Strategic Autonomy, Multi-Alignment and India’s Contemporary Foreign Policy

India’s foreign policy objective has not changed since 1947 and its method has changed completely. The objective is strategic autonomy — the capacity to decide each question on its merits without a patron’s permission. When the system was bipolar, autonomy meant staying out of both blocs. Now that it is neither bipolar nor reliably unipolar, it means being inside many arrangements at once, several formally inconsistent with each other.

The commonest error made about that policy is to read strategic autonomy as neutrality or equidistance. It is neither. It is the retention of decisional freedom, and it is fully compatible with close partnership on a specific issue — India runs deep defence interoperability with the United States and buys Russian crude, because it declines to let either relationship determine the other.

Strategic autonomy as a concept

The definition, and the three things it is not

• Strategic autonomy is the ability to make consequential choices without an external veto — over alignment, the use of force, trade and technology policy, and the sourcing of weapons and energy.
  • It is a claim about process, not outcome. A state exercising it may agree with Washington nine times in ten; what matters is that the tenth remains available.
  • It presumes capability, since a state with no alternatives has no autonomy to retain.
• Neutrality is a legal status assumed in a specific war, carrying duties of impartiality and abstention. A state that supplies aid, votes and mediates informally is not neutral in any legal sense.
• Isolationism is withdrawal. Indian practice is the opposite — dense participation in the United Nations, peacekeeping, trade regimes and a dozen minilateral formats.
• Equidistance implies equal distance from all parties, which India has never practised or claimed: it was closer to the Soviet Union for two decades and is closer to Washington than to Beijing now. Autonomy is the option to differ.

Concept	What it asserts	India’s relationship to it
Neutrality	A legal status in a particular war	Never claimed; India votes, takes positions, supplies aid
Isolationism	Withdrawal from engagement	Rejected; India is a joiner, not an abstainer
Equidistance	Equal distance from all major powers	Never practised; closeness has always been asymmetric
Non-alignment	Staying out of blocs, judging issues on merit	The Cold War instrument of autonomy, not the objective
Strategic autonomy	Decisional freedom, issue by issue	The constant objective, pursued by changing means

Non-alignment was the instrument and strategic autonomy the objective — which is why abandoning the instrument did not abandon the purpose.

The intellectual lineage

• One argument restated in changing circumstances: every major Indian decision on alignment has been defended in the same vocabulary.
  • Nehru insisted that joining a bloc would mean surrendering the independence just won. A state that had ended external control in 1947 would not accept external determination of its policy in 1949.
  • The Indo-Soviet Treaty of 1971 looks like the opposite. It was defended as autonomy in practice — insurance against Sino-American collusion, carrying no standing alliance obligation.
  • The 1998 nuclear tests removed a permanent external constraint on India’s security choices, against near-unanimous disapproval and at the cost of sanctions: autonomy asserted at a price.
  • The 2008 civil nuclear agreement and NSG waiver secured a country-specific exception to the non-proliferation order rather than accession to it, delivering the regime’s benefits without obligations that would have constrained the deterrent.
  • The refusal to sign the NPT and CTBT, the abstentions on Ukraine and the purchase of Russian energy under sanctions pressure sit in the same line.
• The unifying feature is a preference for exceptions over memberships — terms tailored to India rather than accession to a standing rulebook, which is what a state maximising decisional freedom would seek.

Capability, abstention and the alternative universality

• The 2012 policy report NonAlignment 2.0 restated the doctrine for a post-Cold War world, arguing that autonomy now requires capability rather than abstention.
  • Standing aside costs nothing where both blocs court the uncommitted. Among several unequal poles, a state with no leverage is ignored, so autonomy must be purchased with economic weight, military capacity and technological competence.
  • The report framed the task as enlarging India’s strategic space and capacity for independent agency, noting that India fits no one else’s grouping neatly.
• Its most quoted formulation is that India should be a site for “a new and alternative universality”.
  • The claim is not that India offers a rival model for export, as Soviet socialism and the Washington Consensus were exported.
  • It is that a plural, poor, democratic, non-Western state holding together on those terms shows that modernity has more than one form — that constitutionalism and mass democracy are not Western property.
  • The corollary is a soft power that rests on being an example rather than a template, which is why it is diffuse and hard to convert into influence.
• Jaishankar’s restatement is sharper and less idealist, grounding India’s bridging role in national confidence and interest calculation, and describing a world in which India finds convergence with many and congruence with none.

The critiques, and the reply

• A rationalisation of the inability to commit. The doctrine is then not a strategy but a description of India’s limits dressed as a choice — incapacity called a principle.
• Free-riding on an order others maintain. India benefits from freedom of navigation, an open trading system and American extended deterrence in Asia without contributing to their upkeep.
• Hedging without payoff. A state that keeps every option open finds partners pricing in its unreliability: invited to everything, trusted with nothing.
• Incompatible with the interoperability India already has. The foundational agreements — LEMOA, COMCASA, BECA and the earlier GSOMIA — plus co-production and intelligence sharing create a dependence that doctrinal language does not dissolve.
• The reply: India has no cheaper alternative.
  • It faces two nuclear-armed adversaries on contested land borders, the only major power that does.
  • Its forces run on a Russian-origin inventory that cannot be replaced on any timescale a crisis would respect.
  • Its technological future depends on Western capital, semiconductors and research systems.
  • A state with that combination loses more by choosing than by hedging, so hedging is rational rather than evasive.
• The position between these: strategic autonomy is a real strategy with a real expiry condition. It works while the great powers tolerate it — a bet on the system staying loose.

The concept under stress: Kashmir, Ukraine and the 2026 trade understanding

Two episodes are offered as proof that the doctrine still operates: the rejection of American mediation on Kashmir, and the refusal to condemn Russia over Ukraine. Both are harder cases than they look, because the same period produced a trade understanding with Washington whose terms the two governments described differently.

