By Ankit Panda
Why doesn’t India just call them alliances?
It took a long time, but over the past decade, India demonstrated that it was finally comfortable shedding the old vestige of Cold War strategic thinking that was non-alignment. A witness to colonialism and victim to external exploitation, India eschewed alliances and all-weather partnerships for most of the 20th century. It spent its early years as an independent sovereign actor in Asia fomenting the so-called Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) which persists to this day.
Of course, India hasn’t swung full-force into any alliances in the past decade – it has to walk before it can run in that regard. Instead, Indian foreign policy has embraced the concept of “strategic partnerships.” India currently conducts bilateral relations on the level of “strategic partners” with the United States, Russia, China, Japan, Indonesia, Australia, Vietnam, South Korea, Iran, ASEAN, Afghanistan and several others. At this point, I wouldn’t fault a reader for wondering what the deal is with these “strategic partnerships.” India’s relations with the aforementioned laundry list of countries vary greatly. Why does India – at least formally and rhetorically – grant the same level of diplomatic elevation to its relationship with China as it does to its relationship with the United States and Japan?
Read the full story at The Diplomat