It is rarely acknowledged, but regional policy patterns inherited from the British Raj continue to linger on in the contemporary Indian discourse on its neighbourhood. This Raj legacy includes the concept of a regional sphere of influence, the principle that “external” or “extra-regional” powers should not interfere in the subcontinent and the Indian Ocean. It also includes the conviction that Delhi is entitled to ‘special’—if not ‘exclusive’—relationships with its immediate neighbours.
The regional system of the British era traces its origins to the Treaty of Allahabad, signed in August 1765 between the East India Company, Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II, Shuja-ud-Daula (the Nawab of Awadh), and Mir Qasim (the Nawab of Bengal). This treaty followed the East India Company’s decisive victory at the Battle of Buxar in 1764, which established British dominance in eastern India.
The Allahabad Treaty had two key elements. First, it transformed the East India Company from a trading to a territorial entity, embedding the Company Raj into the subcontinent’s state system of the late 18th century. Under the treaty, the Mughal Emperor granted the Diwani rights (the right to collect revenue) in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa to the East India Company. This grant effectively gave the Company control over these regions’ vast resources and administration, establishing the foundation for its future expansion and power consolidation in India.
This treaty not only expanded British influence but also set precedents for future agreements that would shape the subcontinent’s political landscape. It marked the beginning of systematic British control and established a colonial state that would persist for nearly two centuries.
Second, the treaty introduced the concept of a ‘buffer state’ designed to secure the Company rule in Bengal. This latter element became a concrete and expansive feature of British India’s security system and persists, if in a diluted form, in post-colonial India’s regional policy.
For the East India Company, the Allahabad Treaty positioned Awadh as a buffer between Company-controlled Bengal and potential threats—the marauding Afghans in the northwest and the rising Marathas in the west. As the British Raj rapidly expanded, the concept of buffer states and its variants (like protectorates) became fundamental to the subcontinent’s regional security structure. Protectorates maintained less autonomy than buffer states and were neutralised in British India’s favour.
Creating a glacis
Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India at the turn of the 20th century, noted that as the empire expanded, buffer states would become protectorates, and protectorates would eventually be annexed into the empire. The empire was, after all, a dynamic and expanding entity. As it consolidated control over the subcontinent and encountered other empires on its periphery, it established specific arrangements for external boundaries: the Durand Line with Afghanistan (1893), the boundary agreement with Persia on the borders of Baluchistan (1896), and the McMahon Line with Tibet/China (1913).
The Allahabad Treaty… not only expanded British influence but also set precedents for future agreements that would shape the subcontinent’s political landscape. It marked the beginning of systematic British control and established a colonial state that would persist for nearly two centuries
By the turn of the 20th century, a “three-fold frontier” emerged for India, providing the foundation for British paramountcy in the subcontinent. First was the ‘boundary of jurisdiction’, where the Raj exercised full sovereign and administrative control. Second was the ‘boundary of influence’, extending beyond jurisdiction into tribal zones from Baluchistan to Burma. In these areas, the Raj established arrangements with tribal chieftains, who helped protect against external powers in exchange for economic subsidies and internal autonomy. Beyond this lay the ring of protectorates and buffer states friendly to the Raj.
This three-fold frontier created a glacis around India that helped prevent rival European powers from undermining the Raj. The fear that hostile powers might collaborate with disgruntled elements within India has remained a persistent threat to this day. (The “foreign hand” has deep roots in modern India’s territorial construction). In this “Great Game,” the Raj initially focused on the French threat during the Napoleonic era. Attention later shifted to Czarist Russia’s expansion across Eurasia and imperial Germany’s ambitions in the Middle East and South Asia. The Communist Soviet Union, succeeding Czarist Russia in 1917, nurtured similar aspirations—hoping to ignite a revolution against the British Empire in India and Asia.
The paramountcy of the Raj in the subcontinent was complemented by Britain’s naval primacy. The Royal Navy’s 19th-century dominance transformed the Indian Ocean space, once a zone of contestation among European maritime powers, into a British lake. The Indian Army became the primary instrument for stabilising the Indian Ocean littoral—from southern Africa to the Middle East and Far East, extending to Australia. India’s expeditionary operations, beginning in the late 18th century, peaked during the two world wars. The First World War saw nearly 1.2 million Indian soldiers participate, while the Second involved about 2.5 million, making the Indian Army the world’s largest all-volunteer force.
