I ndia’s exit from the Ayni airbase in Tajikistan has sparked significant introspection and debate in recent weeks, with the focus being the lessons India needs to learn from this adverse development. Hence, the withdrawal can have an outsized influence on Indian foreign policy. However, the present discourse suffers a critical drawback — it falls for the myth that Ayni was ever an Indian airbase. The truth, however, is that Ayni has never been an Indian base — a fact better known to foreign regional experts and governments than Indians.

India’s operational hold over the airbase never matured toward a ‘strategic’ force in being — owing to Dushanbe and Moscow’s strategic calculations as well as the lack of substantive depth in Delhi-Dushanbe ties. In this light, the right lessons from the

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