To evaluate the recent developments in India’s foreign policy, the Ankara Center for Crisis and Political Studies (ANKASAM) presents below the interview with Dr. Sreshtha Chakraborty, a Researcher with a PhD in International Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
1. What are your thoughts on India’s foreign policy and, in particular, “strategic autonomy”?
India’s foreign policy continues to be shaped by the pursuit of strategic autonomy, although the concept has evolved significantly since the Cold War. Where non-alignment once implied equidistance and a degree of moral posturing, contemporary strategic autonomy is a harder-edged proposition: the preservation of independent decision-making within a multipolar order, increasingly underwritten by India’s own economic and military weight rather than by rhetorical positioning.
Its operational form is multi-alignment. New Delhi engages a wide range of partners on an issue-specific basis, deepening cooperation with the United States and Europe in defence technology, maritime security, and critical and emerging technologies, while sustaining its defence and energy relationships with Russia. Engagement with China continues through bilateral and multilateral channels even as the two manage an unsettled border.
Strategic autonomy should not be read as strategic ambiguity or as indecision. It is a deliberate effort to maximise policy flexibility, diversify dependencies, and avoid binding alliance commitments while protecting core interests. Crucially, it is a capability-dependent posture: as India’s material power grows, autonomy shifts from being a defensive shield against pressure to an instrument for shaping outcomes.
2. What are the limits of India’s military-security cooperation with Western countries in the Indo-Pacific region? In this context, how does New Delhi view the West’s increased engagement in the Indo-Pacific?
India broadly welcomes deeper Western engagement in the Indo-Pacific, seeing it as a stabilising contribution to an open, rules-based maritime order. Practical cooperation with the United States, France, Australia, Japan, and European partners has expanded considerably, through exercises such as Malabar, the enabling foundational agreements (LEMOA, COMCASA, and BECA), maritime domain awareness arrangements, logistics access, and a growing agenda of co-development and co-production.
The limits, however, are real and deliberate. First, New Delhi remains unwilling to enter arrangements that resemble collective defence or that are framed explicitly around containing China; India’s Indo-Pacific concept rests on inclusivity, sovereignty, and regional stability rather than bloc alignment. Second, India guards its strategic flexibility: it continues to diversify procurement, retains major Russian-origin systems, and insists on independent operational decision-making. The foundational agreements are instructive here, they are interoperability enablers, not mutual-defence obligations. Cooperation with the West is therefore likely to remain robust but issue-based, stopping short of legally binding commitments that would narrow India’s room for manoeuvre.
3. Do you think India has found a balance between the US, European countries, Russia, and China?
India has maintained a functional, though increasingly demanding, balance among the major powers. The logic is not equidistance but the maximisation of strategic opportunity alongside the minimisation of vulnerability.
Ties with the United States have deepened across defence, technology, supply chains, and the Indo-Pacific, even as trade friction and divergences over Russia introduce periodic strain. Europe has become a substantial partner in trade, connectivity (including the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor), clean energy, and security, with an active free-trade agenda. Despite sustained Western pressure after the Russia-Ukraine war, India has preserved its partnership with Moscow across defence, energy, and Eurasian geopolitics, while quietly managing the risks of Russia’s deepening tilt towards Beijing.
The China relationship is the most delicate to characterise. A tactical thaw has been under way since the October 2024 disengagement and the Modi-Xi meeting at Kazan, producing resumed high-level dialogue and partial normalisation on trade and border management. Yet this progress does not alter the fundamentally competitive nature of the relationship, and the underlying disputes over the Line of Actual Control, the trade imbalance, and strategic mistrust remain unresolved. It is stabilisation, not reset. Sustaining the wider balance will grow harder as great-power competition sharpens, but Indian diplomacy has so far shown considerable resilience in avoiding exclusive alignment while expanding options across multiple centres of power.
4. Do you think a NATO-style collective security organization could be established in the Indo-Pacific? If so, what would India’s stance be? Would it join? If the answer is no, why do you think it wouldn’t join?
A NATO-style collective security organisation is unlikely in the foreseeable future, and India would almost certainly stay out of one. The Indo-Pacific lacks the conditions that made the North Atlantic alliance possible: threat perceptions diverge sharply across the region, existing security ties are asymmetric and overlapping rather than unified, and deep economic interdependence with China, which is the leading trade partner for most regional states, raises the cost of hard balancing considerably.
For India specifically, an Article 5-type mutual-defence obligation would cut directly against the tradition of strategic autonomy and the long-standing aversion to binding alliances. India’s principal security challenges, a contested continental border with China and the persistent problem of Pakistan, also sit awkwardly with the maritime, Pacific-facing orientation such a bloc would likely assume.
India will instead continue to favour flexible, issue-based formats: the Quad, bilateral strategic partnerships, and minilaterals focused on maritime security, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, cybersecurity, and emerging technologies. These deliver practical cooperation without formal commitment. In New Delhi’s reading, Indo-Pacific security architecture is far more likely to evolve as a web of overlapping partnerships than as a single alliance-based system.
