‘Act East’ finds its firmest foothold
The success of PM Modi’s Indonesia visit will ultimately be measured by how effectively the agreements are translated into tangible outcomes
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi landed at Jakarta’s Halim air base on July 6, 2026, escorted in by Indonesian fighter jets and received personally by President Prabowo Subianto, it launched the first leg of a six-day, three-nation Indo-Pacific tour — Jakarta, then Melbourne, then Auckland. It is Modi’s fourth trip to Indonesia. The trip is loaded with an unusually concrete agenda: missiles, minerals, and a port.
The friendship long predates the deal-making. Indian traders carried Hinduism and Buddhism across the archipelago some two millennia ago — a debt Modi repays in person at Yogyakarta’s Prambanan temple, where the two governments are set to announce joint restoration work. In the twentieth century, Nehru’s India backed Sukarno’s independence struggle against Dutch rule.
What began as anti-colonial solidarity and non-alignment at Bandung in 1955 was recast for economics by the Look East policy of 1991 and its more assertive successor, Act East, in 2014 — with Indonesia, straddling the Strait of Malacca through which roughly three-fifths of India’s seaborne trade passes, cast as that policy’s most consequential Southeast Asian partner. This visit is built to cash that geography in.
On defence, Indonesia — already BrahMos’s second export customer after the Philippines — is said to be finalising a second missile battery worth some $300 million, alongside reported interest in India’s Astra air-to-air missile following its combat debut in Operation Sindoor. Talks also cover an Indonesian liaison officer at India’s maritime-monitoring hub near Delhi and training berths at India’s defence academies.
On critical minerals, India is angling for a foothold in Indonesia’s nickel reserves, the world’s largest, through manufacturing tie-ups in nickel, steel and rare-earth magnets meant to loosen China’s grip on EV supply chains. On connectivity, the two sides are expected to advance joint development of Sabang port, which overlooks the Malacca Strait barely 150 kilometres from India’s own Great Nicobar project, alongside a UPI-QRIS payments link and MoUs on health, space and food security.
Coming days after Modi hosted Japan’s Sanae Takaichi in Delhi, the Jakarta stop reads less like an isolated bilateral call than a node in a deliberate mesh of Indo-Pacific partnerships meant, without anyone saying so outright, to balance China’s expanding navy. That is Act East’s most ambitious iteration yet — trading palm-oil transactionalism for co-production of missiles and minerals. But ambition and delivery aren’t the same thing: the BrahMos battery has taken years to move from “advanced talks” toward signature, the Astra and nickel arrangements remain sourced to unnamed officials rather than paper, and India’s own ambassador had already conceded some outcomes could still slip. That caveat is worth keeping close.
Jakarta gives Act East its most serious hardware test yet. Whether it becomes a proof of concept or another well-photographed handshake will show only once the batteries, the chips and the port machinery actually move.
