Part I: 2025 Ends India’s Strategic Comfort Zone
If 2025 was about hardening, 2026 will be about choosing between habits and outcomes.
The most immediate challenge lies in managing parallel tracks that increasingly pull in opposite directions. India will deepen security coordination within the Quad even as it prepares to assume a leadership role in BRICS.
This is not a contradiction in New Delhi’s eyes, but it will be treated as one by others.
The Quad expects clarity on maritime security, technology standards, and China. BRICS is drifting—unevenly—toward debates on de-dollarisation, financial autonomy, and post-Western institutional reform.
India need not be the loudest voice in either camp. But it must be the most precise.
That precision is missing in parts of India’s multilateral posture. SAARC was abandoned and BIMSTEC promoted as an alternative, yet BIMSTEC now drifts—under-resourced and politically inert.
India sits within the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation while doing little to strengthen its cohesion and at times signalling scepticism from within. India remains in BRICS even as the grouping edges toward de-dollarisation, a project New Delhi openly resists.
India has also walked a tightrope while balancing its ties with Israel and the Arab world, including Iran and Saudi Arabia. And in a move that raised some eyebrows, it opened up to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, stopping just short of formal recognition.
None of these positions is illegitimate on its own. But together, they raise a basic question: what exactly is India trying to achieve through these platforms?
China, meanwhile, is not waiting. It will continue pressing along the Line of Actual Control without crossing crisis thresholds. It will expand naval presence in the Indian Ocean while denying strategic intent. It will tighten economic and technological ecosystems even as globalisation fragments. The danger for India is fatigue, complacency, and failing to recognise that China prefers to restrain India, not go to war with it.
Against this backdrop, 2026 should be shaped by four deliberate policy moves.
First, lock in deterrence as a system, not a reaction.
The LAC posture has already shifted from temporary to permanent. What remains is institutional follow-through: predictable funding, logistics that assume winter as default, and political messaging that treats the border as a standing condition rather than a diplomatic failure. With Pakistan, deterrence must remain calibrated and unemotional. The objective is not dialogue or dominance but denying space for escalation, mediation theatre, or narrative inversion.
Second, treat defence exports as strategy.
BrahMos sales in 2025 were not just proof of concept; they were a signal. In 2026, India should formalise a tiered export doctrine with clear rules on where, when, and why systems are offered. This allows India to shape regional balances without inheriting regional conflicts.
Third, assume a fractured monetary order.
India should resist grandstanding while quietly expanding settlement options, currency-swap frameworks, and financial interoperability with trusted partners. As BRICS chair, India’s value lies in moderation—preventing the forum from hardening into an anti-Western bloc while acknowledging legitimate concerns over financial concentration and sanctions overreach.
Finally, make neighbourhood policy execution-driven.
With Bangladesh, Nepal, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka, India’s advantage is not ideology or civilisational rhetoric, although these cannot be wished away. It is proximity plus speedy delivery. Power grids, fuel supply, digital public infrastructure, and disaster response capabilities matter more than sanctimonious speeches or summits.
Beyond these choices lies a quieter frontier: geography itself. The Arctic is no longer peripheral. Shorter trade routes, energy access, and reduced chokepoint dependence make northern passages strategically relevant. India’s engagement must be scientific, commercial, and diplomatic—aligned with resilience rather than symbolism.
What India must avoid in 2026 is the temptation to constantly explain itself.
Strategic autonomy does not require narration. It requires consistency. Partners will test resolve. Rivals will probe thresholds. Some will try to force binary choices. The correct response is sequencing—knowing when to move, when to wait, and when to stay silent.
India is no longer operating in a system designed for its rise. It is operating in one strained by others’ decline, anxiety, and revisionism. This requires knowing the difference between adjustment and strategy. And the high cost of indecision.
In a career spanning three decades and counting, Ramananda (Ram to his friends) has been the foreign editor of The Telegraph, Outlook Magazine and the New Indian Express. He helped set up rediff.com’s editorial operations in San Jose and New York, helmed sify.com, and was the founder editor of India.com.
His work has featured in national and international publications like the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, Global Times and Ashahi Shimbun. But his one constant over all these years, he says, has been the attempt to understand rising India’s place in the world.
He can rustle up a mean salad, his oil-less pepper chicken is to die for, and all it takes is some beer and rhythm and blues to rock his soul.
Talk to him about foreign and strategic affairs, media, South Asia, China, and of course India.
