Since 2014, India's approach to China has featured a combination of contradictory policies. On the one hand, India has acted to strengthen its military presence along its borders with China. On the other hand, India has continued to expand its economic partnerships with China. India's Response to China's assertion of regional dominance is explained by the Balance of Power Theory. However, this theory does not explain the apparent contradictions in India's Response. This paper attempts to explain these contradictions by taking a look inside the state to assess how the Foreign Policy Executives (FPEs) of India has prioritized contradictory pressures from outside the state. The FPE consists of the Prime Minister, the Minister for External Affairs, the National Security Advisor, the Defense Minister, and the Ministers for Finance and Commerce.
Using a neoclassical realist framework, the paper treats leaders' threat perception and strategic beliefs as the intervening variable between systemic pressure and policy output. Rather than considering the state as a unitary actor, this paper asks how the relative influence and worldview of individual FPE actors has shaped India's simultaneous competition and cooperation toward China between 2014 and 2024. It pays particular attention to moments of divergence within the executive, such as differing threat assessments across the security and economic bureaucracies following the 2020 Galwan crisis, to show how intra-executive bargaining, not just external pressure, produces policy outcome.
The argument draws on five months of fieldwork in India, including elite interviews with current and former officials, think tank analysts, and foreign affairs journalists, triangulated with official speeches, parliamentary debates, policy documents, and memoirs. The paper contributes to India-China scholarship by bringing decision-makers back into an analysis long dominated by structural variables, and to neoclassical realism by offering a multi-actor account of intervening variables in a case where economic and security logics pull policymakers in different directions. It closes with implications for how India's leadership is likely to navigate strategic competition and economic entanglement with China going forward.
