The Agni-IV and India’s strategic autonomy

India’s test of its Agni-IV last month was not remarkable simply because another missile was launched. With a range of about 4,000km, the Agni-IV can reach Beijing and other important targets deep inside China. What the test shows more clearly is that India has a much greater capacity to deter China well beyond their disputed border.

The missile itself is only part of the story. More important is what it tells us about India’s national capabilities, and how those capabilities affect the way New Delhi deals with Beijing and the regional order.

India’s strategic autonomy is often described as a preference not to choose sides. It is also sometimes understood as an attempt to keep roughly equal distance from major powers. Neither description quite captures what India has been trying to do.

Nonalignment, multiple partnerships and selective alignment have all appeared in Indian foreign policy. They are better understood as policy choices than as the meaning of strategic autonomy itself. What India has consistently sought is the ability to protect its security and make its own decisions when the external environment changes.

That ability depends on more than diplomatic flexibility. A country might stay outside an alliance and have little autonomy if its security depends heavily on outside commitments or if critical military systems come from a single foreign supplier.

The Agni-IV is important in this sense: India has spent more than 15 years testing and improving the system. In the process, it has also accumulated experience in indigenous research and development, systems integration and the operation of strategic forces. These capabilities give substance to an idea that otherwise risks remaining little more than diplomatic language.

Autonomy is only as useful as the choices it leaves open, and Agni-IV matters, because it gives India more of those choices, especially in dealing with China.

A similar pattern can be seen in India’s approach to Beijing, a neighbor it cannot simply disengage from, and a major power that can narrow India’s security and development space.

India has reopened high-level channels with China, but that has not changed the direction of its defense policy. New Delhi is still bolstering its military capabilities, paying greater attention to the Indian Ocean and investing in technologies where dependence could become a liability.

China remains too important for India to sideline. The border dispute is still there, and trade between the two countries remains large. That helps explain why New Delhi has resumed political contact with Beijing.

However, renewed contact says little about the direction of India’s China policy. It matters more to look at the areas in which India continues to rely on China, where it is searching for alternatives and where New Delhi increasingly treats dependence as a strategic risk.

This extends beyond the bilateral relationship. On the Indian Ocean, technology and supply chains, India has been building alternatives and reducing dependence on any single major power. In doing so, it might create more room for other countries in the region as well. The result is a regional environment in which China is important, but not the only center of economic and strategic gravity.

For the Indo-Pacific region, this might be the broader significance of India’s strategic autonomy. An India with greater freedom to act and a stronger ability to withstand pressure adds another center of power to the regional order.

For Taiwan, the important question is what practical options such an India might eventually create.

Lin Hsiao-chen is an assistant professor in the Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies at Tamkang University.