How is India responding to the idea of Indo-Pacific? (2019, 10 Marks)
The Indo-Pacific treats the Indian and western Pacific Oceans as one strategic space. Its modern strategic usage owes much to the Indian naval analyst Gurpreet S. Khurana (2007) and to Shinzo Abe’s Confluence of the Two Seas address to the Indian Parliament (August 2007). It makes India a resident power in a theatre once called the “Asia-Pacific”. India has embraced the idea, but on its own terms.
Conceptual response: an inclusive geography
- At the Shangri-La Dialogue (June 2018), Narendra Modi called the region free, open and inclusive, not a strategy or a club, directed against no country, with ASEAN centrality at its core.
- This differs from the American Free and Open Indo-Pacific, which organises the region around competition with China. India stresses rules, UNCLOS and access, keeping room for engagement with Beijing.
- Rory Medcalf (Contest for the Indo-Pacific, 2020) calls the term a mental map that shapes decisions. India’s map places it at the centre, as a pole rather than a follower.
Institutional response
- The MEA created an Indo-Pacific Division (April 2019).
- The Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative (East Asia Summit, November 2019): a voluntary, seven-pillar framework built on existing bodies.
- SAGAR (2015) as the Indian Ocean doctrine, widened into MAHASAGAR (March 2025).
- The IFC-IOR at Gurugram (2018), now a node of the Quad’s maritime-awareness programme.
Partnership response
- Major powers: the Quad, raised to leaders’ level in 2021; Malabar with all four navies since 2020; logistics agreements with the US, France, Japan and Australia; and a ten-year US defence framework (October 2025). These widen India’s reach despite capacity and capital constraints. The Quad now runs on functional deliverables, such as the Critical Minerals Framework launched at its New Delhi foreign ministers’ meeting (May 2026).
- Island states: the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Mauritius and Seychelles sit closest to India’s security, so their choices matter most. Hence coastal radars, patrol vessels and the Agalega airstrip and jetty (2024).
- Southeast Asia: Act East, and BrahMos exports to the Philippines.
Limits
India’s priority and money remain in the Indian Ocean, not the South China Sea. Its connectivity offer trails the Belt and Road, it left RCEP in 2019, and no Quad leaders’ summit has met since 2024. C. Raja Mohan’s Samudra Manthan (2012) explains the urgency: Sino-Indian rivalry has moved to the sea.
Conclusion
India has turned a borrowed label into a maritime extension of strategic autonomy: it embraces the geography, declines the containment logic and builds its own instruments. This marks a shift from a continental to a maritime self-conception, still constrained by naval capacity and financing.