Head-on | Modi-Putin summit in Moscow sends strong message to West

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi travels to Moscow on July 8-9 for a summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, hackles will momentarily rise in the United States and Europe.

It is exactly the kind of optics they do not want to see as the Russia-Ukraine war grinds on. Modi has made Russia the first bilateral visit of his third term. That will not be lost on Western leaders busy putting out fires in Europe as the continent swings right and an increasingly infirm US President Joe Biden trails former President Donald Trump in opinion polls.

What message does Modi’s summit meeting with Putin in Moscow send to the West? Putin has been vilified, sanctioned and ostracised by the US-led Western alliance since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Significantly, this is the first India-Russia summit since 2021. It is also the first time Modi will meet Putin in Moscow after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The special relationship between the US and India remains strong despite India’s increasing show of strategic autonomy. Both countries have more to lose than gain by loosening ties.

Washington needs India as a reliable ally in the Indo-Pacific. India needs the US for trade and defence technology. Indian and US national interests are broadly aligned. But relations between New Delhi and Washington have cooled since the Nijjar-Pannun cases arose a year ago. President Joe Biden favours closer ties with India even though many of his aides, who lean towards the Democratic party’s hard Left, believe India requires a periodic reality check.

The Nijjar-Pannun case is one such. The FBI cooked up a murder-for-hire charge against Indian businessman Nikhil Gupta based on sketchy online messages. Gupta was entrapped by the FBI in Prague, jailed for a year in the Czech Republic, and extradited last month to the US to stand trial in a New York court.

The evidence against Gupta is so thin that it hasn’t been publicly revealed. US justice can be deeply compromised as cases against recently released Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and the ongoing legal battles with Donald Trump clearly indicate.

The US administration has a well-oiled network of NGOs and global agencies which do its bidding to keep recalcitrant allies on the back foot. A favourite target is religious freedom in India.

The US State Department is often deployed to convey the message. Last month, Secretary of States Antony Blinken personally released the State Department’s “Religious Freedom Report 2023”. It noted violent attacks on Muslims and Christians. The report added: “In India, we see a concerning increase in anti-conversion laws, hate speech, demolitions of homes and places of worship for members of minority faith communities.”

This was a direct attack on India’s internal affairs by America’s most senior diplomat who has developed a close relationship with his Indian counterpart, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar.

It is akin to Jaishankar publicly releasing a ministry of external affairs (MEA) report on racially motivated police shootings of minority blacks in the US. That would be a serious transgression of diplomatic protocol. The US calls itself the leader of a rules-based world order. It breaks every rule in the book but expects other countries to abide by them.

The MEA swiftly issued a strong rebuttal to the State Department’s report on religious freedom in India: “The report is deeply biased, lacks understanding of India’s social fabric and is visibly driven by vote bank considerations and a prescriptive outlook. We therefore reject it. The exercise itself is a mix of imputations, misrepresentations, selective usage of facts, reliance on biased sources and a one-sided projection of issues. This extends even to the depiction of our Constitutional provisions and duly enacted laws of India. It has selectively picked incidents to advance a preconceived narrative.”

Revealing India’s new resolve to take the fight to the US when necessary, an Indian media report on the MEA rebuttal added pointedly: “In 2023, India officially took up numerous cases in the US of hate crimes, racial attacks on Indian nationals and other minorities, vandalisation and targeting of places of worship, violence and mistreatment by law enforcement authorities as well as giving political space to advocates of extremism and terrorism abroad.”

Balancing Moscow and Washington

What worries Washington most is the possible resumption of the Russia-India-China (RIC) trilateral that has been suspended since the LAC standoff in Ladakh in 2020.

Moscow is keen on the RIC becoming an annual summit between Putin, Xi Jinping and Modi. That is unlikely in the near future given the frozen relations between Beijing and New Delhi.

For Russia though, the RIC is another platform to show that most of the world outside the US-led Western alliance has not boycotted Moscow, a stated aim of Washington and London. By freezing $300 billion in Russian assets in Europe and the US and using the income from it to finance the Ukraine war, the West has set a precedent that in future could backfire on it.

India is wary of being drawn too closely into the Russia-China dynamic. It is in particular annoyed with Moscow for pushing to expand BRICS to several countries, including Pakistan.

BRICS has already given membership to five countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, Ethiopia and Iran). Adding another ten or more countries, as Moscow wants, will dilute India’s own standing in BRICS of which it is a founding member.

Moscow’s intent is to broaden every platform it is part of to counter the West’s attempt to isolate it. But this strategy is not in India’s national interest. As the putative third largest economy in the world by 2029, India is positioning itself to play the role of a balancing pivot between the US and China. Aligning too closely with either the US-led West or the China-Russia alliance is not in its long-term interest.

By 2030, India will likely be a $7 trillion economy. Its per capita income in nominal terms will be $5,500. In Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, per capita income will be $12,000. Not high, but well above levels India was stuck at for six decades after Independence.

In Moscow, meanwhile, Modi will have an opportunity to get a first-hand account of the war in Ukraine. Despite the conflict, Russia’s economy is set to grow at over 3 per cent a year, outpacing every major European economy and a shade above even US GDP growth in 2024.

India now buys around half its crude oil from Russia. Rupee-rouble trade is small but, despite setbacks, is growing. The move away from a US dollar-driven global economy is where Moscow’s and New Delhi’s interests converge.

Modi declined to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meeting in Kazakhstan last week, deputing Jaishankar instead, though Xi Jinping and Putin were present. The message of strategic autonomy was aimed at both the West and the Moscow-Beijing alliance.

The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.