Strategic interests bind New Delhi and Manila

Eleven years ago, nobody could have imagined India exporting electronics

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President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s recent visit to India marks a decisive inflexion point in India-Philippines relations. By upgrading ties to a strategic partnership, Manila and New Delhi are signalling that the Indo-Pacific’s centre of gravity is increasingly shaped by agile middle powers forging intent-led coalitions. The upgrade in ties is about two confident democracies leveraging shared interests to shape the contours of engagement in an increasingly contested Indo-Pacific. The growing alignment between Manila and New Delhi indicates that the two are asserting strategic agency — deepening defence ties, expanding maritime cooperation, and reinforcing their commitment to a rules-based regional order.

But this acknowledgement is a recent development. Compared to India’s ties with other South East Asian nations, its partnership with the Philippines has been a relatively late development. While India began conducting bilateral naval exercises with South East Asian countries in the 1990s, its first such engagement with the Philippines was in 2021, when they conducted their first (contactless because of the pandemic) bilateral naval exercise in the South China Sea, specifically within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ). There are three clear drivers behind the accelerated pace of bilateral ties. The most obvious one is, of course, shared security concerns over China's maritime assertions.