Rejecting mediation on Kashmir

• India’s bilateralism on Kashmir is its most consistent diplomatic commitment, and it long predates the present government.
  • The Simla Agreement of 1972 bound India and Pakistan to settle differences bilaterally by peaceful means, read ever since as excluding third parties; the Lahore Declaration of 1999 reaffirmed the frame.
  • The objection is to mediation as a category, not to any mediator. Internationalisation converts an asymmetric bilateral question into a multilateral one, diluting India’s superior weight.
• The 2025 episode was the sharpest test. After hostilities ceased on 10 May 2025, the American President repeatedly claimed credit for brokering the halt and linked it to trade leverage over both states.
  • India’s response was official and repeated: the cessation was agreed directly between the two Directors General of Military Operations, at Pakistan’s request, with no mediation and no trade linkage.
  • The denial was restated in Parliament and by the Ministry of External Affairs over successive weeks against a claim that was itself repeated — a costly consistency.
  • Accepting even a face-saving mediation narrative would have created a precedent, which a state defending a fifty-year bilateralist doctrine cannot concede.

Refusing to condemn Russia

• India neither condemned nor endorsed the invasion of Ukraine, and the refusal was symmetrical in both directions.
  • It abstained on the Security Council and General Assembly resolutions while invoking sovereignty, territorial integrity and the UN Charter in its explanations of vote — naming the violated principle without naming the violator.
  • It supplied humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and ran Operation Ganga, evacuating some 22,500 Indian nationals.
  • It declined to join Western sanctions, on the standing position that unilateral sanctions outside a Security Council mandate lack legal authority.
• The material reasons are neither concealed nor trivial.
  • A very large share of Indian equipment is of Russian origin, and spares, overhauls and munitions come from a single source.
  • Discounted Russian crude became a macroeconomic instrument after 2022, cushioning an import bill that dominates the current account.
  • Russia remains a veto-holding permanent member whose further alignment with China India has an interest in slowing.
• The organising formulation came from Modi’s remark to Putin at Samarkand in September 2022.

“Today’s era is not an era of war.”

Narendra Modi, to Vladimir Putin at Samarkand, September 2022

• The strategic-autonomy reading is that the position was intelligible only in that idiom, and bought something no aligned state could have had.
  • India was the one major economy able to talk to both parties, and was used accordingly — on grain shipments, on the Zaporizhzhia plant, and in the messaging around nuclear threats.
  • It demonstrated the doctrine’s core proposition in the hardest case: partnership with the United States carried no right of veto over India’s other relationships.
• The critical reading is that the position was bought on credit: India took the benefits of Western technology partnership and of Russian energy at once, and the arrangement lasted only while Washington chose not to force the question.

The February 2026 complication

• The United States imposed a punitive tariff tranche tied explicitly to Russian oil purchases, taking the headline rate on Indian goods to 50% — the first time a close partner was penalised for exercising the autonomy India claims.
• Sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil in November 2025 then did what tariffs had not: between December 2025 and February 2026 Russia’s share of Indian crude imports fell below 25% for the first time in two years.
  • The mechanism was payment, shipping and insurance friction, not a declared change of policy: refiners and their banks withdrew from transactions they could no longer clear.
• An India-US trade understanding was announced on 2–3 February 2026, cutting tariffs from 50% to 18% by removing the punitive tranche and part of the base rate.
  • The American President stated that India had agreed to stop buying Russian oil, attaching large figures for Indian purchases of American goods.
  • The Indian government’s own statement did not mention Russian oil. The Prime Minister confirmed the reduced tariff and nothing else; Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said only that sensitive sectors, agriculture and dairy among them, had been protected.
  • Both characterisations stand, and the asymmetry is the analytically interesting fact. One government describes a concession on the central question of India’s autonomy; the other describes a tariff cut. Neither has retracted, and no full agreement text exists.
• The record since does not settle it. A limited American waiver in March 2026 permitted renewed purchases, and Russian crude fell and partially recovered rather than disappearing.

Multi-alignment and issue-based coalitions

What multi-alignment is

• Multi-alignment is the simultaneous pursuit of several partnerships that are formally inconsistent with one another, none carrying an alliance commitment, each with its own issue agenda.
  • Each is entered for what it delivers on a specific problem — technology, capital, energy, maritime awareness, continental reassurance — not as a declaration of allegiance.
  • The inconsistency is deliberate and unconcealed. India does not claim its partnerships are compatible, only that each is separately in its interest.
• It is not non-alignment, which meant staying out of blocs. Multi-alignment means joining most of them, and the older vocabulary cannot describe a state inside both the Quad and the SCO.
• It is not hedging in the narrow sense. Hedging insures against a single identified risk; multi-alignment is portfolio construction across unrelated risks.
• It is not bandwagoning, which aligns with the stronger power to share its gains.

Strategy	Core move	India’s position
Non-alignment	Stay outside both blocs	The Cold War method, formally abandoned
Alliance	Accept obligation for guarantee	Refused; the refusal is the defining limit
Bandwagoning	Join the stronger side	Rejected; it concedes the veto autonomy exists to prevent
Hedging	Insure against one identified risk	A component, not the whole design
Multi-alignment	Hold inconsistent partnerships at once	The current method, and genuinely novel

The evidence

• The Quad — India with the United States, Japan and Australia — is the maritime and technology grouping, revived at official level in 2017 and raised to leaders’ level in 2021.
  • Its agenda is broad and largely non-military: maritime domain awareness, critical technologies, vaccines, infrastructure, undersea cables, space and critical minerals.
  • India resists its militarisation and its description as an alliance, and it carries no mutual defence obligation.
• BRICS places India alongside China and Russia, in a grouping organised around reform of Western-designed institutions.
  • Its deliverables are the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement; expansion since 2024 to Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE has diluted its coherence.
  • India has resisted turning it into an anti-dollar or anti-Western bloc, which is where multi-alignment shows its seams.
• The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation places India alongside China, Russia and Pakistan — the continental counterpart to the Quad’s maritime logic.
  • Its value is presence in a Eurasian security conversation India would otherwise be excluded from, plus the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure.
  • India has used its summits to withhold endorsement of the Belt and Road Initiative, the only member consistently to do so.
• I2U2 — India, Israel, the UAE and the United States — is a functional grouping on food, water, energy and technology investment, with no security content.
• The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, announced at the 2023 G20, links India by sea to the Gulf, overland across Arabia and on to Europe.
• The G20 presidency of 2023 secured the New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration by consensus despite the Ukraine split, and the African Union’s admission as a permanent member.
• Regional formats: the Indian Ocean Rim Association and BIMSTEC, the working alternative to a deadlocked SAARC.
• Institutions India created rather than joined show the strategy is constructive rather than opportunistic: the International Solar Alliance with France in 2015, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure in 2019, and the Global Biofuels Alliance in 2023 — each with no security content.
• The decisive point: the Quad and the SCO are held together. One exists because of Chinese maritime assertiveness; the other has China as a founder and Pakistan as a peer. India holds both, which is the novel feature of the current phase — the willingness to sustain formal inconsistency in public.

