For India, a multipolar world order would also mean a multipolar Asia. Comment. (2025, 10 Marks)
India welcomes multipolarity as the natural setting for strategic autonomy, but a multipolar world and a multipolar Asia are different propositions. The first dilutes any single power’s capacity to constrain India; the second denies regional primacy to the one state able to claim it, China. S. Jaishankar made the link explicit in May 2023: a multipolar world is feasible only through a multipolar Asia.
Why the two need not coincide
- Global plurality, regional hierarchy: if American, European and Russian power diffuses while Chinese power consolidates in Asia, the world grows more plural and Asia less so.
- The power gap: China spent an estimated $336 billion on its military in 2025 against India’s $92.1 billion (SIPRI), and its trade surplus with India reached about $112 billion in 2025–26.
- The stakes: a unipolar Asia would give Beijing a veto over India’s borders, sea lanes and neighbours’ alignments, worse for India than the American unipolarity it adjusted to.
- Theory: in John J. Mearsheimer’s offensive realism (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2001), rising powers seek regional hegemony first; India’s insistence on a multipolar Asia is the counter-move of a state that will not be a junior pole. Amitav Acharya’s “multiplex world” (2014) offers the softer version: order without a single regional manager.
How India builds a multipolar Asia
- Hard power at home: holding the northern frontier and developing the Andaman and Nicobar Islands astride Malacca.
- Strengthening other poles: ASEAN centrality, Act East, and closer ties with Japan, Australia, Vietnam and Indonesia; the Quad as a balancing instrument that is not an alliance.
- Connectivity and public goods: BBIN, the INSTC, IMEC and Chabahar as alternatives to Belt and Road dependence; the International Solar Alliance and MAHASAGAR (2025) as provision rather than coercion.
- Engagement alongside competition: BRICS and the SCO, the 25th Special Representatives’ round (August 2026), and Xi Jinping’s attendance at the New Delhi BRICS summit (September 2026).
Tensions in the strategy
- Autonomy versus balancing: India cannot offset China alone, yet partners that deter demand predictability, which autonomy withholds.
- Neighbours hedge: many prefer extracting from both India and China.
- Uncertain America: no Quad leaders’ summit has met since September 2024; if Washington retrenches, India must fill gaps it lacks resources for.
Conclusion
The statement is accurate. A multipolar world is India’s shield; a multipolar Asia is its stage and its precondition. India must build power at home and pool it with like-minded Asian states, while refusing to call that containment.