Modi-Putin summit: America must understand that it cannot make India abandon Russia

Narendra Modi’s recent trip to Moscow for the 22nd bilateral summit with Vladimir Putin revealed the cracks in India-United States ties and highlighted the fractured global landscape. The prime minister’s visit, that took place as NATO leaders met for the 75th anniversary in Washington DC to convey their moral and materiel support for Ukraine and ramp up pressure on Russia, also underscored the oft-overlooked fact that primal instincts and strategic myopia are often the primary drivers of geopolitics instead of realism or pragmatic diplomacy.

It is ironic that all the sound and fury generated in the West with commentators and even the American establishment going ballistic over Modi’s bear hug and sharing of private dinner with the Russian president misses the wood for the trees – that while India’s engagement with the West remains structurally secure, commercially viable, and underpinned by convergence of interests, India’s ties with Russia are in structural decline with fewer and fewer areas of strategic convergence.

The very mention of Russia, however, is such a red rag for the West that it fails to see, much less appreciate India’s constraints that it cannot afford to alienate Moscow altogether, nor can it base its Russia policy on western insecurities. That India acts on its own interests instead of giving into the binary worldview shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it still did because when it comes to Russia, the West wants to restrict India’s foreign policy choices and throw New Delhi’s time-tested, essential partnership with Moscow into the cauldron of its all-consuming confrontation against Putin.

A normal bilateral visit that was long overdue appeared to have gained in significance due to western overreaction. A hard look at the deliverables from the prime minister’s visit shows that on some of the crucial items on India’s wish-list – solving the trade imbalance that is skewed heavily in Russia’s favour, delivery of S400 systems that have already been delayed, illegal recruitment of Indian nationals deployed in the frontlines of the war, military logistical agreement (RELOS), increasing Russian investments in India or usage of the INSTC corridor – the concrete outcomes have been thin.

Putin has reportedly promised to discharge Indian nationals “ forced ” into fighting the war and offered compensation and citizenship package to families of those killed in action but none of it found mention in the joint statement .

Reciprocal Exchange of Logistics Agreement (RELOS) didn’t find a mention in the statement despite anticipation that it was imminent, there was no mention of a probable deadline for the delivery of the S400 systems, nor was any promise made from the Russian side to address the yawning trade deficit despite a target put on bilateral trade that is expected to touch $100 billion by 2030.

This lack of substantiveness, and the indications therein, got drowned out by the over-the-top paranoia of Atlanticists. The Americans, especially, made it all about themselves by launching a ferocious attack on the tenets of India’s multi-alignment foreign policy without realizing that it presented them, too, with an opportunity. The US ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti, warned India not to take the relationship for granted or subject it to “cynical calculations” and stressed that while ties are growing it is not yet “deep enough”.

In comments that got wide play in Indian media, Garcetti, while speaking at US-India Defense News Conclave in New Delhi, said, “I respect that India likes its strategic autonomy. But in times of conflict, there is no such thing as strategic autonomy.”

In a series of eyebrow-raising comments, the envoy added, “It’s important for us as Americans and as Indians to remember the more we put into this relationship, the more we will get out. The more we insist on kind of cynical calculations in the place of a trusted relationship, the less we will get…”

Harping on the “trust” factor, Garcetti, speaking at a forum to facilitate defence and trade ties, said, “We will, in crisis moments, need to know each other. I don’t care what paddle we put to it, but we will need to know that we are trusted friends, brothers and sisters, colleagues in times of need.”

Leaving aside the point that strategic autonomy can only be exercised during times of conflict or else it’s just a rhetorical ploy, what one found surprising is the barely concealed tone of threat against a strategic partner with whom the US, according to key officials of the Biden administration, shares “the most important bilateral relationship on the planet.”

Rhetoric isn’t a substitute for painstaking diplomacy. The line between ‘frank dialogue’ and ‘my way or highway’ bullying is clear enough. What isn’t clear is what the US envoy meant by “ceasing of strategic autonomy”. Did he mean that India is to join the US-led NATO mission to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia to get reciprocal aid if China attacks India? Or that India cannot remain a bystander when Xi Jinping decides to seize Taiwan?