As Britain led 19th-century globalisation as the world’s foremost economic power, India became a critical node in Britain’s imperial integration. Indian capital and labour—the former in search of opportunity and the latter forcibly—moved across the world, creating a lasting global Indian footprint from the Caribbean to Africa and from the Western Indian Ocean to the South Pacific.
It’s often overlooked that the Raj—headquartered first in Calcutta, then in Delhi—wasn’t merely London’s administrative outpost. The colonial Indian government exercised considerable autonomous authority. While part of the British Empire, it wielded vast influence across the Indian Ocean—earning the moniker “Empire of the Raj.” Britain’s global role as a superpower in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the newly unified subcontinent’s massive resources created a powerful regional actor at the crossroads of Asia and the heart of the Indian Ocean.
Lord Curzon described India’s imperial role in 1909: “The central position of India, its magnificent resources, its teeming multitude of men, its great trading harbours, its reserve military strength, supply an army always in a high state of efficiency and capable of being hurled at a moment’s notice upon any point in either Asia or Africa—these are assets of precious value. On the west, India must exercise a predominant influence over the destinies of Persia and Afghanistan; on the north, it can veto rivals in Tibet; on the north-east and east, it can exert great pressure on China, and it is one of the guardians of the autonomous existence of Siam. On the high seas, it commands the routes to Australia and to the China Seas.”
Effects of the end of the empire
Maintaining this ‘India Centre’ structure grew increasingly difficult in the 20th century. Britain’s economy weakened against American and German competition and was severely strained by two World Wars. Within India, the rising tide of nationalism challenged the Raj. While mainstream nationalists supported the Raj in the First World War, the Indian National Congress opposed war mobilisation in the Second.
The final blow to the Raj came not from Europe but from Japan. This ascending Asian power swiftly displaced British control in Southeast Asia and advanced to eastern India through Burma. Though Britain regained control with substantial American support, the imperial will had faded at home. The Labour Party-led British government hastily withdrew from India, failed to manage mounting communal tensions in the subcontinent, partitioned it along religious lines, and shattered the nearly 200-year project of building a united India under colonial rule.
The divided post-colonial subcontinent continues to struggle with finding peace on its new internal borders and managing the multiple consequences of the Partition—from protecting the rights of minorities to sharing the river waters of the Indus, Ganges, and the Brahmaputra. It faces unresolved disputes on the internal and external boundaries of South Asia. The territories between the British Raj’s boundary of jurisdiction and the boundary of influence, now formally part of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, have yet to be fully integrated into the three nations. Once the glacis built by the Raj broke down, there was no stopping great powers like the US, Russia and China from intervening in the subcontinent, notwithstanding India’s objections.
That the division of India coincided with the unification of China under communist rule has had a profound geopolitical effect on the subcontinent. Communist China’s entry into and control of Tibet since 1950 brought a formidable power to India’s northern and eastern frontiers. As smaller countries—former Raj protectorates—awakened to their national identities and new geopolitical realities, they became less inclined to defer to India and more adept at playing other powers to expand their autonomy in relation to India. Post-colonial India’s ideological tensions with the west and inward-looking economic policies further diminished its regional salience in the second half of the 20th century.
The divided post-colonial subcontinent continues to struggle with finding peace on its new internal borders and managing the multiple consequences of the Partition
Nevertheless, the Raj’s ideas of regional primacy persist in India’s strategic thinking, even as the gap between strategic ambitions and available resources and the new regional context widened. The economic reform era that began in the 1990s brought some revival, as faster growth enabled India to reclaim a larger regional role. However, China’s 21st-century rise—reminiscent of Japan’s ascent in the 1930s—has made India’s regional challenges increasingly daunting.
Although success seems elusive, Delhi is unlikely to give up the idea of regional primacy any time soon. It needs to match that enduring ambition with a resolute search for peace and reconciliation with Pakistan and Bangladesh that will transcend the bitter legacies of Partition. It also requires a new framework for mutually beneficial and less imposing relationships with its smaller neighbours. Delhi must also undergird this effort with a strategy of regional economic integration and institution building. For India’s pessimists, this is a bridge too far. The optimists in Delhi, in contrast, are at least willing to try. It is too early to say the optimists will succeed, but it may be premature to say they are doomed to fail.
