A Missile to Balance Out Beijing

Foreign policy often involves a delicate balance between strategic, security and commercial interests.

- By Pradip R. Sagar

For India, it entails stabilising its northern borders with China and keeping its trade ties with Beijing intact on the one hand, while supporting the cause of a secure Indian Ocean region and Indo-Pacific through its membership with the Quad group of nations and a shared vigil in Southeast Asia on the other. At the heart of this venture, delicate and purposive at once, is the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile.

Jointly developed by India and Russia, this advanced weapon system is emerging as a key tool in India's defence export strategy-and a symbol of its growing engagement with a clutch of Southeast Asian nations bound together by their common sense of threat in the face of China's maritime muscle-flexing.