In the game of Asian power politics, India has been receiving increased attention of late, being wooed in turn by America, China and Japan. India was geopolitically boxed in South Asia for four decades, in part as a consequence of the Cold War when its alignment with the Soviet Union caused the US and China, with the help of Pakistan, to contain it within the sub-continent, and in part because of its own economic and political mindset.

Economic and strategic challenges of the post-Cold War world have been changing India's old mindset and helping it to break out of its South Asian confinement. The opening up of the economy since the early 1990s has led to growth rates averaging around 6 per cent per year. A dynamic economy will provide the resources to pursue wider geostrategic interests. And the sea change in India-US security relations, especially since 9/11, has also made it easier for India to enter into closer political and security cooperation with America's friends and allies in the Asia-Pacific.

India still has many problems, but there is a new confidence that the country matters in the world and can achieve greater things. A richer India that is even partly freed from its preoccupation with South Asia, would be in a better position to pursue its oft stated security interests outside the land mass of the subcontinent. It has defined these, following in the footsteps of the British Raj, as stretching from Aden to Singapore, or as then Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh said in Singapore in June 2000, from the Persian Gulf to Southeast Asia including “an uninterrupted access to the Malacca Straits and the South China Sea”.

India has a modest size navy with 38 principal combatants (destroyers, frigates, submarines and an aircraft carrier). According to present plans, their numbers will not increase significantly over the next decade, but their capability and reach will be expanding. For instance the navy is headed towards a force of two, and larger, aircraft carriers deploying MiG-29 aircraft. The first of these larger carriers, the refurbished Admiral Gorshkov of the Russian navy, is expected to enter service in 2008–2009 while a second carrier of similar tonnage will probably be deployed around 2015.