The vocabulary and the enabling conditions

• Jaishankar’s terminology avoids the word alliance entirely. He speaks of issue-based alignments and of convergences rather than commitments, and of managing several relationships whose gains in one can be used in another.
  • The formulation makes inconsistency a design feature rather than an embarrassment: if partnerships are issue-specific, membership of two rival groupings is no odder than using two suppliers.
• The strategy is available because the architecture is looser than the Cold War’s. Today’s groupings are summit-based, non-binding and overlapping, and exit costs are low.
• Sreeram Chaulia describes the present as an emergent multipolar order — several suitors, none able to enforce exclusivity.
• Jaishankar’s own inventory of the shifts amounts to a checklist of the present phase.
  • Issue-based alignments; active management of great-power relationships; wider regional outreach.
  • Decisions taken on risk-benefit calculation, a willingness to use military power, and defence policy folded into diplomacy.
  • Business and investment placed at the centre, and the deliberate use of soft power and the diaspora.

“There will be convergence with many but congruence with none.”

S. Jaishankar

The costs

• Partners discount a state that will not commit. A guarantee is worth more than a convergence, and allies who paid the price of commitment resent one who takes the benefits without it.
• It yields no security guarantee. Nothing in the Quad, BRICS or the SCO obliges anyone to assist India, and the 2020 boundary crisis was managed by India alone.
• It is a bet on the system, not on India. If competition tightens into bloc politics the available space contracts, and the 2025 tariffs were a preview of that pressure.
• It is manpower-intensive. A dozen minilaterals with working groups and deliverables strains a service of roughly a thousand career diplomats — the constraint the companion note on the executive institutions develops.

The current position of the Quad

• The Quad Foreign Ministers’ Meeting was held in New Delhi in May 2026, with critical minerals and supply-chain resilience prominent.
• The India-hosted Quad Leaders’ Summit never took place. India held the chair from the Wilmington summit of September 2024, and the leaders’ meeting was deferred repeatedly.
  • Following the Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in New Delhi in May 2026, India passed the hosting baton to Australia, with the standalone annual summit expected to give way to meetings on the margins of larger gatherings.
  • The stated reason is scheduling; the reading that matters is that leader-level attention has thinned, which is what happens to an arrangement nobody is obliged to attend.

The Indo-Pacific

From Asia-Pacific to Indo-Pacific

• The change of name is a change in the unit of analysis, and it makes India a resident power in a region that previously excluded it.
  • “Asia-Pacific” was a Pacific-centred construct organised around East Asian production networks and American alliance architecture, and India sat outside it by definition.
  • “Indo-Pacific” treats the Indian and western Pacific Oceans as one continuous strategic space, joined by the sea lanes through the Malacca, Sunda and Lombok straits.
  • Once the two oceans are one theatre, the state that dominates the northern Indian Ocean is inside it rather than adjacent to it. The reconceptualisation is a promotion.
• The framing’s origin is Japanese. Shinzo Abe’s address to the Indian Parliament in August 2007, on the confluence of the two seas, argued that the two oceans were becoming one dynamic space.
• It was adopted by the United States, which renamed its Pacific Command the Indo-Pacific Command in 2018; by Australia; by France as a resident Indian Ocean power; by the European Union in 2021; and by ASEAN in its 2019 Outlook.
• China rejects the term, reading it as a containment coalition assembled under a geographic label.

India’s own conception

• India’s position was set out in the Shangri-La Dialogue address of June 2018, and it differs from the American conception on four points.
  • The region is free, open and inclusive — the third adjective is India’s addition and does the work, since it means no state is excluded, China included.
  • It is a geography, not a strategy: a natural region defined by the sea, not a coalition defined by a shared adversary.
  • It is not directed against any country, a formulation India has repeated ever since.
  • It is not a club or a grouping, and should acquire no membership criteria.
• ASEAN centrality is the structural commitment that follows: Southeast Asian institutions must remain the region’s convening core rather than being displaced by great-power minilaterals.
• The divergence from Washington is real. The American conception is competitive and organises the region around Chinese behaviour; India’s is inclusive and organises it around rules and access — which is why India’s policy looks equivocal from Washington and principled from Delhi.

Question	The American conception	India’s conception
What is it?	A strategy of competition	A geography defined by a shared maritime space
Who belongs?	Partners sharing the strategic assessment	All states with a stake, China included
Directed against?	Chinese coercion, stated openly	No country, stated in every formulation
Core institution	The alliance system, with the Quad layered on it	ASEAN centrality and open architecture
Instrument	Deterrence and forward presence	Development, capacity-building, maritime awareness

The Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative

• The Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative was launched at the East Asia Summit in Bangkok in November 2019 as India’s institutional contribution to the concept.
  • It is a non-treaty, voluntary arrangement, built on existing bodies — the same low-obligation design that characterises everything India constructs, and organised in seven pillars that partners lead or co-lead.
• The pillars and their leads: maritime security (India and the United Kingdom); maritime ecology (Australia and Thailand); maritime resources (France and Indonesia); capacity building (Germany); disaster risk reduction (India and Bangladesh); science and technology cooperation (Italy and Singapore); and trade connectivity (Japan and the United States).

