India’s rising global profile has generated a flood of commentary on its geopolitical ambitions. Its coercion towards neighbours, expanding defence and technology partnerships with the U.S. and West, while simultaneously extracting benefits from Russia, and recent diplomatic U-turn towards Afghanistan’s Taliban regime point to a country newly confident in projecting influence.
Yet India’s strategic behaviour is not merely a function of contemporary leadership or opportunistic alignments. It is anchored in a much older political philosophy that continues to shape decisions today.
That tradition traces back to Chanakya Kautilya—also known as Chanakya—the author of the Arthashastra, a treatise on statecraft that predates Machiavelli by nearly two millennia.
The philosophical irony is noteworthy but rarely discussed: the intellectual milieu in which Chanakya thrived was cantered in ancient Taxila, located around 50-minute drive from Islamabad. Whatever historical boundaries define South Asia today, India has embraced and operationalized a strategic heritage born beyond its contemporary borders. Indian strategy still runs on Pakistani roots that Islamabad chose not to adopt.
Political scientist Roger Boesche distilled the Arthashastra’s foreign policy prescriptions into six measures of statecraft, known as ṣāḍguṇya. These principles remain discernible in India’s modern behaviour, particularly in how it manages asymmetric relationships, hedges in major-power competition, and approaches crisis dynamics.
The first measure, Sandhi, calls for peace when the balance of power is unfavourable. India’s decision to de-escalate and normalize relations after its defeat in the 1962 war with China reflected tactical necessity rather than doctrinal change.
Today, India’s deepening defence cooperation with the United States, including logistics and intelligence agreements, is likewise informed by recognition of asymmetric capability.
Diplomacy becomes a hedge against coercion, not a departure from realism. Whether India will accept costs for someone else’s great power rivalry remains far from certain.
The second measure, Vighraha, prescribes tightening the screws when strength appears to favour one’s side. India has repeatedly tested this logic with Pakistan but with bitter outcomes.
The 1999 Kargil conflict, the 2019 Balakot strikes, and coercive operations during the May 2025 war, called Operation Sindoor, reflected attempts to impose costs without triggering nuclear escalation. Indian strategic planners increasingly experiment with calibrated escalation, hoping to signal control in a nuclearized environment. Yet the outcomes have been mixed, revealing limits in converting operational confidence into political leverage.
The third measure, Āsana, emphasizes neutrality when great powers are balanced. What New Delhi long celebrated as non-alignment during the Cold War was fundamentally strategic caution and a refusal to tie its fortunes to uncertain outcomes.
India’s current articulation of strategic autonomy is not a fresh doctrine but a continuation of this principle in a world where China’s rise, U.S. expectations, and Russian persistence create shifting alignments.
India maintains enough ambiguity to ensure no great power can confidently assume its long-term loyalty. Yet ambiguity has limits once partners begin expecting returns on their investments.
Yāna, the fourth measure, recommends quiet but constant preparation for war even as diplomacy prevails. India’s major modernization programs illustrate this approach. Its nuclear arsenal has expanded in sophistication and survivability since the 1998 tests and it keeps the powder dry for resuming thermonuclear weapon testing. Maritime capability is embodied in its carrier fleet and sea-based deterrent ambitions.
Ballistic missile development and counter-space demonstrations signal a growing role in the Indian and Pacific Ocean region’s evolving military balance. Meanwhile, renewed diplomatic engagement with Kabul serves not humanitarian aspiration alone, but also strategic positioning on the western flank of a primary rival.
The fifth measure, Saṃśraya, encourages seeking allies when a rival’s power trajectory accelerates. China’s rapid ascent provided India the opportunity to exploit American anxieties and move closer to it, Japan, Australia, and Europe, not through ideological convergence, but through so-called collective balancing.
Efforts to integrate into global supply chains, deepen technology partnerships, and diversify energy routes all reflect apprehension about falling behind strategically.
The sixth measure, Dvaidhibhāva, focuses on hedging behaviour – playing a double-game when the world is fluid. This means working simultaneously with multiple partners and minimizing irreversible commitments.
This principle defines New Delhi’s grand strategy today. India strengthens ties with Washington while importing discounted oil from Moscow. It invests in relations with Israel while maintaining dialogue with Iran. It participates in Western-led exercises while maintaining distance from formal alliance agreements. The result is maximum flexibility and positional leverage.
This Chanakyan logic explains global perceptions of India as unpredictable, not because its motives shift, but because its strategic culture prioritizes optionality over alignment. India can support U.S. operations in the Indian Ocean, oppose Chinese territorial pressure, and still refuse to frame itself as part of a Western coalition.
It can experiment with rapprochement toward the Taliban without relinquishing its partnerships in Washington or New Delhi’s long-standing crying wolf about Pakistan.
This raises two critical questions for policymakers outside the region: How should India’s realism be interpreted? And how should its limits be understood?
India’s attempts to coerce neighbours, particularly Pakistan, remain constrained by nuclear deterrence and escalation uncertainty. T
he May 2025 war demonstrated improved confidence in interdiction and signalling capabilities, but it also showed how quickly risk calculations narrow by a Quid-Pro-Quo Plus (QPQ+) conventional response and when nuclear thresholds are engaged. India may initiate escalation, but its ability to shape the political terms of conflict remains unproven.
Internally, India’s ambitions outpace its structural capabilities. Great-power competition exposes vulnerabilities in industrial depth, wartime logistics, technological autonomy, and coalition management. The Arthashastra’s prescriptions assume freedom of manoeuvre that nuclear proximity and global interdependence complicate.
For the United States, misreading India as a steadfast ally could lead to misaligned expectations. The most realistic forecast is situational partnership: New Delhi will align with Washington when threat perceptions converge, especially concerning China in the maritime domain.
But it will hedge where interests diverge, particularly in West Asia, energy security, the Global South, and democratic norms.
India’s strategic direction is driven less by democratic values than by centuries-old realist tradition rooted in the intellectual milieu of ancient Taxila. That ethic seeks gains without entanglements, coercion without escalation, and autonomy without isolation.
Understanding the Chanakyan playbook does not guarantee predicting India’s every move, but it does clarify why India behaves as it does.
The question ahead is not whether New Delhi will continue to follow this logic–it will–but how effectively it can translate ancient statecraft into sustainable influence in a nuclearized, technologically disrupted, and rapidly multipolar Asia.
India is not merely reacting to power politics; it is expressing a dangerous strategic culture that has endured for more than two thousand years. How the major powers adapt to that enduring logic will shape the Indian and Pacific Ocean’s balance. Pakistan, for its part, patiently watches the familiar playbook because its origins are tied to the intellect.
