Over the past few years, New Delhi has developed a keen desire to be part of the geopolitical developments in the Indo-Pacific and has gone about it with great aplomb. It has managed to emerge as a major pivot of the global Indo-Pacific grand strategic imagination, avoided the temptations to militarise/securitise the Quad (Australia, Japan, India and the United States), and has ensured that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) states do not feel uneasy by the ever-increasing balance of power articulations in the Indo-Pacific.
What New Delhi is missing
And yet, New Delhi’s vision for the Indo-Pacific appears half-baked and unsustainable in the long term, given the inadequate attention New Delhi is prepared to give to the geoeconomic developments of the Indo-Pacific. Policymakers in New Delhi today do not appear to appreciate the inescapable linkages between geopolitics and geoeconomics. Put differently, even as contemporary great power behaviour has moved beyond the classical geopolitical imageries, thereby emphasising geoeconomics as the foundation of geopolitics, New Delhi continues to be stuck in the old binaries.
