India’s Energy Route and Transit Pipelines Deadlocks in the Context of the Relations with Central Asia

India and Central Asia states that have common historical, religious and cultural inheritance have an expanding relationship plexus in the context of growing commercial activities, Central Asia’s growing wconomical potential and India’s soft power policies towards the region. It has been seen that the relevant relations started to gain depth before the Soviet period parochially. Hardly, it has been realized that although the progress the relationships between India and Central Asia states got slower in the period of the Soviet Union and following period, India’s ties with the region were not sheared nevermore. India tried to accelerate its relations with the region at diplomatic level aftermath of the Soviet Union particularly. The main two reasons of this phenomenon were Kashmis issue between India and Pakistan and India’s solitude in the international system after breaking of the Soviet Union. India and Central Asia are ingenous allies as well as they are strategic neighbours. Both sides are close to each other geographically and they are the parts of common history and cultural share. But, it is seen that India’s policies towards Central Asia have changed in the last decade on the base of its national interests and energy demand security by means of the transformation of Central Asia as a competition region of great powers. India – trying to be a partner of the competition in Central Asia – has challenges in the region such as energy issues with China, regional security with Russia, Muslims and secularism with Pakistan and being an active power with the U.S. It is realized that India – reverted to the region late in comparison with other actors – has increased its ties with region states and designated a foreign policy concept in the context of its geopolitic and geoeconomic interests in the last decade. In this context, the aim of the study is to analyze India-Central Asia relations, transit routes and India’s deadlocks in the region in terms of India’s increasing energy demand, energy security and its geopolitic and geoeconomic interests. According to the analysis in the study, it has realized that India has stated the region as an epicenter in terms of its energy security but has also realized that India has met dependency on neighboring countries and transit routes in the consequences of reasons like inadequate energy transmission lines, low economic development and indirect transportation to the region. This circumstance affects India’s energy security and cost adversely.