A long-term framework for uranium supply to India’s civil nuclear programme was agreed.
  • Cooperation was agreed on critical and strategic minerals — exploration, processing and integrated value chains — with Indian companies invited into Uzbek mineral projects.
  • A joint feasibility study for a Preferential Trade Agreement was completed and further steps directed, with a joint working group created on non-tariff barriers.
  • A Cultural Exchange Programme for 2026-2030, a Letter of Intent on conserving the Buddhist sites at Fayaz Tepa and Kara Tepa, an MoU on traditional medicine, and three sister-city and sister-state pairings.
  • US$1 million in grant assistance for ecological rehabilitation of the Aral Sea region.
• A long-term arrangement for the supply of Uzbek uranium to India’s civil nuclear programme was announced during the visit, alongside the critical-minerals track.
• Trade stood at about US$1.5 billion at the time of the visit, with a stated target of US$5 billion by 2030. Over 400 Indian companies operate in the country, concentrated in pharmaceuticals, information technology and agriculture.
• Defence cooperation is real if modest: the joint exercise Dustlik was held at Namangan in April 2026 and a joint working group on military cooperation met for the sixth time in August 2026.
• Uzbekistan grants Indian citizens 30-day visa-free entry, the most practically useful concession any Central Asian state has made to Indian travellers.
• The country’s opening under Shavkat Mirziyoyev since 2016 — currency convertibility, border reopening with neighbours, regional summitry — is what made this relationship possible. India is a beneficiary of Uzbek reform, not a driver of it.

Turkmenistan: gas, neutrality and a pipeline that will not arrive

• Turkmenistan holds gas reserves among the largest in the world and has almost no relationship with India, because the only way the gas can reach India is a pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan.
• TAPI — the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline — is designed at 1,814 km and about 33 billion cubic metres a year, with India and Pakistan each entitled to roughly 42% of throughput and Afghanistan 16%. Turkmengaz holds 85% of the consortium; GAIL holds 5%.
• The project has been proposed since 1995, given an inter-governmental agreement in 2010, formalised in 2012 and ceremonially begun in 2015. It was originally to be operational in 2021.
• Construction on the Afghan section began in September 2024 after a Taliban commitment earlier that year, but progress has been slow and difficult to verify: reported completion of the first 153-km stretch to Herat has advanced by a few kilometres at a time, and the Turkmen and Afghan authorities publish figures that do not reconcile. No construction has begun on the Indian section.
• TAPI is the clearest case of the general problem. It is not blocked by economics, price or demand; it is blocked by the same two countries that block every other land route, and no amount of Indian diplomacy in Ashgabat changes that.
• Turkmenistan’s permanent neutrality, recognised by the UN in 1995, also limits what it will do: it stays out of security groupings, keeps the CSTO at arm’s length, and prefers bilateral gas contracts to multilateral corridors.

Kyrgyzstan: education, and a summit venue

• Bilateral trade is the smallest of the five, in the tens of millions of dollars, and there is no obvious commodity to build it on.
• The substantial connection is educational: something in the order of 16,000 Indian students study medicine at Kyrgyz institutions, the largest concentration of Indians anywhere in Central Asia and a genuine, if unplanned, people-to-people link.
• Defence cooperation runs through the joint special-forces exercise Khanjar, held annually since 2011 and alternating between the two countries — one of India’s longest-running bilateral military exercises with any Central Asian state.
• Kyrgyzstan hosted the SCO summit at Bishkek, 31 August-1 September 2026, which the Prime Minister attended, holding bilateral meetings on the margins and attending the opening of the World Nomad Games.
• Kyrgyzstan is also the most politically volatile of the five, with governments overturned by street protest in 2005, 2010 and 2020 — a reminder that the region’s stability is a policy achievement rather than a natural condition.

