To pursue this goal, relations with countries like Singapore are key for India. The two countries elevated diplomatic ties to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership when Mr Modi visited Singapore last year, and during Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s official visit to New Delhi in September this year, the two leaders announced a roadmap for closer cooperation.
There are three key ways in which Singapore’s interests and India’s broader goals fit.
“MULTI-ALIGNMENT” STRATEGY
First, India has long sought not just a multipolar world but a multipolar Asia, where no one power dominates the region. In this regard, China poses the key challenge to India directly across their shared border.
So besides managing direct tensions at the border, China’s growing influence in the rest of South Asia – most visibly in connectivity infrastructure projects but also across the economic, diplomatic and military domains – challenges India’s influence within its own neighbourhood.
India’s response has been to look beyond its subregion and build its “multi-alignment” strategy, engaging with countries in East Asia and the Middle East (India is unique in calling this region West Asia). Though officially part of the Non-Aligned Movement, India has in practice used multi-alignment to fashion a broader coalition of partners and friends and realise its ambitions of becoming a great power.
With the US lacking desire to provide global leadership since Mr Trump’s second term while directly pressing countries to its trade terms, there is fresh impetus for countries to push back against seeing the world in binary choices.
Countries such as India and Singapore appreciate the fundamental role of multilateralism in an increasingly multipolar world and seek to collectively build on multilateral regional institutions and processes. Both India and Singapore seek autonomy in making choices and close bilateral relationships with like-minded partners can help achieve this larger goal.
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