The Long Arc of India–Russia Relations

This article is based on Ramesh Thakur’s research paper, ‘India’s Shifting Balance of Interests vis-à-vis Russia’  published by  The Indian Century Roundtable (Sydney) on 4 September.

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India’s Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi visited Russia on 8-9 July and embraced President Vladimir Putin. The outcome of the visit included mutually beneficial substantive agreements but damaged India’s reputation in the West at a time when President Joe Biden hosted the NATO summit in Washington. The BBC featured an analysis under the title ‘Modi’s balancing act as he meets Putin in Moscow’. On 23 August Modi went to Kyiv, the first visit to independent Ukraine by an Indian PM. The BBC headlined it as ‘Diplomatic tightrope for Modi as he visits Kyiv after Moscow’.

The Ukraine visit was important largely for the symbolism. India made it a point to de-hyphenate relations with Russia and Ukraine and not see them in zero sum terms. The two visits underline how as India’s global profile rises, it must balance its different international relationships and at the same time ensure that the pursuit of material interests remain anchored in foundational principles and global norms – and vice versa.

Changing state attributes and international profile help to explain the shifting balance of interests that have shaped bilateral Moscow–New Delhi relations over three periods. In the first, from independence in 1947 to the end of the Cold War in 1990/91, Soviet economic and military assistance and diplomatic support strengthened the Indian state apparatus domestically, regionally and internationally.

At first glance, India’s close relationship with the former Soviet Union was an ideological misfit. One was the world’s largest democracy with myriad political parties, competing trade unions and a robust press. The other was the most powerful communist state where the party claimed a monopoly of political and trade union activity and the press served the ruling regime. Marxist ideology is the antithesis of India’s caste-dominated majority Hindu society. Culture and education turned Indian minds to the West.

Yet, based on a conjunction of military, diplomatic and economic interests, bilateral relations developed hesitantly but consolidated into broad, deep and durable bonds of friendship and collaboration. A host of framework agreements, treaties of cooperation and joint committees gave organisational structure to the relationship. Diplomatic skill and reciprocal political sensitivity ensured that the good relations survived the vicissitudes of personal and party fortunes in the two countries.

An important catalyst for turning Indian eyes towards the Soviet Union was the integration of its local enemy Pakistan into the Western alliance system in 1955 through CENTO in the Middle East and SEATO in the Asia-Pacific. In due course US arms to Pakistan, provided to combat global communism, were used in wars against India. The twin pacts undermined the rationale of India’s organising principle of nonalignment, brought the Cold War to India’s western and eastern flanks and created the strategic logic for a military relationship between Moscow and New Delhi that proved surprisingly enduring.

Following the 1954 Geneva accords, India was a ringside observer, as chair of the three Indochina control commissions in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, of the Vietnam War. Washington came to believe that India had aligned too closely with Soviet perspectives and interests. But India approached the war essentially as another front in Asian nationalists’ anticolonial struggles to gain independence and defend territorial integrity.

Two other defining events in the period earned lasting Indian gratitude for Moscow’s role in protecting India from global censure and coercion. Soviet veto of Draft Security Council resolutions in December 1961 and 1971, that demanded immediate ceasefires when India used military force against Portugal in Goa and Pakistan in what is now Bangladesh, were vetoed by the USSR. The despatch of the USS Enterprise task force to the Bay of Bengal in December 1971 also left the opposite but no less lasting impression on public consciousness and was internalised in the security elite’s corporate memory for a generation.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union created an economic, strategic and policy vacuum for India. An acute balance of payments crisis in 1991 and the discredited model of the command economy added to the panic caused by the collapse of the Soviet superpower. India scrambled to readjust to the changed unipolar world and recalibrate relations with the US while still heavily dependent on Soviet military supplies.

Yet, Russia and India still had common interests in stabilising the situation in the interconnected regions of Afghanistan and Central Asia. They were also embroiled in an escalating dispute with Washington over the sale of Russian rocket technology. A deal signed in January 1991 was cancelled by Russia in July 1993 under US trade sanctions, highlighting Moscow’s vulnerability in the post-Cold War unipolar moment.

The episode held lessons for India’s autonomous foreign policy. The 1990s completed the triumph of the US political and economic systems. Russia and India gave higher priority to relations with the US than with each other. While legacy relations with Russia have continued, India has not really looked back since those days. Instead, after the nuclear tests of May 1998 and a self-proclaimed status as a nuclear weapons possessor state, India turned its full attention to repairing, cultivating and nurturing ever closer ties with the US which has led the global efforts to break India’s pariah status with regard to the nonproliferation regime.

Over two-thirds of India’s arms purchases over 2012–17 were from Russia. Yet over the six years, Russia’s share fell from 86.5% to 60.1%. In the 2019–23 five year period, Russia remained India’s top source, but for the first time since 1960, at 36% Russian arms fell below half of India’s total imports.

In the third period since February 2022, the impressive Western unity on Ukraine stands in stark contrast to the sharp divide from the rest of the world that holds Russia was provoked by NATO’s eastward expansion which crossed Moscow’s red lines. Reports from Cambridge University (2022) and the European Council on Foreign Relations (2023) map the West-Rest split on Ukraine and US-China relations. Countries outside the NATO-Russia/China rivalry judge their long-term interests lies in minimising the chances of a major power war, protecting the fragile nuclear peace, creating a rules based order that is respected by all powers and in the meantime hedging their bets against geopolitical shocks in their own immediate region.

India has tried to thread the complex and challenging demands on its diplomacy arising from the Ukraine war. It has abstained on, supported and voted against different resolutions in the UN General Assembly and Security Council in New York and the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, depending on their demands and language. The lodestar of its foreign policy will continue to be the safety, security, prosperity and wellbeing of Indians first.

Indians also share unhappy memories with Russians and Chinese of US readiness to weaponise trade, finance and the role of the dollar as the international currency. It’s in their joint long-term interest to reduce exposure to egregious US monetary policy through efforts to de-dollarise trade, sign bilateral currency swap agreements and diversify investments into alternative currencies wherever practicable.

The US is India’s most important global partnership, underpinned by a broad national consensus on investing still more heavily in cooperation in security, intelligence, trade, anti-terrorism and anti-fundamentalism. However, efforts to discipline India into constraining strategic autonomy on foreign policy choices could prove counter-productive. One reason for the longevity of warm relations with Russia is that Moscow has been skilled enough to avoid falling into this trap of a binary choice.

Other articles by this author:

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India-Pakistan cricket is downstream of politics (3-minute read)