By Ramachandran Rajeev Kumar — 2026-05-08

Compartmentalised: India's China Policy Is Quietly Becoming Coherent

Two years ago, the Indian commentariat had a standard line on China policy. It was, depending on who was speaking, either too soft or too hard, and almost always self-contradictory. India was praised for boycotting the Belt and Road, criticised for staying in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, lauded for hosting the Quad, and lambasted for resuming visa issuance to Chinese nationals.

The contradictions were real. They are no longer contradictions. They are a method.

The arc, in dates

The 2024 BRICS summit at Kazan produced the Modi-Xi meeting that ended five years of post-Galwan deep freeze. Patrolling protocols on the Line of Actual Control resumed at Depsang and Demchok. By the second quarter of 2025, India had restored regular tourist visas for Chinese nationals after a four-year suspension. By the third quarter, direct flights between Indian and Chinese cities had been re-cleared, with the IndiGo and Air India schedules ramping through the fourth.

The Kailash-Mansarovar Yatra reopened for the 2025 pilgrim season after multiple years of closure. Trans-boundary river data sharing — the hydrological information that affects the lives of tens of millions in Assam and Bihar each monsoon — resumed. The Special Representatives mechanism for boundary talks met for the first substantive round in five years.

Then came Pahalgam. Then Operation Sindoor. Pakistan's Chinese-supplied air-defence and electronic-warfare picture became a battlefield reality. Beijing's diplomatic posture during and after the strikes was more openly pro-Islamabad than at any point in recent memory. By any reasonable expectation, Indian China policy should have flipped back into a deep freeze.

It did not.

What did not happen

Visas were not suspended. Flights were not paused. The yatra schedule for 2026 was not pulled. Water-data sharing continued. The Indian delegation attended the next SCO ministerial without theatre. The Special Representatives talks continued on schedule. The Indian negotiating posture inside BRICS, where Chinese and Russian preferences increasingly diverge from Indian ones, hardened on substance but did not become performative.

This is the visible evidence of a deliberate policy choice. The choice is not pro-China. It is also not anti-China. It is something more interesting and more useful: a refusal to allow any one file in the relationship to hold the rest of the relationship hostage.

The doctrine, named

A senior Indian official, speaking off-the-record at a Delhi seminar two months ago, used the word that fits. "Compartmentalised." India and China, he argued, will be neighbours, rivals, and trading partners simultaneously for the rest of his career and the rest of his children's careers. The country cannot afford to run a single-track policy that subordinates everything to whichever track happens to be hottest in a given quarter.

So India runs the tracks separately.

On the LAC, India will hold position, build infrastructure faster than China expects, and respond to incursions kinetically when required. That track gets a hard answer.

On trade, India will continue to allow Chinese imports of capital goods that Indian manufacturers genuinely need, while restricting consumer-electronics flows that compete with the production-linked-incentive build-out. That track gets a calibrated answer.

On the multilateral file — SCO, BRICS, climate negotiations, WTO posture — India will engage as a full member, contest Chinese positions on substance, and refuse to walk out of rooms even when walking out would be cathartic. That track gets a patient answer.

On people-to-people — students, pilgrims, tourists, business travellers, water-data engineers, river-monitoring scientists — India will keep the channels open, because closing them hurts Indians more than it hurts the Chinese state. That track gets a generous answer.

The doctrine, in one sentence, is: do not let the worst track set the temperature for the others.

Is this strategic maturity, or fence-sitting?

This is the question the policy attracts from its critics, and it deserves a serious answer.

The fence-sitting case is straightforward. By keeping engagement open across so many tracks during periods when Chinese behaviour has been visibly hostile — military buildup at Aksai Chin, support to Pakistan during Sindoor, dam construction on the Brahmaputra — India is providing Beijing with the diplomatic legitimacy and economic interconnection that it would otherwise have to earn. Critics argue that compartmentalisation is, at the margin, an asymmetric concession that China prices into its own behaviour.

The strategic-maturity case is also straightforward. Severing engagement on the easy tracks costs India access to information, leverage, and ordinary commercial benefit, while delivering no actual punishment to the Chinese system that the Chinese system feels. India has experimented with the alternative — the post-Galwan deep freeze — and discovered that it ceded ground without producing a softer Chinese position. Compartmentalisation, on this view, is the policy that allows India to be tough where toughness matters and patient where patience matters.

The honest answer is that both cases have weight, and the policy will ultimately be judged on outcomes that are not yet visible. Two specific outcomes will tell us which case won.

The first is the LAC itself. If Indian infrastructure, force posture, and surveillance density at the boundary continue to improve at the rate they have over the last eighteen months, compartmentalisation is the policy of a country that is using the open channels to buy time for the hard build. If those metrics slip, compartmentalisation will reveal itself as a softer policy than its defenders claim.

The second is the regional architecture. If India can use its SCO seat, its BRICS membership, and its bilateral engagement with smaller Chinese partners to peel some of those partners away from automatic Beijing alignment — Sri Lanka on ports, the Maldives on security, Nepal on power evacuation, Bangladesh on water — then compartmentalisation is producing leverage. If the regional architecture continues to drift toward Chinese gravity, the leverage was theoretical.

The Pakistan layer

The compartmentalised approach has one obvious tension, and it is named Pakistan.

Beijing's military, intelligence, and diplomatic backing of Islamabad is not a marginal feature of the China relationship. It is a central feature. China-Pakistan defence interoperability has tightened, not loosened, since Sindoor. The CPEC build-out continues. Chinese debt to Pakistan, with all its strategic conditionality, is now larger than the Pakistani military budget for several years running.

Indian policy treats this layer with a particular discipline that is worth naming. We do not pretend it does not exist. We do not respond to it by closing other tracks. We respond to it by competing on the third-country playing field — Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, the Gulf — and by building our own deterrent until the cost-benefit of further Chinese investment in Pakistan starts to look less attractive in Beijing.

This is patient policy. It is also long policy. The pay-off will be measured in decades. The risk is that an Indian electorate, or an Indian commentariat, accustomed to a cycle of high-decibel responses to Chinese provocations, will grow impatient and demand that the longer game be cut short for the satisfying short game.

If the government can hold its nerve, the compartmentalised approach is the most coherent China policy any Indian government has run since the 1970s.

The thing that makes this policy possible

There is one underwriting condition without which compartmentalisation does not work. India has to keep growing fast enough, building fast enough, and modernising its military fast enough that the asymmetry between Indian and Chinese capability narrows over time rather than widens.

If that asymmetry widens — if the GDP gap stays at four-to-one, if defence-spending parity slips further, if the technology gap on AI, semiconductors and aerospace deepens — then compartmentalisation becomes a polite name for accepting permanent inferiority.

That is the real China conversation, and it is mostly an India conversation. The diplomacy is the easy part. The build is the hard part.

Compartmentalisation buys time for the build. It does not substitute for it.

BarathVector covers strategic affairs with the conviction that India's neighbourhood deserves more careful thinking than slogans on either side of the spectrum.