By Sachithanandam Sathananthan –

Strategic ambiguity dribbles into the Arabian sand

India’s subservience to the United States became all too clear, if not earlier, certainly when New Delhi joined and supported US Imperialism’s brainchild, the India-Middle East-Europe-Economic corridor (IMEC) at the 2023 G20 Summit. New Delhi loyally complied as Washington manoeuvred to pit the IMEC as a political challenge to, and a strategic alternative for, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

New Delhi may be convinced that its actions are in accordance with India’s national interests. They include also its participation in US Imperialism’s anti-China 2007 Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), rebooted in 2017, supposedly to ensure “free and open” Indo-Pacific maritime routes. In return New Delhi anticipated the US would side with India as a critical counterweight to China’s growing might in the Indian Ocean

India’s strategy planners masked the consequent self-inflicted geopolitical vulnerability with the slogan Strategic Ambiguity. However they perhaps ought to have paid heed to Russian General and geopolitical theorist Aleksei Vandam’s 1912 aphorism about the perfidious Anglo-Saxons: “It is bad to have an Anglo-Saxon as an enemy, but God forbid to have him as a friend!” Henry Kissinger paraphrased it for the United States.

Washington used Trump Administration’s tariffs to bludgeon New Delhi into acceding to the February 2026 preliminary Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA). The initial terms of the lopsided BTA committed India to, among others, “stop purchasing Russian Federation oil” and “eliminate or reduce tariffs on all U.S. industrial goods and a wide range of U.S. food and agricultural products”.

The near catastrophic damage the BTA would inflict on India’s manufacturing sector is obvious; it is equally clear the concessions the US extracted for its agricultural sector threatens the livelihood of almost 50 per cent of the India’s population, engaged in agriculture. Belated breast beating by nationalist Indians is unlikely to arrest what many bemoan as the gradual re-colonization of India.

Although India is a Founder Member of BRICS, New Delhi’s declaration in early March that it has “absolutely no interest” in the Organisation’s de-dollarization policy is one more reason for the growing suspicion among the Global Majority that India is a US mole within the BRICS. Consequently India’s positions in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) – a counter to NATO – too have come under a cloud, especially since both organisations are strongly backed by China and Russia.

The recent double speak by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson, that “(i)f India is part of Quad, India is equally a partner in BRICS”, convinces at best the party’s diehards. India descends to glib justifications at its peril.

Islamabad steals a march on New Delhi

Pakistan apparently took advantage of the weakening trust in India to score a stunning feat of diplomacy when both Washington and Tehran in late March accepted Islamabad as the main Interlocutor in the on going “talks” on resolving the war triggered by the US-Israeli attack on Iran on 28 February. Islamabad, as Mediator, negotiated the Islamabad Accord, a two-week ceasefire on 8 April with the full backing of Beijing and Moscow and assisted by Muscat; evidently largely due to a significant degree of trust Washington and Tehran have reposed in Islamabad.

Pakistan’s diplomatic coup came as a body blow to India’s long asserted claim to be, in effect, the singular representative of the Global South. Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar strove to minimise the political fallout; he brushed aside Islamabad’s landmark achievement: “We aren’t like Pakistan,” he disdained; “we aren’t a dalal”. Dalal (broker) or not, both Washington and Tehran trusted not India, the self-proclaimed Vishwaguru (Universal Educator), but Pakistan. Islamabad is widely seen to be acting on behalf of the Global Majority’s elites in general in the unfolding historic power struggle in West Asia.

New Delhi’s Strategic Ambiguity, in the Indian context, is arguably the myopic tactic of sitting-on-the-fence; it’s little more than village cunning, so to speak, writ large on inter-State relations. The advantages are obvious; less obvious are the costs of the resulting emasculation of political integrity, of being distrusted by almost all sides. Washington cannot but view India’s presence in the SCO with caution while Tehran is unlikely to be pleased after Prime Minister Narendra Modi assured the Israeli Knesset: “we feel your pain, we share your grief”. What’s worse, he condemned Hamas’ resistance and not Israel’s genocide in Gaza two days before the US-Israeli unprovoked and illegal February attacked on Iran, an attack he unconvincingly claimed was unaware of.

