Time to Reset the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative | Latest news India

The Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative (IPOI), which was launched in 2019 at the ASEAN-led East Asia Summit in Bangkok, showed promise as India’s leading framework to strengthen its role and enhance cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region to improve. Importantly, the IPO announcement marked continued momentum in India’s steady engagement in the Indo-Pacific.

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Intended as a critical perspective for enhancing cooperation among like-minded partners in the Indo-Pacific, the IPOI was based on seven key pillars: maritime ecology; maritime safety; maritime resources; capacity building and resource sharing; disaster risk reduction and management; science, technology and academic cooperation; trade, connectivity and maritime transport. Through this initiative, India sought to enhance cooperation with its partners on these key pillars, along with their shared interests.

This framework mainly took the form of a voluntary scheme. However, while IPOI was conceived as a guiding framework for India’s Indo-Pacific strategy five years later, it appears to have remained marginal in shaping India’s labyrinthine partnerships across the region. This merits a reassessment of why the IPO has been only marginally effective in shaping India’s Indo-Pacific strategy. India’s strategy for the Indo-Pacific region is largely driven by bilateral and mini-lateral cooperation frameworks. New Delhi has been successful in expanding the contours of its bilateral partnerships with like-minded partners in the Indo-Pacific context.

This is particularly evident in New Delhi’s continued treatment of countries on the Indo-Pacific fringe as ‘maritime neighbours’, for example Indonesia and Tanzania. This signals a growing intention in India to emphasize the Indo-Pacific as a shared maritime space linked to regional progress and prosperity. Moreover, the Quad (India, Australia, Japan, US) has been a vital forum for India to engage in the Indo-Pacific. The Quad has shown significant synergies since the leadership-level summits began in 2020. Since then, the group has expanded its agenda to include a critical focus on delivering health security, technology cooperation, information sharing, and humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HADR).

The rapidly changing strategic architecture in the Indo-Pacific appears to be giving way to new geopolitical alignments. The recently concluded US elections have brought President Donald Trump back to the White House. This has fueled speculation about the future of strategic equations in the Indo-Pacific.

The US remains a formidable force in the Indo-Pacific. However, Trump’s emphasis on prioritizing U.S. interests first has often left his strategic alliances and partnerships vulnerable to looming uncertainties. India, in turn, has remained engaged with the US in the Quad, and continues to enjoy favorable bilateral ties with Washington. However, India also has its own ambitions. New Delhi wants to play a major role in the emerging geopolitical architecture in the Indo-Pacific, given its own strategic interests and compulsions.

In the Indian Ocean, India is a formidable force as a first responder in times of security challenges. New Delhi has also managed to maintain critical political influence in the Indian Ocean fringe states. However, given the complexity that arises from the potential of a void, the IPOI could serve as a crucial tool for New Delhi to engage with like-minded partners in the broader Indo-Pacific. For this, a reset of the IPOI is essential. Importantly, the pillars of the IPOI are critical to states in the Indo-Pacific.

To achieve development for the prosperity of states, New Delhi must continue to press on critical issues such as looming maritime ecological crises, HADR, science and technology cooperation, maritime trade and connectivity. An extensive spectrum of partnerships in the Indo-Pacific grants provide India with an opportunity to further enhance cooperation through a calibrated framework such as the IPOI.

India must enhance cooperation with like-minded partners on key issues relevant to the region’s pursuit of progress and prosperity. New Delhi’s role in delivering healthcare delivery and as a first responder in times of natural disasters is likely to enhance the credibility of New Delhi’s ability to initiate and sustain a framework like the IPOI. This requires the IPO to be meaningfully brought back into the mainstream of India’s Indo-Pacific vision, as it was originally envisioned. Given the prevailing complexity in the Indo-Pacific, the time is ripe for an IPOI reset.

Sayantan Haldar is a research assistant in maritime studies at Observer Research Foundation.