Bookmarked: Dissecting India-Russia Ties As War Heats Up In Ukraine

Earlier this week, the United Nations General Assembly voted to condemn Russia’s recent “attempted illegal annexation” of Ukrainian regions, demanding its immediate reversal. India’s refusal to take a clear stand on the Russia-Ukraine war was reiterated when the country abstained from voting on the issue. Delving into India’s stand on the war and its ties with Russia, along with some other pertinent geopolitical issues that India is currently facing, is HarperCollins’ latest book Strategic Challenges: India in 2030—a collection of chapters authored by some of India’s leading analysts and subject matter experts. The book has been edited by Jayadeva Ranade. 

Looking at the Russia chapter titled Russia and Eurasia in India’s Calculus is P.S. Raghavan, a career diplomat, who has been India’s ambassador to the Czech Republic, Ireland and Russia, and has held other diplomatic assignments in the then USSR, Poland, the United Kingdom, Vietnam and South Africa.

Here is an excerpt:

India’s public response to Russia’s war in Ukraine demonstrated an important element of the strategic partnership: that each country is sensitive to the core concerns of the other, even if they do not have the same views. There are many examples of this from the Cold War years, but two from the recent past were India’s muted response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and Russia’s rejection of Chinese and Pakistani attempts to ‘internationalize’ the Indian Constitutional amendments relating to Jammu and Kashmir in 2019. 

Going forward, India–Russia relations will continue to be buffeted by global geopolitical tides. Geography, economics and the politics of Eurasia create overlapping interests. As Indian officials have been at pains to explain to their Western partners, India’s shared interests with Russia, and in Eurasia, need not clash with those of its other strategic partners. 

India and Russia share aspirations for a multipolar world, though their concept of it, and perceptions of their own roles in it, vary. Their international strategies are guided by their respective perspectives on their geopolitical opportunities and challenges. Unlike during the Cold War years, their interests are not congruent. A mature approach should involve emphasizing convergences and managing differences, so that they do not impact core national interests. It also means vigilance to ensure protection of interests. President Putin has said that Russia does not transfer to any other country the military technologies shared with India. This is an assurance that India must constantly verify in respect of the weaponry and technologies that Moscow supplies to Beijing, as also the nature of their intelligence sharing arrangements and joint space-based surveillance. As Russia pursues its economic and geopolitical interests with Pakistan, India needs to monitor the sharing of military tactics and strategic doctrines in their defence cooperation. At the same time, Russia should welcome India’s political and economic initiatives in Eurasia, which would promote its strategic and security objectives and work to dilute Chinese dominance of the region. 

In the post-Cold War world, with its diversity of national capacities and aspirations, countries would have shared interests with a number of others, but rarely a total congruence of interests. This is particularly so for a country in India’s complex geography. This situation, of convergence not amounting to congruence, has been recognized in the context of the India–US partnership by a task force on India–US relations, set up in 2015 by the US Council for Foreign Relations. Observing that an alliance model is not appropriate for India, it suggested that the US should treat relations with India as a joint venture, which would not preclude other partnerships of either party. This is an equally appropriate template for India–Russia relations in today’s world. They have shared geopolitical, defence, economic and energy interests. Each may also have conflicts of interests, flowing from obligations of other partnerships; they will need to manage them through bilateral reconciliation. 

Emphasizing convergence of interests also means exploiting opportunities for mutually beneficial economic cooperation. The leaders of India and Russia have actively encouraged a broad-based economic cooperation architecture to ensure strong mutual stakes in the relationship that would incentivize each partner to be sensitive to the core concerns of the other. These efforts have, in the recent past, come up against fears in the Indian business community of being caught in the complex web of US sanctions against Russia, which may threaten their access to Western markets. Depending on the nature of the sanctions regime after the current war, such concerns could be accentuated. The effort to broad-base the India–Russia relationship is also hampered by unhelpful stereotypes about each other—projected in their media, academia, business communities, and even political circles and officialdom.

In India the narrative is that Russia has been significantly weakened by Western sanctions and its own economic infirmities. This impression could be strengthened after the war. In Indian industry circles, Russia is still associated with the clunky technologies of the Soviet era. On the other side, Russians are theoretically aware of India’s economic progress, but cannot bring themselves to believe that the country in which their forefathers helped set up basic industries, now exports innovations and technologies to many developed countries. This mutual ignorance, in addition to the logistical hurdles, explains the paltry bilateral trade and investment exchanges (other than in hydrocarbons). There could be some improvement in these areas: the constriction of Western supplies during the war has led a number of Russian companies to look to India for inputs for industry. The blockades in the Black Sea have led enterprising traders to explore the multimodal freight route from Russia to India, through Iran. This may speed up the operationalisation of the INSTC, which has been caught up in bureaucratic negotiations over years. 

On the fear of sanctions, Indian diplomacy needs to impress on the US that India–Russia economic cooperation serves the larger US objective of giving Russia an alternative to China and ensuring a strong India as a counterpoise to China. INSTC would serve the same purpose. Similarly, strangling India’s defence cooperation with Russia defeats that objective. Diversification of military supplies necessarily has to be a gradual process if it is not to introduce vulnerabilities in the short term. 

Academia and media in both countries take their analyses of each other from Western sources, which accentuates the distortion of perceptions. Both countries need better public communications about the content and direction of their bilateral relations.

(Excerpted from Strategic Challenges: India in 2030 edited by Jayadeva Ranade, published by HarperCollins, September 2022)

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