Chandigarh: Yet again, India revived discussions earlier this week over the long-delayed transfer of the BrahMos cruise missile system to Vietnam, reopening a strategic conversation that has resurfaced repeatedly over the past 12 years, only to lapse each time into familiar ambiguity and hesitation.On Wednesday, P. Kumaran, secretary (east) in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), announced that talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and visiting Vietnamese President To Lam in New Delhi, included discussions on the sale and maintenance of assorted military platforms for Hanoi, including the BrahMos missile. In cryptic remarks carried in social media video clips, he was quoted as enigmatically declaring “watch this space” regarding the potential export of BrahMos to Vietnam but declined to elaborate further.But variations of Kumaran’s formulation – ranging from tentative hints of a BrahMos missile sale to Vietnam to a stream of carefully worded official statements – have echoed through briefings since 2014, steadily losing salience with each repetition. For many strategic observers in Delhi, these recurring references now symbolise a familiar cycle in the BrahMos outreach to Vietnam: periodic signalling, intermittent hints of progress, and prolonged strategic hesitation, with little tangible movement on the ground.The irony is difficult to ignore. India’s “Act East” policy – articulated in 2014 under the newly elected BJP government, which projected a more muscular and robust approach to national security – was intended to accelerate deeper strategic and defence engagement with Southeast Asia through expanded military cooperation. Even so, initiatives such as the proposed BrahMos transfer to Vietnam have remained in limbo ever since.Within months of assuming power, Modi formally recast India’s earlier “Look East” policy into a more assertive “Act East” framework during the 12th ASEAN-India Summit and the 9th East Asia Summit, held on consecutive days in Myanmar in late 2014. This marked a clear departure from the approach pursued by previous Congress-led administrations, signalling a proactive shift from passive diplomatic engagement with Southeast and East Asian countries, towards deeper strategic, economic, and military involvement across the region. Also read: India Upgrades Vietnam Ties Amid Hanoi’s Diplomatic Push Across AsiaAlongside, Modi also linked this to an ambitiously complementary “Think West” or “Link West” policy towards the Gulf and West Asia, aimed at strengthening India’s strategic and economic footprint across both flanks of the Indian Ocean and Indo-Pacific Region.Together, this dual approach was projected by the MEA, security officials, and a largely obliging media as evidence of the BJP’s intent to fashion a more confident and geopolitically assertive India – one willing to shape its regional environment rather than merely respond to it.Within that framework, Vietnam emerged as one of India’s most strategically important Southeast Asian partners. Hanoi’s enduring tensions with China in the South China Sea, coupled with its longstanding political, diplomatic and military ties with India and its reliance on Soviet/Russian-origin materiel, made it a natural fit for deeper defence cooperation. This included Delhi extending cooperation for the maintenance, repair and upgradation of Vietnam’s Russian-origin Su-30 multi-role combat aircraft and Soviet-era Kilo-class diesel-electric submarines – platforms also operated by India – along with other Moscow-origin equipment, something that was highlighted in Wednesday’s discussions. However, despite the expansive rhetoric surrounding Delhi’s “Act East” initiative, prolonged delays in the transfer of the BrahMos missile to Vietnam have increasingly come to reflect India’s broader strategic restraint in managing ties with China. Senior military analysts argue that this hesitation points to a deeper “institutional risk aversion” within India’s strategic establishment, particularly when policy choices risk overtly escalating friction with Beijing. This, they add, is also evident in Delhi’s measured approach to providing advanced weapon systems to regional partners amid enduring tensions with China.One two-star Indian Army veteran noted that despite successive confrontations with Beijing in recent years – from the 2017 Doklam standoff in the northeast to the 2020 Galwan Valley clash in eastern Ladakh, followed by the prolonged military stand-off along the disputed Line of Actual Control (LAC) that lasted over four years, until late 2024 – India has consistently stopped short of employing one of the few meaningful strategic levers available to it: materially strengthening China’s regional adversaries through sophisticated arms transfers and defence partnerships.“Close to nothing has moved in this direction, despite years of discussions,” the officer said, requesting anonymity. Delhi still appears reluctant to provoke Beijing by transferring BrahMos to Vietnam, he added, even though China has shown no such restraint in its military support to Pakistan.For decades, Beijing has supplied Pakistan with missiles, combat aircraft, naval platforms, and even nuclear weapons-related know-how, as part of its broader regional strategy aimed, in part, at constraining India on its western flank. Consequently, many Indian military planners have long argued that a BrahMos-armed Vietnam could serve as a corresponding eastern counterweight to China, particularly given Hanoi’s territorial disputes with Beijing and its recurring maritime confrontations with the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) in the South China Sea.Besides, Vietnam’s longstanding reputation for military resilience – forged through decades of conflict against far larger powers, including France, the US and China – had further reinforced such thinking within Indian strategic circles. This reputation was further bolstered not only during the three-week-long Sino-Vietnamese War – launched by Beijing in 1979 to “teach Vietnam a lesson” following Hanoi’s invasion of Cambodia – but also through the prolonged border clashes and military confrontations with China that continued well into the late 1980s, before relations gradually normalised in the following decade.