India’s refusal to succumb to US sanctions over Russian crude oil highlights the value of strategic autonomy—defending energy security without severing Western ties. While smaller South Asian nations lack India’s market scale and refining capacity, they can emulate its deliberate approach by building strategic depth. This requires diversifying energy suppliers, expanding diplomatic ties, and establishing emergency reserves. For true regional resilience, India must act as a generous architect rather than a dominant hegemon, supporting its neighbours’ right to diversify their partnerships without viewing their choices as disloyalty. Enabling regional autonomy Ultimately strengthens India’s own security.
India’s response to the latest round of US sanctions has been neither capitulation nor confrontation. New Delhi has defended its right to secure affordable energy for its own population while continuing to engage Washington as a serious partner. That is not stubbornness. It is strategic confidence. India has the size, market leverage, and diplomatic weight to absorb pressure that would break a smaller economy. But the lesson beneath India’s firmness is transferable, even for countries who might not have such capacity.
South Asia and the wider Global South now need to build, deliberately and patiently, the kind of strategic depth that India has, which allows a country to say no without saying goodbye. And if India wants to be more than the region’s largest economy, it must show the same courage vis-à-vis its neighbours, leading not by demanding alignment, but by making room for smaller states to keep their own balance while walking the same road.
Balancing Act: Strategic Autonomy in Action
When a major power imposes sanctions with global reach, the temptation is to assume resistance is a luxury only the strong can afford. India has quietly disproved that assumption.
Faced with new US legislation authorising tariffs of up to 100% on major purchasers of Russian energy, India did not scramble to sever its Russian oil relationship overnight. Nor did it dismiss Washington’s concerns. Instead, Indian officials have publicly defended the country’s responsibility to protect its energy security, while signaling that the new law’s implications are being carefully examined rather than treated as an automatic rupture with either side. This is not neutrality in the passive sense. It is engagement without submission.
India has continued purchasing discounted Russian crude, a decision that has meaningfully lowered its import bill and insulated its economy from the worst of recent price volatility. At the same time, it has not walked away from its expanding strategic and economic relationship with the US. Both tracks continue. Neither has been sacrificed for the other. That is the essence of strategic autonomy, and it is worth naming plainly: India is not choosing a side. It is choosing itself.
Few countries in South Asia enjoy the tools that make this posture possible for India. A market of over a billion consumers, a refining capacity large enough to absorb and reprocess discounted crude at scale, a defence relationship with Russia built over decades, and a growing economic partnership with Washington that neither side wants to abandon; together, these give India room to manoeuvre that Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, or the Maldives do not possess in equal measure.
That gap is real. It should not be overlooked. But the lesson India offers is not “do what India does.” It is “become what India has become.”
Strategic depth is not inherited. It is built deliberately over years through diversified trade relationships, diversified energy suppliers, adequate reserves, and diplomatic relationships broad enough for any single partner to dictate terms. India did not arrive at its current position by accident. It arrived there through decades of policy choices, non-alignment during the Cold War, economic liberalisation in the 1990s, and a post-2000s foreign policy that consciously avoided exclusive alignment with any single power.
South Asia’s smaller economies can begin walking the same path, even without India’s scale.
That means diversifying energy suppliers and shipping routes rather than concentrating risk in a single corridor. It means building strategic reserves that buy time during a crisis rather than forcing emergency purchases at the worst possible price. It means strengthening sanctions-compliance capacity so that legitimate trade is never mistaken for evasion. And it means cultivating relationships across multiple centres of power— Washington, Beijing, Brussels, the Gulf, Tokyo, etc.— so that no single relationship becomes indispensable enough to be weaponised against the country that depends on it.
None of this requires confrontation with Washington, Moscow, or Beijing. It requires patience, consistency, and the political will to resist short-term convenience in favour of long-term resilience.
The Leadership Dilemma: From Hegemony to Empowerment
This is where India’s role becomes decisive, not merely as an example to admire from a distance, but as a potential architect of the very regional depth that smaller South Asian states need to build.
India has long described itself as South Asia’s natural leader. The claim is geographically and economically accurate. But leadership is not a status conferred by size. It is earned by being willing to let others succeed on their own terms. Here is the uncomfortable truth India must confront. Regional leadership built on dependency is not leadership. It is hierarchy dressed in cooperative language.
If India wants Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan to develop genuine strategic depth- rather than becoming smaller versions of dependent states, shuffled between larger patrons, it must actively support their diversification rather than treat it as disloyalty. When Dhaka engages Beijing on infrastructure financing, when Kathmandu explores energy cooperation beyond its traditional partners, when Colombo balances Indian and Chinese investment simultaneously, India’s instinct has too often been suspicion.
That instinct is understandable. It is also self-defeating. A neighbour with room to breathe is a more reliable partner than a neighbour cornered into dependence.
India’s own sanctions posture proves this point, even if New Delhi has not yet applied the lesson to its own neighbourhood. India insists on the right to make its own energy choices without being forced into an exclusive camp. It should extend the same logic to Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka: the right to diversify, to hedge, to engage multiple partners, without having that diversification read as betrayal.
A Shared Future: Collective Resilience as Self-Interest
True regional leadership requires India to hold two positions simultaneously, just as it does with Washington and Moscow. India is, and must remain, the region’s most consequential neighbour, the upper riparian state, the primary security partner, the largest market, and the most immediate diplomatic reference point. That role cannot be outsourced, and geography ensures it never will be.
But it must also become the region’s most generous architect of collective strength, supporting shared energy reserves, coordinated procurement, regional connectivity, and diversified trade relationships that make every South Asian state more resilient, including India itself. A region of resilient, diversified neighbours is a stronger strategic asset to India than a region of dependent, brittle ones. This is not charity. It is enlightened self-interest.
A South Asia capable of collectively absorbing external shocks, energy price spikes, secondary sanctions, and financial disruption is less vulnerable to being picked apart, country by country, by powers far larger than any single South Asian state. India’s own security and prosperity are inseparable from the region’s collective strength, whether New Delhi frames it that way or not.
The path forward is neither dramatic nor easy to narrate. It will not be built through a single summit or a single declaration. It will be built through the same patient, unglamorous work that produced India’s own strategic depth: diversified suppliers, deeper reserves, broader diplomatic relationships, stronger domestic institutions, and the political courage to resist the temptation of quick alignment in exchange for long-term resilience.
India has shown that firmness under pressure is possible without confrontation, and that strength is not incompatible with restraint. That is a genuine accomplishment, and one from which the rest of South Asia and the wider Global South should learn without hesitation.
But the region will only fully absorb that lesson if India chooses to lead by empowering rather than by encompassing, if it allows Dhaka, Kathmandu, Colombo, and Thimphu the same room to manoeuvre that it insists upon for itself vis-à-vis Washington and Moscow.
Strategic autonomy, after all, is not a privilege reserved for the largest power in the room. It is a choice available to any state willing to build it, one diversified relationship, one strategic reserve, one patient decision at a time. India has proven this for itself. Its next test is whether it has the strength to prove it for South Asia as a whole.
*Simon Mohsin is Political and International Affairs Analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh; Research Fellow, Bangladesh Neeti Gobeshona Kendra. The views are his own.
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