India’s long-cherished doctrine of strategic autonomy, once a badge of post-colonial independence, is steadily mutating from a source of flexibility into a condition of strategic drift.
What was designed to preserve room for maneuver is now generating accumulating costs—economic, military and diplomatic—without producing commensurate leverage in return. In a world that is rapidly polarizing, this imbalance is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
Strategic autonomy originated in the Nehruvian era as non-alignment, a pragmatic attempt to avoid entanglement in Cold War blocs while extracting developmental assistance from both.
In its contemporary form, it has been rebranded as “multi-alignment”: deepening defense and technological ties with the United States and its partners, maintaining legacy military and energy links with Russia and sustaining substantial economic engagement with China.
In theory, this portfolio approach should have maximized India’s options in a multipolar order. In practice, the strategy has lost coherence.
Refusal to fully align with Western sanctions on Russia has preserved access to discounted energy, but it has also exposed India to increased scrutiny and tough tariffs from a more transactional Washington, where trade and security are now tightly coupled.
At the same time, economic engagement with China has continued despite repeated border crises, pushing India’s bilateral trade deficit past US$100 billion and reinforcing structural dependencies in critical sectors such as electronics, pharmaceuticals and renewable energy.
The consequence is a widening gap between cost and return. Russia remains a crucial defense supplier, yet delays in delivery and maintenance—exacerbated by its own wartime constraints—have imposed operational and financial burdens on India’s armed forces.
Meanwhile, deeper cooperation with the US and its partners has delivered valuable signaling and interoperability, but without the level of technology access or policy accommodation that full allies typically receive. India finds itself described as an indispensable partner, but treated as a conditional one.
Economic exposure mirrors this strategic asymmetry. Dependence on Chinese intermediate goods has persisted despite political confrontation, leaving India vulnerable to supply disruptions even as Beijing consolidates its manufacturing dominance.
Partial military disengagements along the Line of Actual Control have reduced immediate friction, but they have not altered the underlying balance of advantage, nor produced reciprocal restraint on China’s infrastructure buildup in disputed areas. Engagement continues, leverage does not.
Diplomatically, strategic autonomy has also begun to alienate without appeasing. India’s cautious positioning on major global conflicts has drawn criticism from Western partners while failing to extract meaningful concessions in return, whether on market access, sanctions relief or defense technology.
Multilateral forums amplify India’s voice, but they do not automatically translate into material gains. The risk is that autonomy becomes performative rather than productive. The central problem is not autonomy itself, but the absence of prioritization. Flexibility only creates advantage when it is backed by credible alternatives.
At present, India’s options are constrained by legacy dependencies and unresolved vulnerabilities. Economic mass has not yet been converted into bargaining power, and strategic partnerships have not been translated into enforceable commitments.
Recalibration does not require formal alliances, but it does demand sharper choices. Defense indigenization must accelerate beyond rhetoric, reducing exposure to single-supplier risk. Trade diversification should be treated as a strategic imperative, not merely an economic one.
Partnerships with the US, Japan and Europe need to be leveraged explicitly for technology access and supply-chain resilience, rather than assumed as by-products of goodwill. Engagement with Russia, meanwhile, should be managed within clearly defined limits, not historical sentiment.
In a harsher international environment, ambiguity carries costs. India’s strategic autonomy was never meant to be an end in itself; it was a means to secure sovereignty through leverage. When the means begin to erode the end, course correction becomes unavoidable.
Without greater clarity and discipline, India risks discovering that misapplied autonomy is not a shield—but a liability it can increasingly ill afford.
Colonel Maqbool Shah is an Indian Army veteran.