SAGAR and MAHASAGAR

• SAGAR — Security and Growth for All in the Region — was articulated in Mauritius in March 2015 and became the organising doctrine of India’s Indian Ocean policy.
  • Its content: safeguarding India’s maritime interests; security and economic cooperation with littoral states; collective action against disasters and maritime threats; and the principle that the region’s security rests with those who live in it.
  • Its significance was rhetorical as much as operational: it framed Indian primacy as a service provided rather than a sphere claimed, which is how a preponderant state reassures small neighbours.
• MAHASAGAR — Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions — was announced during the Prime Minister’s visit to Mauritius in March 2025 as SAGAR’s successor.
  • The change is one of scope: from a regional doctrine for the Indian Ocean to a global maritime and development vision oriented to the Global South, extended to Africa, Latin America and the Pacific islands.
  • Read against SAGAR it tracks India’s own self-description — from a regional power securing its neighbourhood to a state claiming a worldwide development-partner role.

Maritime security in Indian foreign policy

Why it has grown

• India’s economic existence is seaborne, which alone would make maritime security a first-order foreign policy question.
  • About 95% of India’s trade by volume and roughly 68% by value moves by sea, so growth is hostage to the security of lanes India does not control.
  • Almost all energy imports arrive by sea. Crude import dependence reached a record 88.7% in 2025-26, and most of that crude transits the Strait of Hormuz.
  • The Indian Ocean carries a very large share of world seaborne oil, and most East Asian energy imports cross it — giving India latent leverage and others a stake in the region’s stability.
• The physical stake is large: a coastline of about 7,500 kilometres, an exclusive economic zone of some 2.37 million square kilometres, and more than a thousand islands.
• The Indian Ocean is the only theatre in which India is the largest resident power. On the continental frontier it is the weaker party against China; at sea, geography and proximity favour it.
• The doctrinal consequence is the Navy’s description as a net security provider — a state supplying surveillance, escort, disaster relief and evacuation rather than merely consuming them.

The threats

• Chinese naval presence and port access is the structural concern.
  • The base at Djibouti, opened in 2017, is China’s first overseas military facility and sits on the Bab el-Mandeb approaches.
  • Gwadar in Pakistan is the maritime terminus of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, near the mouth of the Gulf.
  • Hambantota in Sri Lanka passed to a Chinese operator on a 99-year lease in 2017 after debt restructuring — the standard illustration of lending converting into strategic access.
  • Kyaukpyu in Myanmar terminates the pipelines that let China bypass Malacca, the vulnerability Chinese planners call the Malacca dilemma.
  • The pattern is popularly called a string of pearls, with a fair caveat: commercial port access is not a basing network. Most of these facilities are civilian and hard to use militarily; the concern is trend and optionality, not encirclement.
• Piracy off Somalia, largely suppressed after 2012, resurged from late 2023, with hijackings far into the Arabian Sea.
• Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping from late 2023 forced rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope, adding much higher freight and insurance costs on Indian trade with Europe. The disruption has proved structural.
• Maritime terrorism has been a standing concern since 26/11 in 2008, whose perpetrators reached Mumbai by sea after hijacking a trawler.
• Trafficking in narcotics, arms and persons, and illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing — at once an economic loss and a source of friction with Sri Lanka.

India’s response

• Maritime domain awareness is the centrepiece, since information is the cheapest form of maritime power.
  • The Information Fusion Centre – Indian Ocean Region, established at Gurugram in December 2018, hosts liaison officers from around fourteen partner countries — Australia, Bangladesh, France, Japan, the Maldives, Mauritius, Seychelles, Singapore, Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom and the United States among them.
  • It is fed by white-shipping agreements exchanging commercial traffic data, and issues advisories on piracy, trafficking and vessels of interest.
• The coastal security architecture was rebuilt after 26/11 on a three-tier design — the Navy furthest out, the Coast Guard in territorial waters and marine police inshore, with joint operations centres and a coastal radar chain.
• Operational deployments have grown in reach.
  • Continuous anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden since 2008, with escort of merchant vessels and, on the Navy’s count, thousands of ships and tens of thousands of seafarers protected.
  • The recapture of MV Ruen in March 2024 far out in the Arabian Sea, supported by a long-range air drop, and the freeing of MV Lila Norfolk — the clearest demonstration of expeditionary reach.
• Exercises: Malabar with the United States, Japan and Australia; MILAN at Visakhapatnam; Varuna with France; SIMBEX with Singapore; and participation in RIMPAC.
• Capacity-building for littoral states is where SAGAR became operational — coastal radar chains in Mauritius, Seychelles, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, transfers of patrol vessels and aircraft, hydrographic support, and training at Indian academies.
• Access arrangements are pursued as logistics access rather than bases in the American sense.
  • Duqm in Oman, giving Indian warships a dry dock and support facilities well placed for the western Indian Ocean.
  • Sabang in Indonesia, at the northern tip of Sumatra near the Malacca approaches.
  • Agalega in Mauritius, where an airstrip and jetty built with Indian assistance were inaugurated in 2024, and Assumption Island in Seychelles, where the comparable project stalled on local objection.
  • Chabahar in Iran, where India Ports Global signed a ten-year operating agreement in May 2024, now hostage to the sanctions cycle: the American exemption was revoked in September 2025 and replaced by a short renewable waiver.
  • The Andaman and Nicobar Command, India’s only tri-service command, sits astride the western approaches to Malacca.
• The Deep Ocean Mission extends maritime policy into resources — polymetallic nodule exploration in the Central Indian Ocean Basin and deep-sea technology.

The gaps

• Force levels lag the stated requirement. The Navy operates around 140 ships against an ambition of a substantially larger fleet, and delivery timelines for approvals in hand run into the 2030s.
• The submarine arm is the sharpest shortfall — a conventional force below the sanctioned requirement, ageing boats and a repeatedly delayed replacement programme.
• The aircraft-carrier debate is unresolved. One school holds a third carrier essential to sea control; the other holds carriers costly and vulnerable to anti-ship missiles, with submarines better value. The decision has been deferred.
• The maritime turn competes with a continental commitment that grew rather than shrank. The 2020 crisis moved formations and money back to the Himalaya, and India cannot fund a two-front land posture and a blue-water navy from one budget without choosing.

India’s maritime strategy is ambitious in doctrine, credible in surveillance and diplomacy, and under-resourced in platforms — intent outrunning capability.

