The one product that will be remembered not for handshakes but for its significance will be a single piece of hardware when Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives in Jakarta on July 6 for a three-day visit: BrahMos supersonic cruise missile, which has quietly become India's most consequential export product. Both sides' chiefs have been ticking off the weeks for weeks that an agreement, or at least a major step towards an agreement, is imminent. If it makes it in this trip, Indonesia will be the third country in Southeast Asia to field a weapon India developed with Russia, which has now become the cornerstone of its defence export policy, after the Philippines and Vietnam.

The deal lines have changed in the last couple of weeks. The defence ministry of Indonesia in March confirmed that it had agreed in principle to purchase a single BrahMos coastal battery system to boost maritime defence. But since then, reporting in The Tribune and a confirmation from officials cited in the lead-up to Modi's visit indicated that Jakarta wanted to do more, and consider a phased procurement of more batteries beyond the initial one. A battery normally combines together launchers, radar and missiles and India has also proposed a Joint Defence Industry Cooperation Committee with Indonesia for technology transfer and joint research, as it has done to sweeten the sales elsewhere. The figure most commonly cited for the deal first reported by the South China Morning Post late last year comes in at about 450 million dollars, but India's ambassador to Jakarta, Sandeep Chakravorty, has been careful to describe pricing as still under discussion and has publicly stated BrahMos was an "affordable and reliable" system, a description that points to a buyer who has thus far provided little clarity about its willingness to pay. It is said that Indonesia is interested in funding the purchase via one of its state banks, which is of importance, as it indicates that the transaction is more of a scale play, and not a token/symbolic order.

The context is why Jakarta is more tough this time. Weeks ago, India's defence minister Rajesh Kumar Singh said the BrahMos deal with Vietnam had now been signed but it was not yet officially announced and now Indonesia was next in line. The Vietnam contract is estimated to be worth between 620 million and 700 million dollars, far in excess of the 375 million dollars the Philippines paid in 2022 for its shore-based anti-ship variant, which will be delivered from 2024 onwards. But Indonesia, which does not want to be the last major buyer in South-East Asia to be induced into buying the price, seems to be attempting to negotiate a bigger and/or better package than the original single-battery deal agreed to in March.

The appetite is caused by the missile itself. With a range limited to 290 kilometres in order to adhere to the Missile Technology Control Regime, the export variant is the only supersonic cruise missile in service anywhere in the world and flies at about three times the speed of sound. It can be launched from land, sea or air bases, has a warhead of some 300 kilograms and is designed to be hard to intercept as the time available for an enemy's air defence crew to see, track and destroy it are compressed. It's a creation of a joint venture between Defence Research and Development Organisation of India and Russian NPO Mashinostroyeniya (NPOMP), meaning even if India decides to go ahead with the contract, it would still need approval from Moscow. Not everyone agrees that its speed makes the missile invulnerable – some naval commentators say that contemporary AESA radar and electro-optical sensors can detect a Mach 3 missile from tens of kilometres away and that gives contemporary air defence networks a fighting chance which the missile's marketing does not imply. That scepticism is important to be aware of because it dampens the more triumphal tone of BrahMos as an unstopped equaliser and serves as a reminder of its true value: making an aggressive naval move in the waters off one coastline that has one a bit more expensive and a bit more uncertain, and not automatically deterrent.

That is, after all, the only viable strategic rationale New Delhi can follow. Batteries have been shipped to the Philippines, are nearing completion in Vietnam and are being negotiated in Indonesia, and India is cobbling together a chain of missile installations on its coastlines that border the South China Sea and lope into the broader dispute over Beijing's claims. It has been dubbed a rough mirror of China's own "Belt and Road" initiative of investing in ports and infrastructure throughout the Indian Ocean, sometimes referred to as the "String of Pearls" in response to China's "String of Pearls. The idea is simple: distributed, land based anti-ship batteries can enable a small navy to menace a large fleet over a great distance of water without having to match them ship for ship, making an enemy's ships less willing to venture far from the coast and spend more on their own air defence. While a few missile batteries won't alter the fundamental fact that China's navy is the biggest in Asia, a coastline dotted with a number of BrahMos operators will make it harder for commanders to calculate whether to send their ships into the South China Sea or further west, out through the sea lanes through which four-fifths of China's oil imports from the Middle East pass.

