India’s toughest test: Preserving strategic autonomy in US-China great game

As was to be expected, the recent US-India-China and Russia-India-China equations have raised as many questions as they have answered. Or, they have answered as many questions as have arisen. At the heart of it all is the key question: Will India be able to retain its strategic autonomy amid the evolving international landscape?

Of course, US President Donald Trump kick-started it all by launching a tariff war on India unlike any other nation, including strategic contestant China.Yes, the severity of doubling the India tariff might have been less in comparison to sanctions elsewhere. Likewise, an intention to negotiate from a ‘position of strength’ on tariffs and other aspects of bilateral relations, including defence procurement, might have been the driver, too.

However, the current Indian governmental mood, combined with the public outrage over the Trump announcements on tariffs and opposition to the import of cheap oil from Russia, seems to have caused a very different response from New Delhi compared to what was expected by Washington.

Regional act

What should be of interest to India at the same time is the seeming revival of India’s China relations, as if on an American cue of a different kind. It’s not about the recent India visit of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi; his meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar carried a message of their own.

So did his separate revival of border talks with National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval. The two are the designated Special Representatives (SR) for the border talks that have dragged on for decades and seen many SRs on either side. This round too was not expected to produce anything substantial on the ground or otherwise. Yet, the very idea of such revival and the timing carried another message of its own.

A third and fourth angle(s) may have been added to the evolving regional act by the overarching presence of Russia in the backdrop and India seemingly putting its heart more than in the past into promoting Brics as a ‘fiscal and economic alternative’. An ‘alternative’ to what, why and how, though, remains hazy just now.

Western temptation

Where does it all lead to? Coupled with Trump’s sudden revival of eternal American love for Pakistan, the triangular relations involving India, China and Russia cannot go too far, too fast, either. Even if it happened, it is one thing for India and China to reach a level of cordiality in bilateral relations, erasing India’s hurt and wound from the unprecedented ‘Galwan clash’, 2020.

India cannot think of China independent of the latter’s Pakistan relations, and of Pakistan sans China. If anything, Beijing has talked about a trilateral on Kashmir. This goes against the very grain of the Indian belief that it’s a bilateral and that a bilateral has to be treated only as a bilateral.

Good on paper

Be it as it may, India’s foreign and security policies are at the crossroads as never before.Yes, but there has to be clarity in processing and progressing on the multilateral front if India has to have a win-win situation and not a win-lose or lose-lose situation.

In a way, the current global trend is forcing India’s hand to choose between nations and blocs, where again there is visible confusion and ruptures, however temporary. Only one thing is clear in the milieu. Despite talking trade and renegotiating tariffs, the US and China are not going to be friends. They are the post-Cold War poles and are polarising forces.

There is already talk of a China-India-Russia axis. For long, there have been those who have been talking about such an axis, plus Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, but that is workable at best, good on paper but not on the ground. Such a construct, all at once, converts the belt into the new geostrategic and geopolitical axis of the world.

Will it also be the geo-economic axis? That is another question, as it would have to be presaged by ethnological superiority, which still rests in the geographical North or political West? This is all the more so because the incongruity of the Indian situation vis-à-vis China and Pakistan is the defining aspect of such a construct.

Phenomenon Putin

Russia, at the end of the Ukraine War—that is, if Trump succeeds in his current efforts—may be economically down, but it would have regained at least a substantial part of the prestige of the erstwhile Soviet Union. For one, the Kremlin and Putin can boast of having won a ‘proxy war’ against the US-led West, or at least of having ended it in a deadlock.

This is so despite Putin’s initial setback to end the war even before he began it and even before the world woke up to it and the West arranged its combined defences in a fight where additional sanctions against Russia, over and above those already in place, weaponised the same.

So much so that when Trump chose Alaska as the venue for his summit with Putin recently, the US was conceding that the much-touted ‘arrest warrant’ issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against the Russian President had become irrelevant. It was an acknowledgement that the ICC order was irrelevant from day one.