Tajikistan: the security relationship, and what is true about the air base

• Tajikistan matters to India for one reason: it is the Central Asian state closest to Afghanistan and to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, separated from the subcontinent only by the Wakhan Corridor.
• The military facilities are the most misreported element of India’s Central Asia policy and need stating precisely.
  • Farkhor, in southern Tajikistan near the Afghan border, is where India ran a field hospital in the 1990s in support of the Northern Alliance. It closed after 2001. India separately maintains a 50-bed military hospital in southern Tajikistan.
  • Ayni, also called the Gissar Military Aerodrome, west of Dushanbe, is the facility India actually developed. From around 2001-02 India invested tens of millions of dollars, extending the runway to 3,200 metres and building hangars, overhaul and refuelling facilities, with Border Roads Organisation involvement and about 200 Indian personnel on site.
  • India never permanently based combat aircraft there. A small number of helicopters gifted to Tajikistan were flown by Indian air force personnel for relief work, and a brief fighter deployment took place, but the facility was administered jointly and never was an Indian base in the sense that the term is normally used.
  • The base was used in August 2021 for Indian transport aircraft during the evacuation from Kabul.
  • Tajikistan declined to renew the lease in 2021 and India withdrew in 2022, reportedly under Russian and Chinese pressure over non-regional military personnel. The withdrawal was not publicly disclosed until 2025.
• India did not lose a base; it never had the political weight to keep one. The episode is the clearest single measure of India’s standing in the region relative to Moscow and Beijing.
• Development cooperation is otherwise the main content: several hundred Tajik officials trained under ITEC, over a hundred Tajik cadets through the National Defence Academy and Indian Military Academy, and Indian scholarships.

What India can offer, and what it cannot

India’s regional pitch is not capital. It is a bundle of capabilities that the region genuinely values and that no other external power supplies in quite the same combination — offered at a scale that cannot alter the region’s economic direction.

• Capacity-building is India’s strongest card. The Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation programme and ICCR scholarships have trained officials, doctors, engineers, English teachers and diplomats from all five republics for three decades, and the alumni networks are a real asset.
  • Diplomatic training for Central Asian foreign services is offered through the Sushma Swaraj Institute, and the 2022 summit committed India to expanding both ITEC slots and scholarships.
  • The advantage is that this is cheap and non-threatening, and welcomed by governments that are trying to reduce dependence on any single external partner.
• Pharmaceuticals are India’s largest commercial presence across the region, and in several markets Indian generics are the default supply. This is the one sector where Indian firms have built distribution networks rather than waiting for corridors.
• Information technology and digital public infrastructure are the newest offer and potentially the most consequential.
  • The first IT Park in Tashkent was built on the model of India’s Software Technology Parks.
  • India has committed to assisting the republics in building Digital Public Infrastructure — identity, payments and data layers on the India Stack model — which is an offer China does not make and Russia cannot.
  • A Joint Working Group on banking and digital payments, created in 2025, addresses the mundane obstacle that Indian and Central Asian firms often cannot settle transactions with each other at all.
• Defence training rather than defence sales. Central Asian officers train in Indian academies; India runs Khanjar with Kyrgyzstan and Dustlik with Uzbekistan; but India is not a significant arms supplier to any of the five, and Russian and increasingly Turkish equipment dominates.
• Space services, health care, agriculture and traditional medicine fill out the offer, and the 2025 Dialogue created a working group on health specifically.
• What India cannot offer is what the region most wants: large-scale infrastructure finance, and a route to the sea that works.
  • Indian investment is on the order of US$1.5 billion cumulatively, against Chinese investment measured in tens of billions.
  • The US$1 billion line of credit is the ceiling of India’s financial ambition, and disbursement has been slow.
  • No Indian bank of consequence has established the regional presence that Connect Central Asia envisaged in 2012.

Uranium and critical minerals: where the numbers actually move

Energy and minerals are the one area where Indian engagement has produced commitments large enough to matter, and where the trend line is upward rather than flat.