Connectivity as strategy

• Connectivity is where competition with China is most direct, because the Belt and Road Initiative set a standard of financing and delivery India cannot match.
• IMEC is the flagship response: a ship-rail-ship route from Indian west-coast ports to the UAE, across Arabia by rail to Israeli Mediterranean ports and on to Europe, with pipelines, undersea cables and green hydrogen infrastructure alongside.
  • Its attraction is that it is a coalition project — India, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the EU, France, Germany, Italy and the United States — rather than a single creditor’s undertaking.
  • Its difficulty is that it crosses the most politically volatile ground on earth, and progress since 2023 has been slower than the announcement implied.
• Chabahar and the International North-South Transport Corridor answer Pakistan’s denial of overland transit, which cuts India off from Afghanistan and Central Asia. Both are chronically under-delivered, held back by sanctions exposure, incomplete rail links and financing gaps.
• In the neighbourhood the cheaper forms have progressed: cross-border rail and road links, electricity trade with Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, inland waterways, pipelines, and UPI acceptance abroad.
• India’s connectivity offer is under-resourced relative to the challenge it answers. Indian projects are better designed on sovereignty and debt terms and worse delivered on speed and scale.

Partnerships for a free and open Indo-Pacific

• The partnership set is real, and each partner supplies something different.
  • The United States: the foundational agreements, the 2+2 ministerial, co-production, the iCET framework and its successor TRUST, and the deepest intelligence and maritime-awareness relationship India has.
  • Japan: the Special Strategic and Global Partnership, the largest source of concessional development finance India receives, the high-speed rail project and a logistics agreement.
  • Australia: ECTA in force since 2022, a reciprocal logistics arrangement, critical minerals cooperation and a shared Indian Ocean interest that is easily underrated.
  • France: the most autonomy-compatible partner India has — a resident Indian Ocean power through Réunion and Mayotte, and a supplier that has never imposed political conditions on defence sales.
  • The European Union: the Trade and Technology Council, the concluded trade agreement, connectivity cooperation and a growing maritime engagement.
  • ASEAN and its members: ASEAN centrality as doctrine, the Act East policy, and defence relationships with Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines, to which India has exported the BrahMos missile.
  • South Korea for shipbuilding and manufacturing investment, and the Gulf for energy, some nine million Indian workers, remittances and investment.
• Do these ties deliver? Partly, and unevenly, and the judgement has to be made function by function.
  • On maritime awareness, capacity building and interoperability they deliver well. India sees more of the Indian Ocean and sustains more deployments than ever before, almost all of it partnership-derived.
  • On technology and defence industrialisation they deliver slowly, at a pace set by partners’ export-control systems rather than by India’s ambition.
  • On connectivity they under-deliver. IMEC has advanced little and Chabahar is sanctions-hostage.
  • On deterrence they deliver nothing directly, and were never designed to. No partner is obliged to act, and the 2020 crisis was handled by India alone.
  • On trade with the principal partner they proved actively vulnerable, as the 2025 tariff episode showed.
• The net judgement: these partnerships have measurably improved India’s capability and situational awareness, and bought neither security guarantees nor insulation from coercion by the partners themselves — the expected return on relationships built without obligations.

Hard power, Pakistan and the hyper-realism debate

The trajectory of force below the nuclear threshold

• The interval between provocation and response has shortened at each iteration, and the definition of what may be struck has widened.
  • After the attack on Parliament in December 2001, India mobilised for ten months under Operation Parakram and did not strike. The lesson drawn was that mobilisation is slow, costly and produces coercion without effect.
  • After 26/11 in November 2008, India used no force at all, relying on the diplomatic isolation of Pakistan — defended as responsible, criticised at home as an admission that nuclear weapons had made retaliation impossible.
  • After Uri in September 2016, India conducted surgical strikes across the Line of Control against launch pads and, the real innovation, announced them publicly. Escalation was managed by staying on the disputed side of the border.
  • After Pulwama in February 2019, the Balakot air strike crossed the international boundary into Pakistan proper for the first time since 1971. Pakistan retaliated the next day and an Indian pilot was captured and returned.
  • The pattern is a staircase: each episode makes normal what the previous one treated as escalatory.
• The capability behind the posture has grown: India ranked fifth in world military spending in 2025 at about $92 billion, and holds the world’s second-largest force by active manpower.

The 2025 sequence

• The Pahalgam attack of 22 April 2025 killed 26 civilians, most of them tourists, in the Baisaran meadow — the deadliest attack on civilians in Jammu and Kashmir in years, its victims selected to maximise communal effect.
• The immediate response was non-military and unprecedented in kind.
  • The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 was held in abeyance, the first suspension of a treaty that had survived three wars.
  • The Attari-Wagah integrated check post was closed, ending the only functioning overland trade and travel route.
  • Visas for Pakistani nationals were cancelled, including under the SAARC exemption scheme, and diplomatic representation was downgraded.
• Operation Sindoor was launched on 7 May 2025 against nine terrorist infrastructure sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir, including facilities of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba.
  • The official characterisation was “focused, measured and non-escalatory”, and the government stated that no Pakistani military facility was targeted in the opening strikes.
  • Escalation followed over 8–10 May — drone and missile exchanges, air-defence engagements and, in the final phase, strikes on Pakistani airbases, crossing from counter-terrorist into counter-military targeting.
  • Hostilities ceased on 10 May 2025 after contact between the two Directors General of Military Operations.
• The diplomatic follow-through was as notable as the operation: seven all-party parliamentary delegations, 59 members across 33 countries, were sent to explain India’s position.

The “new normal”

• The Prime Minister’s address of 12 May 2025 set out three principles now widely called India’s new normal.
  • Assured and decisive retaliation on India’s own terms. Any terrorist attack draws a military response at a time, place and intensity India chooses — converting retaliation from a decision taken after each incident into a standing commitment.
  • No tolerance of nuclear blackmail. India will not be deterred from conventional retaliation by the threat of nuclear escalation, challenging the assumption held since 1998 that Pakistan’s arsenal capped Indian conventional options.
  • No distinction between terrorists and the governments that harbour them. This collapses the separation between a group and its sponsor, and makes a strike on a state’s military assets a legitimate answer to a non-state attack.

