August 22, 2026
Dhruva Jaishankar, Executive Director, ORF America spoke with Pallavi Jain of The Australia Today on what India’s rise means for Australia’s strategic future:
Pallavi Jain: Australia and India often describe each other as “natural partners,” yet bilateral trade remains at around A$55 billion, compared with Australia’s trade with China of over A$325 billion. What are the biggest structural barriers holding the relationship back, and what practical steps should governments and businesses take over the next decade to accelerate growth?
Dhruva Jaishankar: I would actually look at the rapid growth of bilateral trade – especially since the conclusion of the Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (ECTA) – as a positive development. China is not a useful comparison, given the history with Australia and scale of resource exports, but India is already Australia’s fifth largest goods trade partner and is likely to surpass Japan and South Korea in the coming years to be a distant third behind China and the United States. That said, there are lots of opportunities to increase the business-to-business partnership beyond commodities, education, and low-cost services. For example, Australia should look to Indian manufacturers to diversify its supply chains, whether for pharmaceuticals, vehicles, refined petroleum, electronics, or machinery and more ambitiously for defense, drones, and semiconductors. There are also exciting new investment opportunities but little public awareness in Australia: indeed, compared to North America and Europe, India is relatively untapped from the point of view of Australian institutional investors.
Pallavi Jain: There remains a perception gap in Australia when it comes to India. Much of the conversation still revolves around migration, education and trade, while there seems to be less awareness of India’s strategic capabilities—including the fact that it has the world’s fourth most powerful military and a rapidly expanding defence-industrial base. How can Australia develop a more complete understanding of India’s hard power, rather than simply viewing it as a fast-growing economy with a large consumer market or a partner in forums such as the Quad?
Dhruva Jaishankar: My sense is that the opportunity is well understood in the Australian government, but less among investors or the Australian business community writ large, particularly those who had some familiarity with the Indian economy in decades past. On defense, there’s been a rapid expansion of cooperation on maritime domain awareness, military-to-military engagements, and training. Indian aircraft now fly to Darwin, just as Royal Australian Navy vessels more regularly dock at Indian ports. The two countries perform a variety of sensitive tasks together, from submarine rescue and air-to-air refueling to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. The opportunities do now need to be seized in terms of defense industrial cooperation and I believe agreements to accelerate that are in the works between the Australian Department of Defense and Indian Ministry of Defense. Questions of export controls, including those involving the United States, will need to be navigated in some cases.
August 21, 2026
Dhruva Jaishankar, Executive Director, ORF America spoke with Gaurav Sharma of RNZ on why India is widening its Pacific ambitions:
Jaishankar cut through the jargon to explain what a strategic partnership means to New Zealand and India in practice.
"It's a signal of intent to the governments itself, and to the bureaucracies in the two countries, as to how much and how frequently to engage, at what levels, with their counterparts," he said.
"[In essence] the prime ministers have told the foreign ministers and other ministers, and the bureaucrats below them, to meet at regular intervals to achieve certain outcomes."
Such interactions have already begun, with Jaishankar saying that India's external affairs minister meets his New Zealand counterpart, Winston Peters, "quite frequently".