Maqbool Shah
India’s long-cherished doctrine of strategic autonomy, once a badge of post-colonial independence, is steadily mutating from a source of flexibility into a condition of strategic drift. What was designed to preserve room for maneuver is now generating accumulating costs—economic, military and diplomatic—without producing commensurate leverage in return. In a world that is rapidly polarizing, this imbalance is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
Strategic autonomy originated in the Nehruvian era as non-alignment, a pragmatic attempt to avoid entanglement in Cold War blocs while extracting developmental assistance from both. In its contemporary form, it has been rebranded as “multi-alignment”: deepening defense and technological ties with the United States and its partners, maintaining legacy military and energy links with Russia and sustaining substantial economic engagement with China.
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