In 2022, India’s Minister for External Affairs S. Jaishankar outlined India’s vision for Asia and, more broadly, the Indo-Pacific by stressing “more collaboration and more integration.” For India, that can only be achieved if Asian countries “consolidate” their independence and expand their “freedom of choice” – a likely reference to India’s hard-fought democracy.
Such Indian sentiment is not a current fad but is closely interlinked with the ramifications of hundreds of years of colonialism that, among other things, laid the framework for India’s unstable borders and the post-independence non-aligned past.
At the same time, India’s core security concerns directly result from its Asian rival China’s phenomenal rise and resultant intent to upend the regional security order, including the status quo along India’s borders. So even as India’s vision for an Asian security order is not yet entirely well-formed, China’s presence as a permanent adversary and its drive for a more Sino-centric Asian security order has given impetus to India’s rhetoric for a multipolar alternative. India’s Indo-Pacific convergence with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the United States, and Europe, as well as like-minded regional partners, many of whom are U.S. allies, such as Australia, Japan, France, the European Union, Vietnam, and the Philippines, must be seen through this lens.
Is India’s vision of an Asian security order separate from its Indo-Pacific outlook? Or do the two coexist amid a common agenda – hailing India’s return to the center of Asian affairs and countering China at its core?
Parsing Indian Policy Rhetoric
Prime Minister Narendra Modi outlined in his first term that India aims for “a more integrated and cooperative future in the region that enhances the prospects for sustainable development for all.” In this context, India’s vision draws from a complex combination of geography, institutional connections, and people-to-people exchanges, among other aspects. India’s lack of direct geographical connectivity with parts of Asian (sub-)regions like Central Asia, East Asia, or the Pacific Islands has not prevented it from focusing attention beyond the continental neighborhood into the extended neighborhood “from the Eastern shores of Africa to the Western shores of America” – the extent of its Indo-Pacific boundary.
Herein also lie the grounds for India’s five pillars of diplomacy, which are shaping its Asian “rebalancing” efforts and its efforts to build closer security cooperation with Asian partners. The five pillars are rooted in re-activating ancient Indian thought and philosophies, expanding its multipolar focus, pursuing developmental force multipliers, becoming a “force for global good,” and looking to the future. In the same vein, India’s continued stress on “ASEAN centrality” in its Indo-Pacific policies emphasizes the significant weighting of principles like inclusiveness and consensus-building, especially in a region riddled with flash points and containing multiple stakeholders.
However, while the principles for an Asian security order – multilateralism, multipolarity, Westphalian sovereignty and territorial integrity, and, importantly, cooperative security – are all present, India’s vision is conceptually not yet entirely coherent. The essence of India’s Asian security vision is about sustaining strategic autonomy and creating options to handle geopolitical challenges. This requires a peaceful, stable, and multipolar Asia. Nevertheless, India has been somewhat slow in laying the political, economic, infrastructural, and institutional linkages that will serve as the foundation for its unfolding Asian security order vision. It is precisely this relative gap that India must address in Asia.
In the last decade, the rise of India’s profile under Modi’s nationalist government has coincided with two global trends. The first is Asia’s transformation into the world’s growth engine, and the second is the growing strategic attention devoted to the Indo-Pacific. Accordingly, today, India’s multipolar vision for Asia is based on an “Asia Plus” network, which comprises both the continental and maritime dimensions and Asian and non-Asian actors.
While region-specific policies – such as Neighborhood First (South Asia), Act East (Southeast and East Asia), Act West (West Asia), and Connect/Act Central Asia – provide an extended and targeted outreach continentally, Security and Growth for All in the Region (SAGAR) and Indo-Pacific Oceans’ Initiative present an exclusively maritime perspective, too. The maritime sphere has received a much-needed boost at the top policymaking level, with Modi emphasizing that India will “will be more dependent than before on the ocean and the surrounding regions. We must also assume our responsibility to shape its future.”
In other words, India’s foreign and security policy has pursued a multidirectional and multialignment trajectory focusing on the Indo-Pacific maritime regions. Through this, India seeks to offset the challenges that stem from Sino-U.S. bipolarity and strengthen Indian comprehensive power in a transition period that ideally leads to a better-represented multipolar arrangement. Connectivity, integration, and joint development are critical in this transition.
But how does India interweave these with its cooperative security principles and vision for the Asian security order?
Highlights of India’s Security Vision
There are three key points of note when considering the security aspect of India’s vision for the Asian regional order. First, parallel to China President Xi Jinping’s 2014 “Asia for Asians” urging, India’s vision of an Asian security order comprises a multipolar Asia. Xi’s adage essentially called on Asian people to drive Asian affairs, solve Asian problems, and uphold Asian security. In comparison, India’s vision does not limit Asia to the involvement of Asian powers only but also invites the engagement of other (democratic) stakeholder powers, including Western states like the United States and European powers, and even to the extent of staying strongly connected with Russia.
