India’s long-cherished doctrine of strategic autonomy, once a badge of post-colonial independence, is steadily mutating from a source of flexibility into a condition of strategic drift. Strategic autonomy originated in the Nehruvian era as non-alignment, a pragmatic attempt to avoid entanglement in Cold War blocs while extracting developmental assistance from both. Diplomatically, strategic autonomy has also begun to alienate without appeasing. India’s strategic autonomy was never meant to be an end in itself; it was a means to secure sovereignty through leverage. Without greater clarity and discipline, India risks discovering that misapplied autonomy is not a shield—but a liability it can increasingly ill afford.