By instinct, New Delhi has been doing something for 10 years and the government has just given it a name and a number. On Thursday, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh unveiled a formal ten-year blueprint titled ‘RAKSHA', which was intended to make the convoluted defence ties joint exercises, arms purchases, visits to naval ports, etc. a concerted plan. It was unveiled in the capital even as Singh met separately with Belgium's defence and foreign trade ministers, Theo Francken, on the sidelines of talks between the two prime ministers, Narendra Modi and Didier Reynders. The contrast was stark: a country which had formed up to purchase arms from Europe is now to point itself out towards it as a salesman, and that on the very same afternoon that it penned the message of its philosophy.

The blueprint has four pillars: enhancing strategic cooperation, encouraging joint exercises and training exchanges, stepping up cooperation in indigenous defence exports and boosting India's role as the primary security provider in the Indian Ocean. All of those ideas are not new on their own. The new thing is to attempt to put them all in one document which officials can refer to for another decade instead of announcing initiatives in a piecemeal fashion at each bilateral summit. Defence diplomacy is not just about the armed forces and national defence; it is a serious step up in thinking at South Block with defence diplomacy being a fundamental pillar of foreign policy on par with trade or climate negotiations, as the ministry of defence put it.

This is no empty gesture. India's defence exports rose to an all-time high of ₹38,424 crore (or about $4.1 billion) in the financial year ending March, up by nearly 63 percent from the previous year and even more than the country was exporting five years ago. The remaining amount was from the public sector companies, such as the former ordnance factories and giants such as Hindustan Aeronautics and Bharat Electronics, and the private manufacturers, many of them less than a decade old. Perhaps most notable is the speed; for one year state-run exporters saw more than a 150 percent increase in their exports to the rest of the world, a testament to decades of protected, inefficient production lines finally facing off against competition for foreign orders in order to sell their product.

The number of registered defence exporters has risen to 145 from 128, and Indian-made equipment now gets exported to over 80 countries, a list not possible to have imagined some 15 years ago when India was one of the largest importers of arms in the world.

Besides money, the geography is as important as RAKSHA. The mere inclusion of maritime security on the list of named pillars is not a theoretical concept, but an Indian indication that it will be the default security partner for the island and coastal nations from the Gulf to Southeast Asia until a competitor steps in to fill the void. The posture has been gradually evolving over the years, with deployments of the frigate fleet, hydrographic surveys and coast guard training missions with partners such as Mauritius, Maldives and Sri Lanka, but putting it down in formal doctrine provides the partner countries with something to plan by and for the Indian diplomats a document to refer to when the foreign counterparts ask them what exactly is New Delhi's agenda with the relationship.

The Belgium meeting on the same day is a typical example of this. Both sides agreed to institutionalise defence dialogue, training exchanges and capacity building programmes on a regular basis, while Brussels highlighted the Indo-Pacific's maritime security as a mutual priority. It's a simple bilateral achievement on its own, but that's exactly what RAKSHA is supposed to foster: dozens of similar conversations going on concurrently with European, South East Asian, Gulf and African partners, all of which push India a step closer towards being a customer as well as a supplier.

Sceptiles will be correct to remind us that other ambitious targets have been set before India, but it has been widely failing to meet them. A $26 billion defence industry target by 2025 was announced once and almost ignored, the export numbers impressive as they may be, are still significantly lower than those of other established suppliers such as the United States, France or Israel. Procurement bureaucracy within India's own ministry is still very sluggish and turning a strategy paper into a signed contract demands a steady diplomatic pulse, which is in high demand for the myriad other foreign policy requirements. Then there is the tougher one about whether partner countries will be comfortable handing over mission critical applications to Indian platforms when New Delhi hopes to go big on such engagements in the future, as after-sales support and technology transfer have been issues in defence deals in the past.

However, the trend is clear. A nation which for years was nearly a net importer of everything it flew, sailed or fired is now in the process of developing its ten-year plans to sell the same hardware abroad and its own backyard as a base for maritime security. The fate of RAKSHA as the operating manual its authors want it to be, or as a document sitting on a shelf with previous deliverables, will depend more on the unglamorous diplomacy that translates strategy into standing relationships training missions, spare parts pipelines, joint ventures than on the pillars it names.