India and Central Asia: Building Strategic Ties

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, five new countries appeared on the map of Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. India was among the first nations to recognise these newly independent republics and open diplomatic ties. Yet despite shared history, cultural affinity, and obvious strategic interest, the relationship struggled to gain momentum for nearly two decades. The reason was simple but stubborn: geography. With no direct land route and a hostile Pakistan blocking the way, India found itself looking at a region rich in energy and opportunity but frustratingly out of reach. Over the past fifteen years, New Delhi has worked methodically to close that gap. This is the story of how India is building strategic ties with a region it calls its “extended neighbourhood.”

Why Central Asia matters to India
The connectivity problem
The Chabahar solution
The International North-South Transport Corridor
The Connect Central Asia policy
From a vision to high-level visits
Building institutions: the Summit and the Dialogue
The India-Central Asia Dialogue
The India-Central Asia Summit
Joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation
Areas of cooperation
Energy and resources
Defence and security
Trade, culture, and people
The road ahead

Why Central Asia matters to India

Central Asia sits at the heart of the Eurasian landmass, surrounded by Russia to the north, China to the east, and Iran and Afghanistan to the south. The region shares millennia-old historical, cultural, and civilisational links with India, forged along the ancient Silk Road through trade, the spread of Buddhism, and Sufi exchanges. These connections give modern diplomacy a warm foundation of goodwill that few other regions offer India.

The strategic case is equally strong. The five Central Asian Republics are landlocked and resource-rich. Turkmenistan holds vast natural gas reserves, Kazakhstan is a major source of uranium, and the region also contains rare earth elements that are essential for clean energy and high-technology manufacturing. For an energy-hungry, fast-growing economy like India’s, this matters enormously. The region also serves as a buffer against instability radiating out of Afghanistan, making it central to India’s security calculations.

The connectivity problem

The single biggest obstacle to India-Central Asia relations has always been the absence of a direct route. There is no sea link between India and the landlocked region, and the natural overland path runs straight through Pakistan and Afghanistan. Because Pakistan denies India transit access and Afghanistan remains unstable, this route has never been a safe or reliable path for trade and commerce.

This is not a minor inconvenience. It is the reason trade volumes have stayed low for decades. Meanwhile, China moved aggressively into the region through its Belt and Road Initiative, pouring billions into pipelines, railways, and infrastructure. The gap is striking. Since 2006, India has invested roughly $360 million in Kazakhstan, while China invested over $19 billion there in the same period. India’s challenge, therefore, has been to find a way around the geography that nature and politics handed it.

The Chabahar solution

India’s answer was to build a route through Iran. The Chabahar Port, located on Iran’s Gulf of Oman coast, allows Indian goods to reach Afghanistan and Central Asia by sea and then overland, completely bypassing Pakistan. First proposed by India in 2003, the project is widely seen as India’s response to Pakistan’s Gwadar port and China’s wider regional push.

The commitment deepened significantly in May 2024. India signed a ten-year agreement with Iran to manage and develop the Chabahar Port – the first overseas port that an Indian company operates. This was a major step, turning a long-discussed idea into a concrete, long-term venture.

The International North-South Transport Corridor

Chabahar works as part of a larger system called the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC). Conceived in 2000 by India, Iran, and Russia, the INSTC is a 7,200-kilometre multimodal network linking India’s western ports through Iran and the Caspian Sea to Russia, Central Asia, and onward to northern Europe using a combination of sea, rail, and road. The corridor is steadily becoming real. Since March 2025, India has been sending cargo from Mundra Port in Gujarat to Central Asia via Iran, and a major milestone came in November 2025 when a cargo train crossed Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan before entering Iran. India has been pushing to formally fold Chabahar into the INSTC framework and to bring Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan into the corridor as members.

The Connect Central Asia policy

The strategic framework that organises all of this is the Connect Central Asia Policy, formally announced in June 2012 at Bishkek. It is a broad-based approach covering political, security, economic, and cultural connections, with the primary goal of re-connecting India with a region it has long historical ties to.

The policy is deliberately multi-dimensional. Its objectives span economic and trade engagement, political and strategic cooperation to counterbalance growing Chinese presence, and the revival of cultural and people-to-people contacts. However, in its early years the policy suffered from a lack of institutional machinery to engage the region consistently at the political and economic levels. That weakness is what later summit mechanisms were designed to fix.

From a vision to high-level visits

The policy got a major boost in 2015. Prime Minister Narendra Modi became the first Indian premier to visit all five Central Asian Republics, a tour that significantly strengthened India’s political and security cooperation with the region. Such high-level exchanges are not just symbolic. They build personal trust between leaders and create the political will needed to move large projects forward.

