The Pulse | Security | South Asia

India’s Multialignment Test: Everything, Everywhere All at Once

The convergence of multiple theaters, crises, and strategic conversations at once makes this perhaps the most consequential test of India’s multialignment strategy.

India’s unusually crowded diplomatic calendar reflects the turbulent era we inhabit, one defined by profound geopolitical, geoeconomic, and technological transitions. Some of the developments occupying New Delhi’s strategic thinking do not involve India directly, yet their ramifications are central to India’s strategic calculus. Multiple theaters of interest are converging on India simultaneously. The recently concluded Trump-Xi meeting unfolded almost in parallel with the BRICS foreign ministers’ gathering in New Delhi. 

Around the same time, Prime Minister Narendra Modi embarked on a five-nation tour covering the UAE, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Italy. And this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited China, even as the Quad foreign ministers prepare to land in New Delhi. Layered onto this is the unresolved West Asian crisis, which continues to roil energy markets and disrupt shipping routes. The convergence of multiple theaters, crises, and strategic conversations at once makes this perhaps the most consequential test of India’s multialignment strategy and its ability to engage multiple poles simultaneously while retaining control over its own independent agency.

Autonomy Is Not Equidistance

Each of these summits presents a plethora of opportunities as well as risks for India’s foreign policy, underscoring the quintessential dilemma between caution and leverage. This, in turn, calls for a constant revision of the conceptual and operational meaning of strategic autonomy. Can autonomy accommodate selective deepening and selective distancing, as and when India’s interests demand, without running the risk of being labeled unreliable by opposing ends of the strategic spectrum?

Each of the platforms competing for India’s policy bandwidth and attention is intrinsically tied to the advancement of India’s national security and economic development: the Gulf for energy security; Europe for trade, technology, and industry; the Quad countries for maritime security, connectivity, and critical minerals supply chains; and BRICS for political space in global governance and reformed multilateralism. The new grammar and geometry of great power relations shape India’s strategic calculations. New Delhi is navigating the interplay of foreign policy legacy, pragmatic linkages, and prevailing power asymmetries.

Undeniably, the policy thinking underpinning India’s external engagements has changed significantly, both in substance and optics, over the last two decades and more. The practice of strategic autonomy is no longer defined by ideological straitjackets, but by the extent and limits of India’s traction within the international system. This, in turn, is informed and shaped by the significant transformation in India’s material capabilities.

While India is increasingly willing to make strategic and tactical choices that redefine its alignments and realignments, power asymmetries vis-à-vis countries with far greater material capabilities continue to constrain the range of choices New Delhi seeks to make. There is also a more unapologetic emphasis on development and growth in India’s policy narrative, with the argument that what is beneficial for India’s growth is, by corollary, beneficial for regional and global growth.

Bespoke Multialignment for Asymmetric Multipolarity 

While the post-Cold War world has steadily moved away from American unipolarity, genuine multipolarity remains incomplete and uneven, as power has diffused but continues to remain heavily concentrated in a few major states, particularly the United States and China. Multipolarity is not an automatic structural outcome, but one actively shaped by how states behave, align, compete, and cooperate. Rather than producing a balanced and cooperative order, the rise of great power rivalry has resulted in an “asymmetric” or “unbalanced” multipolarity, where smaller powers seek greater strategic space even as major powers continue to dominate the system. Therefore, navigating the vagaries of an asymmetric multipolarity will make India’s practice of multialignment germane, as it maneuvers through a system defined by political choices, strategic calculations, and the interactions among states themselves.

At the end, India’s foreign policy challenge is not........

© The Diplomat