• Uranium is the concrete success. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan between them supply a substantial and growing share of India’s imported natural uranium, and the two 2026 arrangements — the US$4 billion Kazatomprom contract and the Uzbek long-term supply framework — are the largest India has concluded in the region in any sector.
  • This matters because India’s civil nuclear expansion depends on imported fuel. The government’s stated target is 100 GW of nuclear capacity by 2047 against roughly 8,900 MW installed today, and domestic uranium is inadequate.
  • The legal basis for these contracts changed in 2025: the SHANTI Act, which received assent on 20 December 2025, replaced the Atomic Energy Act of 1962 and the civil nuclear liability legislation of 2010, restructuring the framework within which foreign fuel and technology enter India.
  • Uzbekistan’s earlier contract supplied 1,100 metric tonnes of uranium concentrate over 2022-2026; the country is targeting 7,100 tonnes of annual production by 2030.
• Critical minerals are the newer prize, and the more competitive. Central Asia holds significant deposits of rare earths, tungsten, lithium, titanium, and the tungsten and antimony that defence manufacturing needs.
  • India held the first India-Central Asia Rare Earth Forum in New Delhi in September 2024, and the 2025 Dialogue called for a second at the earliest opportunity.
  • The August 2026 Tashkent agreements specifically cover exploration, processing and integrated value chains, which is the right formulation — the value in critical minerals lies in processing, and that is where Chinese dominance is most complete.
  • India is entering a field the United States entered first. At the C5+1 summit in Washington on 6 November 2025 — the first held in Washington at leaders’ level — close to twenty business agreements were signed, including a US$1.1 billion tungsten venture in Kazakhstan and rare-earth projects in Uzbekistan.
• India is buying commodities, not building supply chains. Uranium contracts are purchases. Processing capacity, refining joint ventures and offtake-linked equity are where influence accumulates, and India’s position there is embryonic.

Terrorism, radicalisation and the limits of the SCO channel

Security is the strand where Indian and Central Asian interests converge most exactly, and where the institutional channel available to India is least useful.

• The convergence is genuine. All five republics regard transnational jihadist networks operating out of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region as their principal external threat, and all five have supported Indian positions on cross-border terrorism with unusual consistency.
  • The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and its successors originated in the Fergana Valley, relocated to Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas, and have long-standing operational links to the networks India confronts.
  • Central Asians formed one of the larger foreign contingents in the Islamic State’s Syrian and Iraqi operations, and Islamic State Khorasan Province has invested heavily in Tajik- and Uzbek-language recruitment.
  • The Crocus City Hall attack near Moscow on 22 March 2024, carried out by Tajik nationals recruited online for ISKP, made the point violently: the vulnerability is not primarily in Central Asia but among Central Asian labour migrants abroad.
  • The fourth Dialogue in June 2025 condemned the Pahalgam attack unequivocally and proposed regular consultations between national security councils — a format India values because it is bilateral in substance even when multilateral in form.
• Narcotics trafficking out of Afghanistan through the Tajik and Turkmen borders is the second shared concern, and the SCO’s anti-narcotics machinery is one of the few areas of practical regional cooperation.
• The SCO is the channel India uses to reach the region, and it is a compromised one. India was admitted at Ufa in 2015 and became a full member at Astana in 2017, partly in order to have a standing seat at a table where all five republics sit.
  • The organisation is dominated by the two powers India is trying to balance, and consensus procedure means India’s connectivity language is regularly diluted.
  • India has consistently refused to endorse the Belt and Road Initiative in SCO documents, and the summit formulations on connectivity now carry Indian language about respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity — a reference to the corridor through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir that everyone present understands.
  • Pakistan’s membership converts the SCO’s counter-terrorism work into a negotiation. India’s insistence on “no double standards” and on refusing to treat terrorism as a strategic asset is a standing feature of its summit statements precisely because the language is contested inside the room.
  • Pakistan holds the SCO chair for 2026-27, which is a fair summary of the mechanism’s limits as an Indian instrument.
• At Bishkek in 2026 the Prime Minister framed India’s approach around security, connectivity and opportunity, pressed for measurable outcomes rather than declaratory language, and called for dismantling the whole ecosystem of terrorist financing, recruitment, radicalisation and safe havens rather than proscribing individuals.
• The Bishkek Declaration did carry connectivity language India wanted, endorsing the Chabahar-Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan corridor and the INSTC — which is worth noting, because it shows the SCO can be made to serve Indian purposes when Indian purposes align with Central Asian ones rather than with Chinese ones.

