Context: Indian Prime Minister’s Asia tour covering the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in Tianjin, China and a bilateral visit to Japan has significant implications for India’s foreign policy. The visit comes amid trade tensions with the US, strained ties with China, and shifting alliances in Asia.
Relevance of the Topic: Mains: PM Modi’s Asia Tour: Opportunities and Challenges for India.
For India, the tour highlights both strategic opportunities and persistent challenges in its continental and maritime engagements.
Opportunities for India
- Strengthening Strategic Partnership with Japan: India and Japan share converging interests in maintaining a free, open, and inclusive Indo-Pacific. Defence cooperation, joint exercises, and technology collaborations can deepen mutual trust. Japan’s concerns over US unpredictability create room for India to emerge as a reliable strategic partner.
- Expanding Trade and Technology Cooperation: Japan offers prospects for investment in critical technology, resilient supply chains, and infrastructure development. Collaborations in areas like digital economy, semiconductors, and green energy can reduce India’s over-dependence on China.
- Leveraging Maritime Asia: India’s geographical position and naval strength make it a natural partner for Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asian nations. Maritime partnerships allow India to project influence beyond the continental constraints of its neighbourhood.
- Diplomatic Space in SCO: Despite contradictions, the SCO provides a platform for India to engage with China, Russia, Central Asia, and Pakistan simultaneously. Participation helps India avoid isolation in regional forums where China is expanding its influence. Even limited dialogues on border management or counter-terrorism can reduce immediate risks of escalation.
- Balancing Major Powers: India’s presence in both Japan and China underscores its multi-alignment strategy. By engaging with the US allies like Japan, while also remaining part of SCO, India signals its intent to retain strategic autonomy.
Challenges for India:
Economic Vulnerabilities to China
- India’s manufacturing sector remains dependent on China for critical inputs like rare earth magnets and tunnelling equipment. Disruptions in supply chains, such as China’s withdrawal of engineers from iPhone production in India expose India’s fragile industrial base.
- Campaigns like Make in India and Swadeshi will take time to reduce this dependency.
Limitations of the SCO Forum:
The SCO is portrayed as an inner-Asian club standing up to American dominance, but this aspiration is undermined by severe internal contradictions. They include-
- India-China mistrust
- India-Pakistan disputes
- Though counterterrorism was one of SCO’s founding goals, the forum has been unwilling to censure Pakistan due to China’s protection.
- Economic divergence: India rejects China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), central to SCO’s economic vision.
Russia’s Shrinking Utility:
- Discounted Russian oil, once seen as a stabilising factor, has now become a diplomatic liability as the US pressures India to scale down energy ties with Russia.
- Russia’s growing dependence on China reduces India’s room for manoeuvre in Eurasian geopolitics.
Erosion of Strategic Primacy in South Asia:
- With SAARC effectively non-functional, China has quietly drawn much of the Asian subcontinent into the SCO orbit. China is promoting new minilateral formats such as trilaterals with Pakistan and Afghanistan, and dialogues with Bangladesh and Myanmar positioning itself as South Asia’s most consequential external power.
- China seeks to entrench its role as both economic engine and political stabiliser, thereby eroding India’s traditional strategic primacy in the neighbourhood.
Uncertainty in US Relations:
- Trade tensions with the US threaten India’s biggest export market.
- While the SCO and Japan visits show alternatives, neither Russia nor China can replace the US as a trade partner. In 2024, India’s exports to the US stood at $88 billion with a $45 billion trade surplus, far exceeding exports to Russia ($5 bn) and China ($15 bn) combined.
Risk of Losing Strategic Space to US-China Rivalry:
- As both the US and China advance competing regional visions for South Asia, India risks being squeezed between the two.
- China is embedding itself as the region’s “benign benefactor” through the SCO and minilateral formats, while the US has signalled its intent to counter this influence by appointing a special envoy for South Asia.
- In this growing great-power rivalry, India faces the danger of erosion of its traditional strategic primacy in its own neighbourhood.
For India, the challenge is to stabilise difficult ties with China and Russia, while deepening reliable partnerships like Japan to safeguard its strategic autonomy in an era of great-power rivalry.