What India learned from refusing to choose
Multi-alignment as statecraft, tested across three consecutive crises.
Eighteen months ago the question asked about India was which side it would choose. The answer New Delhi gave was different: it would choose neither and keep billing all of them. Three consecutive crises served as the test, and the result is less a moral victory than a method of state — expensive, reversible, and workable only while all three partners need India.
The term describing this has an author. “Multi-alignment” was coined by Shashi Tharoor in the 2000s, presented unsuccessfully at the annual conference of Indian ambassadors in 2009 and adopted by S. Jaishankar, who turned it into foreign ministry vocabulary. It is worth saying what that means: it is a think-tank phrase that became a ministerial speech, with no doctrine codified in a document. India practises something it has not yet put on paper.
First test: the four-day war
On 22 April 2025 an attack in Pahalgam killed 26 civilians in Jammu and Kashmir. India suspended the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty the following day, holding it “in abeyance”, and launched Operation Sindoor on 7 May with missiles and air strikes on nine targets in Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir. The ceasefire came on 10 May, through a direct line between the two directors general of military operations.
The episode left two marks. The first is that India refused American mediation on Kashmir, restating that the matter is bilateral. The second is that when Donald Trump said he had offered trade concessions to induce the ceasefire, foreign ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal denied it with bureaucratic precision: trade did not come up in any of those conversations. In a four-day crisis, India accepted the outcome and refused the narrative.
Second test: the neighbour talking again
With China, the move was the inverse in tone and identical in method. In October 2024 the two countries agreed patrolling arrangements on the Line of Actual Control at Depsang and Demchok, closing the standoff opened in 2020. In August 2025, after Wang Yi’s visit for the 24th round of talks, came an agreement to resume direct flights suspended since 2020, reopen border trade at three points and create a working group on delimitation.
In September 2026 Xi Jinping was in New Delhi for the BRICS summit — his first visit to India since the Galwan clash — and the two declared commitment to “peace and tranquillity” on the border and to addressing the structural trade imbalance. No territorial concession was made: there was a normalisation of process, with the border still undelimited.
One honest note: if “crisis” means physical friction, the China test belongs to 2020, not 2026. What was tested in the past year was the ability to turn a freeze into routine.
Third test: the price of the Russian purchase
The hardest test came from Washington. In August 2025 the United States added a 25% punitive tariff to the existing 25% reciprocal tariff, taking the total to 50% on Indian goods — the highest applied to a major partner at the time. The justification was explicit: Russian oil purchases.
In February 2026 came the deal. The White House announced the removal of the additional 25% “in recognition of India’s commitment to stop purchasing Russian Federation oil”, with the reciprocal tariff falling to 18%, and listed in an official fact sheet what New Delhi concedes on industrial and agricultural goods, digital trade and export controls.
Two things were left unsigned. The first is the oil commitment itself: no Indian document confirms the promise, and Indian refineries kept booking Russian cargoes for September and October 2026. The second is the deal. In September 2026 the House of Representatives passed a bill authorising tariffs of up to 100% on countries with Russian energy dependency; the foreign ministry reacted in unusually strong terms, saying the measures could affect the bilateral relationship and that the energy security of 1.4 billion people is not negotiable with anyone.
India did not choose between Moscow and Washington: it turned its own refusal to choose into an asset — and now discovers the asset has a counterparty.
What holds the method up
Multi-alignment is only practicable because India can pay at every table. In defence, diversification is measured and old: Russia accounted for 55% of Indian arms imports in 2015-19, falling to 36% in 2020-24, according to SIPRI, while France and Israel gained ground. The contract for 26 Rafale-Marine fighters, worth about $7.4 billion, and the negotiation for 114 more with local production show that the European alternative stopped being rhetoric.
And at the bottom of the equation sits domestic production: according to the Press Information Bureau, Indian defence production reached 1.78 lakh crore rupees in the 2025-26 fiscal year and exports hit a record 38,424 crore, against 686 crore in 2013-14.
The method, however, has a structural limit no rhetoric resolves: it depends on all three partners needing India more than India needs any of them. While the 2026 sanctions bill is alive and the Chinese border remains undelimited, the refusal to choose will keep being billed at every round — and the date on which it stops paying is not marked on any Indian calendar.