India and the Super-Powers: From Bilateral Anchors to Networked Strategic Autonomy for Viksit Bharat

This article examines the contemporary dynamic of India’s engagements with the Russia, the United States, and China. The article argues that, as part of rising India’s major-power engagements, its interactions with these three “superpowers” have evolved from conventional compartmentalised bilateralism into an increasingly interconnected strategic ecosystem shaped by defence-industrial linkages, geo-economic networks, and the diplomatic logic of rivalrous multipolarity. India’s policy towards these “superpowers” now operates through overlapping patterns of cooperation, competition, and managed interdependence crafted as multi-alignment. The article demonstrates how India’s strategic hedging and networked strategic autonomy — expressed through diversified defence, energy and economic partnerships, embedded into multilateralism — undergird its evolving and asymmetric equilibria in its functional engagements with Russia, the United States and China. It concludes that given validity of global structural drifts, India’s continued rise towards Viksit Bharat (developed India) depends on its ability to institutionalise such interconnected gains without eroding its strategic autonomy at the core.