Garcetti, one hopes, is aware that India is not a treaty ally of the US. Such an offer isn’t on the table, nor does India aspire to be one, and that while India does not impose choices on strategic partners, it does not accept limits on its choices either. The decision to intensify strategic partnership with the US does not involve compromising on its sovereign right to choose, and it is a bipartisan, bicameral sentiment.

Speaking of “trust”, an issue that came up repeatedly during Garcetti’s address, only one side among India and the US had resorted to ‘gunboat diplomacy’ to force the hand of the other.

When Bangladesh was under the yoke of Pakistan’s genocidal tactics in 1971 and was yearning for independence faced with mass rape and slaughter, then US president Richard Nixon’s cynical calculations led Washington to back Pakistan’s military dictator Gen Yahya Khan instead.

As Brahma Chellaney recounts in Project Syndicate, “Nixon pressed China to open a military front against India. It was Kissinger’s job to goad the Chinese into initiating troop movements toward the Indian border, according to declassified White House tapes and documents. Nixon went so far as to tell Kissinger that India needed a ‘mass famine.’”

To counter then Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi’s treaty with Moscow to deter China, Nixon “in a show of force aimed at coercing India into limiting its involvement, the US deployed a nuclear-capable naval task force off the southern tip of India. This gunboat diplomacy led India to conduct its first underground nuclear test in 1974; the US responded by imposing technology sanctions on India that remained in place for almost three decades. Meanwhile, the US and China helped Pakistan to build its own nuclear bomb,” writes Chellaney.

But why go so deep into the annals of history? Garcetti was speaking of “mutual trust” even as American infantry was involved in a two-week long “Paramount Cobra Exercise” for ‘counter-terrorism’ with Pakistani counterparts that concluded in Pabbi, Pakistan, on Saturday.

In May this year, American and Pakistani navies conducted a four-day bilateral training exercise , ‘Inspired Union 2024’, in Karachi, “focused on maritime interdiction operations, explosive ordinance disposal mine countermeasure tactics, techniques, and procedures, and harbor security.” According to a readout from the American navy, “the exercise created opportunities for improving readiness, enhancing maritime security and stability, and promoting the freedom of navigation in the US 5th Fleet area of operations.”

Garcetti would perhaps be able to explain if this is how “trusted partners” operate. The US ambassador also advised India to learn to take criticism and touting India and US as partners in a “marriage”, said, “let’s make sure that we look at each other not as a bet.”

Perhaps he hadn’t been paying attention. Just a couple of days before Garcetti’s address, US national security adsiver Jake Sullivan was heard telling an American news outlet on Modi’s visit to Russia, that “we’ve made clear to every country in the world including India that a bet on Russia as a long-term, reliable partner is not a good bet” because Russia is “becoming the junior partner to China. And in that way, they would side with China over India any day of the week…”

It’s obvious that Garcetti was not speaking in a vacuum. His sermons had sanction from the highest echelons of the Biden administration. The Hindu has reported that ahead of Modi’s trip, Sripriya Ranganathan, India’s Acting Ambassador in Washington, was “asked to explain the reason for the visit and its timing by the US State Department officials.”

The American pique seems to be centred especially on the timing of Modi’s visit that threw up images of Putin driving around his prized guest in a golf cart around his dacha and conferring Russia’s highest national award on the Indian prime minister even as NATO members were plotting his downfall in Washington. When the leader of the world’s largest democracy locks Putin in a bear hug, it dashes the intended imagery of Russian isolation.

American media outlets were chock-full of accounts of how the “visit was difficult and uncomfortable for the Biden team” and how key Biden administration officials, including deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell, worked the phone to impress upon India’s foreign secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra “that the visit’s timing was particularly problematic for Washington.”

“The optics were terrible”, one Biden administration official was quoted, as saying in Washington Post. This, when India, according to US officials themselves New Delhi had given Washington “advance notice” of Modi’s visit and reportedly also “assured the US that the trip would be light on substance.”

This infantilization of India’s foreign policy arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of the Russia-China-India dynamic. This is not a ‘you are either for us, or against us’ moment in history. If America’s aim is to weaken the Russia-China axis – as it would seem from the various policy documents issued by Biden administration and in fact, even the latest NATO declaration – then it should encourage New Delhi to keep the channels of communication well lubricated. There is a near-perfect convergence in American and Indian interests not to see Russia-China ties develop into a bloc, and it should be the endeavour of both parties to provide Moscow with reasons, options and scope to retain its agency instead of falling into the predicament.