The foreign policy mandarins in New Delhi seemingly believe India’s Strategic Ambiguity involves being friends with all countries; India’s prominent role in the Non-Aligned Movement infused the stance with an element of credibility, which, however, wore off after the Cold War ended in 1990-91. Most among the Global Majority are not impressed by the foreign policy posture, as evidenced by the limited support India received, from the US, UK, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and EU, for its 2025 Operation Sindoor against Pakistan.

India’s collaboration with US Imperialism and NATO’s brutal colonial invasion and occupation of Afghanistan (2001 to 2021) also tainted its geopolitical standing. New Delhi chose to be a Development Partner, implementing a wide range of infrastructure and capacity building projects, costing more than $3 billion, it plausibly claimed to have “humanitarian” outcomes including a taste for Bollywood movies distributed to enhance India’s soft power.

However, New Delhi stood with US Imperialism and on the wrong side of history in Afghanistan. The Global Majority in general cannot but interpret India’s interventions as designed to prop up, to “stabilise”, the US colonial regime in Kabul.

Unsurprisingly, the fiercely nationalistic Afghan people, whose country has been the Graveyard of Empires, and many a Muslim-majority country could not have forgotten India’s dreadful bid to buttress the US Occupation. That deepened India’s political isolation.

New Delhi palpably hoped to worm its way back into Afghan hearts by aligning with Kabul against Islamabad in the recent skirmishes between the two nations. The ploy proved essentially futile since the April Kabul-Islamabad peace talks were held in Beijing – not in New Delhi!

Washington’s demarche

Strategic Ambiguity suffered a further setback. The visiting US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau delivered his government’s demarche to the Indian foreign policy establishment at the Raisina Dialogue on 5 March 2026, about a week into the US-Israeli aggression on Iran. He reminded New Delhi of its role as a subordinate ally: “India should understand that we are not going to make the same mistakes with India that we made with China 20 years ago in terms of saying, we are going to let you develop all these markets, and then, the next thing we know, you are beating us in a lot of commercial things.”

Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar’s tepid response, the “rise of India…will be determined by our strength, not by the mistakes of others”, dodged directly challenging Washington. The Opposition Congress Party pounced on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s timidity.

Landau insinuated the US is not fooled by India’s amorphous foreign policy position, which would not dissuade Washington from undermining, directly or indirectly, the country’s economy if that ever remotely challenged US global hegemony (as China has done successfully). Is it a mere coincidence that about a week after the US demarche, Indian security forces arrested six Ukrainian nationals and one US citizen in Mizoram and charged them with training “insurgents” and supplying them weapons in the India-Myanmar border areas?

The Clinton administration did not make “mistakes”, as Landau claimed. They supported China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1999, a White House press statement explained, to “enable Chinese businesses and consumers to connect with the global economy and advance China’s integration into that economy…This cannot help but promote the right kind of change in China.”

Reading between the lines, inviting China into the WTO is a counter-revolutionary strategy. Washington schemed that China’s private sector manufacturing and high technology entrepreneurial class, once integrated into the “global [capitalist] economy”, would grow stronger. The emboldened class could then, if necessary nudged to, challenge the Chinese Communist Party’s Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and gradually “promote the right kind of change”, towards a US-style capitalist system.

The subterfuge ignominiously failed because Beijing took advantage of Washington’s ignorance of China’s economic model and artfully dodged the trap. They exploited the expanded access to global markets through the WTO to accelerate China’s State-planned market economy and boost its own meteoric economic rise during the three post-Cold War decades (1991-2020).

Strategic Ambiguity: Gandhi’s legacy

The Strategic Ambiguity approach, arguably, is partially rooted in Mohandas K. Gandhi’s politics of non-violent resistance, predominantly through self-deprivation, against British colonial rule in India (1920 -1942). Though cloaked in the lofty concept of Satyagraha (truth as strength), most Indian housewives would readily recognise the tactic; for they routinely threaten to touch not a morsel of food, a drop of water (fasting) till the abusive husband changes his ways (if at all, and not for long). It’s a weapon of the weak.