Episode	Response	Depth and target set	What it established
Parliament, 2001	Ten-month mobilisation, no strike	None	Coercive diplomacy without force
26/11, 2008	Diplomatic isolation only	None	Nuclear deterrence appeared to hold
Uri, 2016	Surgical strikes, announced publicly	Launch pads across the Line of Control	Ground action across the LoC is normal
Pulwama, 2019	Balakot air strike	Air power across the international boundary	Air power inside Pakistan proper is available
Pahalgam, 2025	Operation Sindoor, plus treaty abeyance	Nine sites, then Pakistani airbases	Military targets and treaty leverage are available

Has India turned hyper-realist?

• Hyper-realism is the third of the three schools Kanti Bajpai identifies in Indian strategic thought, alongside Nehruvianism and neoliberalism; the framework is set out in the companion note on the determinants of Indian foreign policy.
  • It holds that conflict is endemic to a system of self-interested states, that force is the principal currency of security, that institutions and interdependence do not restrain adversaries, and that India should build hard power and use it.
• The case for saying hyper-realism has gained momentum is substantial.
  • The response interval collapsed — ten months in 2001, twelve days in 2019, fifteen days in 2025, with non-military measures beginning within twenty-four hours.
  • The target set widened at every iteration, from launch pads to terrorist headquarters to military airbases.
  • Nuclear deterrence was explicitly rejected, in a formal address by the head of government: a doctrinal statement, not a tactical one.
  • The state and the group were treated as one, removing the distinction that let both sides preserve deniability.
  • A treaty that survived three wars was placed in abeyance, converting a resource kept outside the conflict into an instrument of coercion — a position held through the Court of Arbitration’s award of 31 August 2026 that the treaty remains in force.
  • Domestic politics reward visible retaliation, and the electoral premium on demonstrated toughness is a real input into crisis decision-making.
• The case against overstating it is equally substantial.
  • The operations were declared non-escalatory and were terminated within four days, at Pakistan’s request, without India pressing the advantage.
  • India sought no territorial gain, which a genuinely hyper-realist actor with escalation dominance would have considered.
  • Escalation was cheap in this case. Bilateral trade was negligible, there was no interdependence to protect and no third party with a stake in restraining India. A doctrine tested only where it costs nothing has not really been tested.
  • India’s conduct toward every other adversary is not hyper-realist. The 2020 boundary crisis with China — a graver loss of territory and life against a far more capable adversary — produced disengagement and, by 2025-26, a managed normalisation.
  • A single crisis is not a doctrine. Doctrines are shown by repetition under varying conditions, and the new normal has been stated more often than applied.
• The judgement: something real changed, and it is narrower than the label suggests — a calibrated lowering of the threshold for punitive action against a single adversary, where escalation costs are low and domestic returns high. Pakistan policy has become realist; Indian foreign policy has not.

A doctrine applied to one adversary in one theatre where escalation is cheap is a posture, not a worldview.

The nuclear dimension

• India’s declared doctrine of 2003 rests on credible minimum deterrence, no first use and massive retaliation to a first strike, with a stated exception for chemical or biological attack on Indian forces.
• Whether no first use has been diluted is a live debate. Ministerial statements that the commitment depends on circumstances have been read as a hedge toward pre-emption; the written doctrine has not been revised.
• The no-nuclear-blackmail formulation interacts with Pakistan’s doctrine, which uses ambiguity about a low threshold to cap Indian conventional operations. India asserts the cap is not real, and that cannot be established except by testing it.

Economic diplomacy

Why the economic content has grown

• Economic diplomacy now sets the agenda for relationships once organised around politics, because India’s external economic exposure has risen faster than any other measure of its position.
  • Trade in goods and services has risen from around 15% of GDP before 1991 to roughly half in recent years, converting external conditions into a domestic political variable.
  • India is among the world’s five or six largest economies and the fastest-growing major one. Reported fourth-largest in 2025, it was placed sixth on the IMF’s April 2026 World Economic Outlook after a national-accounts base-year revision to 2022-23 and an 11% rupee depreciation, with the IMF projecting a return to fourth in 2027.
  • Remittances reached $135.46 billion in FY 2024-25, a record and the largest flow to any country, which makes diaspora welfare a foreign policy interest in itself — developed in the companion note on soft power and the diaspora.
• What India seeks from partners has changed accordingly: investment, technology, market access, energy and supply-chain position, in place of the aid and concessional finance that dominated the first four decades.

The trade-agreement wave

• India has concluded more trade agreements since 2022 than in the previous twenty years, after a decade in which it signed almost nothing.

Agreement	Status
India-UAE CEPA	In force since May 2022; the template for the current wave
India-Australia ECTA	In force since December 2022; CECA negotiations continuing
India-EFTA TEPA	In force October 2025, with an investment commitment of about $100 billion over fifteen years
India-UK CETA	Signed July 2025; entered into force 15 July 2026, with a social security agreement
India-Oman CEPA	Signed December 2025; implementation subject to ratification
India-EU FTA	Concluded 27 January 2026; legal scrub and ratification pending
India-New Zealand FTA	Signed 27 April 2026; ratification pending
India-United States	February 2026 understanding, tariffs cut from 50% to 18%; no full FTA

• The pattern is instructive. India now signs comprehensive agreements covering services, investment, mobility and regulatory cooperation, and signs them with developed economies whose markets it wants.
• The EFTA investment commitment is the genuine innovation: tariff concessions traded for a quantified investment obligation, a template no other country’s agreements contain.

The limits set by domestic politics

• India withdrew from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in November 2019, at the final stage, after seven years of negotiation.
  • The stated reasons were the trade deficit with China, inadequate protection against import surges, and the exposure of dairy and agriculture to Australian and New Zealand competition.
  • The decision cost India membership of the world’s largest trading bloc and a place in the East Asian production networks it says it wants to join.
• Agriculture and dairy have been protected in every negotiation since — with the EFTA states, the United Kingdom, the European Union and, on the Indian government’s account, the United States in 2026.
• Economic diplomacy therefore operates inside a domestic political boundary that has not moved. India will trade access in manufactures and services; it will not trade the livelihoods of a very large agricultural population.

Energy security

• Energy is the standing constraint on Indian foreign policy, because it turns every producing region into a strategic interest whether India wants one there or not.
  • Crude import dependence reached a record 88.7% in 2025-26, with domestic output falling against rising demand.
  • The Gulf remains the principal source — Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the UAE above all — which is why India’s West Asia policy is simultaneously more active and more studiously non-partisan, sustaining relations with Israel, the Arab states and Iran at once.
• The Russian crude episode is the clearest case of energy driving diplomacy.
  • Russian crude went from negligible before 2022 to about a third of Indian imports through 2024 and 2025, and the discounts materially reduced the import bill.
  • Sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil in November 2025 cut Russia’s share below 25% by early 2026 through financial and shipping friction; a limited waiver in March 2026 allowed partial recovery.
  • India was not compelled by tariffs but was substantially moved by financial-system sanctions — a statement about where leverage over India actually lies.
• Diversification is the structural answer, running on renewables, nuclear and the strategic petroleum reserve. India holds among the world’s most ambitious renewable capacity targets and leads the International Solar Alliance.
• Civil nuclear commerce was reopened by the SHANTI Act of December 2025, which repealed both the Atomic Energy Act, 1962 and the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010, confining supplier recourse to express contract or intentional misconduct.
  • Those provisions had deterred foreign suppliers for fifteen years and were the principal reason the 2008 agreement produced no reactors. Their removal is the most consequential legislative change for Indian foreign policy in a decade, and is under challenge in the Supreme Court.

Technology, critical minerals and development partnership

• The newest layer of economic diplomacy is about inputs rather than markets, and exists because supply chains became a security question after 2020.
  • Semiconductors: fabrication and assembly-testing investment under the India Semiconductor Mission, with partnerships involving the United States, Japan, Singapore and the EU.
  • Critical and emerging technology: the iCET framework and its successor TRUST, covering semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum technology, biotechnology and space.
  • Critical minerals: the National Critical Mineral Mission, membership of the Minerals Security Partnership, and agreements with Australia, Argentina and African producers — because a clean-energy transition dependent on Chinese processing merely relocates the vulnerability.
  • Digital public infrastructure as an export: the Aadhaar-UPI-DigiLocker stack offered as an open-source alternative to proprietary platforms — India’s most distinctive current soft-power instrument, because it is infrastructure rather than image.
  • Data and artificial intelligence governance, where India positions itself as a voice for the Global South against rule-making by a few advanced economies.
• India is simultaneously an aid recipient and a donor, and its assistance is concentrated in the neighbourhood by design.
  • The Overseas Development Partnership vertical is the largest single head in the ministry’s budget at ₹6,997 crore in 2026-27, over 31% of its allocation, delivered through Exim Bank lines of credit, grant assistance and ITEC training.
  • The 2026-27 allocations are themselves a statement of priorities: Bhutan ₹2,288.56 crore, Nepal ₹800 crore, the Maldives and Mauritius ₹550 crore each, Sri Lanka ₹400 crore, Afghanistan ₹150 crore — and Bangladesh ₹60 crore, halved from ₹120 crore.
  • The Bangladesh halving is a foreign policy statement made through a budget line, following the political rupture of 2024, while the increase for Afghanistan records pragmatic re-engagement with an administration India does not recognise.

Multipolarity and a multipolar Asia

A multipolar world is India’s stated preference and a multipolar Asia its stated requirement, and the two are not the same proposition. The first dilutes any single power’s ability to constrain India; the second denies primacy in India’s own region to the one state capable of it. A multipolar world containing a unipolar Asia is entirely possible, and would be worse for India than the American unipolarity it spent thirty years adjusting to.

• Why India wants a multipolar world.
  • Several centres of power mean several suppliers, markets and partners, the material precondition of autonomy; multi-alignment is unavailable in a bipolar system.
  • It supports India’s institutional agenda — Security Council reform, quota realignment at the IMF and World Bank, a larger developing-country voice — all arguments that authority should track power.
  • It reflects a normative position held since Nehru, that no single civilisational model should organise the world.
• Why a multipolar world does not guarantee a multipolar Asia.
  • Global multipolarity is compatible with regional hierarchy. If American, European and Russian power diffuses globally while Chinese power consolidates regionally, the world becomes more plural and Asia less so.
  • China’s regional preponderance is already large: the largest economy and military in Asia, the largest trading partner of almost every Asian state, and the principal creditor of several of India’s neighbours.
  • A unipolar Asia would hand China the veto over Indian choices that strategic autonomy exists to prevent — over borders, sea lanes, neighbours’ alignments and access to technology.
• The tension this creates is the central problem of Indian foreign policy today.
  • Preventing Chinese primacy requires partners, since India cannot balance China alone on economic size, defence spending, industrial capacity or technological depth.
  • Acquiring partners requires accepting constraint, because partnerships that deliver deterrence require predictability — precisely what autonomy withholds.
  • India wants the balancing benefits of alignment without the obligations, which is why the Quad matters to it as an instrument and unsettles it as a commitment.
• What India does about it: supports ASEAN centrality; builds Japan, Australia, South Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia as independent poles; uses the Quad as a balancing instrument that is not an alliance; and refuses to call any of it containment.
• The obstacles are serious. The power gap with China widens on some measures; India’s neighbours are economically dependent on China; and several Asian states prefer a bipolar Asia in which they can extract from both sides.

India wants a world with many poles and an Asia with more than one — and the second objective quietly requires the partnerships the first is designed to avoid needing.

The China question

• The 2020 boundary crisis was the largest shock of the current phase — friction at multiple points in eastern Ladakh, the first combat fatalities on the border since 1975 at Galwan, and a forward deployment that has not been reversed.
  • It produced economic decoupling measures — investment screening for land-bordering countries, app bans, procurement restrictions — and made India’s China problem continental and maritime at once.
• The relationship has since moved into a managed normalisation whose depth should not be overstated.
  • Patrolling and disengagement arrangements were announced in October 2024, followed by leader-level meetings at Kazan and Tianjin.
  • Direct flights resumed, the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra restarted, border trade was taken up again and visa issuance was eased.
  • The twenty-fifth round of Special Representatives’ talks was held in Beijing in August 2026, carrying the boundary framework forward through expert and working groups, adding two new hotlines and further military commander meetings.
  • What has not happened is de-escalation, delimitation or a settlement. Forces remain forward-deployed and the framework talks are procedural; the movement is tactical rather than strategic.
• Economic dependence deepened while the politics improved. China became India’s largest trading partner in 2025-26, with a trade deficit of about $112 billion — concentrated in pharmaceutical ingredients, electronics, solar modules, rare-earth magnets and capital goods.
• India’s entire multi-alignment strategy is ultimately a China strategy. The Quad, the Indo-Pacific framing, the American technology partnership, the maritime build-up and the corridors address one problem from different directions, while the SCO, BRICS and the border talks manage it directly — coherence around a single adversary, not inconsistency.

The challenges to the current phase

• Nuclear proliferation and the arms-control vacuum. India is the only major power with two nuclear-armed adversaries on contested land borders, one expanding its arsenal rapidly and the other relying on ambiguity about a low threshold. The arms-control architecture is in disrepair, which is the standing justification for India’s deterrent.
• Energy security: dependence at 88.7%, exposure to Hormuz, to sanctions regimes and to price shocks, and a diversification programme whose payoff is a decade away.
• Water.
  • The Indus Waters Treaty remains in abeyance despite the Court of Arbitration’s award of 31 August 2026 that it is fully in force. India rejected the award and the tribunal’s competence, and holds that the abeyance stands until Pakistan ends support for terrorism.
  • The Ganga Waters Treaty of 1996 expires in December 2026; renewal talks are under way and West Bengal has been brought into the inter-ministerial consultation — the same federal constraint that has blocked a Teesta agreement for over a decade.
  • Chinese construction on the Brahmaputra, including very large hydropower projects in Tibet, raises a control problem India cannot negotiate about, since no water-sharing treaty exists with China — only data-sharing memoranda suspended in periods of tension.
• Food security. A rising population against finite land and water, and climate stress on yields, which is why India defends public stockholding and minimum support prices at the WTO — at once a domestic welfare programme and a fixed negotiating position.
• Terrorism. Cross-border terrorism from Pakistan drives the security relationship; Taliban control of Afghanistan has produced pragmatic re-engagement without recognition; and India’s Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism, proposed in 1996, remains deadlocked on the definition of terrorism.
• Climate change. India’s position rests on historical responsibility and common but differentiated responsibilities, is committed to net zero by 2070, and has institutional form in the ISA and the CDRI. The EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism is the newest friction — protectionism, on India’s reading, wearing a climate label.

Domestic concerns or strategic issues?

• The distinction has collapsed, and its collapse is the defining feature of the present phase.
  • Energy is a balance-of-payments, inflation and alliance problem at once: buying Russian crude was a domestic macroeconomic decision that produced a tariff crisis with the United States.
  • Water is an agricultural and state-politics question that sets the terms of two international treaties, and a state government’s objection has blocked a bilateral agreement for a decade.
  • Food is a welfare programme that is also India’s fixed position in every trade negotiation.
  • Climate is industrial and development policy that is also India’s principal claim to Southern leadership.
  • Terrorism is an internal security problem whose management now sets the terms of a nuclear-armed relationship.
• The older classification assumed a boundary between the inside and the outside of the state, with foreign policy conducted by specialists over a settled domestic consensus. The questions now dominating India’s external agenda have domestic constituencies, costs and political returns.
• The consequence is institutional. These issues cut across Petroleum, Jal Shakti, Agriculture, Environment and Home, and none belongs to the Ministry of External Affairs, so coordination becomes the binding constraint — which is why the National Security Council was created.

The features of Indian foreign policy in the twenty-first century

• Multi-alignment: simultaneous participation in the Quad, BRICS, the SCO, I2U2 and IMEC with no alliance commitment. The defining feature is their formal inconsistency.
• Economic diplomacy as substance: trade, investment, energy, technology and supply chains now constitute agendas once conducted in political language.
• The Indo-Pacific as the organising geography, expressed through SAGAR and MAHASAGAR, the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative and the Navy’s role as a net security provider.
• Issue-based coalitions built rather than joined: the International Solar Alliance, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure and the Global Biofuels Alliance.
• Southern leadership reasserted: the Voice of the Global South Summits, the third of which drew 123 countries in August 2024; the G20 presidency of 2023; the African Union’s admission to the G20 — a claim resting on deliverables rather than rhetoric.
• Security activism: counter-terrorism designations at the United Nations, maritime domain awareness, and a demonstrated willingness to respond militarily across the Line of Control.
• Soft power and diaspora engagement through yoga, cinema, education, Buddhism, digital public infrastructure and the world’s largest overseas community — developed in the companion note on soft power and the diaspora.
• The continued refusal of alliance is the limit that distinguishes India’s partnerships from those of American treaty allies. India will do almost everything an ally does except promise.

Assessment

• India’s current foreign policy is unusually well matched to the system it faces. A loose order with several centres and no enforcer puts a premium on states valuable to more than one side — courted by the United States because it is not China’s, by Russia because it is not the West’s.
• It has delivered real returns: technology partnerships, a defence relationship with the United States unimaginable in 1998, an investment commitment written into a trade agreement, and maritime awareness across an ocean it could not previously survey.
• The failures are identifiable. The neighbourhood record is uneven, with reverses in the Maldives, Nepal and Bangladesh; the China gap is wider than when the strategy began; and the doctrine did not stop punitive American tariffs over a third country’s oil.
• The strategy depends on a condition India does not control: that the great powers keep tolerating partial commitment. The tariffs and sanctions of 2025 were the first serious test of whether they will.
• The unanswered question is what India does if the system tightens. If competition hardens into blocs — technology controls, financial exclusion, demands for exclusivity — the space multi-alignment occupies contracts, and India faces the choice its foreign policy was designed to avoid.
  • The optimistic answer is that India’s weight has grown enough that it will be courted rather than coerced.
  • The pessimistic answer is that November 2025 showed the coercion works, that financial-system exposure is the lever, and that India’s autonomy has never been tested against a great power willing to pay to end it.
  • The honest answer is that the design exists to keep the question open as long as possible. Strategic autonomy is less a solution to India’s strategic problem than a method of postponing it — and for a rising power, postponement is itself a strategy.