New Delhi is inexorably aligning its interests with the wider West. That has put Australia on the A-list of the Indian government’s international partners.
The almost startlingly rapid growth of Australia-India relations in recent years is a rare happy by-product of a tense, divided and more dangerous international system.
India is already Australia’s fourth-largest goods and services export market. Even so, making full use of the “interim” agreement will be a feature of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s forthcoming visit to India. He will travel with heavyweight Australian CEOs. And closer ties with Australia are part and parcel of a gradual but inexorable alignment of Indian and Western interests. This seismic change in India’s worldview is being driven by structural changes in an economy now linked more deeply to the West, a large and influential Indian diaspora in the English-speaking world, and above all the growing and multidimensional challenge from China.
Similarly, with an eye to sensitivities in Southeast Asia, Australia is comfortable with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’sIndia’s cautious response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disappointed many of its friends. It serves as a reminder of the lingering legacies of the Cold War geopolitics that produced a solid partnership between Delhi and Moscow. Still, even here trends favour the West.
Leaders in Australia and India like to emphasise a shared history as liberal democracies. This runs into the growing concerns in the West about democratic backsliding in India. But those fears must be weighed against India’s central reality – its extraordinary religious, linguistic, and regional diversity that prevents any one community from exercising long-term and absolute hegemony over its polity.
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