Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Australia this week has been big on substance and high on optics. The choreography is familiar now given the warmth in the relationship: a forward-leaning leadership interaction, a massive diaspora event and a joint statement packed with deliverables and road maps. The Australian government sees India as central to its economic diversification strategy. Its new economic road map and packed ministerial calendar for India underwrite this intent. The elite consensus seems bipartisan and the convergence only growing.
Yet, the harder part for most strategic relationships is drawing the line between convergence and alignment. The two might sound like synonyms, but they are not. Convergence is two countries arriving at similar conclusions about the world for their own reasons. Alignment is what happens when those separate conclusions are built into matching capabilities, institutions and habits of engagement. India and Australia have achieved a great deal of the first. The real test of this visit, and of the years after it, is whether it endures by delivering the second.
The convergence is not in doubt, and it is easy to see why it has deepened. Both countries are hedging against overdependence in a global order in transition. Australia’s dependence on China, and its alliance dependence on an unpredictable Washington, have come under visible strain. This year’s Lowy Institute Poll found trust in the United States at a record low of 31%, with a narrow margin of Australians saying that Canberra should distance itself from Washington under U.S. President Donald Trump. India is running its parallel diversification across energy suppliers, defence platforms and critical minerals processing, driven by a similar instinct.
New Delhi wants to limit its exposure; the Iran and Ukraine conflicts have driven home that any single-point dependency, however longstanding, is now a liability. No country can single-handedly balance China or hedge against American unpredictability. Together, and alongside partners such as Japan, they improve their odds. That is genuine convergence.
This visit has produced tangible evidence of that strategic lock-in. A Joint Declaration on Defence and Security Cooperation delivers a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Australia’s Maritime Border Command and the Indian Coast Guard and adopts an India-Australia Maritime Security Collaboration Roadmap to address shared threat perceptions. These are practical mechanisms that deepen interoperability without altering the basic character of the relationship: India remains a trusted security partner, not an ally. On energy security, Australian uranium has been legally available to India since the bilateral 2014 civil nuclear agreement, but it never actually moved commercially, largely because India’s own nuclear liability law made foreign suppliers nervous about exposure.
That changed with the SHANTI Act last December, which reformed that liability regime. The agreement on uranium has operationalised a deal lying dormant for a decade. The summit also launched the Australia-India Partnership on Cyber, Critical Technologies and Supply Chains (PACTS), while reaffirming the complimentarity to the Australia-Canada-India Technology and Innovation Partnership as focusing on building resilient technology partnerships through flexible minilateral arrangements. These are examples of alignment beginning to take institutional form.
But for alignment to be durable, convergence must translate into operational overlap. This is most consequential in the Indian Ocean, a region where Australian and Indian interests overlap most naturally. Both are Indian Ocean states with real stakes in the region’s sea lanes. India’s Information Fusion Centre-Indian Ocean Region has emerged as a key hub for maritime domain awareness, even as Australia pays closer attention to its western seaboard and Indian Ocean approaches. The two navies have converged on similar risk assessments of shadow fleets, threats to undersea cables and coercive activity below the threshold of conflict.
The new Coast Guard MoU and Maritime Security Collaboration Roadmap narrow the gap between strategic intent and operational cooperation. Yet, Australia’s most consequential force-structure decisions, from AUKUS (trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.) to its broader defence posture, remain oriented towards the Western Pacific, while India’s strategic planners continue to divide attention between continental threats and maritime challenges. The shared ground is real; it is simply narrower than the political convergence sometimes suggests.
Economically, the pattern is similar. Trade has grown sharply since the Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement came into force, but industry voices behind closed doors argue that growth sits disproportionately with large firms. Smaller exporters on both sides remain unaware of how to use it. Track 1.5 dialogues have flagged this as an operationalisation gap.
The knowledge deficit is more obvious when one looks at Australian public consciousness on India. This year’s Lowy Poll found only 5% of Australians expect India to be the world’s most important power a decade from now, against 54% for China, even as trust in India remains comparatively high. Convergence at the top has not yet trickled down into wider awareness of India’s strategic heft.
The diaspora remains the biggest opportunity to change this, but with a caveat. Indian-origin Australians are now the country’s largest immigrant-born community, ahead of the U.K.-born population for the first time. Political leadership has celebrated the diaspora’s contribution, and a Centre for Australia-India Relations study finds that Australians broadly recognise it as skilled migrants, students and workers. But recognising the diaspora as a cultural asset, or an electoral constituency, is not alignment. Alignment would require translating that diaspora leverage into a public case for why India matters economically to the average Australian. It would require institutionalising the diaspora’s comparative advantage in helping Australian Small and Medium-sized Enterprises navigate Indian regulatory and business culture, and vice versa, rather than leaving that work to individual champions. It would also mean untangling the mobility of Indian professionals from Australia’s increasingly fraught migration politics.
Mr. Modi’s visit has provided fresh ballast for these conversations about the future of the India-Australia partnership. His message on Australian Pension funds investing in India particularly resonated in the room when he said India would not just treat them as capital but as a marker of strategic trust imposed by Australian families in India. These statements matter because they build the broader public consciousness of India as a trusted partner for the future. Convergence got India and Australia to the table; it is these steps that institutionalise engagement incrementally that build alignment that endures.
Shruti Pandalai is the Inaugural India Chair at The Lowy Institute, Sydney, Australia
Published - July 10, 2026 12:08 am IST