ABSTRACT
India’s decisive turn to “Indo-Pacific” order is primarily guided by its deep-seated desire to ensure national security and bring prosperity to its people. Historically, India adopted distinct strategies and approaches to simultaneously work on both frontiers but it somehow failed to resolve a number of imbalances that militate against protecting the country’s vital interests. Amid various disjunctions, the twin notable imbalances – one in the strategic domain and the other in the economic sphere – have emerged as the key variables shaping India’s engagement with the Asian region and beyond. India’s “strategic imbalance” overtly focused on mitigating threats crossing continental borders, often at the cost of neglecting maritime threats, has played a crucial role in its involvement with the Indio-Pacific strategy. Similarly, prosperity in India has been grossly undermined due to its equally important “economic imbalance” with East Asia which has acted as a catalyst to change the country’s policy focus from geo-economics to geopolitics.
India started to move out from the geo-economically aligned identity construct symbolised by “Asia-Pacific”, and began concentrating on geopolitically inclined “Indo-Pacific” identity. However, in a country as large and diversified as India, some voices are still out to encourage NAM era “neutrality” and “autonomy” in the reconstituted NAM 2.0 framework.
