Indian leaders often claim that their foreign policy is based on ancient wisdom. However, India’s strategic culture today is a blend of mythical history, strict hierarchy, and cinematic politics, shaped by geography, sectarianism, and self-interest. The idea of India as an enduring civilization-state hides deep contradictions, which are a structural dilemma. India is both a subcontinent that is too big for its own good, a society divided by caste and creed, and a government where Hindu nationalist ideas and myths of expansion have crept into an autocratic administration. This mix makes Indian policy less of a stable grand strategy and more of a reflection of current domestic crusades, with Pakistan always being seen as the enemy in a made-up civilisational struggle.

India’s current regime is based on an ideology that apparently asserts a proud civilisational heritage. Nevertheless, the predominant Hindu nation narrative is largely a contemporary construction rather than an enduring reality. Colonial and nationalist thinkers changed history in certain ways to bring people together. In fact, even the most important Hindutva texts are from the 20th century, such as Vinayak Savarkar’s Hindutva (1923), which explicitly envisioned India as a unified Hindu Rashtra, generally known as Akhand Bharat, and explicitly anticipated the realisation of the Zionist dream, envisioning India, akin to Palestine, as exclusively Hindu. M. S. Golwalkar, an ideologue for the RSS and the author of We, or Our Nationhood Defined (1939), told India that to learn from Nazi Germany and said that any foreign race meant Indian Muslims should either adopt Hindu culture or be completely subordinated to the Hindu nation. The radical intellectuals who established the ideological foundations of today adopted foreign supremacist models rather than an uninterrupted indigenous heritage.

India’s land and coastlines affect its strategy, but not always in the same way, since it is both a continental and maritime nation. It is aware of continental pressures due to its long borders with China, Pakistan, and Myanmar. Its Indian Ocean coastline and maritime heritage connect it to naval issues. This makes it hard to find a balance between being too open and being too vulnerable, especially since almost 95% of India’s trade goes through open waters. The Indo-Gangetic plains and northwest have also made India vulnerable to repeated threats throughout history, making it an invader’s paradise and forcing it to defend long borders at a high cost. Because of this, India’s goals are often bigger than what it can afford.

Indian........

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