[10th July 2026] The Hindu OpED: Building a durable India-Australia partnership

Mentor’s Comment

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Australia produced a cluster of institutional deliverables, a defence MoU, a maritime security roadmap, an operationalised uranium supply deal, and a new critical-technology partnership. The visit has sharpened the question of whether India and Australia have moved from independently arriving at similar strategic conclusions (convergence) to building genuinely interlocked capabilities and institutions (alignment).

Why Is Strategic Convergence Between India and Australia Deepening?

1. Shared hedging instinct: Both countries face structural risk from single-point dependence, Australia economically on China and militarily on the United States, India across its energy suppliers, defence platforms and critical minerals sourcing.
2. Eroding trust in Washington: This year’s Lowy Institute Poll recorded Australian trust in the United States at a record low of 31%, with a narrow majority of Australians favouring distance from Washington under President Trump.
3. Conflict-driven lesson on dependency: The Iran and Ukraine conflicts demonstrated that long-standing single-point dependencies, however historically stable, have become strategic liabilities.
4. India’s parallel diversification: New Delhi is diversifying energy suppliers, defence platforms and critical minerals processing for the same underlying reason as Australia.
5. Limits of unilateral hedging: No single country can balance China or hedge against American unpredictability alone, which makes partners such as India, Australia and Japan mutually reinforcing.

What Institutional Steps Toward Alignment Did This Visit Deliver?

1. Defence and security MoU: A Joint Declaration on Defence and Security Cooperation created a memorandum of understanding between Australia’s Maritime Border Command and the Indian Coast Guard.
2. Maritime Security Collaboration Roadmap: Both countries adopted a roadmap to address shared threat perceptions across maritime domains.
3. Uranium deal operationalised: The SHANTI Act, enacted last December, reformed the nuclear liability regime that had deterred foreign suppliers since the 2014 bilateral civil nuclear agreement. 
4. Technology partnership launched: The summit launched the Australia-India Partnership on Cyber, Critical Technologies and Supply Chains (PACTS), positioned to build resilient technology partnerships through flexible minilateral arrangements. 
5. Complementary minilateral framing: PACTS was framed as complementary to the Australia-Canada-India Technology and Innovation Partnership, both structured as flexible minilateral arrangements rather than formal alliances.

Why Does Convergence Still Fall Short of Durable Alignment? 

1. Indian Ocean overlap is real: India’s Information Fusion Centre-Indian Ocean Region and Australia’s closer attention to its western seaboard show converging maritime domain awareness.
   1. Information Fusion Centre-Indian Ocean Region: India’s hub for monitoring regional shipping movements and maritime threats.
2. Shared threat assessments: Both navies have converged on assessments of shadow fleets, threats to undersea cables, and coercive activity below the threshold of conflict.
3. Australia’s force posture points elsewhere: Australia’s most consequential defence decisions, including AUKUS, remain oriented toward the Western Pacific rather than the Indian Ocean.
4. India’s strategic attention remains divided: India’s planners continue to split focus between continental threats and maritime challenges, limiting dedicated Indian Ocean bandwidth.
5. Operational overlap is narrower than political rhetoric: The shared strategic ground between the two countries is real but narrower than the convergence visible at the political level.

Why Has Economic Convergence Not Translated into Broad-Based Alignment?

1. Trade growth is concentrated: Trade has grown sharply since the Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement came into force, but gains sit disproportionately with large firms.
2. SME awareness gap: Smaller exporters on both sides remain unaware of how to use the trade agreement’s provisions.
3. Operationalisation gap flagged by experts: Track 1.5 dialogues have identified this awareness gap as a structural obstacle to broad-based trade alignment.
   1. Track 1.5 dialogue: a hybrid diplomatic format combining government officials and non-official experts.

Why Does Australian Public Perception Lag Behind Elite Convergence?

1. Wide perception gap with China: This year’s Lowy Poll found only 5% of Australians expect India to be the world’s most important power a decade from now, against 54% for China.
2. High trust, low strategic recognition: Trust in India remains comparatively high among Australians, but this has not translated into recognition of India’s strategic weight.
3. Elite-public disconnect: Convergence at the political and institutional level has not yet trickled down into wider Australian public awareness of India’s strategic heft.

Can the Diaspora Bridge the Convergence-Alignment Gap?

1. Diaspora scale: Indian-origin Australians are now the country’s largest immigrant-born community, surpassing the U.K.-born population for the first time.
2. Existing recognition is narrow: A Centre for Australia-India Relations study finds Australians broadly recognise the diaspora as skilled migrants, students and workers, but only in that limited sense.
3. Cultural asset is not alignment: Recognising the diaspora as a cultural or electoral asset differs from using it to build a public economic case for India.
4. Institutionalisation is missing: Alignment requires institutionalising the diaspora’s role in helping Australian SMEs navigate Indian regulatory and business culture, and vice versa, rather than relying on individual champions.
5. Migration politics complicate mobility: The mobility of Indian professionals remains entangled with Australia’s increasingly contested migration politics.
6. Visit as fresh ballast: PM Modi’s remarks on Australian pension funds investing in India, framed as a marker of strategic trust rather than pure capital, provided renewed momentum for these conversations.

Conclusion

The India-Australia relationship rests on strong convergence: both countries are independently hedging against overdependence on China and an unpredictable Washington. Alignment, however, remains narrower than the political rhetoric suggests. Defence cooperation stays bounded by Australia’s Western Pacific-oriented force posture, trade gains remain concentrated among large firms, and Australian public perception of India continues to lag behind elite consensus. The partnership will deepen only if institutional steps, the Coast Guard MoU, the uranium deal, and diaspora-linked economic outreach, are sustained incrementally, since convergence alone does not guarantee durable alignment.