Defence Minister Rajnath Singh released ‘RAKSHA’ in New Delhi this week, a structured ten-year roadmap for India’s global defence partnerships built around four pillars: strategic partnerships, capacity building through joint exercises and training, indigenous defence exports under Make in India, and maritime security anchored in India’s role as Net Security Provider and First Responder in the Indian Ocean Region. It’s a genuinely significant document in form, if not entirely in content — India has conducted defence diplomacy for decades without ever codifying it into a single strategic blueprint, and giving that activity a named framework with defined pillars makes it easier to track, measure, and hold the ministry accountable to over time.
What’s notable, reading through the document’s own stated pillars, is what isn’t explicitly named as one of them. “Neighbourhood First” has been a standing pillar of India’s broader foreign policy rhetoric for over a decade, invoked repeatedly by ministers when discussing Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan specifically. RAKSHA’s four pillars — partnerships, capacity building, exports, and maritime security — are broad enough to encompass neighbourhood relationships, but they’re built around functional categories rather than geographic priority, which means neighbourhood partners compete for attention within the same “strategic partnerships” bucket as major global powers, defence export customers, and Indo-Pacific partners with far larger budgets and higher strategic profile.
That framing matters concretely for how this document should be read by readers in border states like Tripura, where India’s actual defence relationship with its neighbours plays out as lived experience rather than diplomatic abstraction. Nepal’s Chief of Army Staff has visited New Delhi in the recent past specifically to discuss training, joint exercises, and equipment supply — precisely the kind of capacity-building the RAKSHA document names as a pillar. Bangladesh sits even closer to Tripura’s own daily reality, given the state’s dependence on Bangladeshi transit routes and border cooperation. Whether RAKSHA’s ten-year framework translates its capacity-building pillar into deeper, faster support specifically for these adjoining countries — support that, this newspaper has argued elsewhere, could strengthen exactly the kind of cross-border monitoring and coordination Nepal needed during its recent barrier-lake flood crisis — is a different and harder question than whether the document exists at all.
There’s a reasonable case that a functional, capability-based framework is actually more useful than a geography-based one: partnerships with Nepal or Bangladesh benefit from the same training programmes, joint exercises, and equipment support mechanisms RAKSHA describes generically, without needing a separate neighbourhood-specific chapter. Structure alone doesn’t determine outcomes. But structure does reveal priority, and a document that names maritime security in the Indian Ocean as an explicit pillar while leaving land-neighbour capacity building folded into a broader partnerships category suggests where the document’s authors expect India’s defence diplomacy energy to concentrate over the next decade.
None of this diminishes RAKSHA as a useful organizing document for India’s broader strategic engagement. But dailyArchives readers in the Northeast, closest to the neighbours this framework is meant to serve, should watch the next decade’s actual allocation of exercises, training slots, and equipment support to Nepal and Bangladesh specifically — not just the document’s language — before concluding whether “neighbourhood first” survives as more than a phrase inside a framework built primarily around bigger strategic relationships.
DA Editorial Desk( Sara Debbarma)