India’s Security Paradox: How Strategic Ambition Generates Regional Crises

The empirical record over the past five years illustrates the pattern. In June 2020, the deadly clash at Galwan in Ladakh exposed the consequences of an aggressive border infrastructure build-up that, as the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission catalogued, escalated into the first fatalities along the Line of Actual Control in forty-five years. Despite seventeen rounds of military talks and visible disengagement at certain friction points, the United States Institute of Peace recorded further clashes, including the Tawang incident of December 2022. India’s posture along the LAC has hardened a previously manageable boundary dispute into a permanent strategic frontier with consequences for force posture, fiscal allocation, and diplomatic bandwidth.
In June 2023, India’s alleged role in the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil triggered a diplomatic rupture that has since metastasised into a sustained criminal investigation. As Foreign Policy noted at the time, the operation, if confirmed, would constitute one of the most brazen targeted killings on notionally friendly soil in recent memory. The strategic logic of conducting such an operation against a Five Eyes partner, in pursuit of a low-priority diaspora target, illustrates the substitution of tactical aggression for strategic prudence. India lost a credible Western partner, complicated its standing in the Anglosphere, and gained nothing of measurable strategic value.
In May 2025, Operation Sindoor extended this pattern. Following the Pahalgam attack of 22 April 2025, India launched cross-border missile strikes that escalated into a four-day exchange with Pakistan involving drone warfare, attempted strikes on capital-region targets, and a ceasefire that was effectively brokered by Washington. The Carnegie Endowmentconcluded that while India established military dominance on certain metrics, it absorbed unacknowledged initial losses and revealed gaps in air defence, electronic warfare, and information operations. War on the Rocks’s analysis was sharper still, observing that India had ceded the initiative to Pakistan-based militants by openly committing to military retaliation against any future attack, thereby tying its own hands in subsequent crises.
In the Maldives, the cycle of overreach and recovery is even clearer. The “India Out” campaign that helped elect Mohamed Muizzu in 2023 reflected accumulated grievance with Indian heavy-handedness. Only after a sustained recalibration, documented by the Observer Research Foundation, did relations stabilise. The lesson is that Indian influence is most effective when it is restrained and most fragile when it is asserted. New Delhi appears to learn this lesson only in retrospect, never in advance.
Taken together, these episodes are not isolated misjudgements. They form a pattern. Each crisis follows a similar arc, an external trigger or perceived insult is met with maximalist rhetoric, kinetic or quasi-kinetic action is undertaken to satisfy domestic audiences, the immediate tactical objective is declared a strategic victory, and the diplomatic costs are then absorbed quietly over the months that follow. The pattern is sustained because it is politically rewarded. The electorate cheers, the media celebrates, and the cycle resets. What it does not produce is a more secure India or a more stable region. The cumulative effect, visible from Dhaka to Male, from Kathmandu to Colombo, is that India’s neighbourhood now treats Indian power as something to be hedged against rather than partnered with.