Building institutions: the Summit and the Dialogue

One of India’s smartest moves has been to create permanent platforms for engagement rather than relying on one-off meetings. Two mechanisms stand out.

The India-Central Asia Dialogue

Launched in January 2019 at Samarkand, the India-Central Asia Dialogue brings together the foreign ministers of India and the five republics. It has become the working-level engine of the relationship, meeting regularly to discuss security, connectivity, and economic engagement. At the 4th Dialogue in New Delhi in June 2025, chaired by External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, the ministers reaffirmed their commitment to deepening cooperation through the INSTC and the Chabahar Port.

The India-Central Asia Summit

The relationship reached its highest level in January 2022 with the first-ever India-Central Asia Summit. Prime Minister Modi hosted all five Central Asian presidents in a virtual meeting on 27 January 2022, a gathering that coincided with the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations. The leaders had originally been invited as chief guests for India’s Republic Day, but the pandemic forced the summit online.

The summit produced concrete outcomes. A Delhi Declaration was adopted along with a 30-year roadmap, and India committed a $1 billion Line of Credit for development projects in energy, healthcare, connectivity, IT, and agriculture. The summit also established a Joint Working Group on Afghanistan and agreed to set up an India-Central Asia Secretariat in New Delhi. The timing was telling. China had convened its own virtual meeting with the same five presidents just two days earlier, offering $500 million in assistance – a clear sign of competition for influence in the region.

Joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation

India’s engagement is not only bilateral. In 2017, India became a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a regional grouping dominated by China and Russia that includes all five Central Asian states. Membership gives India a permanent seat at the table where Eurasian security and economic questions are debated.

The benefits are practical. The SCO supports India’s Connect Central Asia goals, provides access to mineral resources such as Kazakhstan’s uranium, and through its Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure offers intelligence-sharing on terrorism and drug trafficking. That said, the SCO is not without friction. The presence of both China and Pakistan complicates India’s freedom of action, and some Western observers view the bloc with suspicion. India therefore treats the SCO as one tool among many rather than the centrepiece of its regional strategy.

Areas of cooperation

Beyond the headline projects and institutions, the relationship rests on several practical pillars.

Energy and resources

Energy is arguably the most important area of cooperation. India has signed agreements with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan for the supply of uranium, vital for its civil nuclear programme. The long-discussed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline remains the most ambitious energy project, though it has seen minimal progress because it would have to cross unstable Afghan and Pakistani territory. More recently, India has begun pursuing rare earths and critical minerals from the region to reduce its dependence on Chinese supply chains.

Defence and security

Security cooperation has grown steadily. India shares counterterrorism and anti-drug-trafficking goals with the republics, holds regular national security adviser-level consultations, and conducts joint military exercises such as DUSTLIK with Uzbekistan and KAZIND with Kazakhstan. The instability following the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in 2021 made this cooperation more urgent, drawing India and the region closer on questions of regional stability.

Trade, culture, and people

Trade remains modest, but the human and cultural ties are deep. Kazakhstan is India’s largest trade and investment partner in the region, many Central Asian students come to India for affordable higher education, and Bollywood films and Hindi music remain hugely popular across the region. These people-to-people connections, a defining feature of the Connect Central Asia Policy, provide the soft-power foundation on which harder forms of cooperation can be built.

The road ahead

India’s strategy in Central Asia is a patient one. It cannot match China’s financial firepower, and it cannot solve the geography problem overnight. Instead, India has positioned itself as a reliable, development-focused alternative that respects the sovereignty of its partners. The republics, eager to diversify their relationships away from over-dependence on China and Russia, increasingly welcome India as a credible third option.

Challenges persist. The Chabahar route depends on Iran, which faces its own sanctions pressures, and connectivity projects still suffer from slow implementation and banking hurdles. But the direction is clear. Through Chabahar, the INSTC, the Summit and Dialogue mechanisms, and SCO membership, India has steadily converted goodwill into structure. The strategic ties it once struggled to build are now resting on firmer institutional ground than at any point since 1991.

What do you think? Given that geography will always favour China and Russia in Central Asia, is India’s slower, development-first approach a smart long-term strategy, or does it risk being left behind? And how much should India’s connectivity ambitions depend on a single partner like Iran, whose own situation can change quickly?

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Table of Contents

Why Central Asia matters to India 🔗

The connectivity problem 🔗

The Chabahar solution 🔗

The International North-South Transport Corridor 🔗

The Connect Central Asia policy 🔗

From a vision to high-level visits 🔗

Building institutions: the Summit and the Dialogue 🔗

The India-Central Asia Dialogue 🔗

The India-Central Asia Summit 🔗

Joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation 🔗

Areas of cooperation 🔗

Energy and resources 🔗

Defence and security 🔗

Trade, culture, and people 🔗

The road ahead 🔗