India, explained.
India’s private sector – such as Skyroot Aerospace, which completed the country’s first private orbital launch last month – is poised to extend space diplomacy rather than replace it (R. Satish Babu/AFP via Getty Images)
India has spent a decade turning satellites into goodwill – a strategy that costs little and asks for even less.
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India’s quiet space diplomacyIndia’s quiet space diplomacy
When India signed (Opens in new window) a space cooperation agreement with Seychelles in late June 2026, it barely registered outside diplomatic circles. Announced during a meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Patrick Herminie in the Seychellois capital Victoria, the pact covers ocean observation, marine science, and coastal management. On its own, it looks like a routine technical arrangement. Seen alongside a decade of similar moves, though, it reveals one of the quietest transformations in India’s foreign policy. Space has become one of India’s most durable instruments of diplomacy.
The template for this was set in May 2017, when India launched the South Asia Satellite (Opens in new window), a geosynchronous communications satellite offering tele-medicine, tele-education, disaster management and broadcasting services across the region. Modi had proposed the project three years earlier, describing it as India’s “gift” to its neighbours, invoking the concept of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world as one family). Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Afghanistan signed on, but Pakistan opted out (Opens in new window), rejecting the project as an Indian gift rather than a joint initiative from the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).
In January 2019, India announced plans for five ground stations across Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives (Opens in new window), part of a wider push to counter China’s regional influence. In the years since, India has built a ground station in Bhutan (Opens in new window), pursued similar facilities in Fiji (Opens in new window) and Vietnam (Opens in new window), deepened space cooperation with Australia, Japan, and the United States (Opens in new window), and launched a formal Space Dialogue with the European Union (Opens in new window) in November 2025. By early 2024, New Delhi had signed space cooperation agreements with 61 countries and five multilateral organisations (Opens in new window).
Seychelles is simply the latest addition to a list that keeps growing, each broadly following the same template of satellite-based services offered on generous terms.
An Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) rocket carrying the CMS-03 communication satellite blasts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, an island off the coast of Andhra Pradesh state, on 2 November 2025 (R. Satish Babu/AFP via Getty Images)
Seen against India’s wider diplomatic toolkit of the past decade, this list looks less like a series of disconnected bilateral deals and more like one strand of a much larger project. Since 2014, New Delhi has built an entire soft power portfolio around modest, practical initiatives presented as goodwill rather than strategy. Yoga diplomacy secured an International Day of Yoga at the United Nations (Opens in new window). Buddhist heritage has been used to court partners across Southeast and East Asia. Diaspora engagement has become a formal channel of outreach, most visibly through Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Opens in new window) (Overseas Indian Day) events. What ties these efforts together isn’t the substance on offer but the tone. India presents itself as sharing what it already has, not extracting favours or striking bargains. This is soft power in service of statecraft, not sentiment.
Few other instruments fit this diplomatic style as naturally. Yoga and Buddhism rely on cultural or spiritual affinity, which not every partner shares. Diaspora diplomacy depends on where Indians have settled. Satellites carry no such constraints. They can be offered to any country, regardless of history or culture, on the same practical grounds of connectivity, disaster management or resource mapping. That portability may explain why this particular instrument has proved so easy to extend outward, from South Asia to Southeast Asia and now to the Indian Ocean island states.
There are limits to how far this can be pushed. India cannot compel a partner country to build the ground stations or train the technicians a satellite agreement requires, which means it is effectively acting on faith, delivering its side up front with no lever to ensure follow-through. Soft power of this kind tends to accumulate slowly and diffusely, in goodwill rather than leverage, and it is hard to point to a single agreement and say precisely what it bought.
India’s approach earns less strategic leverage in the short term, but it also earns far less local backlash than China’s infrastructure diplomacy.
At the same time, this approach is an advantage over China’s. Its Belt and Road infrastructure financing in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific has drawn exactly the resentment India’s space diplomacy avoids, because debt invites scrutiny in a way a tele-medicine link or a cyclone-tracking feed does not. India’s approach earns less strategic leverage in the short term, but it also earns far less local backlash, which is not nothing in a region where several governments are already wary of being caught between rival great powers.
Even so, the pattern is unmistakable. India has courted the Pacific Islands (Opens in new window) since 2015 and pursued a satellite monitoring station in Fiji, in a region where several states have voiced unease about Chinese fishing fleets and port ambitions (Opens in new window). As New Delhi looks to deepen those ties, satellite cooperation is a natural next step, offering exactly the kind of maritime monitoring and disaster forecasting Pacific states have asked for. If India wants this tool to do more than accumulate goodwill, it could tie it more explicitly to the region’s own priorities, such as fisheries surveillance under the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent (Opens in new window). That would cost India little.
India’s technical base for this diplomacy is expanding too. In July 2026, Skyroot Aerospace completed the country’s first private orbital launch (Opens in new window), a genuine milestone that still depended on state-run facilities and support, suggesting a private sector poised to extend India’s space diplomacy rather than replace it. Either way, if the first decade of India’s space diplomacy demonstrated its technological reach, the next could demonstrate its strategic intent.
About the author
Arijit Mazumdar
Arijit Mazumdar (Opens in new window) is Professor of Political Science and Director of the International Studies Program at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, United States.
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