In his recent article on rediff.com, Gulf War: India Is In A Catch-22 Situation, Ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar is right to underline the seriousness of India’s dilemma.
But his prescription belongs to another era.
His argument is framed in the fading language of the Non-Aligned Movement—a world of posturing, diplomatic distance and moral balancing—when the strategic environment India faces today is far harsher, more transactional and far less forgiving.
This is no longer the 1990s, let alone the Cold War. We are living through a fractured multipolar order defined by hard dependencies: energy vulnerability, technology control, supply-chain coercion, financial weaponisation and pervasive strategic insecurity. In such a world, nostalgia for NAM is not strategy; it is escapism.
That is why the suggestion that India should “observe and learn from Islamabad’s footfalls” is unpersuasive.
Pakistan is not an example of successful balancing. It is a rentier state, structurally dependent on external patrons, bailout cycles and security sponsors. Its foreign policy reflects regime preservation more than strategic sophistication. India does not learn statecraft from a power surviving on external support.
The invocation of BRICS as a corrective is equally incomplete. BRICS is not a neutral strategic sanctuary; it is a forum shaped by China’s weight, ambition and agenda. To speak of it as a stabilising platform without acknowledging Beijing’s dominance is to sidestep the central contradiction.
The same applies to the SCO. These are not post-ideological spaces of equal cooperation, but arenas of influence where China enters with structural advantages India cannot ignore.
Even Russia’s behaviour should temper any romanticism about bloc politics. Moscow may have drawn closer to Beijing under Western pressure, but it is hardly comfortable with long-term overdependence on China. It would clearly prefer a wider capital base and greater strategic optionality, including Western and dollar investment in its energy sector if sanctions ease.
That alone underscores a larger truth: even great powers caught in bloc confrontations seek exits.
India, therefore, is not confused. It is adapting.
New Delhi is engaging BRICS and the SCO where useful, while simultaneously deepening trade and strategic ties with the EU, UK, Australia, Canada, Japan and other Western partners.
It is managing an important, if unpredictable, relationship with the United States under Donald Trump, while preserving policy space elsewhere. This is not inconsistency; it is what serious states do when the system itself is unstable.
The clearest example lies in West Asia. India has strengthened ties with Gulf monarchies, sustained engagement with Iran, and deepened strategic, technological and security cooperation with Israel—without formally aligning with one camp against another.
This is not fence-sitting. It is a deliberate multi-vector strategy designed to secure energy flows, market access, connectivity, diaspora interests and geopolitical flexibility.
That is the larger point. India’s external posture is being shaped in a world convulsed by the Ukraine war, Gaza, wider Middle East tensions, maritime insecurity, the weaponisation of trade, economic fragmentation and AI-driven technological shifts.
No major power can navigate such a system through doctrinal purity or inherited slogans. Strategic autonomy today does not mean standing apart from all sides. It means retaining the ability to engage all sides without becoming captive to any.
India’s challenge is not to revive the vocabulary of non-alignment. Nor is it to indulge the fiction that BRICS offers an uncontested pathway to multipolar stability. And it certainly is not to emulate Pakistan’s dependency-driven opportunism.
The task is harder: to live with contradiction, hedge without apology, and build leverage across competing poles in a world where disorder is becoming the organising principle.
Yes, India is in a Catch-22. But that is because the international system itself is in a Catch-22.
In such a world, hedging is not hesitation. It is strategy.
(Sumeer Bhasin is a geopolitical analyst and strategic affairs commentator)