This map shows the situation of Indonesia, which is not as straightforward as Vietnam or the Philippines. Even as it has a long coastline that borders the South China Sea off the Natuna Islands where Chinese claims have often clashed with Indonesia's exclusive economic zone and caused friction on fishing rights and gas exploration, Jakarta does not officially view China as a threat and has historically adopted a hedging strategy towards Beijing. The advantage of land-based missile batteries is that Jakarta would not have to join an alliance and call Beijing its adversary, but would be able to assert a lever over Beijing's shipping as it modernises its own military under President Prabowo Subianto, a former general whose foreign policy revolves around ‘non-alliance' even while he pursues a campaign of modernising the armed forces.

This isn't happening in a vacuum separate from economics and that is where the substance of the visit may be. Indian officials state that a group of memoranda of understanding will be finalized, in addition to the defence talks, on critical minerals, natural resources, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, education and space cooperation. The main component is nickel. The metal, which is key to EV batteries and the clean energy transition, is found in the largest reserves in Indonesia, whose government wants India to work with their companies to establish processing and refining facilities on the ground, not just purchase ore. The strategic irritant is that China owns some 75% of nickel refining facilities in Indonesia, which has been the result of massive Chinese investment in nickel smelting plants in Sulawesi and other islands in the last 10 years. The International Energy Agency (IEA) in its Global Minerals Outlook report stated that the combined output of Indonesia and China would reach approximately 65 per cent of the world's refined nickel, and that by 2040, the demand for refined nickel is expected to reach between 5 and 6 million metric tonnes per year, with Indonesia's share projected at 44 per cent. In monetary terms, a break in any of those refining segments away from Chinese capital would be as important as any missile sale, and it's not a coincidence that both deals are taking place during the same week.

Additionally, the economic landscape in India also provides a reason as to why Delhi is so aggressively promoting defence exports in the region. In April, India's Ministry of Defence announced that the country's defence exports reached a record 38,424 crore rupees (about 4.11 billion dollars) during the financial year that ended in March 2026, representing a significant 63 per cent increase from the previous year. Close to 55 per cent of that was from defence public sector undertakings, which grew a whopping 151 per cent year-on-year, while the rest, 45 per cent, was from the private sector manufacturers, which grew a more measured 14 per cent year-on-year. Today, India exports military hardware to more than 80 countries, compared to a small list five years ago; there are now 145 registered exporters. At the same time, the total domestic defence production is at an all-time-high of around 1.78 lakh crore rupees or nearly 19 billion dollars, which is almost double the figure five years ago, and the government has formally set a target of 50,000 crore rupees in annual exports in the financial year 2028-29, which is achievable if the big platform sales like BrahMos continue to be achieved in time. The Indonesia deal is not just about naval deterrence in a contested sea from this vantage point, but is a variable of a wider industrial policy, where arms sales are as much a growth driver for the state-owned giants as for India's growing private manufacturing sector, as are pharmaceuticals, digital services and now critical minerals the cornerstones of India's economic diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific.

Geography of the visit is broader, which reinforces reading. Modi's visit will include stops in Australia and New Zealand, which analysts at Gateway House and elsewhere view as an effort to bolster a security and economic partnership between Indo-Pacific democracies amid growing strains in traditional alliances like the Quad and an increasingly uncertain U.S. stance toward the region. India and Indonesia have been having Comprehensive Strategic Partnership since 2018 and in June, the two foreign ministers had a comprehensive review on the multifaceted ties, including defence, trade and energy, connectivity and consular cooperation. The outcome of the BrahMos deal whether it will be inked this week or put on hold for more jostling over the price, or simply held back pending Moscow's approval is already obvious a gradual but relentless expansion of military and economic Indian footprint on waters that China views as its backyard, one missile battery at a time, one mineral processing plant at a time.