India's neighbourhood has never been easy. Surrounded by states of varying size, stability, and strategic alignment — Pakistan, China, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bhutan, and Myanmar — India has spent seven decades managing relationships that combine deep cultural and historical ties with genuine security tensions, economic asymmetries, and the constant pressure of great power competition in its own backyard.

What concerns me, reflecting on the past decade of Indian foreign policy, is not that the neighbourhood is difficult. It has always been difficult. What concerns me is that India's approach to it has become reactive rather than strategic — responding to crises as they arrive rather than shaping the conditions that determine whether crises arrive in the first place.

Consider the record. The Maldives elected a government in 2023 explicitly hostile to Indian presence — and India was caught off guard, having failed to build the political relationships beyond the government of the day that would have given it resilience against electoral change. Bangladesh is navigating a post-Hasina political landscape in which India's close association with the previous government has created a perception problem with the new one that will take years to manage. Nepal continues to oscillate between India and China, partly because of genuine geopolitical interest and partly because India's engagement model — heavy on government-to-government ties, light on people-to-people depth — has not built the societal anchoring that durable relationships require. Sri Lanka's debt crisis created an opening for deeper engagement, and India moved well — but the China footprint in Hambantota remains, and the strategic competition for influence in Colombo is ongoing.

The common thread across all of these cases is not Indian failure — India has managed each of these relationships with considerable skill at critical moments. The common thread is the absence of a proactive, long-term neighbourhood strategy that goes beyond bilateral crisis management.

What would such a strategy look like? Three things, in my assessment.

First, India must invest in people-to-people relationships at scale — through scholarships, cultural exchange, medical tourism, digital connectivity, and the kind of soft power that outlasts any particular government. India's ITEC programme and its scholarship schemes are valuable but massively underscaled relative to what China offers in the same countries.

Second, India must accept that economic integration is the most durable foundation of neighbourhood stability. SAARC has failed as an institutional framework — largely because of Pakistan. But BIMSTEC, bilateral FTAs, and the connectivity projects that link India's northeast to Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Southeast Asia can build the economic interdependence that makes political turbulence less consequential.

Third, India must engage opposition parties and civil society in its neighbourhood countries, not just incumbent governments. The cost of being seen as too close to a government that subsequently falls is a cost India has paid repeatedly. Relationships with political movements, business communities, media organisations, and academic institutions give India the strategic depth that government-to-government ties alone cannot provide.

India's neighbourhood will continue to be difficult. The question is whether India manages that difficulty reactively, absorbing each crisis as it comes — or proactively, shaping a regional environment in which India's influence is broad, deep, and resilient enough to withstand the inevitable turbulence of democratic change and great power competition.

The answer to that question is a choice. And it is a choice India needs to make deliberately, not by default.