The competition India is in

India is not the largest, the richest, the closest or the oldest of the outside powers active in Central Asia. It is the one with the fewest instruments and, arguably, the least objectionable intentions — which is worth something, but not as much as a railway.

• China is the economic fact of the region. Trade between China and the five republics reached a record US$106.3 billion in 2025, up about 12% in a year, with Chinese exports of US$71.3 billion against imports of US$35.1 billion.
  • The country breakdown shows how deep the penetration runs: Kazakhstan US$48.7bn, Kyrgyzstan US$27.2bn, Uzbekistan US$16.1bn, Turkmenistan US$10bn (overwhelmingly gas flowing east) and Tajikistan US$4.3bn.
  • Chinese investment in the region is measured in the tens of billions, against Indian investment of roughly US$1.5 billion. India’s trade with the five is of the order of US$2-3 billion — roughly one-fortieth of China’s.
  • China has built its own leaders’ mechanism. The China-Central Asia Summit met at Xi’an in 2023 and at Astana on 16-18 June 2025, where a Treaty of Permanent Good-Neighbourliness, Friendship and Cooperation was signed with all five states, twelve cooperation agreements concluded, four new cooperation centres opened and more than a hundred sister-city pairings formalised. The third summit is due in China in 2027.
  • The comparison with India’s summit record is the honest one: China has held two leaders’ summits in three years and has a permanent secretariat that meets; India has held one in five and is aiming for a second.
• Russia retains security primacy and the labour relationship, and both are being tested. Its position rests less on trade than on three things India cannot replicate.
  • The Collective Security Treaty Organisation includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and Russian bases remain in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Uzbekistan has left twice; Turkmenistan never joined.
  • The Eurasian Economic Union binds Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan into a Russian-led customs and regulatory space, which is why India’s own trade approach to the region now runs partly through FTA negotiations with the EAEU, whose terms of reference were signed on 20 August 2025 on an eighteen-month work plan.
  • Labour migration is the deepest bond and the most coercive. Over 80% of Tajik and Kyrgyz migrants work in Russia; remittances were about 49% of Tajikistan’s GDP in 2024 — the highest ratio in the world — 24% for Kyrgyzstan and 14% for Uzbekistan.
  • Since the Crocus attack Russia has tightened migration control sharply through biometrics, SIM deactivation and registration requirements, and the republics have begun looking for alternative destinations. This is the most significant loosening of Russian influence in a generation, and India is not positioned to benefit from it.
• Turkey’s play is cultural and increasingly military. The Organization of Turkic States brings together Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan as members, with Turkmenistan and Hungary as observers, on an explicitly pan-Turkic basis.
  • Turkish exports to the grouping ran to US$36.6 billion over 2020-24, and Turkey has become a serious defence supplier — joint drone production with Kazakhstan, military-technical agreements and drone purchases by Uzbekistan.
  • For India this is not a neutral development, given Turkey’s alignment with Pakistan; but Turkish influence is constrained by exactly what constrains India, namely the region’s deeper dependence on Russia and China.
• The United States has re-engaged around minerals. The C5+1 format, created a decade ago at official level, met at leaders’ level in Washington in November 2025 with a minerals-centred agenda explicitly framed as a supply-chain alternative to China.
• The Gulf states are the newest entrant, with sovereign wealth deployed into Uzbek and Kazakh renewables and logistics at a scale India does not match.

Debates, critiques and scholarly assessment

The scholarship on India in Central Asia divides, roughly, between those who treat the shortfall as a failure of Indian effort and those who treat it as a structural condition. The second reading is the stronger one, but the first is not empty.

