Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand: India’s strategic recalibration in Indo-Pacific through Mandala framework

It is indeed sad that when Indian diplomacy has taken up the challenge of owning the Indo-Pacific framework through bold activism and a new algorithm of collaboration -- notwithstanding a frowning China and a disinterested United States -- Indian media’s attention was occupied by ‘important’ reportage emerging from New Zealand, on whether Modi’s visit included nap time or climbing up stairs. Kitsch is the new normal.

I was waiting for Modi’s New Zealand’s tour to finish. I posit that his return from New Zealand culminates a grander arc of Indian diplomacy. For instance, to view the prime minister’s whirlwind tour of Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand from July 6-11 in isolation would be a strategic misstep. Between the third week of April and the second week of July, New Delhi sat at the centre of a remarkable diplomatic activism.

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South Korean president Lee Jae-myung arrived on April 19 for the first state visit by a Korean president in eight years. Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi followed on July 1 for the 16th annual summit, her maiden visit to India since taking office. Within 72 hours of her departure, Modi was airborne on a six-day, three-nation journey through Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. The calendar was certainly not coincidental, nor did it merely signify multilateralism.

Together, these engagements represent the structural operationalization of Kautilya’s Mandala theory in the 21st-century Indo-Pacific. By reinforcing a concentric circle of partnerships with like-minded maritime democracies, New Delhi is constructing a normative and security architecture to increase its strategic space. The objective is not the creation of an exclusionary, Cold War-style anti-China coalition, but rather the cultivation of a balanced multipolar region that shapes Beijing’s behavioral calculus.

Whereas Kautilya’s Arthashastra conceived of the immediate neighbour as natural rival and the neighbour’s neighbour as natural ally, instead of enmity and amity, Modi’s statecraft formulates circles of graduated partnership as they pan across the Indian Ocean into the western Pacific through contemporary instruments such as the Act East policy, the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative and the MAHASAGAR vision.

The immediate, overlapping sphere of influence is contested by an assertive China. Beijing’s overbearing presence and statecraft has complicated India’s relationship with its immediate neighbours such as Bangladesh, Nepal or even Sri Lanka. Consequently, India’s strategic imperative is to bypass its immediate continental constraints and forge deep, structural alliances with the outer ring of maritime states.

This theoretical framework may explain the sequencing of India’s diplomatic outreach. President Lee Jae-myung’s visit laid the northern anchor of this outer ring, focusing on critical technologies and supply chain resilience. Takaichi’s visit solidified the eastern anchor, underscoring the alignment of Japan’s ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’ with India’s Indo-Pacific Oceans’ Initiative (IPOI) and MAHASAGAR framework. The Japan-India Joint Declaration on economic security recorded “grave concerns over the use of economic coercion” and export restrictions on critical minerals. The two sides also sealed the first-ever defence co-development project, the UNICORN naval antenna. It signalled the coming together of two of Asia’s most capable democracies.

It is against this backdrop that Modi’s three-nation tour acquires its coherence -- and nowhere more so than in Jakarta, the first and the most critical leg with the prime minister responding to the invitation of Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto.

This was Modi’s first bilateral visit to the archipelago since the elevation of India-Indonesia ties to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in 2018. Indonesia -- a fellow civilizational power that values strategic autonomy -- is the indispensable fulcrum of the Indo-Pacific, controlling the vital maritime choke points of the Malacca, Sunda, and Lombok straits that connect the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

The India-Indonesia joint statement and its accompanying outcomes demonstrated a marked shift from historical platitudes to hard security and maritime strategy.

A $630 million agreement made Indonesia the third country to acquire the BrahMos cruise missile and the first customer for the Astra Mk-1 beyond-visual-range air-to-air missiles for Indonesia’s fleet of 16 Su-30 fighters.

The two sides renewed their Maritime Safety and Security MoU, concluded an arrangement between Indonesia’s BAKAMLA and the Indian Coast Guard, and agreed to station an Indonesian liaison officer at India’s Gurugram-based Information Fusion Centre. Subianto welcomed Indian participation in developing Sabang port at the mouth of the Malacca Strait, barely 150km away from India’s Great Nicobar trans-shipment port project.

The economic layer was equally thought-out -- a rare-earth magnets agreement aimed at diversifying supply chains, a SAIL-Krakatau Steel joint venture, local-currency settlement and integration of India’s UPI with Indonesia’s payment system.

The joint statement reaffirmed commitment to a “free, open, transparent, rules-based, peaceful, prosperous and inclusive Indo-Pacific region”, invoked UNCLOS and freedom of navigation and overflight, and endorsed synergy between ASEAN’s outlook and India’s IPOI.

By committing to diversified supply chains and increasing bilateral trade, India and Indonesia are trying to reduce their asymmetrical economic dependencies on Beijing, while their deeper security cooperation may raise the costs of coercion in the region.

In Kautilyan terms, Indonesia is the vital Mitra whose geographic positioning complements India’s maritime outreach. Without a robust partnership with Jakarta, India’s Indo-Pacific framework remains structurally incomplete.

Melbourne extended the geometry into the middle ring. The Third India-Australia annual summit produced a new Joint Declaration on Defence and Security Cooperation, a Maritime Security Collaboration Roadmap, a coast guard agreement with Australia's Maritime Border Command, and more than a decade of dormancy since the 2015 civil nuclear pact -- a finalised arrangement enabling long-term Australian uranium exports to India.

This nuclear cooperation is an indicator of profound strategic trust and is expected to contribute to India’s energy resilience. In the maritime domain, the expansion of joint operations under the Quad umbrella and bilateral frameworks reinforces a shared commitment to a rules-based maritime order.

China had recently test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile into the Pacific and Australia prime minister Anthony Albanese raised it directly with Modi.

The joint statement’s declaration that both nations “strongly opposed any destabilising or unilateral action to change the status quo” was the most explicit pointer.

Auckland completed the outermost ring. The first visit by an Indian PM to New Zealand in 40 years – days after the signing of a free trade agreement -- elevated ties to a Strategic Partnership with a Roadmap to 2030.

Modi and his New Zealand counterpart Christopher Luxon established a pragmatic five-year target to double annual bilateral trade in goods and services to Rs 35,000 crore by 2030. By expanding the Mandala to include New Zealand, India has pushed its strategic frontier to the very edges of the Indo-Pacific, ensuring that the normative rules of the region are upheld not just in the contested littorals of Asia, but across the entire oceanic expanse.

Read across all five engagements, the pattern is unmistakable. New Delhi is building an overlapping, flexible lattice of partnerships and each ring engages India at the relative depth that its own circumstances permit -- missile sales and co-development of Sabang port for Indonesia, uranium and cyber pacts for Australia, logistics, hydrography and nautical cartography for New Zealand, shipbuilding and semiconductors for Korea, co-development of naval systems and economic-security doctrine for Japan.

By converging with like-minded democracies on security, rules, interoperability and resilient supply chains, India is expanding its own strategic space while altering -- incrementally and without confrontation -- the risk-reward calculus for any revisionist power (read China) that seeks to unilaterally alter the status quo. The aim is deterrence through density. Arthashastra sought conquest. Modi’s statecraft is seeking equilibrium.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)