Gandhi’s Satyagraha technique claims to not coerce but to persuade and transform the violator by the force of reason. The suffering of the oppressed is said to purify the sufferers and appeal to the soul of the oppressor. The theme is cinematically exploited by countless Indian movies (Devdas) to almost deify the sacrificial wife/lover and Hollywood (The Beauty and the Beast) popularised it globally.

No convincing historical or contemporary evidence could be found to support the contention that a victim’s suffering purified the soul of either the oppressed or the oppressor. Moreover, the practice of Satyagraha severely retards the growth of adversarial political teeth, essential to effectively interact in power-driven realpolitik. What’s worse, it avoided challenging the legitimacy of the British colonial regime.

Consequently individuals committed to Satyagraha internalised the causes of oppression embedded in the structure of the colonial State; they compensated their powerlessness by claiming an elusive moral high ground, even superiority, by eschewing violence in their asymmetric, largely losing struggles against the systemic forces of political oppression and military domination.

Trained as a lawyer, Gandhi understandably was unaware that political violence is structural. In Apartheid South Africa, where he first experimented with Satyagraha, he seemingly failed to recognise violence was not embedded in the law but was integral to the colonial system, impelled by the dominant colonising classes in pursuit of their rapacious interests. Perhaps he believed, as many in his fraternity mistakenly do, that reality follows law.

Consequently, he reduced historical processes to the individual who is an intrinsic part of, and largely constrained by, the same forces; his ahistorical approach missed the wood for the trees. Gandhi’s (and his followers’) obsession with the trees – an admittedly inspirational “be the change you wish to see in the world” – failed to grasp the historical task of inflicting a military defeat upon the colonial power.

The anti-colonial revolutions led by Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Ming, Ahmed Ben Bella, Agostinho Neto, Samora Machel, Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Augusto César Sandino and many others resolutely followed the ancient Tradition of the Warrior: that national character is forged in the Crucible of the Sword by vanquishing the gratuitous violator of one’s world.

Frantz Fanon’s formulation in his The Wretched of the Earth sharply underlines that the victory of armed revolutionary force and attendant sacrifices made during an anti-colonial war are essential to reconstitute, to decolonise, the colonised mind savaged by the coloniser.

Crucially, neither Gandhi nor his followers were physically and psychologically equipped for armed revolutionary tasks.

So, Satyagraha spurned that hallowed revolutionary tradition. It papered over the consequent ideological timidity and organisational weakness by invoking the moral superiority of Ahimsa (not inflicting suffering).

Political logic of Satyagraha

The preference for non-violence, despite its moralistic garb, assumes that the colonised people are too weak to directly challenge the colonial State’s armed power wielded by the white master, in whose Empire the sun was said never to set. Gandhi very likely imbibed these formative perceptions of unassailable British military power during his stints with the Natal Indian Volunteer Ambulance Corps in the Second Boer War (1899) and the Indian Stretcher Bearer Corps during the destruction of the Zulu Resistance (1906).

He organised the two Corps as the Empire’s loyal Subject, duty-bound to buttress its colonial wars. He attempted a short-sighted transactional ploy believing that the imputed beneficence of alleged British fair play, perhaps internalised during his legal training as Barrister-at-Law at London’s Inner Temple (1891), would reciprocate Indians’ collaboration by granting a few more rights than those allowed to South Africa’s black population. The Apartheid regime tossed a separate, third door for Indians to enter the post office to chew on, and not much more.

If, as alleged, the counter-revolutionary brutality Gandhi witnessed, especially during the repression of the Zulus, transformed him from the disillusioned Subject into a hopeful rebel, the butchery also overawed the Gandhi. It is fair to surmise that, rather than confront what he saw as devastating British military power and risk a repetition of the terrifying slaughter he had witnessed, Gandhi creatively reached deep into Indian philosophical traditions of non-violence to take refuge in the morally plausible passive resistance or non-cooperation – a sort of State-level trade union action against the British Indian regime.

