Table of Contents
Today’s brief reads three articles. Ghadeer Nabizade in an MP-IDSA issue brief argues that India held its own line through the war on Iran, and paid more for it. Aparna Rawal in South Asia Monitor sets out why India answers Chinese pressure on the Brahmaputra at the Strait of Malacca. Anand Kumar in South Asia Monitor says India’s place in Bangladesh now rests on what it delivers.
India held its own line through the war on Iran, and the price of holding it went up.
Ghadeer Nabizade takes one episode and reads Indian foreign policy through it. Between June 2025 and April 2026 the United States and Israel fought a military campaign against Iran. India had important interests on every side of that fight. Washington is its partner in the Indo-Pacific. Israel supplies much of its defence equipment. Iran carries its road to Afghanistan and Central Asia. So New Delhi asked for restraint and for talks, and it blamed nobody. Nabizade says this worked. He also says it cost more than such balancing used to cost. Strategic autonomy today is less about standing at equal distance from great powers. It is about holding together relationships that work against each other.
The record
- The United States and Israel fought a campaign against Iran between June 2025 and April 2026. The first phase opened on 13 June 2025 with Israeli strikes on Iranian military, nuclear, security and strategic targets. It ended with American strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.
- The second phase opened on 28 February 2026. It began with a joint American and Israeli campaign against Iran’s Supreme Leader.
- India asked for restraint, for de-escalation and for talks. It did not put political blame on any party.
- Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri signed the condolence book at the Iranian Embassy after the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader. Indian authorities described the event as the demise of the leader.
- India’s stake with the United States runs through defence cooperation, intelligence sharing, advanced technology and the Quad. Marco Rubio, the American Secretary of State, visited India in May 2026 and called India one of America’s most important strategic partners.
- Israel is among India’s most reliable defence partners. It supplies military equipment, missile systems and surveillance technology. It also sits in the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, or IMEC.
- Iran’s value to India is mainly geographic. Chabahar Port and the International North-South Transport Corridor give India a road to Afghanistan and Central Asia that avoids Pakistan.
- India had largely stopped importing Iranian crude oil before the 2026 war. Nabizade writes that Iran is still viewed as a possible energy partner in the future.
- Iranian commentators questioned how far India stands by Chabahar. They pointed to slow work on the port and to India’s part in IMEC, which many in Iran read as a rival to the INSTC.
- Nabizade separates two ideas that answers often mix. Strategic autonomy means freedom from outside constraint and independent decision. Multi-alignment means building partnerships with several competing powers at once, among them the United States, Russia, Israel, the Gulf states and Iran.
The argument
The article gives a fresh case for continuity and change in Indian foreign policy. The old answer said autonomy meant equal distance from the great powers. Nabizade offers a newer one. India now holds many partnerships at once, and each of them limits the others. Autonomy is the aim. Multi-alignment is the method.
There is a ready use in answers on determinants of foreign policy. Nabizade lists three pressures that narrow India’s room. Competition among the great powers is sharper. Security, technology and trade have grown into one another, so a choice in one area is felt in the others. Partners now expect political support and not cooperation alone.
Note what India did not do. It did not condemn the United States and Israel. It did not back Iran either. In an answer that is the difference between staying silent and keeping a balance. India spoke, and what it spoke for was restraint.
“The challenge for New Delhi will be not whether to preserve it, but how to manage the growing costs that accompany it.”
Ghadeer Nabizade
“Future crises may therefore test India’s strategic autonomy not because New Delhi lacks options, but because each available option is likely to carry greater diplomatic and strategic costs than before.”
Ghadeer Nabizade
India cannot answer China on the Brahmaputra, so it builds its answer at the Strait of Malacca.
Aparna Rawal puts two pieces of geography side by side. China sits upstream on the Brahmaputra. India sits beside the Strait of Malacca. After India held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance in 2025, Chinese voices close to Beijing raised the idea of restricting the Brahmaputra. India cannot reply in the same coin. China draws almost nothing from Indian rivers, and no treaty binds Beijing on shared water. So India builds strength in the one place where the map favours it. Rawal reads the work on Great Nicobar and the port arrangement at Sabang as that reply.
The record
- The Strait of Malacca is a 930-km passage between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra. About 40 to 50 percent of world trade and about 80 percent of China’s crude oil imports pass through it.
- Chinese strategists call this weakness the Malacca Dilemma. Hu Jintao named it in public in 2003.
- Work began on the Medog dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo in July 2025. It is planned at 60,000 MW, at a cost of about $167 billion. It stands close to the point where the river crosses into Arunachal Pradesh and becomes the Siang.
- China has not shared hydrological data on the Brahmaputra with India since 2022. Beijing had already broken off the limited Brahmaputra understanding during the Doklam standoff in 2017.
- India held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance after the Pahalgam terror attack of 22 April 2025. That treaty was signed in 1960, and the World Bank brokered and guaranteed it.
- The Brahmaputra has no such treaty. India and China work only through voluntary understandings on seasonal data and flood warnings. China has not signed the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention.
- About 80 percent of Pakistan’s 16 million hectares of farmland depends on irrigation from the Indus basin.
- The Great Nicobar project is worth $10 billion. It lies 150 km from the northern gateway of the Malacca Strait, closer to Sumatra than to the Indian mainland. It carries a transhipment terminal at Galathea Bay, an airport for civil and military use, a power plant and a township.
