No BFFs needed

NAM has served its purpose, Modi has said. Some might say this is hardly news. NAM has been dysfunctional for years. But an Indian PM saying this, albeit very politely, is not without significance. It underlines the big pivot India’s foreign policy has taken, especially over the last two decades, as well as the new challenge for India – as a large, reasonably fast-growing economy and as a big country with big ambitions, its best, and only, option in geopolitics is strategic autonomy, more friendly to some than others but not forever aligned with any one group.

This autonomy is predicated on four factors – managing the China challenge and by extension the China-Pakistan axis, securing supply chains in critical products, achieving competency in critical technologies, and furthering diversification and indigenisation of defence platforms. These require looking for allies for specific needs. India needs its partnership with the US to counter China. But securing its future energy needs requires it to maintain cordial ties with Central Asian Republics, who have been traditionally aligned with Russia and now increasingly with China.

India imports defence platforms from countries with different geopolitical positions such as France and the US. True, both those nations are Nato allies, but France has a different position on the Indo-Pacific and had opposed sanctions against India in the aftermath of its 1998 nuclear test. India’s import of Russian crude despite Western restrictions greatly aided its economy, even as New Delhi sent several tranches of humanitarian aid to war-hit Ukraine. Similarly, India’s championing of the Global South in G20 gives it much strategic elbowroom with big powers. Strategic autonomy demands flexibility, not iron-clad military alliances. And it demands that India’s economy doesn’t falter.

END OF ARTICLE