Abstract
India’s engagement with West Asia has historically been managed as a series of episodic transactions like oil purchases, remittance flows, and periodic evacuations rather than as a coherent strategic engagement. Over the last decade, however, the region has emerged as a common strategic arena for Indian policy, characterised by simultaneous diplomatic, military, economic, and intelligence engagement across the Gulf, the Levant, North Africa, and the wider Indian Ocean rim. This paper argues that the transformation is institutional rather than merely rhetorical. It is the product of a coordinated whole-of-government architecture in which the Ministry of External Affairs, the Ministry of Defence (and its newly created Department of Military Affairs), the National Security Council Secretariat, and allied intelligence and maritime agencies have been deliberately wired together under the Prime Minister’s Office direction. Drawing on the literature on civil-military relations, foreign-policy bureaucracy, and institutional decision-making, and on the empirical record of recent operations and exercises, the paper maps this architecture, demonstrates its functioning in crises and in steady state, and identifies three structural fragilities: civil-military integration gaps, PMO bottlenecking, and capacity constraints in the foreign service that condition its durability. The paper closes with six recommendations directed at the tri-services and strategic policy community.
