India's Indo Pacific Strategy and Pakistan's Security Dilemma: A Regional Security Complex Analysis

Abstract

This paper explores the implications of India's emergence in the Indo-Pacific for Pakistan's security landscape and strategic choices. The paper takes as its starting point Darshana M. Baruah's 2020 Carnegie Endowment study, India in the Indo Pacific: New Delhi's Theater of Opportunity, which views India's Indo Pacific pivot not as a far-flung maritime concept but as a structural change with implications for the regional order in South Asia. The study is based on two complementary theoretical approaches: Barry Buzan and Ole Waever's Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT) and the classical security dilemma of John Herz and Robert Jervis. RSCT places the India-Pakistan conflict at the heart of the South Asian security complex and shows how the emergence of China is entangling South Asia in a larger Asian super complex; the security dilemma explains why Indian capability-building is interpreted as an offensive by Pakistan and why the action-reaction spiral is hard to break. The paper is methodologically designed as a comparative qualitative study that compares the strategic behaviour of India and Pakistan using document and content analyses of official documents and available literature. The main thesis is that India's Indo-Pacific strategy exacerbates the material and diplomatic imbalance between the two countries, shifts the rivalry from a land centric to a maritime domain, and leaves Pakistan with limited options for a defensive strategy, including sea denial, reliance on China, and the securitization of Gwadar. The paper concludes that Pakistan's most realistic option is not a symmetric naval competition, which it cannot afford. Still, a calibrated approach of selective deterrence, economic maritime diplomacy, and risk management that will reduce, not exacerbate, the security dilemma.