Between Strategic Autonomy and Strategic Partnerships: India’s QUAD Strategies

By Shreya Das

Published on Feburary 28, 2025

Shift in Narratives: Is Strategic Autonomy Outdated?

India’s strategic lexicon has recently undergone a shift owing to the new directions in India’s post-Cold War foreign policy in security circles and political communities. The backdrop to this is the US rebalancing strategy towards Asia, as China became more assertive militarily and economically. New Delhi has implicitly welcomed the US-led assistance to India to pursue great power status and resist a Sino-centric Asia. There has been a shift in narratives: the focus is no longer on the seemingly conservative approach of ‘strategic autonomy’ when notions of autonomy and sovereignty guided India’s foreign policy decisions to maintain relative independence in policy-making in the strategic domain. Rather, the official narrative is now oriented toward ‘strategic partnership,’ especially Indo-US relations, due to enhanced political will for defense, industrial, and technological cooperation. This article will focus on how both narratives have been deployed in the context of India’s engagement with the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD), where, on the one hand, India has pushed for QUAD’s focus on non-traditional security issues such as maritime domain awareness, humanitarian and disaster relief, vaccine diplomacy, while also garnering a reputation of being QUAD’s ‘weakest link’ due to its opposition to an institutionalized military alliance.

Historical Evolution: Strategic Autonomy vis-a-vis Strategic Partnerships

 Strategic autonomy has been a cornerstone of Indian foreign policy since its inception, underlying the Non-Aligned movement. It initially entailed policy abhorrence to strict alliance to any of the Cold War great power blocs, and later transformed into India developing its nuclear programme despite American pushback. Foreign policies of states are subjected to both changes and continuities over time, regardless of changes in government, and the notion of strategic autonomy has undergone a similar transformation under the Modi government. Supply chain diversification has become integral to India’s development programmes in recent years. As a result, India has actively expanded its defense procurements beyond Russia. It is keen on discarding the traditional buyer-seller relationships and developing technological cooperation for the coproduction of defense equipment with states like France. The growing Chinese influence in the Indian subcontinent has also pushed it closer to Washington, and the media have consistently highlighted the personal ties between Modi and Trump as a marker of strong and sustaining Indo-US ties. The transition from strategic autonomy to strategic partnerships was born out of the ‘multi-alignment’ strategy – India’s calculated push to not keep all eggs in one basket, where, on the one hand, it has gotten closer to its Western powers and their allies but also maintained its commitment to old friends like Russia.

Strategic partnerships are historically bilateral, and to date, India has signed over 30 strategic partnerships, including all the member states of the QUAD. It has created a space to develop a regular dialogue with major powers such as the USA, France and Japan to assess their priorities and mutual interests and build trust and confidence. It gives them access to defence technology, intelligence, trade and investment. Strategic autonomy and strategic partnerships should not be treated as fixed binaries distinct from each other. Rather, strategic partnerships operate within the ambit of strategic autonomy to build and sustain relationships with multiple states while also being mindful of the changing world order and adapting in light of these changes.

QUAD: Recontextualizing Strategic Autonomy and Partnerships

 QUAD, the informal strategic forum consisting of India, the US, Australia and Japan, was first conceptualized by Shinzo Abe, the late prime Minister of Japan, and revived under the first Trump administration. The narrative is that of ‘like-minded’ democratic countries converging with the primary objective of maintaining the Indo-Pacific region's ‘stability and prosperity.’ China’s growing presence in the Indian Ocean region has been regarded as India’s motivation to engage with QUAD proactively. However, Indian officials have dismissed perceptions of QUAD as an ‘anti-China’ grouping or alliance in the making. The unwillingness to champion QUAD as a Chinese containment forum – unlike the USA, which would prefer to mould the grouping into a formal alliance to counter any Pacific conflict in the future, is rooted in its historical tradition of strategic autonomy. However, India’s strategic autonomy should not only be understood in relation to the USA and its regional priorities. In doing so, we might continue to get caught up in the outdated understanding of India's strategic autonomy as a cautionary tactic to stay out of great power politics. Rather, India’s strategic autonomy should be understood in the context of its multi-alignment strategy and its aspirations for great power status. Critics have often pointed out the ‘lack of strategic culture’ in India, but norms and values have remained integral to Indian foreign policy – particularly the idea of being a responsible, non-interventionist power.

