Signalling through implicature: How India signals in the Indo-Pacific
| Published date | 01 February 2025 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481241270422 |
| Author | Raphaëlle Khan,Kate Sullivan de Estrada |
| Date | 01 February 2025 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481241270422
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2025, Vol. 27(1) 43 –68
© The Author(s) 2024
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sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13691481241270422
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
Signalling through implicature:
How India signals in the
Indo-Pacific
Raphaëlle Khan1,2
and Kate Sullivan de Estrada3
Abstract
When signalling in the Indo-Pacific, India must manage several contradictory imperatives. Signals
of resolve that explicitly frame China as a threat or order challenger can raise tensions with this
more powerful neighbour. Yet, given India’s strategic resourcing needs, some indication of resolve
is necessary in order to project ‘like-mindedness’ with strategic partners – especially the United
States – who seek to counter-balance China. Meanwhile, signals of reassurance to the United
States and its allies may read as signals of resolve towards China in and of themselves, and/or lead
to rhetorical entrapment into alliance-like relations that erode India’s strategic autonomy. Since
signalling is both purposeful and socially contingent, these complexities are reflected in India’s
discursive signalling strategy. We argue that India often signals via a mode of indirect speech known
as implicature. When states implicate, they convey meaning beyond what is explicitly said, while
depriving recipients of the rhetorical material to evidence resolve or reassurance. As a signalling
strategy, implicature aims to avoid breaches in India’s distinctive social relationships with China and
the United States. Signalling through implicature thus manifests as a mode of social hedging, intended
to widen the choices of secondary states in the polarised signalling arena of the Indo-Pacific.
Keywords
China, implicature, India, Indo-Pacific, rhetoric, signalling
Introduction
Recent scholarship on India’s approach to the Indo-Pacific identifies China’s growing
power and expanding regional influence as New Delhi’s central strategic challenge. In
these accounts, India faces a core paradox: it must materially balance China even though
material balancing can convey resolve and therefore risks provocation. For Rajagopalan
1City University of New York – City College, New York, NY, USA
2Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, MA, USA
3Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, and
St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Corresponding author:
Raphaëlle Khan, City University of New York – City College, Political Science Department, 160 Convent
Avenue, New York, NY 10031, USA.
Email: rkhan4@ccny.cuny.edu
1270422BPI0010.1177/13691481241270422The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsKhan and Sullivan de Estrada
research-article2024
Special Issue Article
44The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 27(1)
(2020: 93), India’s chief concern is to ‘[prevent] China from dominating the region by
building balancing coalitions, while also persuading Beijing that India is not actually
attempting to balance China’. For Tarapore (2023: 244–245), India lacks ‘the material
capacity or political commitment to undertake more costly internal or external balancing’
and one of India’s central concerns is the risk of ‘triggering a costly or self-defeating
security dilemma’.1 Both authors contend that India has no particularly good options for
avoiding the provocation of China. New Delhi must either resort to dissimulation2 or
employ less threatening – and less effective – balancing measures such as the develop-
ment of ‘regional capacity and resilience’ (Rajagopalan, 2020; Tarapore, 2023: 244, 256).
In this article, we concur in broad terms with Rajagopalan’s and Tarapore’s characteri-
sation of the paradox that India faces in the region when seeking to manage China’s grow-
ing power and influence. However, we shift our theoretical frame away from a materialist
preoccupation with balancing and into the conceptually richer but less examined domain
of signalling, aiming to take seriously the social context of India’s strategic preoccupa-
tions in the Indo-Pacific. Our central argument is that material balancing is of less interest
and significance to India’s relations with China than India’s strategy of signalling simul-
taneously to both China and the United States in such a way as to avoid a breach in social
relations with each of these more powerful states. The end goal of this social strategy is
for India to retain as much autonomy over its material choices as possible. India’s avoid-
ance of social breaches in these two critical relationships therefore constitutes a hedging
behaviour, a behaviour we term social hedging.
Our first point of departure is that material signals of and by themselves mean little
without the social framing that actors attach to them, discursively and otherwise. Social
constructivist approaches to strategic signalling – in particular Goddard’s (2018: 11) cen-
tral observation that signalling is ‘not an objective and given, but an intersubjective and
contingent process’ – drive us to examine how India seeks its preferred strategic out-
comes by discursively attaching meaning (or avoiding attaching explicit meaning, as we
will show) to a range of signals in anticipation of their reception by China.3 We consider
this approach necessary because there are good reasons to doubt assumptions4 that China
always views India’s growing material capabilities either as efforts to balance China
directly, or as uniformly threatening. Material power asymmetry in China’s favour,
already significant, has been increasing between the two countries (Pardesi, 2021). In
2022, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) was more than five times higher than
India’s, despite the latter’s higher growth rate that year ($17.96 tn vs $3.42 tn) (World
Bank, 2024). China has been India’s largest trading partner since 2008, with a trade defi-
cit running in Beijing’s favour, and bilateral trade and investment relations continue to
grow, even following the border confrontation in 2020 (Taneja, 2020: 199, 291; Verma,
2023). But these trends aside, China scholars have argued that Chinese elites have not
generally perceived India’s internal balancing efforts as a threat (Pu, 2017, 2022; Saalman,
2011). Moreover, China has been supportive of some elements of India’s regional and
great power aspirations, since they can ‘reduce the domination of the United States in
what is becoming a multipolar world’ (Pu, 2017: 148). Certainly, as Sino-US relations
have come increasingly under strain, debate in China over India’s external balancing
behaviours has intensified (Li and Tianjiao, 2023). Perceptions among India experts in
China that India remains committed to a ‘tradition of strategic autonomy and non-align-
ment’ have given way, since 2019, to apprehensions that India is ‘willing to act as an
important fulcrum of the US’s “Indo-Pacific strategic arc”’ (Li and Tianjiao, 2023: 122,
126). Yet, opinion in China remains divided, with some predicting that India will not
pivot entirely to the United States, that the Quad will not function as a close alliance, and
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