India–Australia ties come of age
Modi’s third visit to Australia, shows a relationship that has moved past symbolism into the business of contracts and commitments
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi touched down in Melbourne on Wednesday evening, fresh from a warm reception in Jakarta and Yogyakarta, he was on an important leg of a three-nation Indo-Pacific tour. This is his third visit to Australia as Prime Minister — a frequency no Indian premier has matched — and it says something about how central Canberra has become to New Delhi’s calculus east of Singapore, defined by ‘Act East’ policy.
At the third Australia-India Annual Summit, Modi and his host Anthony Albanese oversaw what officials describe as eighteen distinct outcomes: a Joint Declaration on Defence and Security Cooperation that upgrades the relationship with an Annual Defence Ministers’ Dialogue, a new maritime security roadmap, and — most striking — a commercial uranium supply agreement building on the 2014 Civil Nuclear Agreement, under which Australia has so far shipped uranium to India just once, in 2017, to feed India’s ambitious 100-gigawatt nuclear power goal.
Talks on the long-pending Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement were formally accelerated, building on the 2022 Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement that was India’s first developed-country trade deal in a decade. Education, critical minerals, and cultural repatriation rounded out a genuinely wide canvas.
Trade negotiators have set a target of AUD 100 billion in two-way commerce by 2030, roughly double current levels, and Thursday’s acceleration announcement gives that number a fighting chance. For decades, India and Australia were bound loosely by cricket and Commonwealth ties rather than strategic convergence; the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, now six years old, has since matured from rhetoric into structure. A 2021 logistics agreement already lets warships use each other’s ports, and the new defence declaration reads less like an aspiration than a maintenance upgrade on an alliance-adjacent partnership.
But it was not smooth sailing for the Indian Prime Minister. Rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, used the visit to press Canberra to raise India’s democratic backsliding, a criticism that has trailed Modi’s Australian visits since 2023. It was indeed a low point of the visit but was not allowed to overshadow the visit.
Where does this leave the two countries? Well, the trajectory is unmistakably upward, but increasingly instrumental rather than sentimental. Both governments now speak the language of supply-chain security, critical minerals, and an “open, rules-based” Indo-Pacific. The Quad remains the scaffolding; bilateral deals are increasingly the substance built upon it. If the Jakarta leg was about breadth — reviving an old civilisational friendship into hard defence contracts like BrahMos — the Australia leg was about depth, converting decades of trade and strategic dialogue into binding commitments. The test now is delivery: whether CECA is actually concluded, whether uranium shipments follow the ink, and whether the partnership can absorb criticism without either side flinching.
