Durian Diplomacy: India and ASEAN's Two Flavours of Strategic Autonomy
- Luo Chen Jun
- Jul 20
- 5 min read
Ambassador Gurjit Singh's recent book on India–ASEAN relations borrows its title from Southeast Asia's most polarising fruit, ‘The Durian’, intoxicating or repellent depending entirely on the palate doing the tasting. Similarly, the same book was published in Singapore under a different name altogether, “The Mango Flavour”, after India's own iconic fruit instead. Even the author couldn't describe this relationship the same way to both audiences, which is a fitting place to start. At the fourth FPT India-ASEAN Youth Conference 2026 this month, one phrase came up in nearly every session, meaning something different depending on who used it: strategic autonomy. When a delegate from Delhi says it and a delegate from Singapore or Manila says it, they are getting two genuinely different flavours out of the same fruit.
For a state the size of India, strategic autonomy is a question of capability. India can sit in the Quad, BRICS, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation at once, hedge on Russian energy, push back on Washington over tariffs, and still absorb the consequences, because its economy is large enough to make the costs bearable. Autonomy, for India, means having enough weight that no single relationship is load-bearing.
For most of ASEAN, autonomy cannot work that way. Singapore, Vietnam, and the Philippines, for example, small, trade-dependent economies, do not have the size to absorb a great power's displeasure. Their autonomy rests on the survival of a rules-based order: the idea that a small state's rights are protected by agreed rules rather than by its own capacity to resist pressure. This is why ASEAN centrality has never been a vanity project. It is small states insisting on writing themselves into the rules before the rules get written around them.
This asymmetry is usually treated as a problem, proving that the phrase means too many things to mean anything. I'd beg to differ because it is exactly why India and ASEAN need each other. A fraying rules-based order is a survivable inconvenience for India. But for most of ASEAN, it is closer to existential. India has a genuine, self-interested stake in propping up institutions it does not formally belong to — the East Asia Summit, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific, which India's own Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative was deliberately built to complement rather than compete with. That complementarity shows up in unglamorous places too: the ongoing review of the ASEAN–India Trade in Goods Agreement, and ASEAN's new Digital Economy Framework Agreement, a domain still open enough that both sides can help write the rules rather than simply receive them.
That formal architecture has, in fact, been climbing steadily for over three decades. India and ASEAN moved from Sectoral Dialogue Partners in 1992 to a full Dialogue Partnership in 1995, and on to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in 2022, one of seven such partnerships ASEAN now maintains, with 2027 marking 35 years since that first formal step, and 2026 already declared the ASEAN-India Year of Maritime Cooperation. It's a genuinely impressive trajectory, and also not quite the same achievement as the one this piece is arguing for. Upgrading a partnership's tier is something governments can settle in a single summit communiqué. On the other hand, reconciling what the two sides actually mean by their most-used phrase takes considerably longer, and there's no ceremony scheduled for that.
None of this should be oversold. ASEAN's consensus rule has looked especially fragile over the past year, with the bloc's formal mechanisms sitting largely unused while the Thailand–Cambodia border conflict escalated into the most serious fighting the two countries have seen in over a decade. India, for its part, cannot fully credibly help write the ASEAN region's economic rules while remaining the only major regional economy outside RCEP. ASEAN’s own polling reflects this: asked who they would actually turn to as a hedging partner against US-China rivalry, ASEAN elites put India a distant third, behind the EU and Japan. Middle powers don't earn a seat at the table by declaring intent. They earn it by becoming difficult to do without.
That expectation gap runs deeper than economics or security cooperation. At a seminar marking a decade of Act East, Yanitha Meena Louis of ISIS Malaysia pushed back on the reflex to define India's regional role only as a counterweight to China, arguing that India's ASEAN engagement reflects independent strategic interests of its own and is better understood through roles like development partner, security provider, and inter-regional connector. That's a distinction worth taking seriously. The capability India actually offers, room to manoeuvre without being cornered, was never meant to be lent out as someone else's balancer.
Which points to the more useful way to think about strategic autonomy: it is not a posture adopted by saying the words, it is a capability that has to be paid for. Act East's own record shows exactly where India has and hasn't paid up. Security cooperation — a first-ever maritime dialogue with the Philippines, a new security dialogue with Malaysia, a first BrahMos sale to Manila — has raced ahead, built on what India can supply as a capable partner. Economic integration, where ASEAN's rules-based logic sets the terms, has lagged: trade imbalances persist, and investment still concentrates almost entirely in Singapore. Autonomy bought this way is durable. Autonomy merely declared is not.
That distinction is about to be tested in public, not in a seminar room. When ASEAN's foreign ministers gather in Manila from July 20 to 22, India's minister will be in the room alongside counterparts from Washington, Beijing, and Moscow, before stepping into a separate Quad meeting on the sidelines with the US, Japan, and Australia. That is exactly the kind of issue-based alignment this argument describes, played out in real time: the same city, the same week, two deliberately different tables, and India choosing to sit at both rather than pick one. Whether that reads as genuine dexterity or as simple fence-sitting will depend on what, if anything, either room actually produces, which is just the “autonomy has to be paid for” argument again, this time as a live test rather than a thesis.
I came away from the Conference thinking the most useful thing this generation of India–ASEAN voices could do is stop treating strategic autonomy as a slogan the two sides already share and start treating it as two distinct projects that reinforce each other. India's autonomy is a hedge against being cornered. ASEAN is a hedge against being erased. Same fruit, different flavours, and both are worth the trouble of acquiring a taste for. Act East has spent a decade proving India can deliver its own mango. Its second decade will be judged on whether it can finally acquire a taste for ASEAN's durian too.
This article written by Luo Chen Jun, Partnerships Manager at Common Purpose Asia Pacific. Based in Singapore, they were a delegate at the 4th India–ASEAN Youth Conference 2026, where they spoke on the panel on Strategic Autonomy and Regional Stability in a Fragmenting Global Order.
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