The Confluence of the Three Seas: Modi, Meloni and Takaichi have created a new paradigm.

by Vas Shenoy

Seven years before Narendra Modi came to power, on a rainy day in August 2007, Shinzo Abe stood in the Indian Parliament and invoked the title of Dara Shukoh’s final masterpiece, Majma-ul-Bahrain, the Confluence of the Two Seas. He quoted Swami Vivekananda, a thinker who has inspired Modi as well as large strands of the Hindu right.

Shukoh, the crown prince and son of Shah Jahan, ultimately paid with his life for his intellectual audacity. His attempt to reconcile Islam and Hinduism, to unite spiritual oceans, led to his execution at the hands of his brother Aurangzeb. Abe also dared to imagine a confluence, not of religions but of geographies, the bringing together of the Pacific and the Indian oceans into what he framed as a single strategic theatre.

If Shukoh’s work shaped the moral imagination of India. Abe’s speech performed a similar act in modern geopolitics. It helped return India to the centre of Asian strategy and gave language to what would become the Indo-Pacific.

History in India often feels cyclical. Disruptions occur, alignments fracture, and yet patterns re-emerge in new forms. Despite the turbulence generated by Donald Trump’s second mandate in global politics, New Delhi has continued to deepen ties both westward and eastward. Defence cooperation with Israel and the United Arab Emirates has strengthened frameworks such as I2U2, while relationships with Japan and Australia have matured into durable pillars of regional balance.

The circle that Abe sketched now appears to be tightening.

With the arrival of Sanae Takaichi as Japan’s first female leader following her electoral victory, continuity with Abe’s worldview is unmistakable. Modi was among the first to congratulate her, stressing that the India-Japan partnership plays a decisive role in global peace, stability and prosperity, and expressing confidence that ties would reach new heights under her stewardship.

Takaichi’s reply was swift and pointed. She emphasised her desire to continue strengthening the Special Strategic and Global Partnership and to cooperate in realising a Free and Open Indo-Pacific. The invocation of FOIP was not a rhetorical courtesy. It reaffirmed India’s centrality in Tokyo’s long-term balancing strategy, encompassing defence technology, resilient supply chains, innovation networks and talent mobility. Abe’s architecture endures.

A similar transformation has taken place in Europe.

Giorgia Meloni inherited a difficult legacy from Mario Draghi. Yet Italy’s first woman prime minister has not only exceeded expectations but restored to Rome a degree of visibility and strategic relevance many believed had faded. Under her leadership, Italy has carefully distanced itself from excessive dependence on China and invested political capital in building a robust relationship with India. The personal chemistry between Meloni and Modi has been captured in the shorthand of the hashtag Melodi, symbolising a partnership that is still developing institutionally but already carries strategic weight.

Just as important is the emerging rapport between Meloni and Takaichi. Two women leading G7 nations, meeting frequently, aligning priorities from the Global Combat Air Programme to supply-chain resilience, have added political acceleration to bureaucratic processes that might otherwise have moved more slowly. Personal diplomacy is reinforcing institutional convergence.

The earlier India-Japan-Italy trilateral launched during the Draghi years still exists, but it risks being overtaken by a more dynamic geometry. The Meloni-Modi-Takaichi axis is sketching a new confluence, a Confluence of three seas, stretching from the Mediterranean, through the Indian Ocean into the Pacific, bound by democratic identity, maritime interest and a shared sensitivity to the voice of the global south.

In this vision, the Indo-Mediterranean and the Indo-Pacific are not competing maps. They are parts of the same continuum.

At the southern tip of India, near the rock associated with Vivekananda’s meditation, the Arabian Sea meets the wider Indian Ocean, and the Indo-Mediterranean meets the Indo-Pacific. Abe recalled that symbolism in 2007 when he cited Vivekanand’s words. “Different streams, rising in different lands, ultimately merge in the same water.”

Nearly two decades later, that metaphor has become strategy.

Vas Shenoy is the Chief Representative for Italy by the Indian Chamber of Commerce (ICC). The views expressed here are personal.