Review: Friends; India’s Closest Strategic Partners by Sreeram Chaulia
On the intricacies of India’s vital bilateral partnerships with Japan, Australia, the USA, Russia, France, Israel and the UAE in the context of the nation’s ambition and ascent as a leading power
Sreeram Chaulia’s latest book, Friends: India’s Closest Strategic Partners, stands apart from other works on Indian foreign, economic and security policy in the 21st century. It brings together, in one treatise, not only the doctrines at play but also the variegated dynamics of seven case studies of India’s valuable friends to illuminate the opportunities and challenges, larger purposes and thrust of India as a rising power.

Chaulia has explained the intricacies of India’s vital bilateral partnerships with Japan, Australia, the USA, Russia, France, Israel and the UAE in the context of India’s ambition and ascent as a ‘great power to be’ or a leading power. The title, Friends, and the author’s usage of Kautilya’s characterization of friendships in the epigraph are intriguing. But then Prime Minister Narendra Modi has consecrated the idea of India as a ‘Vishwamitra’ – friend to the world – and so this seems apt.

Can two countries be friends the way two individuals can be? Chaulia draws parallels, pointing out that a strategic partnership is akin to a live-in relationship and that an alliance evokes the exclusivity and commitments of a rigid marriage. Strategic partnerships give both sides benefits but also accord space to each side to pursue other friendships as long as those are not inimical to the two sides’ interests.
Therein lies the crux. They must have each other’s back. Recent developments in Bangladesh and controversies over harbouring and encouraging violent extremists, terrorists and separatists against India are tests of India’s strategic partnerships and highlight the need to draw some red lines even as tectonic shifts can happen when governments change in democracies like the USA. Also, how strategic partners of India navigate their relationships with Pakistan or China in terms of countering terrorism and checking threats to India’s territorial integrity and security demand maturity and restraint.

Chaulia’s book uniquely builds on the theory and practice of international relations discourse regarding friendship and special ties, which became a trend around the beginning of the twenty-first century. Contrary to earlier scholarship, which put the relationships India had in either a transactional, ad hoc, tactical or opportunistic mode, Chaulia avers that these friendships with both materially and ideationally endowed friends matter for boosting India’s image and soft power globally.
India’s strategic partners not only help to counter threats, bolster strategic positioning, soft and hard balancing, but also act as force multipliers by gathering the constellations of allies and partners of each friend into the equation of goodwill, profit and influence with India.
Today, India is asserting its rights, status, goals and rules in the emerging multipolar world order and is avoiding ‘bandwagoning’ onto existing great powers. Chaulia’s book shows how strategic partnerships are crucial for India to maintain its independent judgement and multi-alignment strategy.
One of the key merits of this work is to demonstrate why, how, and under what conditions friendships between India and these seven friends emerged, evolved, are likely to subsist or could even dissolve. It is said that the master key of knowledge is the questions you ask and the highest wisdom stems from questions asked as much as the answers given. I commend this book on the acuity of the questions Chaulia has asked and sought to answer under the rubric of rising powers, choices of friends, how each friend matters, how they become thick and resilient to shocks, and whether strategic partnerships might morph into alliances.

As a multilateralist, I concur with Chaulia about the centrality of special bilateral partnerships and their extensions into plurilateral partnerships. Equally, I feel that multilateral or plurilateral cooperation can reinforce core bilateral partnerships, as was seen during India’s successful G20 presidency in 2023. Bilateral dyads are good not only for advancing India’s core national interests, but also useful for geopolitical and geoeconomic stabilization and regional and global governance.
While the symbiosis between India and its best friends in economic, military and geopolitical domains is growing, one has to be wary of weaponization of interdependencies. What if the volatile regional and global situation changes and the dependability of some of these friends comes into question? Chaulia has raised the issue of parallel dependencies of some of India’s friends on China and how that can pan out. India must continue to build self-reliance and diversification in critical areas as an insurance vis-a-vis the inbuilt risks of some of its strategic partnerships.
One could argue that other strategic partnerships could have been included in this book. But the seven that Chaulia has chosen are worthy enough. Some of them, like Russia, are time-tested friendships that have survived major tremors and tensions. With others, like Australia, Japan and the UAE, we have witnessed a metamorphosis in the Modi era, with a high degree of strategic closeness that no one would have imagined even one decade ago.
In the case of the USA, the doctrinal shift from ‘Asia-Pacific’ to ‘Indo-Pacific’ and India’s induction into Washington’s ‘latticework’ of regional security arrangements have reduced many barriers with New Delhi. The personal chemistry that Modi has built with every American president from Barack Obama to Donald Trump is underpinned by this deeper strategic convergence.

Still, given recent cross currents, India must have safeguards against slide backs and it should keep itself open to other friendships among and beyond the three dozen strategic partnerships that it has signed around the world. As Chaulia emphasizes, far from being monogamous, strategic partnerships are promiscuous and involve dual-faced hedging games. India is not about to join an ‘Asian NATO’ nor tie itself down to one or the other blocs in the ‘new Cold War’. It must ensure that its friendships become models of mutual benefit and spawn and inspire other such partnerships that are safeguarded through storms, be they internal to those countries or regional and global upheavals.
This book should be compulsory reading for all those with a stake in Indian foreign policy and its journey to the status of a developed country or leading power. Chaulia has presented a thought-provoking narrative about how the seven closest strategic partners of India and other such countries can be our best friends, philosophers and guides in what is bound to be an exhilarating but bumpy road ahead in an unpredictable, tumultuous world riddled with zero-sum rivalries.
Lakshmi Puri is a former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and a former Indian Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina.