Beyond the Middle East: India’s Continental Connectivity to Central Asia

The partition severed a continent from the Indian perspective. Every direct land route India could have used to reach Central Asia in historic arteries through Peshawar, Kandahar, and Khyber fell on the hostile side of the frontier. For years after independence, India’s Central Asia policy has rested more on a wish than a plan. There is indirect hope that Pakistan would permit transit or that Afghanistan stabilises enough as a worthy substitute. 

Illustration by The Geostrata

Neither has happened, and the post-Sindoor period has made the wager look even worse. Renewed volatility along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in tandem with the resurgence of militant networks operating across that frontier and Islamabad's continued refusal to grant India transit rights under SAFTA-linked frameworks is confirmation of the continued rigidity of the problem. 

Central Asia sits atop uranium, rare earths, and hydrocarbons that India's energy and technology ambitions seek is a region where five republics are trying to keep it from falling entirely into Chinese or Russian orbit.

ISLAMABAD CAN PROBABLY NEVER BE THE PLAN

Three decades of Indian diplomacy have tested every plausible incentive to open Pakistani transit via trade liberalisation offers, track-two dialogue, multilateral pressure through SAARC, and each one has foundered on the same strategic logic in Rawalpindi: transit access is leverage, and leverage is not surrendered without extracting a resolution on Kashmir.

Kashmir is and always will be a red line for India, to consider cooperation a possibility from Islamabad otherwise, especially after the hardline stance drawn by the current government after Operation Sindoor, is not an ideal strategy when it comes to Central Asia. 

Even in periods of relative calm, Pakistan has restricted India-Afghanistan trade to one-way flows through the Wagah-Attari crossing, denying reciprocal transit. Layered atop this hostility is a security environment that has deteriorated even more over the years as cross-border militancy has intensified, and Kabul-Islamabad relations have themselves grown adversarial, undercutting the theory that Taliban-era Afghanistan would at least serve as a stable pass-through. A corridor requires willingness and safety. India currently gets neither because of Pakistan.

THE ROADBLOCK IN TEHRAN

Chabahar was conceived as the answer to this problem as a deep-water Iranian port bypassing Pakistan, linking India by sea to Afghanistan and to Central Asia. 

For a decade, it delivered real, if modest, results: India's Shahid Beheshti terminal operation moved humanitarian wheat and pulses into Afghanistan and anchored India's western node on the International North-South Transport Corridor. But 2025-26 has turned Chabahar into the strongest argument for diversification.

Washington's revocation in September 2025 of the sanctions exemption and the subsequent expiry of a conditional waiver in April 2026, along with a full-scale US-Israel-Iran war, have forced New Delhi towards reportedly transfer its stake in the Chabahar Free Zone entity to an Iranian partner, with a return contingent on sanctions relief. India's 2026 budget allocated zero rupees to the project for the first time in nearly a decade.

Chabahar was not a mistake. It is that even India's best-diversified alternative turned out to be a single point of failure with its own constraints, as it was always hostage to a great-power sanctions regime and a regional war that India did not start.

THE INSTC ANCHOR

The International North-South Transport Corridor, which has been linking Indian ports to Iran, the Caspian, Central Asia, and Russia, has always been marketed as a faster route to Europe than the Suez Canal. 

That understates its value to India. INSTC's real significance is continental and not merely commercial, as it is the only multimodal architecture that gives India sea-to-rail access into Eurasia without touching Pakistani or Afghan soil. 

Its problems are well known, as customs harmonisation across Iran, Azerbaijan, and Russia remains incomplete, along with insurance and financing for Iran-linked legs being constrained by sanctions exposure, and container throughput being a fraction of what the corridor could theoretically carry. However, these are implementation problems and are solvable with investment and customs protocols.

India should stop treating INSTC as a shortcut and start treating it as the primary spine for its Eurasian access and as the corridor to be protected and expanded regardless of Chabahar's fate, since INSTC has rail and river alternatives that do not depend solely on the Iranian leg. 

