Why India Should Stop Trying to "Reconnect" With Central Asia

India's Central Asia Problem Isn't Geography Alone

• It's the Story It Keeps Telling Itself For three and a half decades, Delhi's Central Asia policy has carried an emotional charge that its actual reach never matched. When the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, India greeted the five new republics with talk of restored civilisational ties. What followed instead was a Pakistan-shaped wall across the obvious overland route, an unstable Afghanistan on the only detour and - more recently - an Iran-US standoff complicating even the Chabahar workaround India spent years building.

The Region Has Moved On

The republics Modi visits this week are not the ones he toured in 2015. Since 2018, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have met regularly as a bloc, settled long-running Fergana Valley border disputes and pulled Azerbaijan in to form a "C-6" grouping reaching toward the Caucasus and Türkiye.

In 2025 alone, their leaders held summits with the EU, China, Russia, the US and Japan. Kazakhstan has joined the Abraham Accords; Gulf capital is flowing in; Türkiye has turned the Organisation of Turkic States into a real instrument of cooperation.

This is a region practising the same "multi-vector" logic India uses for itself - engaging everyone, committing to no one.

Why Sentiment Isn't a Strategy

TAN's position is that India should stop competing for Central Asia's affection and start competing on the narrow set of things it can actually deliver. Delhi cannot out-spend China's infrastructure diplomacy, match Russia's geographic head start or replicate Türkiye's direct Caspian access.

Continuing to frame the relationship in the language of historic reconnection sets an expectation India's actual capabilities cannot meet - and every year that gap persists, it looks less like patience and more like drift.

The INSTC and Chabahar were the right idea a decade ago; they now sit constrained by a conflict Delhi does not control and no amount of civilisational goodwill fixes a blocked corridor.

What a Narrower Approach Would Actually Look Like

A modest, sustained presence - steady diplomatic attention, targeted economic cooperation in areas like pharmaceuticals, IT and education where India has genuine comparative advantage and enough flexibility toward Pakistan, Türkiye and Azerbaijan to open alternative routes - would do more for India's standing than another summit built around historical ties.

Central Asia's five states are not looking for a patron; they are looking for partners who show up reliably and ask for less exclusivity than Russia or China implicitly do. That is a role India can actually fill, if it stops trying to fill a bigger one it was never positioned for.