- INS Baaz at Campbell Bay is India’s southernmost air station. Rawal records a second military airfield there, long-range radar, underwater surveillance arrays and modernised communications.
- Sabang port sits on Weh Island in Indonesia’s Aceh province. It is about 170 km from India’s Indira Point. The 2018 arrangement allows visits by Indian naval and coast guard vessels, sharing of intelligence and joint patrols.
- Chinese port investment sits on many sides of India. Rawal names Gwadar in Pakistan, Hambantota in Sri Lanka, Kyaukpyu in Myanmar and Mongla in Bangladesh.
- The port at Great Nicobar is meant to handle its first traffic by 2028. Sabang has moved slowly since 2018 and is still an arrangement on paper with a joint task force.
The argument
This is a clean case for India and China and for river water disputes in one answer. The two sides are not matched. China holds the upper river and owes India nothing in law. India holds no card of the same kind on water, so it answers at sea.
Carry the difference between control and cost into answers on national interest, security and power. India does not threaten to close the strait. Rawal is careful here. Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore are the coastal states with the final say. What India gains is watching and influence. That is enough to raise the price of Chinese pressure.
The article also serves India’s Look East policy in its later form. Great Nicobar, Sabang and the understanding with Jakarta show what that policy looks like on the ground. Note the caution too. India has never tied this building work to the Brahmaputra in public.
“While China’s leverage over India runs through an upstream river Beijing controls, India’s leverage over China runs through a chokepoint India will now sit astride.”
Aparna Rawal
“India’s position offers influence and monitoring, not sovereign control of the Strait, while Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore remain the littoral states with final say.”
Aparna Rawal
Bangladesh is widening its choices, and India loses ground where it does not finish what it starts.
Anand Kumar reads Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s visit to China in June 2026. Dhaka and Beijing raised their ties to a Comprehensive Strategic Cooperative Partnership. Rahman went to Beijing before he came to New Delhi. Kumar tells Indian readers not to treat this as a change of side. Bangladesh is doing what medium sized states now do. It takes what it can from every large partner and keeps its own hands free. The warning in the article is about India’s record. Where India promises and does not build, China builds.
The record
- Tarique Rahman visited China from 22 to 26 June 2026. The joint statement raised the relationship to a Comprehensive Strategic Cooperative Partnership.
- Two of the agreements touch India directly. China will support the Teesta River Comprehensive Management and Restoration Project, including its feasibility study. China and Bangladesh will also carry forward the Mongla Port modernisation and expansion project, along with a Chinese economic and industrial zone.
- The Teesta project lies near the Siliguri Corridor, the narrow neck of land that joins the rest of India to its north-eastern states. Mongla Port sits close to the Bay of Bengal.
- Bangladesh gave India land near Mongla in 2015 for a Special Economic Zone. India did not begin the work. Years of delay led Dhaka to cancel the arrangement and call in China.
- China is Bangladesh’s largest trading partner, its main supplier of defence equipment and one of its biggest sources of development finance.
- The two sides agreed to a strategic dialogue between their foreign ministers. They will also look at a 2+2 dialogue covering diplomacy and defence.
- Bangladesh repeated its support for the One China policy. China backed Bangladesh in BRICS and in its application to become a partner of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
- India and Bangladesh share rivers and a border of 4,000 kilometres. Trade, connectivity, energy, security work and access to India’s north-eastern markets keep India in place.
- Ties have been repaired in part since the upheaval in Dhaka in 2024. Cross-border transport has resumed, tourist visas are being restored, and India supplied emergency fuel during a regional energy disruption.
- The unsettled questions are the Teesta water sharing agreement, border management and illegal migration.
The argument
This is the article for India and South Asia, the neighbours. Kumar corrects a common mistake. Bangladesh is not choosing China over India. It is buying from both. He calls this strategic diversification, and he keeps it apart from a change of camp. Learn that pair.
The Mongla story is the fact to carry into the exam. India held the project from 2015 and did not start it. Dhaka waited, then gave it to China. One example of that kind does more work in an answer than a page of general worry about Chinese influence.
Kumar also gives the remedy, and it is not diplomacy alone. He asks for faster building, better finance, steady policy and closer political attention. Geography gives India an advantage that no rival can buy. It does not give India influence by itself.
“India’s regional influence will increasingly depend on its ability to deliver, not merely on geography or historical goodwill.”
Anand Kumar
“If not, China will continue to occupy the strategic space that India leaves unfilled.”
Anand Kumar
Where this belongs in your syllabus
Open the note and read the full topic.
The questions this feeds
Questions from earlier years that today’s reading speaks to. Where the answer is written, the red link opens it. The full set is in the PYQ Vault.
- PSIR Paper II · 2025 · 20mIndia continues to invoke its time-tested policy of strategic autonomy vis-a-vis both the United States of America and Russia by rejecting US’ offer of mediation on Kashmir issue and by refusing to criticize Russia in its ongoing war against Ukraine. Comment.Answer
- PSIR Paper II · 2024 · 15m“India has of late, chosen to debunk non-alignment in its pursuit of multi-alignment.” Comment.Answer
- PSIR Paper II · 2019 · 20mExamine the increasing significance of maritime security in India's foreign policy.Answer
- PSIR Paper II · 2020 · 15mExamine the Geo-strategic points of contention in the bilateral relationship between India and China.Answer
- PSIR Paper II · 2025 · 10mChina's growing footprint and a tangible shift in power dynamics in Bangladesh has weakened India’s leverage in Dhaka. Comment.Answer