India’s Radical Reimagination: No More Bandwagoning, for Real

Abstract

In 2020, following the deadliest border crisis with China in over 45 years on the Himalayan frontier in the Galwan valley, India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar clarified that “we were never part of an alliance and will not be.” Aversion to alliances notwithstanding, there is more than one way to balance China’s rise, and India has recently decided that it needs to. Indian media often attributes Beijing’s increasing aggressiveness to the shifts in SinoIndian balance of power: “the balance of power has shifted against us and so, China’s behaviour has changed too.” New Delhi’s approach to restoring the balance is to build a strategic partnership with the United States, and to reinforce the global balance of power in favor of the US. As former Indian Foreign Secretary and former Ambassador to China Vijay Gokhale opined in The New York Times in 2020, “The world needs balance—at the moment, no country other than the United States has the means to ensure it. At a practical level, its leadership is indispensable.” Such an explicit embrace of American power is surprising for India. Amidst searching for its place as a major power in a multipolar world, New Delhi has historically practiced strategic distancing from great powers through non-alignment. Nonalignment, articulated as a foreign policy strategy by India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1947-1964), aimed to keep India from becoming entangled in Cold War power binaries between the US and Soviet Union. Yet over the long horizon of its existence, it principally translated into anti-