The political diffidence inherited from the practice of Satyagraha against colonialism was clearly evident when Nehru invited Lord Mountbatten – the arch Imperialist – to assume the historic role of the first Governor General of India in 1947. It was in full display again in the new Indian Army’s tear-jerking farewell to the last departing British contingent, the 1st Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry. The units of the newly formed Indian Army provided the guard of honour and the Indian government gifted an oil painting, the Indian tricolour and a miniature silver replica of the Gateway of India, all presumably in appreciation of the East India Company’s pillage and British Crown’s brutal colonial rule over about two centuries.

One cannot help but contrast the historic defeat of Imperialism’s satrap Chiang Kai-shek in China and the humiliating retreat of the French and US colonial rulers with their armies as they fled Vietnam.

Eisenhower administration’s China trap

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Premier Zhou En-lai exchanged letters in 1959 over the India-China border issue. In the one dated 7 November Zhou implied neither New Delhi nor Beijing had a hand in delineating the colonial border and both sides should logically have no stake in it and, therefore, ought to reach a workable compromise.

A May 1959 note, apparently drafted by Mao Zedong, reportedly assured: “our principal enemy is US imperialism…China will not be so foolish as to antagonize India in the west.” Foreign minister Chen Yi reportedly added: “Our dispute with India is very small…We are in a serious situation and need your friendship”.

At the April 1960 Nehru-Zhou summit, Zhou reportedly suggested a “Barter” to settle the border disputes: China would recognise the McMahon Line and India’s sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh provided Nehru recognised China’s sovereignty over Aksai Chin. Nehru’s formative political grooming in Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement had not sharpened his adversarial teeth to confidently explore Zhou’s offer.

Nehru rebuffed Zhou’s proposed swap reportedly citing constitutional grounds and dismissed it as “horse trading.” He perhaps was emboldened by the Dwight Eisenhower administration’s leanings towards India in the backdrop of US Imperialism’s aggression against China in the east (Korea) and rising Cold War tensions.

New Delhi proudly and with misplaced confidence apparently assumed that the country’s moral defence of China’s right to the UNSC seat occupied by the Republic of China (Taiwan) might compensate for aligning with Washington against Beijing.

However, with the US effectively in their corner and given the deteriorating Sino-Soviet relations, the emboldened Nehru and senior Congress Party leaders adopted a firm, even unyielding, stance against the independently confident revolutionary leadership of China; though formally legal, they yet unwisely clung to British India’s Imperial Forward Policy and the British-drawn flawed border. By digging its heels in, New Delhi played into Washington’s hands.

Evidently Nehru failed to recognise the trap set by Eisenhower; it was in Washington’s geostrategic interest to block a rapprochement between New Delhi and Beijing and, if possible, fan flames of conflict. The legacy of the unresolved Sino-Indian conflict has favoured Washington, which has manipulated New Delhi’s vulnerability arising from its avoidable, hostile opposition to Beijing to this day, demonstrated by New Delhi’s involuntary involvement in the Quad and IMEC and the unsteady role in BRICS.

The credibility of Gandhi’s Satyagraha is based on the so far largely unquestioned and unproven belief that the non-violent agitation either terrified British Imperialism into retreat or reformed Imperial rulers or both to engineer a transfer of power to India. On other hand, the Red Fort Trials of captured patriotic Indian soldiers of Subhas Chandra Bose’s revolutionary Indian National Army catalysed a widespread nationalist upsurge, challenged the legitimacy of the British Indian Regime, struck a deep sympathetic cord among the majority Indian troops in the British Indian Army and arguably played a greater role to stampede the British rulers to transfer power.

*The author is a Sri Lankan independent researcher who read Political Economy for the Ph.D. degree at the University of Cambridge Wolfson College. He was Assistant Director, International Studies at The Marga Institute, Colombo; Visiting Research Scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies; and has taught World History at Karachi University’s Institute of Business Administration. In his Youtube channel @DrSSathananthan discusses history and politics in the current context.  He is an award-winning filmmaker. email: commentaries.ss@gmail.com