Second, a fundamental aspect of India’s multipolar vision is linked to the idea of shared leadership, and the same can be noticed in New Delhi’s “Global South” proposition. This focus is driven by a desire both to limit China’s (latent) dominance over Asian (and eventually global) affairs and to improve India’s own power base. In other words, New Delhi believes that shared leadership would help promote a more equitable order. It would also give India a more significant say over regional and global affairs and ensure that powerful states like China cannot take up the reins and potentially dictate the decision-making of other Asian states that fall lower on the totem pole.
Third, India’s security vision for Asia increasingly revolves around the maritime domain. With the country touching the Indian Ocean on three sides, New Delhi realizes its future is inextricably linked to the seas. As such, ensuring maritime security in the Indian Ocean Region and the Indo-Pacific at large is a priority for India. Most importantly, perhaps, as a growing economy with a staggering 95 percent of its international trade by volume moving by sea, India is highly dependent on the seas. Therefore, ensuring freedom of navigation and trade via sea routes is critical. India’s SAGAR (translated as “sea” in English) initiative embodies the country’s approach toward maritime security and diplomacy.
Seeking Global Solidarity Amid China-Centered Concerns
Further, India’s ambitious multipolar vision includes the needs and aims of the developing world to reform the existing multilateral forums that are being widely called out for their lack of diverse representation. Concurrently, India aims to reduce, if not negate, the impact of great power competition, and its security ordering norms and policies reflect this.
On the one hand, as the “voice of the Global South,” India is seeking to blunt Western influence by pushing for South-South cooperation through the newly expanded BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), ASEAN, and triangular cooperation with “like-minded,” including Western, partners. On the other hand, India ambitiously seeks to counter the Chinese intentions to gain an edge in the developing and emerging world through China’s infrastructure projects like the Belt and Road Initiative, which have broader political, security, and cultural implications.
With these factors in mind, India is coalescing cooperation using the rhetoric of “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” or “the world is one family,” particularly toward the Global South. Such thinking aims to offset the China challenge by, in principle, including the marginalized world while also benefiting from the developing world’s growing anxieties about the West. India prioritizes its neighborhood of South Asia for partner countries, but cooperation in the wider Indo-Pacific is also witnessing an uptick. India’s approach to the developmental security partnership draws on solidarity as a formerly colonized power and “shared struggles for freedom.”
Recognizing the Limits of Non-Western Outreach
Importantly, India’s idea for a multipolar Asia is steeped in non-Western leadership as much to numb the U.S./Western-dominated global political and security design as to “resurrect effective multilateralism with the right leadership.” However, the rifts within the non-Western world, exemplified by China-India or India-Pakistan rivalries, have compelled India to acknowledge the limits of such cooperation. This has been heightened following Russia’s Ukraine invasion, which has fueled the already strengthening Russia-China congruence.
This has given momentum to India’s delicate balancing of its constrained approach in China- and Russia-dominated multilateral forums like the SCO, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank , and the Russia-India-China trilateral versus an expanding vision for the Indo-Pacific via its own policies like SAGAR; strategic forums like Quad (comprising Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S.) and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity; and inclusive regional forums that stress on geography like the Indian Ocean Rim Association and ASEAN.
At the same time, India’s diplomatic outreach has dwarfed its, albeit rising, economic and security/military capabilities. This is particularly in contrast to China, whose economic, technological, and military strengths are incomparable. As a result, India has been insisting on the “abnormality” in China-India ties, refusing to lower its power-parity equation, and continuing to reach out to the United States on high-tech-oriented security cooperation bilaterally and multilaterally, particularly through the Quad.
On alliances, India, like China, rejects collective security on principle and is hence not part of the U.S.-led hub-and-spokes alliance system that dominates in East and parts of Southeast Asia. However, India has yet to refrain from deepening technology and defense cooperation with the United States, including joint exercises and co-production of defense equipment.
In sum, India’s vision for the Asian security order comprises a multilateral, multipolar Asia. In the broader Indo-Pacific domain, where India places Asia, India’s vision is inclusive and invites engagement from like-minded partners, including extra-regional powers, for an “Asia Plus” security ordering. India views such involvement as important for shared and right leadership. This is particularly aimed at ensuring India can balance China – a core component in India’s vision – and reinstate its status.
This piece on India is the second part of a two-part series on how China and India perceive the Asian security order. The first part, on China’s perception of the Asian security order, was published on May 18, 2024.