India-Australia relations: Preparing for CECA
A rapidly changing global environment, certainly, can impose a strategic necessity in reinventing bilateral, regional, and global relationships. At the same time, the evolving nature of foreign policy itself constantly reassesses relationships to maximize national interest. In other words, the forging and enhancement of relationships is not solely driven by externally imposed compulsions.
Countries discover each other because relationships also have their own bilateral rationale.
It is in this context that the dramatic transformation of India-Australia relations, in less than a decade, from persistent suspicions and distrust, occasional animosity, and polite disinterest to one driven by strategic necessity, mutual benefit, and proactive bipartisan political will needs to be seen.
Australian Parliamentarian Andrew Charlton, in his recently published book titled Australia’s Pivot to India, characterizes the relationship as one that did not happen overnight but incrementally moved through four distinct phases – acquaintances, friends, family, partners – before it arrived at the current state of play.
From what was a tepid, almost moribund, engagement, it has leapfrogged to emerge as one of the most exciting and fastest growing relationships in the Indo-Pacific, spanning multiple and diverse verticals from defence to education to critical technologies to the social sector to trade, to name a few.
The willingness of both countries to enter into a comprehensive relationship is by itself spectacular, given how mundane the relationship earlier was. But willingness alone does not move mountains.
