India and the Hierarchies of Power in South Asia: The Elephant That Refuses to Be Named

As New Delhi navigates the global high table, its smaller South Asian neighbours find their own strategic horizons increasingly compressed by an anxious and assertive giant

• Influence in this context is rarely exercised through explicit coercion. It operates instead through repetition, expectation and the gradual internalization of constraints

In international politics, power is rarely controversial in its possession; it is controversial in its use. Rising states are not judged merely by the scale of their capabilities, but by the political orders they construct around them. In South Asia today, India stands at such a moment of reckoning - its ascent unmistakable, its intentions carefully articulated, yet its regional conduct increasingly questioned.

In the history of international politics, the ascent of power has rarely been destabilizing in itself. Instability emerges when rising states struggle to translate material capability into a regional order perceived as legitimate by those it encompasses. Power that remains personalized or ad-hoc may compel compliance, but it seldom commands durability. Enduring regional systems have instead rested on a balance between authority and restraint, where influence is exercised through predictable arrangements rather than episodic assertion.

India’s rise is empirically undeniable. It has surpassed China as the world’s most populous country, overtaken Japan in nominal GDP, and is projected to become the third-largest economy globally within this decade. Diplomatically, New Delhi occupies a position of unusual breadth, strategic partner of the United States through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue(QUAD), a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization(SCO), a founding participant in BRICS, and a stakeholder in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank(AIIB). Few contemporary powers straddle competing institutional architectures with such confidence.

This posture is justified through the doctrine of strategic autonomy, a legacy concept refined for a multipolar age. Through it, India reconciles security cooperation with Washington, economic interdependence with Beijing and enduring partnerships with Moscow and Tehran. In classical realist terms, this is strategic sophistication. Yet realism, when unevenly applied, risks transforming prudence into hierarchy.

The paradox emerges most clearly in India’s neighbourhood. While New Delhi asserts autonomy as a sovereign right, it appears markedly less tolerant of similar agency among smaller South Asian states. SAARC, once envisaged as the region’s principal multilateral platform, has languished into irrelevance. In its place stands a mosaic of sub-regional and issue specific arrangements; BIMSTEC, IORA and the Colombo Security Conclave, forums rich in dialogue but thin in institutional depth. These mechanisms manage regional space rather than genuinely pool authority. Other regions suggest that dominant states consolidate leadership most effectively when they institutionalize restraint; Indonesia’s conduct within ASEAN, for example, demonstrated how influence can be preserved by embedding it within rules that limit its overt exercise.

Trade patterns reinforce this structural imbalance. Despite India’s global trade exceeding USD 1.7 trillion annually, commerce with South Asia accounts for little more than one percent of this total, a figure that underscores the limited degree to which regional economic integration has translated into reciprocal dependence. Even within this limited exchange, India maintains persistent surpluses. Sri Lanka exemplifies the pattern; substantial bilateral trade volumes accompanied by minimal market access for Sri Lankan exports. Integration under such conditions ceases to be reciprocal, it becomes asymmetric.

More consequential than trade, however, is India’s selective approach to external alignments. New Delhi sustains a significant trade deficit with China while discouraging neighbouring states from deepening economic or strategic engagement with Beijing. Where India’s own ties with Russia or Iran are framed as necessities of strategic autonomy, comparable choices by smaller states are portrayed as destabilizing. Autonomy, in effect, becomes stratified by size.

To be sure, smaller South Asian states are not passive actors in this process; they exercise agency through selective alignment, issue based bargaining, and calibrated hedging, even as structural constraints narrow the range of available choices.
Sri Lanka’s experience illustrates how influence is exercised in contemporary form. India’s role has been neither overtly coercive nor formally imperial. Instead, it has been cumulative; embedded in credit lines, emergency assistance, currency swaps, infrastructure engagement, and security coordination. Such instruments are presented as support, yet they also narrow strategic alternatives. Agreements concluded with limited transparency, pressure on third party port access and growing influence over connectivity and energy projects collectively compress Colombo’s decision-making space. Influence in this context is rarely exercised through explicit coercion. It operates instead through repetition, expectation and the gradual internalization of constraints, whereby alternative courses of action recede not by prohibition, but by calculation.

Historical memory sharpens these anxieties. India’s past hardline involvement in Sri Lanka’s domestic affairs especially in the ethnic conflict, its fluctuating positions in multilateral human rights forums and its periodic revival of territorial and ethnic sensitivities including possible regime change efforts continue to define regional perceptions. Humanitarian assistance, whether during civil conflict, natural disasters, or public health crises, has undoubtedly alleviated suffering. Yet in strategic terms, such interventions also consolidate presence and expectation. In statecraft, compassion and calculation frequently coexist.

From New Delhi’s perspective, these policies may appear both rational and inevitable. Great powers seek strategic depth, influence and insulation from external rivals. This outlook is also shaped by a genuine security dilemma. India occupies a uniquely exposed strategic geography, bordered by two nuclear armed rivals and embedded in a region historically permeable to external intervention. The deepening presence of extra regional powers in South Asia, particularly China’s expanding economic and maritime footprint is not a neutral phenomenon but a direct challenge to its security environment. Policies that seek to limit strategic access, influence connectivity choices, or shape regional alignments are therefore framed not as dominance, but as defensive measures intended to prevent encirclement and preserve regional stability. Yet history offers a cautionary lesson; regional orders built on hierarchy rather than consent are inherently brittle. Smaller states may comply, but they hedge quietly, resist incrementally and search persistently for alternatives.

India’s most consequential strategic test, therefore, lies not in managing China or navigating great-power competition, but in redefining its neighbourhood policy. Leadership in a multipolar century cannot rest solely on economic gravity or diplomatic leverage; it must also be anchored in restraint and predictability. A regional order perceived as equitable is ultimately more durable than one sustained through asymmetry.

The elephant in the room is not India’s power, but its reluctance to confront how that power is experienced by those in its immediate orbit. If India seeks recognition as a global leader rather than merely a major power, it must first reconcile ambition with reassurance at home. Otherwise, South Asia risks becoming not a community of shared destiny, but a landscape of managed dependence - stable in appearance yet strategically unsettled beneath with a multiplicity of fault-lines.
History has tended to judge rising powers less by the magnitude of their ascent than by the stability of the regional arrangements they leave behind.

History will judge India less by the scale of its rise than by the order it chose to build around it, whether it emerged as a benign center of gravity or an anxious hegemon. That choice remains open, but the window for shaping perceptions is narrowing.

The writer Ms. Jeevani Senevirathne, is a Senior Lecturer, Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Management Studies and Commerce, University of Sri Jayewardenepura. She can be reached at [email protected]