India's Response to China's Geoeconomic Rise: Hedging With a Multipronged Engagement

China's geoeconomic assertiveness through the Belt and Road Initiative and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has a significant impact on countries in various parts of the world, and India is one of the major countries that have received complicated influences from such assertiveness. This article aims to examine India's strategic response to China's increasing geoeconomic presence in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region. It argues that India has adopted policy options of confrontation and practical cooperation through risk management amid China's growing geoeconomic presence, and has pursued a multi‐pronged engagement, aimed at not taking sides between the United States and China and securing ‘strategic autonomy’. These policy options contributed, as a hedging strategy, to defending and enhancing its dominant regional status in uncertain geostrategic politics. Additionally, India has pursued a hedging‐oriented ideational strategy of diluting the confrontational nature of the US‐led Indo‐Pacific strategy and advancing its ideational vision for the Indo‐Pacific.