India must shed the illusion of primacy and become a dependable regional partner that listens, delivers, and shares prosperity. Only then will its neighbours stop hedging and begin embracing its leadership.
India’s increasing isolation in its immediate neighbourhood is not a sudden development but the cumulative outcome of diplomatic complacency, strategic under-reaction, and a persistent failure to translate political intent into credible delivery. While New Delhi continues to project itself as South Asia’s natural leader, it has struggled to convert goodwill into lasting influence, allowing China to occupy the strategic space with speed, coherence, and purpose.
The erosion of India’s regional standing is therefore less about hostile neighbours and more about self-inflicted gaps in policy execution, follow-through, and political sensitivity. The limitations of India’s ‘Neighbourhood First Policy’, conceived in 2008 and intensified post-2014, however, are not solely the result of external disruptions; they are rooted equally in structural and political shortcomings.
The contrast with China is stark and instructive. Through the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, defence diplomacy, sustained political engagement, and aggressive narrative management, Beijing has woven deep economic and political dependencies across South Asia. India, by comparison, has relied on episodic outreach, delayed project implementation, and an assumption of automatic primacy rooted in geography and history. That assumption no longer holds. Smaller neighbours today act with sharper strategic agency, leveraging India-China rivalry to maximise benefits, and New Delhi has been slow to adapt to this new realism.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has further complicated India’s neighbourhood calculus. His transactional foreign policy, marked by abrupt shifts, selective engagement, and a preference for short-term leverage, has unsettled regional equations. Renewed tactical engagement with Pakistan—driven by counterterrorism optics, Afghan spillovers, or episodic bargaining—undercuts India’s effort to diplomatically isolate Islamabad on terrorism. At the same time, Washington’s inconsistent signalling on China and reduced commitment to multilateral frameworks have encouraged South Asian states to hedge more aggressively. As U.S. posture oscillates, India’s leadership space narrows, forcing it to manage uncertainty generated far beyond the region.
These external pressures make an internal course correction unavoidable. The first requirement is sustained high-level political re-engagement. Visits by the Prime Minister and External Affairs Minister to Dhaka, Colombo, Kathmandu, Naypyidaw, and Malé must resume with intent rather than symbolism. India must also consciously abandon perceptions of partisanship in domestic political contests across the region and reaffirm a posture of principled neutrality, especially during elections and political transitions.
