India as a Regional Security Provider: From Activism to Forced Diffidence

Abstract

India’s economic rise and concomitant expansion of its military capabilities has engendered calls for New Delhi to assume greater responsibility in the management of regional security, especially in its immediate vicinity. But while India’s growing role as a security provider in East and South-east Asia as well as in the larger Indian Ocean region is garnering a lot of attention, it is in India’s immediate neighbourhood that New Delhi finds itself constrained to an unprecedented degree. This paper examines India’s role as a regional security provider by looking into four categories of security governance (assurance, prevention, protection and compellence). It argues that India’s role as a regional security provider will remain circumscribed by the peculiar regional constraints India faces.