 Contrary to traditional realism, great power status is derived from material dominance and the ability to affect the ideational component of a structure. QUAD is still at a nascent stage on a slow path toward institutionalization. At this juncture, India would want a greater say in managing security in its backyard, rather than being swayed by American leadership’s interests in the South China Sea and the Indo-Pacific in general. To be a strong, assertive, and influential great power in the making, it must begin by asserting its interest and identity within the grouping itself. QUAD’s flexibility allows India to counter the political and military domination of actors external to its neighborhood while elevating its status as a regional leader committed to maintaining a ‘free, open, prosperous and inclusive’ region. Indian pragmatism is non-expansionist despite the domestic projection of being ‘muscular’ in nature. Adhering to a hard-security alliance with the USA will also detract from India’s central quest for rapid economic growth.

 In S. Jaishankar’s book, The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World, he writes eloquently, that New Delhi must not fall into simplistic alignments. Rather, it should advance “national interests by identifying and exploiting opportunities created by global contradiction” – extracting from as many ties as possible and benefiting from emerging rifts in the international system. India is committed to QUAD but also its emphasis on non-traditional security is at once a status-seeking project, a commitment to its normative values, and its distinct understanding of liberal values as well as extracting the cooperation of other members for health, climate, critical and emerging technology, space, infrastructural investments, maritime domain awareness, and cyber security.

However, the focus on non-traditional security has also greatly de-securitized the forum, initially envisioned to strategize maritime security concerns. The focus on bilateral strategic partnerships with QUAD members can be deduced as a mitigating tactic to the negative press surrounding QUAD’s de-securitization. India has signed bilateral defense agreements with all QUAD members, such as the COMCASA (with the USA), that facilitated interoperability between militaries and sale of high-end technology, as well as the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET) for collaboration across key technological sectors like space, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence. On the maritime front, it conducted Malabar naval exercises with Japan in 2017 and is now a permanent partner for these exercises. Japan has also pledged a 42 million dollar investment to support India’s quest for supply chain diversification for semiconductors and rare earth minerals. India has also signed a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with Australia, with plans to renew and strengthen the Joint Declaration on Defence and Security Cooperation in 2025 to reflect the elevated strategic partnership between the two countries.

 While India may not commit to any formal military alliance, either as a part of a security community or on a bilateral basis, these partnerships reflect convergence in defence and technological domains that is mutually beneficial – acting as building blocks for trust and compatibility that are required to sustain a nascent organization such as QUAD that is still in the process of articulating its practical goals and objectively measurable output. It has facilitated technological; resource exchange and access plus mitigate risks of entanglements in US-China or Japan-China conflicts. Strategic Partnerships act as an additional insulation layer against major power coercion in multilateral groupings, where, on the one hand, India can continue to foster close relations with revolving US leadership in a steadily fracturing global arena, be it the former Biden or the current Trump administration, while also prioritizing its interests and status within QUAD. It gives India the much-needed material investment to militarily and economically position itself against future Chinese aggression without being entangled in zero-sum games involving the USA or China.

Conclusion

The need of the hour is to strike a delicate balance between strategic autonomy and strategic partnership in a manner adaptable to the fluctuations in the geopolitics of the world order. QUAD is not only integral to India’s security interests in the Indian Ocean Region but also a platform for it to leverage its great power status. Chinese critics have already mocked the QUAD as a concept that would “dissipate like foam in the Indian or Pacific Sea”. The Biden administration had elevated QUAD to the summit level, and with Trump coming back to the office for the second time, India must reorient its QUAD strategies to sustain the US’s enthusiastic support for the grouping while retaining pragmatic, issue-based linkages.

 It is imperative for policymakers across all the member states to recognize that India’s strategic autonomy has evolved beyond its conservative anti-West stance during the years of the decolonization era towards promoting rights as a sovereign territory with an independent agency. India is committed to maintaining the liberal world order, much like its QUAD peers. Ultimately, the sustainability of the balancing act of strategic autonomy and strategic partnerships will be tested due to the world order's inherent volatility. Therefore, the premature state of the QUAD necessitates an adaptability that is mindful of external aggression, internal coercion, the possibility of becoming defunct, and India’s national interests and aspirations.

*Shreya Das is a Research Intern at the Kalinga Institute of Indo-Pacific Studies (KIIPS), India. She is also pursuing her Masters in International Relations at South Asian University, New Delhi.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are author's own.

Pic courtsey: Business Standard/https://www.business-standard.com/external-affairs-defence-security/news/opportunity-risks-for-india-in-quad-s-trump-card-to-counter-china-125012700005_1.html