My personal take on this -
We bit more than we can chew. It would have been wise to align with one superpower (either USA or China), grow our economy to ~20T, modernize our Army like China, flush off all insurgencies & seperatist movements, then we could have taken the step towards strategic autonomy.
Instead, we foolishly cozied up to a dying relic of past Russia, who have no real future. Nostalgia or long-term trust aside, we should have been wiser to understand there is no long-term friend in global diplomacy.
Now some deshbhakts will come to me frothing from mouth how we are strong independent nation doing the correct thing of not being anybody's pet. To that, I will say, you need friends and connections to succeed in life.
Even China for the first 20-25 years of their economic growth was a timid yes-man of western powers keeping below the radar and slowing becoming the manufacturing superpower. You can show bravado once you have become so big nobody can touch you.