Based on common colonial links and political systems, Australia's relations with India should be close and comfortable and those with China contentious. For example, Indian contingents fought alongside the ANZACs at Gallipoli that is so central to the founding myth of Australian (and New Zealand) identity.

In fact, compared to the substantial and mutually beneficial relations with China, Australia has had sparse and troubled relations with India.

With India's history of opposition to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and its refusal to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the nuclear irritant to the bilateral relationship assumed a symbolic importance out of proportion to the objective dimensions of the problem. Each side was firmly convinced of its own intellectual and moral rectitude and therefore smugly contemptuous of the other. The stark reality that India today matters more than Australia has provided the strategic rationale for Canberra to modify a key and long-standing plank of its anti-nuclear policy.