The Russian President had become the most courageous of all. Here was a leader, who was facing arrest in every Western capital, and yet he was walking into what could have been a lair laid for him, that too in a US military camp in Alaska.

Now, Putin has got what he really wanted, whatever the other territorial compromises he may have to make. The war was over Ukraine wanting to join Nato, and the US especially encouraging the same for close to thirty years. Now, both have mud on their faces, with the US proposing ‘No Nato membership for Ukraine’, and Kyiv conceding it. Europe can only stand out. All of Putin’s newfound glory would be over and above what accrues to Trump for his effort at ending what had become an unending war – and embarrassingly so for the US and its allies.

All of it also leads up to one conclusion, one situation. Up to now in the post-Cold War era, the world has got used to ranking Russia way below the US and China, rather as an appendage of the latter. It is not unlikely that China and Xi Jinping too have got used to such an idea. But now after neutralising Western Europe and the US together—the Kremlin may want to develop its own equations with China.

Not their war

In this background, India can see itself being wooed in many directions. On the one side, you will have the US and Europe, and the battle of mutual supremacy may be rejoined after the distraction provided by the Ukraine War. Likewise, Russia and China will be on the same side of the global divide, still silently seeking to woo India, one-upping the other.

Of course, it presupposes a situation in which China concedes its legitimate space in the global community. The shadow-boxing between the US and China thus far in South Asia centred on India.

The events of the past months, especially, and since the outbreak of the Ukraine War, have otherwise helped India to define/redefine its geopolitical and geo-economic priorities, and hence the geostrategic space. After unjustifiably denying India fertiliser, rare earths and bore-drilling machinery, China, during Wang Yi’s visit, has agreed/offered to reconsider/revive their supply.

That’s only a beginning, and that can only be a beginning. India-China bilateral relations are too complex, and the Xi leadership in particular has complicated them in multiple ways. They include China’s geo-economic outreach in India’s neighbourhood, including the vast Indian Ocean waters, aimed at geopolitical influence and geostrategic space.

China can now argue that all of it was aimed at containing the US in what Beijing sees as its legitimate space for expansion/expansionist policies, and not necessarily at India. But that was not the message that they conveyed to New Delhi.

Of course, once late Defence Minister George Fernandes declared in a leaked letter to American President Bill Clinton that the Pokhran-II (1998) nuclear weapons tests were aimed at China (not Pakistan). Further, the Quad grouping, of which India continues to be a part, is primarily aimed at countering Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific, although other objectives are now being emphasised. However, India has consistently conveyed that matters of security, defence, and geostrategy will remain bilateral—with New Delhi alone deciding for India.

Complex situation

None of this suggests that India is anywhere close to severing ties with America for good or fully embracing China. New Delhi’s relations with Russia will continue to be on an even keel; Moscow has proved to be more trustworthy than others.

As it turned out, at the first available opportunity after meeting Trump in Alaska, Putin called PM Modi to brief him on what was discussed. He did not wait for the immediate and previously scheduled visit of EAM Jaishankar to Moscow, when, anyway, Russian interlocutors would have briefed the visitor on the Alaska summit.

Now after all that has happened on the India-US front, PM Modi has decided to travel to China for the SCO Summit. It would have been doubtful till near the last moment if he would participate, given particularly China’s known weapons supplies, whose only purpose was to use against India.

India has still not forgotten China’s tactical support to Pakistan during Operation Sindoor.

The question now is what will flow from a Modi-Xi summit on the sidelines of the SCO summit, and how it will influence bilateral relations and multilateral equations.

Alongside would also be discussions on India wanting to do more and more business through the rupee, and not the US dollar, purely for economic reasons. However, the geopolitical impact of the same could be devastating for the US, especially if it became a trendsetter.

But all these will still create a difficult situation for India, as avoiding harm and keeping its strategic independence will be crucial challenges for India in times to come.

N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst & political commentator. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.