India’s ‘G Minus Two’ Play: ASEAN Centrality and the Indo-Pacific Balance

CURRENT AFFAIRS | 8 JULY 2026

India’s Eastward Pivot and the Search for an Asian Balance

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent eastward tour — taking in Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand — has crystallised a strategic idea that some analysts have begun to describe as the “G Minus Two” approach to the Indo-Pacific. The phrase is deliberately provocative. It rejects the notion of a “G2”: a Sino-American condominium in which the United States and China quietly divide Asia into spheres of influence. For India and its partners across the region, such an arrangement would be unacceptable, since it would reduce middle and rising powers to the status of bystanders in decisions about their own neighbourhood.

The logic of “G Minus Two” rests on an uncomfortable pair of truths that most Asian capitals now privately accept. The first is that there can be no stable balance of power in Asia without a sustained American strategic presence. The second is that China’s rising weight cannot be balanced by the rest of Asia acting alone — not even by Japan, India, Australia and the ASEAN states working in concert. Caught between these realities, the region’s response has been neither to embrace a bipolar carve-up nor to pretend it can manage without Washington, but to build a denser web of partnerships that keeps the US engaged while giving Asian powers real agency of their own.

ASEAN Centrality and the Architecture of the Indo-Pacific

At the heart of India’s approach sits the concept of ASEAN centrality — the insistence that the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations should remain the convening hub of the region’s diplomatic architecture, rather than any single great power. Founded in 1967 with its headquarters in Jakarta, ASEAN today brings together ten Southeast Asian states. India’s relationship with the grouping has deepened steadily: New Delhi became a Dialogue Partner in 1992 and was elevated to a Strategic Partner in 2012, a trajectory that mirrors the broadening of India’s own “Act East Policy”.

Two 2019 documents give this vision institutional shape. India’s Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative (IPOI), announced in 2019, sets out cooperative pillars ranging from maritime security to connectivity and disaster risk reduction. In the same year, ASEAN adopted its own ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP), an inclusive, non-confrontational framing that stresses dialogue over containment. India has been careful to align IPOI with AOIP, precisely to reassure Southeast Asian states that its Indo-Pacific engagement complements, rather than competes with, their centrality.

Alongside these inclusive frameworks sits the QUAD — the quadrilateral grouping of India, the United States, Japan and Australia. The QUAD is an example of what strategists call minilateralism: small, flexible coalitions of like-minded states that can act more nimbly than large multilateral bodies. Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, meanwhile, continue to build on their bilateral security partnerships with Washington, reinforcing the American presence that the whole balance depends upon.

De-risking Without Decoupling

The strategy is not one of confrontation for its own sake. Every major economy in the region is deeply intertwined with China’s. India’s annual trade with China stands at roughly $150 billion; Japan’s exceeds $300 billion; Australia’s is over $200 billion; and ASEAN’s trade with China has crossed the trillion-dollar mark. To sever these ties would be economically ruinous. The objective, therefore, is to “de-risk” — to guard against Beijing’s ability to weaponise interdependence, whether through export controls, informal trade coercion or supply-chain leverage — while keeping trade open and channels of communication alive.

This is the delicate balancing act that defines the moment. Countries want the economic upside of proximity to the world’s second-largest economy, but they are wary of the political cost of dependence. Diversifying supply chains, building resilient partnerships and anchoring the American presence are the three legs on which this de-risking stool stands. It is a posture of hedging rather than choosing — precisely the essence of strategic autonomy.

Why This Matters for India

For New Delhi, the “G Minus Two” logic is more than a slogan. It reflects a matured worldview in which India refuses both subordination to a great-power duopoly and the illusion of going it alone. By deepening ties with Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand — three states with very different geographies but a shared stake in an open Indo-Pacific — India signals that the region’s future should be shaped by many hands, not two. The Act East Policy, once largely an economic outreach to Southeast Asia, has thus grown into a comprehensive strategic doctrine spanning security, connectivity and the rule of law at sea.

The coming years will test whether this middle path can hold. If the American presence wavers, or if economic coercion sharpens, the balance could fray. But for now, India’s bet is clear: an Asia that is neither carved up between two giants nor left to drift, but held together by a resilient network of partnerships resting on ASEAN centrality and the freedom of the seas.

From Non-Alignment to Strategic Autonomy

It is worth pausing on the intellectual lineage behind this posture. In the decades after independence, India championed non-alignment — a refusal to join either the Western or the Soviet bloc during the Cold War, and a founding role in the Non-Aligned Movement. Critics sometimes read non-alignment as passivity, but its core impulse was the preservation of decision-making freedom. In today’s very different world of a rising China and a recalibrating United States, that same impulse survives under the label of strategic autonomy. The vocabulary has changed; the underlying principle — that India should keep its options open and make choices on the merits rather than out of bloc loyalty — has not.

Strategic autonomy explains why India can simultaneously be a member of the QUAD, a partner of Russia, a member of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and a deepening friend of Southeast Asian democracies. To an outside observer these commitments can look contradictory. Viewed through the lens of autonomy, they are coherent: each relationship is a lever, and India declines to surrender any of them for the sake of a single alignment. The “G Minus Two” approach is simply this doctrine applied to the specific problem of the Indo-Pacific — an insistence that the region’s order be plural rather than bipolar.

For a country of India’s size and ambitions, the stakes are considerable. A stable, open, rules-based Indo-Pacific serves India’s trade, its energy security and its aspiration to be a leading power. A region carved into two spheres, by contrast, would leave New Delhi with far less room to manoeuvre. That is why the eastward tour, the courting of ASEAN centrality and the quiet reinforcement of the American presence all point in the same direction: towards an Asia that many hands help to shape.

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