NEW DELHI: India and Poland elevated their ties to the “strategic partnership” level this week during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s historic visit to Warsaw. During Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s visit to Delhi earlier this month, Delhi and Kuala Lumpur upgraded their ties from “enhanced strategic partnership” to “comprehensive strategic partnership”.
These terms have only appeared in dictionaries in the last few decades to describe different types of partnerships, but there is no official or legally binding definition of what these partnerships include.
Some scholars have noted that these terms typically serve “bureaucratic purposes.”
Read the full story
“These are terms that serve bureaucratic purposes during foreign visits and act as deliverables. But there is no official categorisation of what strategic partnership and comprehensive partnership mean, although the latter implies deeper cooperation in security, technology and other important areas,” said Rajesh Rajagopalan, professor of international politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).
Other experts said such partnerships could be seen as a “level of trust” and mutual understanding between countries seeking to strengthen engagement.
“These may be seen as necessary steps or milestones that countries take in building trust. In India’s case, elevating its ties to these types of partnerships will strengthen India’s multilateral approach in global affairs,” Amit Ranjan, research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), National University of Singapore (NUS), told ThePrint.
The government source added that there are no specific codified requirements for what these types of partnerships constitute, but elevating the relationship to either level “signals the maturity of the relationship”.
Key areas of strategic partnership typically include economy, defense, energy security, intelligence and foreign policy cooperation, scientific and technological innovation, and technology cooperation.
A comprehensive strategic partnership is seen as a higher level, involving more extensive engagement in the same or even more fields. Bilateral relations are considered to be significantly deepened through a comprehensive strategic partnership.
For example, when US President Joe Biden visited Vietnam in September last year, he elevated relations with Hanoi to the level of a comprehensive strategic partnership, skipping the strategic partnership level.
India Partnership
As international political scientist Ian Hall pointed out in a 2016 research paper titled “Multilateral Alliances and Indian Foreign Policy under the Narendra Modi Administration,” India has strategic partnership agreements with more than 30 countries, including the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, the European Union, and China.
On the other hand, India does not have many comprehensive strategic partnerships because they are limited to partners with which the Indian government seeks to forge broader agreements and build deeper cooperation. Countries with which India has these types of partnerships include Australia, the UK, the United Arab Emirates, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
The scope of this level of agreement is broad and covers all aspects of bilateral relations, including technology, trade, economy, science and technology, energy security and people-to-people ties.
However, there are no specific requirements for a strategic or comprehensive partnership from either side other than cooperation on common goals. A comprehensive strategic partnership may also provide impetus for higher level interactions between countries at the summit level, though this may vary from country to country.
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)
Also read: India-Japan 2+2: What Jaishankar and Rajnath focused on during the third bilateral dialogue