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Chapter 75: India: The Elephant in the Room: India's Great Power Hedging

In the sprawling, modern campus of the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi, a vast sandstone palace humming with the quiet, confident energy of a rising power, Priya, a brilliant and increasingly influential American-educated diplomat in the Policy Planning division, works on a puzzle of impossible geometries. Her life has become a masterclass in strategic schizophrenia, a daily intellectual exercise in holding two powerful, diametrically opposed ideas in her mind at the same time.

Her mornings are spent in the cold, clear, Anglophonic world of democratic alliances. She sits in a secure video conference room, its lighting a sterile white, and engages with her counterparts in Washington, Tokyo, and Canberra. On the large screen, the faces of American admirals and Japanese strategists nod in agreement as they review naval deployment schedules and intelligence-sharing protocols for the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—"The Quad." The binders on her desk are thick with the strategic documents of this nascent democratic bulwark, a maritime alliance designed for one clear, if often unstated, purpose: to contain the relentless expansionism of China in the Indo-Pacific. She spends her hours using the shared language of the West: freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, upholding a "rules-based international order," and reaffirming the common values that bind the world's great democracies together. Her work is focused on the threat from the north, on the long, disputed, and un-demarcated border in the high Himalayas where grainy, terrifying drone footage had shown Indian and Chinese soldiers bludgeoning each other to death with nail-studded clubs in the thin, freezing air. China wasn't a theoretical threat on a map; it was the active, breathing reason her country could not afford to make a single new enemy.

But at lunchtime, she must pivot her entire worldview 180 degrees. Her aide, a somber man from a different department, brings her a different set of files. These are not about alliances, but about commodities. They are the daily tracking reports, printed on flimsy paper, for a fleet of aging tankers—the Volga Dream, the Tigris Sun—vessels purchased by anonymous shell corporations and sailing under a dozen different flags of convenience. They are ferrying millions of barrels of discounted Russian Urals crude oil from the cold ports of the Baltic to the hot, humid refineries of Gujarat. She saw the daily figure: a saving of nearly $35 per barrel on two million barrels a day. The math was simple and brutal. Sixty million dollars. Per day. That was the price of a dozen new hospitals, of a thousand kilometers of roads. It was the price of India's rise, and it was a price being paid, conveniently, by Russia.

Her final, and most intellectually demanding, task for the day is to draft a statement for the Indian Ambassador to the UN. The statement is for a General Assembly vote condemning Russia's latest atrocity in Ukraine—a missile strike that deliberately targeted a children's hospital. The words must be chosen with the precision of a diamond cutter, a linguistic exercise of breathtaking delicacy. The speech must begin with a strong, unwavering affirmation of India's commitment to the UN Charter, to the sacrosanct principles of national sovereignty, and to the inviolability of internationally recognized borders. It must express deep and sincere concern for the tragic loss of civilian life.

She tried to push the memory of her last meeting with the Ukrainian attaché out of her mind—a woman her own age, who had shown her a photo of her six-year-old nephew, killed in a missile strike. Priya had offered sincere condolences. Now she was crafting the very words that would offer her country's diplomatic cover to the nation that had fired that missile.

Then, the speech must pivot. Subtly, expertly, without any sense of contradiction, the speech must explain why India, the world's largest democracy, will once again abstain from the vote. She uses the familiar, carefully workshopped phrases that she herself has helped to perfect: "the need for dialogue and diplomacy," "the importance of considering the legitimate security interests of all parties," "this is not an era of war." She told herself this feeling of hypocrisy was a luxury her country could not afford. This was statecraft, not sentiment. It was the purest, most pragmatic expression of India's foreign policy doctrine: "multi-alignment." Her primary duty was not to a universal "rules-based order," but to the singular, overriding goal of ensuring the rise of India as a great and independent "civilization-state." And if that required her to wargame against China with one hand while writing the checks that fund China's primary strategic partner with the other, then that was simply the necessary, and unavoidable, price of a great power's destiny.