To abandon Russia, which still enjoys robust trade and defence ties with India, and for whom New Delhi remains a hedging partner, is to practically force Moscow to draw closer to Beijing, despite the power asymmetry. Such a client-patron relationship may already be under way but India banks on its traditional ties with Russia, its calculation that Russia-China mistrust is more than skin deep and remains a lingering reality and Russia is too proud a civilization to accept Chinese vassalage.

In a fraught geopolitical climate while India is trying to bring down the temperature by placing itself as a cautious mediator, quite a different dynamic is at play at the NATO. A defiant and gaffe-prone Biden, faced with calls from within the Democratic Party to stand down for his rapid cognitive decline and a belligerent media at home, has decided to prove his virility and strength by bashing Russia to a pulp.

He might be confusing Harris with Trump or Zelenskyy with Putin, but remains fixated on “beating Putin”. The NATO that met in Washington accordingly decided to Trump-proof the alliance from delivering weapons to Ukraine, and has begun sending US-made F-15 fighter jets to bolster Kyiv, drawing a combative response from Russia.

Even as NATO allies go into full-scale offensive mode against the nation that possess the largest nuclear arsenal in the world while shutting down all channels of communication and trying to isolate Putin, when it comes to China, their attitude show only an incremental change – from a distant threat to only a “decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine.”

In its statement, NATO members hit out at Beijing for enabling “the largest war in Europe in recent history” and call for ceasing “all material and political support to Russia’s war effort” yet they “remain open to constructive engagement with the PRC, including to build reciprocal transparency with the view of safeguarding the Alliance’s security interests.”  In sum and substance, the change isn’t a marked one from earlier documents, such as the 2022 Strategic Concept when alliance members vowed to “work together responsibly, as Allies, to address the systemic challenges posed by the PRC to Euro-Atlantic security and ensure NATO’s enduring ability to guarantee the defence and security of Allies.”

While NATO missed the chance to call out China as a “threat”, it is evident that geography trumps geopolitics. Despite demanding from India that it degrade ties with Russia so that NATO’s mission remains successful, the US-led 31-member alliance has little regard for New Delhi’s concerns for whom the China threat remains a dangerous reality. PLA’s belligerence at the LAC is taking new forms as China pushes its revanchist claims over Indian sovereign territory.

The question then arises, how different is India’s “constructive engagement” with Russia?

If NATO can refrain from designating China as a specific threat and keep trade (the EU and China are each other’s largest trading partners) and business relations intact, why can’t India do the same with Moscow?

If anything, India has a stronger case because unlike China vis-à-vis Europe, Russia is not out to subvert India’s security, interests and values. On the other hand, Modi sat across Putin and delivered a stern message on the suspected Russian attack on a children’s hospital in Kyiv, telling the Russian president that the death of innocent children was “painful and terrifying”. The prime minister told the Russian president that “for a bright future for the new generation, peace is most essential…Peace talks do not succeed amidst bombs, guns and bullets…”

He remains the only world leader with the intent and capability to do so.

As former Indian ambassador to Russia Pankaj Saran writes in Hindustan Times, “Engagement and discussion are needed most when tensions are high and even bigger conflagrations seem imminent. India has been a leading advocate of this approach towards global conflicts. If talks between the two leaders can pave the way to peace and de-escalation, they would serve a cause that goes far beyond the bilateral. The visit does not signify India’s support to Russia’s actions just as India’s interactions with the West do not constitute a stand against Russia.”

It was clear from Modi’s statement, when he referred to the “international community” during his tête-à-tête with Putin while stressing on “peace talks”, that he remained aware of what was at stake. While this is a sort of counterfactual to Putin’s well-laid plan of putting Modi in trouble by bombing a hospital the day the Indian prime minister landed in Moscow, it is also an indication that India and the US can manage the relationship despite the Russia irritant.

The US has a propensity to define the India-Russia partnership as one where New Delhi is beholden to Moscow. India holds a few cards as well, and its status as Russia’s hedge against the West allows for a degree of balance against intensifying Russia-China axis. It would require the US-led West to steer clear of myopia to grasp this reality.

More than that, however, it would require Washington to come to terms with and adapt to the realities of a multipolar world.

The author is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets @sreemoytalukdar. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.