Context:

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent visit to Australia was rich in both substance and symbolism.
• It followed a now-familiar pattern for the relationship: warm leadership engagement, a large diaspora event, and a joint statement packed with deliverables and future roadmaps.
• Australia views India as central to its economic diversification strategy, reflected in its new economic roadmap and a busy ministerial calendar dedicated to India.
• The political consensus on this relationship appears bipartisan, with convergence between the two countries only deepening over time.

From Convergence to Alignment: Understanding the Difference

• For most strategic relationships, the harder challenge lies in moving from convergence to alignment — and these two terms, though similar-sounding, are fundamentally different.
  • Convergence happens when two countries reach similar conclusions about world affairs, but for their own separate reasons.
  • Alignment happens when those separate conclusions get built into matching capabilities, institutions, and habits of regular engagement.
• India and Australia have achieved considerable convergence already. The real test — for this visit and the years ahead — is whether this convergence can evolve into durable alignment.

Why Has Convergence Deepened?

• Both countries are currently hedging against overdependence in a changing global order:
  • Australia's concerns
    • Its heavy dependence on China, along with growing unpredictability from its traditional ally, the United States, has come under visible strain.
    • This year's Lowy Institute Poll found trust in the US at a record low of 31%, with a narrow majority of Australians favouring greater distance from Washington under President Trump.
  • India's concerns
    • New Delhi is similarly diversifying its dependencies — across energy suppliers, defence platforms, and critical minerals processing.
    • Conflicts in Iran and Ukraine have reinforced the risks of relying too heavily on any single partner, however longstanding that relationship might be.
  • Since neither country can single-handedly balance China or manage American unpredictability alone, partnering together — along with allies like Japan — improves their odds. This shared strategic instinct represents genuine convergence.

Tangible Outcomes From This Visit

• The visit produced concrete evidence of growing strategic cooperation:
  • A Joint Declaration on Defence and Security Cooperation, including a MoU between Australia's Maritime Border Command and the Indian Coast Guard.
  • Adoption of the India-Australia Maritime Security Collaboration Roadmap to address shared threat perceptions.
  • On energy security, Australian uranium — legally available to India since the 2014 civil nuclear agreement but never commercially utilised due to India's nuclear liability law — can now move forward, thanks to the SHANTI Act passed last December, which reformed India's liability regime.
  • Launch of the Australia-India Partnership on Cyber, Critical Technologies and Supply Chains (PACTS).
  • Reaffirmation of complementarity with the Australia-Canada-India Technology and Innovation Partnership, focused on building resilient technology partnerships through flexible minilateral arrangements.
• These developments mark early institutional steps toward genuine alignment, rather than mere symbolic convergence.

Where the Real Gaps Remain?

• The Indian Ocean Puzzle
  • The Indian Ocean region is where Australian and Indian interests overlap most naturally, since both are Indian Ocean states with genuine stakes in regional sea lanes.
  • India's Information Fusion Centre-Indian Ocean Region has become an important hub for maritime domain awareness.
  • Both navies now share similar assessments regarding threats like shadow fleets, undersea cable vulnerabilities, and coercive activities below the threshold of open conflict.
  • However, a structural gap persists: Australia's most significant defence decisions — including AUKUS (its trilateral security partnership with the UK and US) — remain oriented toward the Western Pacific.
  • Meanwhile, India's strategic planners continue dividing their attention between continental and maritime challenges.
  • The shared strategic ground, while real, remains narrower than political rhetoric sometimes suggests.
• Economic Cooperation: Growth Without Depth
  • Trade between the two nations has grown significantly since the Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (ECTA) came into force.
  • However, industry voices point out that this growth has disproportionately benefited large firms, while smaller exporters on both sides remain largely unaware of how to actually utilise the agreement's benefits.
  • Track 1.5 dialogues have already flagged this as a genuine "operationalisation gap."
• The Public Awareness Deficit
  • Perhaps most striking is the gap in Australian public understanding of India's global significance.
  • Various polls show that strategic convergence at the elite level has not yet translated into broader public awareness of India's growing importance.

The Diaspora Opportunity — With a Caveat

• The Indian diaspora represents the biggest opportunity to bridge this awareness gap.
• Indian-origin Australians have now become the country's largest immigrant-born community, surpassing the UK-born population for the first time.
• However, experts caution that recognising the diaspora merely as a cultural asset or electoral constituency does not amount to genuine alignment. True alignment would require:
  • Building a public case for why India economically matters to the average Australian citizen;
  • Institutionalising the diaspora's unique ability to help Australian small and medium enterprises navigate Indian regulatory and business culture (and vice versa) — rather than leaving this to individual efforts;
  • Separating the mobility of skilled Indian professionals from Australia's increasingly contentious migration politics.

A Symbolic Moment: Pension Funds as Strategic Trust

• During this visit, PM Modi's remarks on Australian pension funds investing in India resonated strongly.
• He noted that India would treat such investments not just as capital inflow, but as a genuine marker of strategic trust placed by Australian families in India's future.
• Such statements matter because they help build broader public consciousness of India as a reliable long-term partner — moving the relationship beyond elite-level convergence toward grassroots alignment.