The Indo-Pacific Consensus: The Past, Present and Future of India’s Vision for the Region

The view that the concept of the Indo-Pacific is not new nor an aberration has anchored New Delhi’s embrace of this geopolitical reality and the articulation of its central role and vision for this dynamic theatre. This revisiting of history has happened, in New Delhi’s understanding, because of drivers such as globalisation, multipolarity and a recognition by the United States that it needs to work with others to manage the disruptive rise of China, among other global challenges. India has always considered itself an Indo-Pacific actor, given its geographical location, its interests and stakes primarily in the Indian Ocean and increasingly in the pacific, its bilateral partnerships which then see a shared interest in the region, its presence in existent Indo-Pacific bodies spanning the two oceans and its growing role as a provider of net security and preferred maritime security partner for many countries in the Indo-Pacific. This article traces the evolution of the Indo-Pacific in New Delhi’s strategic calculus and its pre-eminence as a theatre of geo-strategic and geo-economic opportunity. It argues that three trends have emerged as distinguishable features, which serve as building blocks of cooperation in the Indo-Pacific today, especially for India: (a) issue-based coalitions driven by function, where flexibility of these configurations remains a strategic asset, (b) like-minded countries working together in overlapping bilateral, minilateral and plurilateral formats to expand global initiatives in a way that they are institutionalised within the national agendas of regional like-minded powers and (c) a focused effort on building capacity of countries in the Indo-Pacific to give them viable alternatives which go beyond binaries formed around ideological and political contestation. Post COVID-19, consolidating the India way in the Indo-Pacific will depend on how India strengthens its domestic capacity and shapes geopolitics at the regional and global levels.