“From this perspective,” said the aforementioned army officer, “supplying the BrahMos missile and possibly the indigenously developed Akashteer automated air defence control and reporting system to Vietnam, would not just constitute a much-desired defence export transaction. More significantly, it would represent a calculated strategic assertion that India too was willing to use regional partnerships to impose strategic costs on China in its own neighbourhood,” he declared.Other veterans from the Indian Navy (IN) and Indian Air Force concurred, noting that Hanoi has long been a particularly significant prospective customer for BrahMos, given its doctrine of coastal denial and anti-access warfare against China. “The missile’s supersonic speed and anti-ship capability make it especially well-suited to these roles,” said a retired three-star IN officer who, during his service, closely monitored PLAN activity in the Indian Ocean Region. Hence, supplying BrahMos batteries to Vietnam would potentially reinforce the regional balance of deterrence in the Indo-Pacific maritime theatre vis-à-vis China, he added, declining to be identified.India’s discussions with Vietnam on the possible export of the BrahMos missile system date back to 2014, coinciding with Modi’s assumption of office. Thereafter, then Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar held extensive consultations with Hanoi over the next two years on the possible supply of an undisclosed number of BrahMos batteries to Vietnam, alongside training arrangements and the potential deployment of Indian technical personnel to support their induction.At the time, Indian security officials privately indicated that procedural issues with Moscow – including export clearances and intellectual property-related approvals stemming from the BrahMos missile’s status as a joint Indo-Russian system derived from the 3M55 Oniks/Yakhont family – had largely been resolved. BrahMos production facilities in Hyderabad were also expected to expand to meet anticipated export demand, not only from Vietnam but from other Southeast Asian countries as well, most notably the Philippines, which eventually proceeded with missile systems acquisition.In January 2022, Manila signed a $375 million agreement with BrahMos Aerospace for three shore-based anti-ship missile batteries, becoming the system’s first and, to date, only foreign customer. The contract included training, logistics, and maintenance support and was aimed at strengthening Philippine coastal deterrence capabilities amid escalating tensions with China in the South China Sea.Industry officials in Delhi said the Philippines has begun inducting the BrahMos missile into operational service, with the first battery handed over in April 2024 and additional consignments still continuing thereafter. In this context, they said, the prospective supply of the BrahMos missile to Vietnam remains tentative, shaped by political restraint within Delhi’s policy establishment.Such disinclination to proceed with the BrahMos missile transfer to Vietnam, despite years of talk, negotiations and repeated official signalling , has been further underlined by increasingly explicit Chinese messaging.In 2018, China’s state-controlled media openly cautioned India against strengthening military ties with Vietnam in ways that could “disturb” regional stability. Though diplomatically phrased, the message was unambiguous: Beijing viewed any BrahMos missile deployment to Vietnam as a direct strategic challenge, potentially inviting wider Chinese retaliation – whether along the LoAC, through economic or diplomatic coercion, or via deeper military cooperation with Pakistan, individually or in combination.Meanwhile, Wednesday’s India-Vietnam leaders discussions elevated bilateral ties to an “Enhanced Comprehensive Strategic Partnership”, with Delhi confirming that military projects worth $300 million had already been identified under an earlier $500 million defence line of credit extended to Hanoi in 2016. These include the procurement of 14 patrol boats, naval platforms and equipment upgrades, and submarine batteries.The two sides further discussed expanding military training, maritime cooperation, port calls, joint UN peacekeeping deployments, cybersecurity coordination, counterterrorism cooperation, intelligence-sharing, and a proposed 2+2 ministerial dialogue involving Indian and Vietnamese foreign and defence ministers. Agreements on sharing white shipping information – covering the identity and movement of commercial, non-military merchant vessels – along with cooperation on tackling transnational crime, online scams, and money laundering were also included as part of the expanding security partnership.Collectively, the widening strategic agenda reflects the steadily growing importance of the India–Vietnam relationship within the broader Indo-Pacific theatre. Nevertheless, the BrahMos missile issue continues to hover at the centre of this partnership – both as its most widely discussed possibility and its most visible unresolved question, repeatedly signalled but never resolved.