Buddhism and Borders: India’s Power Play in Mongolia

In the light of global geopolitics, there are some moves of power that whisper, not bellow. India's latest overture to Mongolia is such a whisper that is soft, nuanced, yet very significant. Situated between Russia's vastness and China's bristling shadow, Mongolia now finds itself at the periphery of India's growing strategic arc, one that runs from the Indo-Pacific seas to the steppes of Central Asia. On the surface, it's a technical mission: training Mongolia's border guard troops. Peel back a layer, though and it's a tale of civilization, of faith and of strategy, Buddhism and borders blending together into one smooth thread of diplomacy.

While Mongolian President Ukhnaagiin Khurelsukh was on a visit to India in mid October 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly declared a new capacity building program for Mongolia's border security agencies. The program will train Mongolian personnel, augment tactical and operational levels and extend India's defence footprint deep within a region long regarded as China's backyard. The initiative is complemented by India's announcement of the posting of a Defence Attaché to its Ulaanbaatar embassy and enhanced joint exercises like Nomadic Elephant and Khaan Quest.

The Soft Power Behind the Soldier

It is simple to read this step in purely security terms, but that would be to ignore the subtext. This is realpolitik wrapped around Buddhist tradition, the marriage of moral heritage with practical statecraft. The philosophies of Nalanda flowed north for centuries into the Mongolian steppe, influencing its spiritual landscape. Now, they come back as tools of modern day diplomacy.

In many ways, this outreach mirrors New Delhi’s long-standing Himalayan playbook where security and spirituality have often converged. Just as India’s defence cooperation with Bhutan and Nepal has evolved under the broader canopy of shared faith and geography, its engagement with Mongolia carries a similar undertone, though one that is less about borders and more about belonging. The Buddhist civilizational connection lends this alliance an ideological richness that differentiates it from India's traditional defence diplomacy. It enables New Delhi to marry strategic presence and cultural mission, confirming influence without seeming intrusive.

Prime Minister Modi characterized the India-Mongolia relationship as "spiritual siblings bound by the tenets of Lord Buddha." Those words aren't empty sentiments. To complement security cooperation, India is also taking sacred relics of Buddha's two major disciples i.e. Sariputra and Maudgalyayana to Mongolia in 2026. India will also send a Sanskrit teacher to the Gandan Monastery as well as digitize a million ancient Buddhist texts. Every action reinforces not only religious kinship but cultural sovereignty which is making India the spiritual hub of the Buddhist world.

The Great Balancing Act

Mongolia squats awkwardly between Russia in the north and China in the south, two titans who have shaped and sometimes suffocated, its strategic room. For years, Ulaanbaatar has yearned for what it terms a "third neighbour"  a sure friend beyond its regional geography. Enter, India.

In training Mongolian border troops, India provides exactly what China can't: trust without intimidation, partnership without pretension. This extends beyond combined military exercises like Nomadic Elephant and Khaan Quest. It's about creating long-term familiarity, institutional, not merely tactical between the two militaries.

The origins of Mongolia's "Third Neighbour Policy" date back to the early 1990s, as the nation broke out of the Soviet umbra and started seeking strategic independence. Decades of reliance on Moscow, militarily, economically, even ideologically which meant that Ulaanbaatar began looking to diversify its diplomatic credentials. It developed relationships with the United States, Japan, South Korea and India as a bridge between the democratic and the authoritarian worlds in Asia. Diversification here was not only a matter of balancing; it was a matter of survival in a region characterized by great power asymmetry.

India's present role is perfectly integrated into this policy's development. New Delhi offers a choice to both Chinese economic hegemony and Russian security dominance. Its involvement comes without conditionality, enabling Mongolia to open up agency instead of substituting one dependency with another. The cooperation on training border security forces increases institutional resilience in a manner that complements Mongolia's overall diversification strategy.

India’s economic footprint, too, aligns with this historic strategy. Its $1.7 billion partnership for building Mongolia’s first oil refinery, one of the largest development assistance project India has ever undertaken abroad, holds powerful symbolism. It represents self reliance, an antidote to Mongolia’s dependence on imported fuel and Chinese controlled mineral exports. While Beijing’s investments tend to extract, New Delhi’s tend to enable. The refinery thus becomes a metaphor for choice.