The Discourse 75: The Doctrine of "Multi-Alignment"

75.1 Beyond "Non-Alignment": A Great Power in the Making
India's determinedly neutral and often confounding response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine cannot be understood through the simplistic Western binary of "choosing a side." It is the deliberate, sophisticated, and unapologetic execution of a uniquely Indian grand strategy known as "multi-alignment." This doctrine is not, as many mistakenly believe, a mere continuation of India's historical Cold War-era policy of "non-alignment." That was a largely passive, defensive stance of a developing nation seeking to preserve its sovereignty amidst the titanic struggle of two superpowers. Multi-alignment, by contrast, is an active, assertive, and deeply pragmatic offensive strategy. As articulated in great detail by its chief architect, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, it is the strategy of a nation that sees itself as a great power in the making, and it involves simultaneously and aggressively engaging with multiple, often competing, great power blocs to advance India's singular national interest: its own rapid and unhindered rise as a global power. See [citation 4]. India's leadership views the current global landscape not as a final, apocalyptic struggle between democracy and autocracy, but as the chaotic and formative birth of a new multipolar world order. Its primary strategic objective is to ensure that India emerges as one of those essential poles, and it is willing to accept profound contradictions to achieve that end.

75.2 The China Imperative: The Enemy of My Enemy's Enabler
The single, overriding, and non-negotiable factor in India's strategic calculus is the existential threat posed by its northern neighbor, the People's Republic of China. This is not a distant or theoretical threat. The two nuclear-armed nations are locked in a tense, decades-long, and often violent border dispute along the thousands of kilometers of the un-demarcated Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the Himalayas. This "cold" conflict has repeatedly broken out into deadly, hot skirmishes, most notably the brutal, medieval-style clash in the Galwan Valley in 2020 that saw dozens of soldiers killed on both sides. See [citation 2]. This grim reality informs and dominates every aspect of India's relationship with Russia. New Delhi's foreign policy elite views Russia not as an ideological partner, but as a critical and indispensable source of advanced military hardware. An estimated 60-70% of the Indian military's entire hardware inventory is of Russian or Soviet origin, including the entirety of its main battle tank fleet (T-72s/T-90s) and its primary air superiority fighters (Su-30MKIs). This deep, systemic dependency makes a sudden geopolitical pivot impossible. More importantly, Indian strategists see a friendly relationship with Russia as a vital geopolitical hedge—a way to prevent the formation of a monolithic and completely hostile Sino-Russian axis that would be squarely aimed at containing India. They are making the calculated gamble to tolerate Russia's aggression in Europe in order to secure their own flank against China in Asia.

75.3 Strategic Autonomy and the "European Problem"
The doctrine of multi-alignment is built upon a core, almost sacred, belief in "strategic autonomy"—a deep-seated rejection of the idea that India, a civilization of 1.4 billion people, should have to subordinate its own vital national interests to those of a Western-led alliance. This belief is rooted in a long memory of the Cold War, in which New Delhi recalls Washington's "tilt" towards its arch-rival Pakistan and the sanctions imposed by the West after India's 1998 nuclear tests. This history fuels the powerful institutional consensus that India can ultimately only rely on itself. Consequently, Indian policymakers view the war in Ukraine not as a global crisis of principles, but largely as a "European problem"—a regional conflict born from the specific, local history of NATO expansion and decades of European security failures. There is a deeply held belief in New Delhi that the West—which has often acted unilaterally in its own interests—has no moral standing to demand that India make significant economic and social sacrifices to uphold a "rules-based order" that the West is perceived to apply selectively. See [citation 1]. This allows India to frame its massive purchases of discounted Russian oil not as an act of amoral complicity, but as a sovereign, justifiable, and even morally necessary economic decision to protect its own population from energy poverty.

75.4 The "Quad" and the Fine Art of Compartmentalization
India's active and enthusiastic participation in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue ("The Quad") alongside the United States, Australia, and Japan is a perfect illustration of the doctrine of multi-alignment in action. The United States and its Pacific allies view the Quad as a nascent democratic-military alliance, a coalition united by shared values and designed to uphold international law in the face of Chinese aggression. See [citation 3]. India, however, sees it as just one pillar among many in its foreign policy architecture. It has successfully "compartmentalized" its policy, cordoning off its Quad commitments from its other relationships. In practice, this means cooperating closely with the American and Australian navies on maritime security in the Indo-Pacific, while simultaneously deepening its economic and energy partnership with the primary strategic partner of the very country the Quad was designed to contain. This ability to maintain contradictory alliances is the hallmark of multi-alignment. This entire strategy, however, depends on a tacit "strategic tolerance" from the United States, which has decided that India is too important as a democratic counterweight to China to risk alienating over its relationship with Russia. The critical question, which the next chapters will explore, is whether this sophisticated hedging strategy is a sustainable act of brilliant statecraft, or a catastrophic moral and strategic compromise that ultimately empowers the very autocratic axis that is India's greatest and most dangerous long-term threat.