When Prime Minister Narendra Modi makes his way to those three countries in the first week of July, it will be to put the Act East policy front and centre. You can expect the results to have a bearing on how we handle maritime security, open new trade lanes and make headway on tech and the like.
Rudrendra Tandon has let us know the schedule: the PM is in Indonesia for the 8th and 9th, then on to Melbourne for the 10th and New Zealand on the 11th. The Ministry of External Affairs is calling it a move to consolidate our strategy in the eastern waters of the Indian Ocean.
Strategic pivot to the eastern maritime region
There’s been a conscious effort to reorient our focus to the east, as Tandon put it. We are looking at the eastern maritime part of the Indian Ocean and the kind of Act East work that ties together defence, commerce and some cultural exchange.
You could say this is in the wake of some recent overtures to island nations. New Delhi is after more reliable supply lines and better security pacts. Over the course of these three stops, we’ll see if we can get things like cybersecurity and critical minerals to go from being talking points to actual results.
Here is what the officials are zeroing in on:
– Defence and maritime security
– Making trade and supply chains more robust
– Projects in the realm of cybersecurity and critical minerals
– Some work on cultural conservation
Indonesia: heritage and security on one platform
The first leg is in Jakarta, where Modi will be going over the state of play on defence, trade and the rest. He will also be in Yogyakarta to see the Prambanan Temple complex; India and Indonesia are in on a plan to work together on its upkeep.
Tandon says you can trace this back to when President Prabowo Subianto was in for Republic Day last year. It’s a mix of the hard side of security and a bit of history, all in the name of building trust and some steady growth.
Australia: third Annual Summit in Melbourne
Melbourne is the venue on the 10th for the third of our Annual Summits with Australia. This is the kind of institutional talk we put in place with the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in 2020. We’ll be covering the usual ground on defence and foreign policy, but also some newer territory that the industry is keen to put some muscle behind.
According to Tandon, the conversation will be on critical minerals, the resilience of our supply chains and the like. For the universities and firms involved, it’s an opportunity to get on the same page and set some dates for when things can be put out there commercially.
New Zealand: FTA sets the tone for outcomes
On the 11th, it’s off to New Zealand for a sit-down with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. Tandon would have it that we’ve had some good momentum since Luxon was here in 2025, a real change in the dynamic.
It all came to a head with the FTA we put pen to paper on in late April. We’ve done away with duties on all of our exports to them, and they have put down $20 billion in investment for the next 15 years, he says.
So the FTA is the context for this visit. The idea is to see if we can convert that duty-free access into some market share for our exporters and put that investment to use in areas where we can both grow fast.
What to watch across the tour
The Act East policy is the lens here. We’ll be measuring success by whether our security talks lead to something we can do together and if we can get past the MoU stage with our tech and mineral partners. And who knows, the work at Prambanan could be a model for a kind of diplomacy that has some teeth to it.
