Power, perception and partnership: India’s South Asian test

For decades, India’s neighbourhood policy has swung between ambition and hesitation, outreach and retrenchment. Connectivity corridors have multiplied. Infrastructure financing has expanded. Crisis response has become faster. Yet mistrust persists. Political volatility continues to disrupt engagement. External powers are more deeply embedded than ever. The central dilemma is this: India has become indispensable to its region, but it has not yet become indispensable with its region. That gap is increasingly shaping South Asia’s strategic future.

Much of India’s recent neighbourhood diplomacy has emphasised connectivity—roads, railways, power grids, ports, digital links. These are necessary. But they are not sufficient. Connectivity is physical; integration is political. A highway can be built in months; trust takes decades. Transmission lines do not automatically create constituencies for cooperation. Regulatory alignment, trade facilitation, and dispute-resolution mechanisms determine whether infrastructure becomes a shared asset or a contested symbol. Across South Asia, projects are scrutinised not only for economic returns but for strategic intent—who controls them, who benefits first, and what leverage they might create in a crisis.

That scepticism has been sharpened by the growing presence of extra-regional players and, more recently, by upheavals linked to Chinese ventures such as those associated with Zeng, which have sparked domestic political debates, protests, and regulatory pushback in parts of the region. These episodes underline a broader reality: South Asian States increasingly evaluate major-power engagement not only through the prism of development but also sovereignty, transparency, and political risk.

South Asia is bound together by geography—rivers, mountains, coastlines, ethnic communities—but divided by historical grievances, identity politics, and unresolved disputes. Borders are lived spaces of trade and migration as much as of surveillance and insurgency. For India, this creates a permanent tension. Stability in neighbouring States is vital to its own security, yet involvement in those very states is often politically sensitive. What appears in New Delhi as support can be framed elsewhere as interference. Relationships remain intensely election-sensitive and vulnerable to sudden swings, shaped as much by domestic coalitions as by strategic calculations.

No assessment of the neighbourhood can avoid the triangular dynamic involving Pakistan and China. Islamabad’s deepening partnership with Beijing has added new layers to South Asian geopolitics, linking continental corridors, military cooperation, and infrastructure diplomacy. More broadly, China is no longer approaching the region only across the Himalayas; through Tibet and Xinjiang it is pushing southward via trade routes, development finance, and security ties. This is not merely competition over projects. It is competition over narratives—about reliability, political conditionality, and long-term commitment—forcing smaller states to hedge, diversify, and keep their options open in a crowded geopolitical marketplace.

India has often drawn upon Kautilyan ideas to frame this environment—the famous mandala of neighbours, rivals, and allies. But ancient realism cannot be transplanted wholesale into a region defined today by electoral politics, coalition governments, social media mobilisation, and development-driven public expectations. Influence now flows through supply chains, tourism, disaster relief, education links, and digital infrastructure as much as through coercion or alliance. Power still matters—but it is also judged. Strength without reassurance invites resistance; leadership without consultation produces counter-balancing.

The revival of talk about spheres of influence only heightens these pressures. Smaller States are not passive objects in this process. They bargain hard, extract benefits, and play competitors against one another. India, therefore, cannot assume automatic alignment because of geography or shared history; it must persuade, compete, and remain visibly present over the long term.

One of the most persistent criticisms India hears—fair or not—is the perception of behaving like a big brother, a phrase freighted with connotations of dominance and unilateralism. What India must strive for instead is the posture of an elder brother: confident but restrained, powerful yet consultative, willing to absorb short-term costs for long-term stability. This is not sentimentality; it is strategy. An elder brother provides public goods—market access, humanitarian assistance, security cooperation—without turning every transaction into political leverage. In a sovereignty-sensitive region, tone can be as consequential as policy.

Neighbourhood diplomacy, finally, has to be bespoke. Bhutan’s calibrated balancing of development and strategic partnership, Bangladesh’s export-led transformation, Nepal’s uneasy coexistence of nationalism and dependence—all illustrate that there is no template for regional engagement. Strategic competition in South Asia is here to stay, but conflict is not inevitable. India’s challenge is to ensure that rivalry does not crowd out cooperation, that infrastructure competition does not fracture regional systems, and that security dilemmas do not overwhelm economic logic.

Ultimately, the measure of India’s rise will not only be how it performs on the global stage, but how its neighbours experience that rise in their daily lives. If they see opportunity rather than constraint, stability rather than pressure, partnership rather than hierarchy, India’s regional strategy will have succeeded.

This article is authored by Shishir Priyadarshi, president, Chintan Research Foundation, New Delhi.