India and Central Asia: Seeking a "Third Path" amid BRICS expansion and geopolitical fracture

In September 2026, New Delhi hosted a BRICS summit of unprecedented scale. Unlike the 2021 gathering of just five nations, held entirely online, this year's venue seated representatives from eleven full member states—Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia having joined—transforming what was once a "like-minded small club" into a complex, broad platform. Just two weeks before the summit opened, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had completed visits to Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, attending the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek. The convergence of these two diplomatic threads outlines the core proposition of India's position in the current Eurasian landscape: in Central Asia, what exactly does India want to demonstrate?

To understand India's Central Asian impulse, one must first understand the shift in Central Asia's own status. This region, once viewed as an "object of great power competition," is undergoing an identity transformation. The new-generation leaders of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan no longer settle for passively choosing sides between Moscow and Beijing. Instead, they actively construct a "multi-vector diplomacy"—simultaneously developing relations with Russia, China, the United States, the European Union, Turkey, and Iran, treating each external partner as a functional "investment portfolio" rather than a political alliance. In 2025, the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway broke ground; the EU-Central Asia summit signed a €13 billion Global Gateway agreement; Uzbekistan signed a nuclear power plant contract with Russia; and Kazakhstan negotiated critical minerals cooperation with the United States. This "portfolio politics" has transformed Central Asia from an object of geopolitical contestation into a regional actor capable of setting the terms of the game.

For India, this change is both an opportunity and a source of urgency. Central Asia's resource endowment needs no elaboration: Kazakhstan's uranium and iron ore, Uzbekistan's gold and natural gas, Kyrgyzstan's hydropower potential. But what truly grips India's attention is the dual anxiety of security and connectivity. After the Taliban's return to Afghanistan, the risks of extremist spillover and drug trafficking have risen, making India's shared interests with Central Asian states in counterterrorism and regional stability more concrete. On the connectivity front, since launching its "Connect Central Asia" policy in 2012, India has consistently faced a fundamental obstacle: geographic isolation. Pakistan's obstruction prevents India from reaching Central Asia by land, a reality that has forced India to look toward Iran's Chabahar Port and the 7,200-kilometer International North-South Transport Corridor.

Chabahar has thus become the fulcrum of India's Central Asia strategy. In May 2024, India signed a ten-year operating contract with Iran for the Shahid Beheshti terminal at Chabahar Port, attempting to open a route for Indian goods to Afghanistan and Central Asia that bypasses Pakistan. Kyrgyzstan's Ambassador to India, Bekhimov, explicitly stated that Bishkek "fully supports" the development of Chabahar Port and the INSTC, believing it will "significantly shorten the physical distance" between India and Central Asia. Yet the vulnerability of this route is equally evident. In 2026, as US-Iran tensions escalated and joint Israeli-American strikes targeted sites inside Iran, the security environment around Chabahar deteriorated sharply. India has had to prepare to transfer its direct equity stake to an Iranian entity to circumvent the secondary effects of US sanctions. The US Treasury's threat to exclude any foreign bank dealing with Iran from the dollar system places India's Chabahar investment under severe strain.

The other side of the connectivity dilemma is India's narrative competition with China on the Eurasian continent. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor's flagship Gwadar Port lies barely a stone's throw from Chabahar on the map, yet the strategic logic behind the two is diametrically opposed. At the SCO summit, Modi repeatedly emphasized that "connectivity projects must respect sovereignty and territorial integrity"—the target of which was self-evident, as CPEC traverses the Gilgit-Baltistan region that India claims as its own territory. The signal India seeks to convey is that the connectivity it supports is "principled," while China-led connectivity is "expansionist."

But India's display in Central Asia goes far beyond counterbalancing China. The three pillars Modi proposed in Bishkek—"security, connectivity, opportunity"—in fact constitute a complete definition of India's Central Asian role. On security, India-Kyrgyzstan defense cooperation has "formed a structured mechanism," with joint working groups regularly formulating annual action plans, and bilateral military exercises and tailored training courses continuing. On opportunity, India is promoting its digital public infrastructure as a diplomatic tool in Central Asia. In Uzbekistan, the two sides elevated their relationship to a "comprehensive strategic partnership," with a cooperation agenda covering critical minerals, innovation, startups, agriculture, and space.

The most tangible breakthrough on this front is the internationalisation of India's Unified Payments Interface. UPI, which processes over 18 billion transactions a month domestically, is now being offered to Central Asian states as a ready-made, low-cost digital payment rail. In 2025, India and Uzbekistan signed a memorandum of understanding to pilot UPI-based merchant payments in Tashkent and Samarkand, with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan expressing interest in similar arrangements. For landlocked Central Asian economies seeking to reduce dependence on Russian and Chinese payment corridors, UPI offers an attractive third option: interoperable, smartphone-based, and built on open-source architecture. Indian fintech firms are pairing UPI with RuPay card acceptance and digital identity stacks, positioning India not merely as a trading partner but as a standards-setter in the region's digital financial architecture. The pitch is simple—if UPI can scale from a Bangalore tea stall to a Tashkent bazaar, India's claim to be a "digital bridge" between South and Central Asia acquires concrete substance.

People-to-people ties are India's asset in Central Asia that requires the least "construction." Over ten thousand Indian students study at universities in Kyrgyzstan, primarily in medicine; more than a thousand Kyrgyz citizens travel to India for medical treatment each year. There are roughly three thousand shared vocabulary words between India and Uzbekistan, and cultural affinities from cuisine to language can be traced back to the spread of Buddhism in the Kushan era. These connections cannot change trade figures in the short term, but they provide India with a narrative foundation that other Central Asian suitors cannot easily replicate: India is not a "newcomer" but a "returner."

Yet India must confront a fundamental structural constraint. Central Asian states welcome Indian investment, markets, and digital technology, but they do not regard India as a "substitute" for Russia or China. As Central Asia expert Juraev warned, portraying India as a "force to counterbalance China or Russia" would "backfire" in Bishkek. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan need a diversified portfolio of partners, not camp-based alignment. India's value lies precisely in its "third pole" attribute—a partner that maintains working relations with both Moscow and Beijing while also having dialogue channels with Washington and Brussels.

This is precisely the role India seeks to demonstrate at the BRICS summit. BRICS in 2026 is no longer an anti-Western club but a loose alliance of eleven members, ten partner countries, and four continents. As chair, India must navigate this more complex environment: divisions between Iran and the UAE over joint statements have already derailed foreign ministers' meetings; US tariff threats against Russian oil buyers hang overhead. The agenda India is pushing—cheaper cross-border payments, local currency trade settlement, and UPI-linked digital currency interconnection—is essentially a pragmatic path of "de-risking" rather than "de-dollarization."

India's investment in Central Asia must ultimately answer one question: can it position itself as Eurasia's "trustworthy connectivity provider" and "exemplar of multi-vector diplomacy"? Chabahar's sanctions risk, the INSTC's operational efficiency, and the reality that trade volumes with Central Asian states have long hovered at low levels are all obstacles to be overcome. But India possesses a unique advantage of time: Central Asia's "multi-vector" era has only just begun, and India is precisely one of the few major powers capable of conversing with all vectors simultaneously.

At the opening ceremony of the World Nomad Games in Bishkek, Modi sat shoulder to shoulder with Central Asian leaders. The symbolism of this scene may outweigh any specific agreement signed: what India wants to show is not whom it can replace in Central Asia, but that it can become a partner that does not create camps on an increasingly fractured Eurasian continent. If UPI can ride the same rails as the INSTC, India's "third path" may prove more durable than the corridors of its rivals.