New Delhi, July 12 (IANS) Picture the scene. Perth, January 2008. India’s special envoy has come seeking uranium for a power-starved nation of a billion people, from the country that sits atop the largest uranium reserves on earth. The answer is a flat no. Sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty first, India is told, or go home. India goes home.
Now cut to Melbourne, July 2026. The Prime Minister of Australia stands beside the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, and announces that Australian uranium will fuel Indian reactors. No sermons this time. No demand for a signature, India has honourably declined for decades. Only the respect due to a responsible nuclear power. The same door that was shut on India’s envoy is now held open for India’s leader. Between those two frames lies the story of PM Modi’s journey through Jakarta, Melbourne and Auckland. It is not a story of travel. It is a story of doors bolted against India for decades, now opening one after another.
The fuel they refused us
The uranium history deserves to be told fully, because memory is the first casualty of political convenience. In 2006, even as Washington embraced civil nuclear commerce with India, Canberra refused to follow. In 2008, Canberra reversed even its own earlier in-principle willingness. Through the entire UPA decade, the position was held. Delhi pleaded. Canberra declined. Australia, remarkably, kept discussing uranium sales to China while denying them to democratic India.
When UPA left office, not one gram of Australian uranium had a legal pathway to India. Within barely a hundred days of taking office, PM Modi signed the long-pending Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement in September 2014. This week in Melbourne, the final administrative lock was broken, and supply stands operationalised, fuelling India’s march to one hundred gigawatts of nuclear power.
Understand what changed. Not India’s stance on a treaty we rightly declined. The world’s estimation of India changed, and the rules followed.
The defence arsenal finds its market
If Melbourne rewrote what India may buy, Jakarta rewrote what India now sells. For seventy years, our defence story was a buyer’s story, written in queues outside foreign capitals. In Jakarta, the queue reversed.
India and Indonesia signed agreements for the supply of BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles, making Indonesia the third nation after the Philippines and Vietnam to stake its security on Indian steel, alongside a pact for Astra air-to-air missile systems. BrahMos carries the credibility of combat, proven in Operation Sindoor. And note the timing, for history rarely offers cleaner symbolism. Southeast Asia’s largest economy surveyed a hardening neighbourhood and chose the Indian shield. That is not a transaction. That is a verdict.
Geography as strategy
The map agreed in Jakarta matters even more than the missiles. India will partner in developing Sabang Port at the mouth of the Malacca Strait, barely 160 kilometres from India’s upcoming Great Nicobar transshipment hub. Two ports, two flags, one gateway commanding nearly a third of the world’s trade. Cooperation deepens in critical minerals, with the nation holding nearly 60 per cent of the world’s nickel.
President Prabowo conferred upon PM Modi the Bintang Adipurna, Indonesia’s highest civilian and military honour. Then the Prime Minister travelled to Yogyakarta, to the thousand-year-old spires of Prambanan, where India will support the restoration of one of the great Hindu temples on this earth. Missiles for the present. Ports for the future. Temples for eternity. Only one statesman could have negotiated on all three registers in a single visit.
Trade at the speed of trust
The pattern runs through commerce too. The results are now arithmetic, not argument. Since the trade agreement of 2022, bilateral trade with Australia is up 55 per cent, and both Prime Ministers have ordered the full Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement concluded at the earliest. AustralianSuper announced an investment of half a billion Australian dollars in India even as PM Modi beckoned Australia’s four trillion-dollar pension pool towards Indian infrastructure. Money is the most honest editorial page in the world. It has endorsed India.
Forty years ended in a morning
New Zealand tells the same story at a higher velocity. No Indian Prime Minister had visited in four decades. Trade talks had meandered without result since the UPA years. This government concluded a full Free Trade Agreement with a swiftness PM Modi called perhaps a global first. In Auckland, welcomed with the traditional Maori Powhiri, he crowned it with a new Strategic Partnership and a Roadmap to 2030 spanning maritime security, counter terrorism and cyber defence, a trade target of seven billion New Zealand dollars, and a mutual logistics pact between the Indian Navy and the New Zealand Defence Force.
An Indian warship may now provision in Auckland. Let that sentence settle. The Indian Navy’s writ of friendship runs from the Gulf of Aden to the South Pacific.
One design, many doors
Set the outcomes side by side, and the design declares itself. Uranium refused for two decades now flows. Missiles India once imported are now exported. Trade pacts that gathered dust for years are concluded at a record pace. A nation once lectured about treaties is decorated with the highest honours of the very capitals that once said no.
None of this is an accident. None of it is atmospherics. It is the compound interest of 12 years of credibility, banked patiently and now drawn upon across half the planet. Nations do not decorate supplicants. They decorate those whose respect they seek. When the Prime Minister of Australia stands beside PM Modi before the largest gathering of Indian Australians ever assembled at Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium, he is not extending courtesy. He is acknowledging gravity.
A closing thought
Centuries ago, the ships of Kalinga and the Cholas crossed these very waters carrying trade, faith and civilisation eastward. The stones of Prambanan still bear their signature. This week, the Indian Prime Minister retraced that ancient route, not with fleets of conquest but with instruments of partnership, and found every harbour open.
Doors do not open themselves. Someone must arrive with the standing to knock, the patience to persist, and the strength to be welcomed. For decades, the world kept India waiting on the threshold. PM Modi ended the wait. India no longer knocks on the world’s doors. The world now holds them open.
(The author is a Senior Advocate practising in the Supreme Court of India)
–IANS
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