In that regard, India's presence in Mongolia is not to substitute Russia or China but to expand the geopolitical vocabulary of Mongolia. Each collaborative venture, from the refinery to the training at the border, serves to uphold the notion that minor states can be agents of change through diversification, rather than confrontation. It's an opportunity for India to project its influence without openly challenging Beijing; for Mongolia, it's an opportunity to gain breathing space without angling for trouble among its neighbors.

Together, they are building a more subtle balance that prioritises independence over alignment, collaboration over patronage.

Strategic Spirituality

In an era of superpowers exercising cutting edge diplomacy, India plays a more subdued game of employing culture as a medium and history as a bargaining chip. Buddhism here translates into something more than religion, It's power. Across Sri Lanka to Japan, Thailand to Mongolia, Buddhist diplomacy is aiding India in remapping Asia's soft borders, resurrecting an intellectual genealogy and quietly undermining China's ideological monopoly.

China also lays claim to Buddhist heritage by virtue of its management of Tibetan monasteries and "Buddhist Belt and Road" efforts. But its interest continues to be transactional state-driven, hierarchical and frequently propagandist. India's approach is authentic and inclusive, Nalanda rather than nationalism, common heritage rather than hegemony. While China uses Buddhism politically, India retrieves it as an ethical resource.

The Border Symbolism

Mongolia's border force may be trained like a military programme, but on a symbolic level, it connects two frontiers: the physical and the philosophical. The physical frontier divides Mongolia from China; the philosophical frontier divides cooperation from coercion. India's presence assists Mongolia in protecting both.

By providing capacity building, India indicates that sovereignty does not have to be at the expense of dependence. For a landlocked democracy like Mongolia, diversifying defence cooperation increases its strategic autonomy. For India, this subtle engagement provides an observing presence in East Asia, without openly provoking Beijing. Its subtle leverage, earned not through aircraft carriers but through classrooms, exercises and shared values.

But the horizon of this alliance goes far beyond the barracks. Over the past few years, India has increasingly demonstrated a readiness to integrate non-traditional security cooperation into its diplomatic engagement from Indo-Pacific HADR operations to cooperating on joint training in UN peacekeeping frameworks and cyber resilience. Mongolia's entry into such discussions would represent a natural development of this trust based alliance, one that enhances the region's collective capacity to address common vulnerabilities more than common enemies.

These softer modes of security engagement, disaster relief, cyber security of digital infrastructure and peacekeeping  also have a particular moral heft. They announce India's willingness to lead by readiness, not to provoke; to extend solidarity, not hegemony. In that way, border force training of Mongolians is less a case of militarisation and more an affirmation of India's conviction that 21st-century security is as much about resilience as it is about defence.

The Echoes of Nalanda

The renewal of Buddhism as a foreign policy tool has been strategic. Through the likes of Nalanda University, intellectual diplomacy has been integrated into India's global identity. The new collaboration between Nalanda and Mongolia's Gandan Monastery is both academic and symbolic in nature, indicating renewed trans-Asian Buddhist scholarship.

The common cultural heritage is the scaffold upon which geopolitical trust is erected. As earlier monks used to trade knowledge instead of resources, India's diplomacy today wishes for assent instead of obedience. It is a balance for Mongolia, reach for India and a reinforcement of identity for both.

A Quiet Plane

It's not big stick diplomacy, rather a whisper. No coercive alliances, no bases just education, faith and training morphing into influence. That's what makes this India-Mongolia partnership more significant than the modest headlines that it has created. It's not arrival declarations; it's making sure one is present.

Whereas China measures borders in miles, India measures them in meaning. That is how quiet power operates: it does not announce itself; it speaks. While ancient ruins make their way to Ulaanbaatar and contemporary troops are trained in Pune, the message is clear: India's geography comes to an end at the Himalayas, but its civilization does not.

In the thick of global power struggles, New Delhi has again opted for an unorthodox strategy, using Buddhism not as historical baggage but as a tool of policy for the future. Somewhere between monk and warrior, scripture and military strategy, India's interaction with Mongolia creates a "continental complement" to its Indo-Pacific maritime outreach, an intentional attempt to reach out beyond the middle of Asia, connect continental corridors and oceanic trade routes, and fashion a network of partnerships that mirror both land and sea security interests. Mongolia, placed between Russia and China, becomes a key node in India's grander vision: linking Himalayan security to East Central Asian stability, and by doing so, strengthening the maritime and continental components of its regional strategy.