Introduction

On January 26, 2015, in New Delhi, Barack Obama became the first US president to grace India's prestigious Republic Day parade as its chief guest of honour. A day earlier, President Obama and Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, had issued a Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean Region. Noting that “a closer partnership between the United States (US) and India was indispensable to promoting peace, prosperity and stability” in the Indo-Pacific region, the two leaders, in their Joint Strategic Vision, affirmed:

The direct reference to the South China Sea (SCS) was among the first of its kind in a heads-of-government level communiqué featuring the US and India.

A year and a half later, in the course of an address to a joint session of the US Congress, Prime Minister Modi declared that India and the US had finally shed their “hesitations of history.” Peering ahead ambitiously, he averred that, “[a] strong India-U.S. partnership can anchor peace, prosperity and stability from Asia to Africa and from Indian Ocean to the Pacific. It can also help ensure security of the sea lanes of commerce and freedom of navigation on seas.” India and the US, in the Prime Minister's telling, shared congruent security interests across the vast Western Pacific and Indian Ocean maritime space writ large. In the years to come, New Delhi would grow into the role as a privileged partner and quasi-ally of Washington in the region, including in the critical, and contested, maritime cockpit of the Indo-Pacific – the SCS.

Barely two years later, on June 1, 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was singing a different tune to the gathered audience of defence ministers, uniformed officers, and defence specialists at the prestigious Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.