There have also been expectations that India would fall into defence alignment with the United States on China.

A number of things contribute to this way of thinking. There is the vast change in Indo-American relations in the past decade, spurred by US interests in attending to its strategic vulnerabilities in the Indian Ocean because of the fragilities in its dealings with India in the past; India’s desire to come in from the cold in developing its civilian nuclear capabilities; and India’s unequivocal commitment to economic globalisation. The rapprochement with the United States was linked to putative concerns about the rise of China, although, no matter how much some might have wished it to be, that issue was never central to the historical watershed that has already taken place in Indo-American ties. The strategic importance of the Indo-American relationship stands independently of either country’s approaches to China.

In the lead essay this week, Sourabh Gupta asks what India’s foreign policy might look like in the Asian Century. Gupta points out that India’s leaders have shown a consistent grasp of the country’s strategic purpose.

As a strategic protagonist in the prospective geo-politics of Asia, will India seek, Gupta asks, to forge a broad set of strategic partnerships, while maximising its leverage by not aligning with any particular state or group of states? Or will it develop a preferred partnership with a select power or set of powers?

As a recent entrant to the East Asian emerging power equation, will India seek to serve as its ‘external’ balancer? Or will it, with a Machiavellian realism, lend its weight to the winning side of the immediate regional challenge of the day, and periodically shift between strategic partners?

Will India seek to forge a ‘natural alliance’ of democratic states in the Indo-Pacific, framed in conscious contra-distinction to China and its regional interests? Or will it seek to articulate an alternate, pan-Asian model of international relations that is keyed to regional tradition and historical circumstance and driven at its core by shared Sino–Indian interests?

Inheriting the strategic compass of its colonial masters, will India aspire to impose a liberal-minded primacy in its backyard? Or will it affix its strategic identity to a set of shared values that might tolerate coercive strategies of intervention by necessity, although it is unlikely to accept them as a generalised principle?

India’s National Security Advisor, Shivshankar Menon, Gupta says, has defined India’s enduring principles of order for the emerging Asian Century. He has argued that India’s foreign policy posture needs to be ‘inclusive, comprising all powers — regional and extra-regional — relevant to the practice of Asia’s security. Its geographic scope ought to be extensive, extending from the Suez to the Pacific and seamlessly enfolding the maritime periphery with the rising continental core. Its security structure ought to be plural and open-ended, having learnt its lesson from past collective security failures. Finally, its institutional mechanisms ought to be consultative and non-prescriptive, respectful of the region’s preference for consensus-based approaches to problem solving, and centred in that crossroads of Asian inter-civilisational interaction, Southeast Asia’.

India can have ambition to be ‘an enabling power, seeking to establish a loose understanding of principles and practices related to the core issues of the region’s international relations, such that power is exercised in a spirit of self-restraint by its dominant entities’. India can also be an engaged power, and ‘hope to frame its rise in consonance with the greater Asian region as a whole’. India will probably be a pluralistic power, ‘facilitating the involvement of the widest spectrum of participants in the region’s endeavours, and eschewing exclusivist multilateral constructs (particularly in the area of non-traditional security)’. And India may in some circumstances be a stabilising power, ‘prepared to use its considerable security capabilities to help resist revisionism and maintain a more stable equilibrium — a key national interest’.

As India grows into its global role over the next decade or two, economic modernisation — and the creation of an environment to facilitate this agenda — will remain an overriding imperative, as Gupta says. It is important that India succeeds in this task and in the aspirations that its leading foreign policy analysts have defined for it, consistently with its own political DNA.

Peter Drysdale is Editor of the East Asia Forum.