At the heart of New Delhi's strategic calendar on Wednesday, October 14, 2026, Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh took the stage at the inaugural session of the ASEAN–India Defence Think Tank Forum — the first dedicated multilateral platform bringing together defence researchers from India and across Southeast Asia under one roof. The venue was the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis (MP-IDSA), New Delhi's premier strategic-studies institution.

A forum born from three decades of Act East momentum

The event does not arrive in a vacuum. India has been systematically deepening its institutional ties with ASEAN — the ten-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations — since elevating the relationship to a Strategic Partnership in 2012. Defence and maritime security have long formed a load-bearing pillar of that partnership, but dialogue on the security-studies and think-tank level has historically lagged behind the political summitry.

That gap is precisely what this forum is designed to close. By convening defence analysts, scholars, and strategic thinkers from ASEAN member states alongside their Indian counterparts at MP-IDSA, the platform institutionalises the kind of second-track intellectual exchange that governments increasingly use to test ideas before they become policy.

MP-IDSA: the venue is itself a message

Choosing MP-IDSA — renamed in 2018 to honour the late Manohar Parrikar, who served as Defence Minister — carries symbolic weight. The institute, previously known as IDSA, has for decades been India's flagship address for defence and strategic-studies research. Hosting the inaugural session here signals that India intends this forum to be a serious, research-grounded engagement, not a ceremonial meet-and-greet.

Where this sits in India's broader security architecture

The forum is a textbook expression of India's Act East Policy, the strategic doctrine that successive governments have used to deepen institutionalised engagement with Southeast and East Asia. Shared concerns over regional stability — particularly maritime security in the Indo-Pacific — give this inaugural session real strategic urgency beyond diplomatic optics.

The forum also dovetails with existing multilateral mechanisms such as the ASEAN Defence Ministers' Meeting Plus (ADMM-Plus) process, potentially feeding research outputs upstream into official deliberations. Whether joint statements, research collaborations, or a calendar of follow-up sessions emerge from this inaugural edition will determine whether the platform becomes a durable fixture in the India–ASEAN security calendar.

For Rajnath Singh, addressing the opening session places India's most senior defence voice directly in front of the region's strategic community — a pointed reminder that New Delhi sees Southeast Asia not as a peripheral interest but as a front-row seat in its long-term security thinking.