Strategic Autonomy as a Living Doctrine in a Bipolar Decade

Strategic autonomy has been the single most durable idea in Indian foreign policy, tracing an unbroken lineage from Jawaharlal Nehru's non-alignment through the more assertive multi-alignment of the post-Cold War decades to its current articulation under successive external affairs ministers as the principle that India will not subordinate its own judgment on any issue to the preferences of another power, however close the relationship. The doctrine has survived the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union that had been India's closest strategic partner, and the rise of a far more consequential relationship with the United States, precisely because it was never really about equidistance from great powers so much as about preserving India's own room for manoeuvre. What has changed, and changed significantly over the past decade, is the cost of exercising that autonomy in a world where the space for genuine non-alignment between rival powers has narrowed considerably compared to the Cold War, when India could credibly claim it was choosing neither side because a genuine third position, the Non-Aligned Movement itself, offered real diplomatic company and moral standing.

The Russia Test

The clearest test of strategic autonomy's current viability has come through India's continued relationship with Russia since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. India abstained on nearly every United Nations resolution condemning Russia's action, continued and in fact expanded its purchases of discounted Russian crude oil, and has maintained defence procurement relationships, including for spare parts and maintenance of a military inventory still substantially of Soviet and Russian origin, all while facing considerable diplomatic pressure from Washington and European capitals to align more visibly with the Western position. India's public defence of this position, articulated repeatedly by External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, rests on two distinct arguments that are often conflated but should be separated: first, that India's dependence on Russian-origin military equipment, built up over seven decades and still comprising a majority of the inventory across the three services, makes an abrupt rupture strategically reckless regardless of the moral clarity Western capitals might prefer; and second, a broader argument that Western nations selectively invoke a rules-based order when it suits their interests while tolerating or participating in other violations elsewhere, a point that has genuine force in the Global South even if it should not be mistaken for a considered defence of Russia's actions themselves.

The Quad Complication

Simultaneously, India has deepened its participation in the Quad alongside the United States, Japan and Australia, a grouping whose entire strategic rationale is balancing against Chinese assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific, and has expanded defence cooperation with Washington through agreements on logistics, communications and geospatial intelligence sharing that would have been unthinkable for an ostensibly non-aligned power a generation ago. This is not a contradiction so much as an illustration of what strategic autonomy actually means in current Indian practice: not equidistance between Washington and Beijing, since India has unambiguously identified China as its primary security threat following the 2020 Ladakh clashes, but rather a refusal to convert that alignment against China into a comprehensive alliance commitment that would also require aligning against Russia, a country India does not perceive as a threat and continues to value as a source of military hardware, a check on excessive Chinese-Russian alignment, and a vote in multilateral forums.

The Rising Costs of the Balancing Act

The genuine strain in this balancing act has become more visible in recent years, and honesty requires acknowledging it rather than assuming the doctrine can be sustained indefinitely without friction. American patience with India's Russia posture, while considerable, is not infinite, and successive administrations have signalled, through sanctions threats over the S-400 missile system purchase and periodic public frustration, that Washington's tolerance rests partly on a calculation that India's strategic value against China outweighs the irritant of its Russia policy, a calculation that could shift if US-China competition intensifies further or if domestic American politics produces less patient leadership. Simultaneously, Russia's own deepening dependence on China following Western sanctions has altered the strategic logic that made the Russia relationship valuable to India in the first place: a Russia that is increasingly a junior partner to Beijing is less useful to India as a hedge against Chinese dominance of the Eurasian landmass than the more independent Russia of previous decades, raising the uncomfortable possibility that India's investment in the relationship yields diminishing strategic returns even as its diplomatic cost rises.

The Case Against Overcorrection

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude from these strains that India should abandon the doctrine in favour of a clearer alignment with Washington, as some voices in Indian strategic commentary have begun to argue. India's history with alliance relationships, including the more binding elements of the Soviet-era "friendship treaty" of 1971, has generally shown that formal alignment constrains Indian decision-making at moments of crisis without delivering commensurate security guarantees, since even treaty allies of the United States have discovered that American commitments carry more ambiguity in practice than in text. India's ability to maintain relationships with Iran, engage in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS while also deepening Quad cooperation gives it diplomatic reach that a more clearly aligned posture would forfeit, reach that has proven useful in contexts ranging from evacuating Indian nationals from conflict zones to maintaining energy supply diversity.

Managing Rather Than Resolving the Tension

What strategic autonomy requires today, more than at any point since its Cold War origins, is active management rather than passive assertion: a continuous, case-by-case calibration of how far India can lean toward Washington on China-related security cooperation while preserving enough independence on Russia, Iran and multilateral positioning to retain genuine freedom of action rather than a freedom that exists only in rhetoric while every substantive choice has already been made elsewhere. That is a harder doctrine to sustain than the moral clarity Nehru once claimed for non-alignment, precisely because it offers no fixed principle to fall back on beyond India's own continuously reassessed interest, but it remains, on balance, better suited to India's circumstances than the alternative of choosing a camp in a rivalry whose ultimate outcome nobody, least of all the rival powers themselves, can currently predict with confidence.