• Alexander Cooley’s account of the external competition is the standard scholarly correction to “new great game” language. His argument is that Central Asian governments are not the objects of great-power rivalry but agents within it: they set the local rules under which external powers operate, extract rents from competing offers, and use the competition to reinforce their own sovereign authority rather than to align with any patron.
  • The implication for India is double-edged. The region wants more external partners, not fewer, which is why India is welcome. But being welcome is not the same as being needed, and states that are skilled at balancing suitors do not reward the poorest one.
• P. Stobdan has argued at length that India’s Central Asia policy suffers from a gap between declaration and implementation — that Delhi announces frameworks it does not fund, treats the region as an adjunct of its Afghanistan and Pakistan calculations, and lacks the institutional machinery to convert political goodwill into economic presence.
• Meena Singh Roy has emphasised connectivity as the binding constraint and the INSTC and Chabahar as the only viable answers, and has consistently linked India’s Central Asia prospects to the state of its Iran relationship — a linkage that 2026 has vindicated in the most damaging possible way.
• Nivedita Das Kundu has worked on the institutional side of the relationship, on the Eurasian frameworks India must engage, and on the argument that India’s regional standing depends on being present in the multilateral bodies where Central Asian states actually make decisions.
• Emilian Kavalski has framed India’s engagement in terms of normative and civilisational appeal rather than material power — the proposition that India offers a model and a set of relationships rather than infrastructure. The critique of this reading is that soft power without logistics does not move goods.
• C. Raja Mohan situates Central Asia within the broader argument that India’s continental strategy has been chronically neglected relative to its maritime one, and that a country whose overland access is blocked by an adversary must either build maritime workarounds or accept a diminished continental role.

Is multilateralism real in this relationship?

The honest answer requires distinguishing what has been built from what it does.

• The formal answer is that multilateralism is real. The mechanisms exist, they are region-wide, and all five states participate willingly. No other external power except China has built a comparable leaders’ architecture, and India built its first.
• The substantive answer is five bilateral relationships with a regional roof. The content that has moved — the Kazatomprom contract, the Uzbek partnership, the Kyrgyz medical-education flow, the Tajik security connection — is bilateral in every case, and none of it was generated by the multilateral machinery.
• The decisive test is the summit’s own promise. A body that agreed in 2022 to meet every two years and has not met since is not a functioning multilateral institution; it is a signalling device.
• The reason is not lack of will on either side. Multilateral formats require multilateral business — shared corridors, common tariffs, joint projects — and the corridor that would generate that business does not work. Regionalism follows traffic; India has architecture without traffic.

The constructive strategic partnership is real as intention and as institution, and thin as practice, because the one thing that would make it thick is a route India cannot open on its own.

Conclusion

• India’s interest in Central Asia is genuine and specific: uranium for a nuclear programme that needs imported fuel, critical minerals for a manufacturing base being built now, a security perimeter north of Afghanistan, and five states that actively want a partner outside the Chinese and Russian orbits.
• The historical claim is stronger than most of India’s regional claims anywhere — Buddhist, Timurid, Sufi and cinematic — and it is genuinely reciprocated. It has not proved convertible into commerce.
• The policy architecture is well designed and under-used, and its two most valuable instruments, Chabahar and the INSTC, were degraded within months of each other in 2026 by wars India had no part in.
• What has actually delivered is bilateral and commodity-shaped: a four-billion-dollar uranium contract with Kazakhstan, a comprehensive strategic partnership and a uranium framework with Uzbekistan, minerals cooperation with both.
• The verdict on the wider ambition is that intention has consistently exceeded instrument. India is a welcome partner rather than a consequential one, and the difference is measured in a trade figure of two to three billion dollars against a Chinese figure above a hundred.
• The binding constraint is geography made political by Pakistan and unstable by Afghanistan. India can work around it — at sea, through Iran, through air corridors, through capacity-building that does not need a road — but it cannot remove it alone, and no amount of summitry substitutes for that fact.