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Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s third term has started with a flurry of activity on the global stage. Days after his swearing-in ceremony, Modi was in Puglia, attending the G7 outreach on Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s invitation. Coinciding with the NATO summit in Washington DC, he visited Moscow, his first bilateral visit of his third term.
The famous Modi-Putin hug drew comments from the US as well as varied tenors of criticism from Western allies. It seemed that the India-Russia partnership had reached new heights, though Swasti Rao, a researcher at the Indian think tank IDSA, pointed out that the 81-point joint statement did not have anything really concrete to report.
India’s nostalgia for Russia
The Indian Administrative Service is around 100 years older than the Republic of India. Traditionally, since the great game, Russia has been an Indian ally against British imperialism, less due to its wish of seeing an independent India and more to counter British influence in the sub-continent and easily access the Indian Ocean. India also yearns for its influence in central Asia, its reach amputated by the partition since it has lost land access to Iran, Afghanistan, and the Central Asian Republics due to Pakistan’s independence. In a way, this nostalgia translates into an important driver in India’s strategy towards Russia and finds strong support with its strategic thinkers and policymakers.
Russia, apart from the various Indian modern-day dependencies for defence and energy, is seen by India as a deciding factor in India’s strategic depth in Central Asia as well as a key player in countering China. For the West, the battle with China is naval; it is a question of sea lanes and global trade. India and Russia share extensive land borders with China. For China, subjugating Russia as a vassal and a junior partner is essential to keeping its Russian front under check. China has therefore become Russia’s largest investor, developing bridges, roads, and rail networks to connect Heilongjiang and its other northeastern provinces with the hope that the “dragon-bear” partnership will indeed become a friendship with no limits under Chinese domination.
China’s Indian land border is its Achilles heel. Not only is the Sino-Indian border located in some of the most treacherous battlegrounds in the world, but Tibet and XinJiang (China’s provinces bordering India) are both hostile to China’s Han majority and consider themselves occupied.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsRussia is aware of China’s opportunistic friendship and intends to continue walking the tightrope between India and China. Complete capitulation to China is unacceptable to Putin, though it may be inevitable. Modi’s visit to Moscow was not only a show to the West but, more importantly, to China, that Putin and Moscow had no intentions of abandoning India. This also allows Russia to enter the Indo-Pacific dynamic, as it has done with Dawei Port in Myanmar. For India, the hope of keeping the wedge between Russia and China is essential in its calculations to escape the inevitability that it is now a firm part of the Western alliance, which it has resisted since its independence.
BIMSTEC: India’s potential IMEC to the East?
In all this high-tension drama between the West, the G7, and Russia, starring India, a few key diplomatic developments have gone unnoticed. The BIMSTEC Foreign Ministers Retreat was hosted by S Jaishankar in Delhi on July 11 and 12, the first since the BIMSTEC Charter went into effect on May 20. The Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) is an international organisation of seven South and South East Asian nations (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand), dependent on the Bay of Bengal.
BIMSTEC is dominated by India, the primary force in the Bay of Bengal and Sea of Andaman, where there is strong competition between India and China to develop ports and projects in BIMSTEC countries. BIMSTEC has the potential to be India’s eastern outreach trade corridor, like the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), announced at the G20 in September 2023.
Prime Minister Modi’s BJP is now governing in Orissa, which has key ports in the Bay of Bengal. In neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, Modi ally Chandrababu Naidu was sworn in as Chief Minister. As many as 16 Members of Parliament of Naidu’s TDP provide Modi with the majority in the Parliament, and within five days of his swearing-in ceremony, Naidu has obtained approval for a refinery in his state. Naidu is known for his radical transformation of Hyderabad in his previous terms as Chief Minister before the state was split into Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
From the sleepy capital of the erstwhile Nizams, Naidu transformed Hyderabad into India’s premier IT hub, attracting investment from the largest corporations worldwide. With the current advantage he has with the Modi government, it is expected that the new Andhra Pradesh will become a centre for space technology, AI, data cables, and energy, with world-class ports and infrastructure allowing India to project its power into the Sea of Andaman and eventually into the Indo-Pacific. Naidu’s Andhra will be India’s projection into the Sea of Andaman and the Pacific Ocean.
If BIMSTEC and the transformation in Orissa and Andhra Pradesh are coordinated by Delhi, BIMSTEC could be the first leg of a trade corridor that extends to South East Asia, providing advantages to smaller countries in energy supply, data lines, and cheaper and faster logistics from Europe and the Gulf Cooperation Council. Trade between BIMSTEC, Southeast Asian countries, the GCC, and Europe could be redefined. India already has a strong railway network that connects ports on the eastern and western coasts. Transporting containers by train from India’s ports on the east coast to the west coast and vice versa would cut the time and cost of shipping to BIMSTEC countries and South East Asia in an “IMEC of the East’’ project.
While IMEC forms a fundamental pillar of India’s Indo-Mediterranean strategy, BIMSTEC could be the foundation of its Indo-Pacific outreach to actually contain China.
The author is an Indo-Italian entrepreneur and writer, has worked closely and continues to advise various governments in Europe, Middle East and Africa. He is the founder of the Dialogue on Democracy. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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