UNDEREXPLORED TIES WITH ASTANA

Central Asia policy discussions have for too long reduced Kazakhstan to a waypoint. Kazakhstan is the region's largest economy and its principal uranium exporter, crucial for India's civil nuclear programme, along with being an emerging source of the rare earth and critical minerals India will need for its energy transition and modern manufacturing. 

Deepening defence cooperation along with digital connectivity and logistics partnerships with Astana gives India a substantial stake in the region's politics, not just a route through its territory. A relationship with Kazakhstan survives even if a given corridor doesn't, because it is built on mutual economic interest rather than transit alone. 

THE MIDDLE CORRIDOR

The Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, or the "Middle Corridor," running through the South Caucasus and Turkey, has gained momentum as Russia's war in Ukraine has pushed European and Central Asian traffic to look beyond Russian territory. 

For India, the Middle Corridor is not a rival to the INSTC; it is a second leg of the same bandwidth, offering an alternative that runs through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Türkiye. Indian integration here would require active diplomacy with Baku, Tbilisi, and Ankara.

These are relationships India has historically underinvested in relative to their emerging logistical weight. However, with India’s deteriorating ties with Ankara and growing ties with Armenia, it is unlikely to view the Middle Corridor as an alternative New Delhi can or even should invest in the near future. 

EXPLORING THE CHESSBOARD

The BRI gives Beijing the kind of redundancy in Central Asia that India needs today because it covers land, sea, and rail networks, which prevents China from being vulnerable to global shocks in the same manner as India is when events like the closure of Hormuz happen.

Due to the lack of diversification, India faces a far worse impact of this than Beijing.

This article argues India needs rail, road, energy pipelines, and the Gwadar port, sitting barely 170 kilometres from Chabahar. 

Russia has its own reasons to want INSTC functioning because sanctions have pushed Moscow toward southbound trade routes that bypass the West. Gulf states such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia, above all, have been pouring capital into ports and logistics to hedge against their own oil-dependent futures, which is why India's Gulf partnerships deserve to be treated as connectivity infrastructure and not energy transactions.

Central Asian Republics themselves have a vested interest in moving away from trade dependence on Russia. However, it is unlikely they would trade it away for dependency again, this time on China. India must capitalise on the opportunity available here to cater to the interests of the Central Asian countries in avoiding dependency while gaining access to raw materials and trade routes compatible with core Indian interests. 

IS IMEC AND OMAN THE FUTURE FOR INDIAN TRADE?

IMEC's eastern maritime leg was designed to route through the Strait of Hormuz, a known chokepoint that the 2026 US-Israel-Iran war closed or threatened to close for extended periods, exposing a routing decision that in hindsight looks less like careful design and more like an unexamined assumption. 

Oman's Duqm port, which sits on the Arabian Sea and would bypass Hormuz entirely, was conspicuously left off the original IMEC signatory list. An omission that reflected the depth of UAE-India commercial ties. IMEC also has no permanent secretariat, no unified tariff structure, and as of mid-2026, no firm construction timeline; Gaza-linked strain on Israeli normalisation and Haifa port's limited capacity compound this uncertainty.

None of this means IMEC is worthless. It means India should treat it, and Gulf logistics investment generally, as one probabilistic bet among several rather than a Western anchor, and it strengthens, rather than weakens, the case for building INSTC, Chabahar-adjacent alternatives subsequently. 

The strategic error India cannot afford to repeat is treating any single route, Pakistani, Iranian, or Gulf, as their corridor. Chabahar's near-collapse under sanctions and war is not an argument against connectivity. It is proof that resilience commands redundancy, not from picking the correct single bet.

India's future in Eurasia will be built the way durable networks always are: not around the shortest path, but around the largest number of paths that can each fail individually without the whole system failing.

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BY KRISH PRAHALADKA

TEAM GEOSTRATA

info@thegeostrata.com