Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit to Russia in five years underscores the strategic importance India attaches to its relationship with Moscow. Indian leaders view that relationship as essential to a balanced foreign policy — especially at a time when India seems, at least to some, to be subtly tilting toward the West — and to providing strategic leverage against China.
Russia and India started holding annual summits in 2000. After Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2021 trip to New Delhi, it was Modi’s turn to visit Moscow in 2022.
However, in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — which spurred the US and its partners to impose unprecedented sanctions on the country — Modi kept deferring his visit.
Illustration: Mountain People
He did meet Putin in 2022 on the sidelines of a regional summit in Uzbekistan, where he told the Russian leader that it was no time for war.
Today, it is apparent that Russia has neither been isolated internationally nor hobbled economically, despite the West’s best efforts. So, after narrowly winning a third term last month, Modi announced that he would take his long-delayed trip to Moscow.
The objective of the visit on Monday and Tuesday was not to take Russia’s side; on the contrary, at last month’s G7 meeting in Italy, Modi embraced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and engaged in bilateral discussions with him. Rather, Modi was seeking to affirm India’s enduring foreign policy independence, while reaping the strategic benefits of closer ties with Russia.
India’s relationship with Russia dates back to 1971, when India was at its most vulnerable. The Pakistani military was attempting to crush the independence movement in then-East Pakistan — now Bangladesh — by any means necessary. Up to 3 million Bangladeshi civilians (mainly Hindus singled out by Pakistan’s Muslim army) were slaughtered, about 200,000 women were coerced into rape camps and about 10 million people fled to India.
The US was more than complicit in the carnage. Far from pushing back against Pakistan’s military dictator, General Yahya Khan, then-US president Richard Nixon’s administration maintained friendly relations with him to advance US interests in Asia.
While Khan’s army carried out the genocide in East Pakistan, Nixon sent then-US national security adviser Henry Kissinger from Pakistan to Beijing on his now-famous secret trip, which led to Nixon’s own visit to China in February 1972.
At a White House meeting, Kissinger credited Khan for the success of his “cloak and dagger” diplomacy with China, saying: “Yahya hasn’t had such fun since the last Hindu massacre.”
On a memorandum from Kissinger regarding the crisis, Nixon wrote: “To all hands: Don’t squeeze Yahya at this time.”
Yet that was not all. In an effort to prevent Bangladesh from achieving independence, 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, declassified White House tapes and documents show.
Nixon went so far as to tell Kissinger that India needed a “mass famine.”
Faced with such hostility, then-Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi concluded a friendship treaty with the Kremlin. The pact’s security provisions helped to deter China from opening a front against India when Indian forces eventually intervened to help Bangladesh gain independence in a swift, 13-day operation.
Nixon’s dissatisfaction was obvious: 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.
Today, India maintains deeper and broader ties with the US than with Russia, but Nixon’s China opening still haunts the bilateral relationship. With its decades-long policy of aiding China’s economic rise, the US not only created the greatest strategic adversary it has ever faced, but also saddled India with a formidable military foe that is aggressively striving for regional hegemony. One manifestation of this is the Sino-Indian military standoff in the Himalayas, which is now in its fifth year.
This is a key motivation behind India’s efforts to strengthen its relationship with Russia, which India believes can counterbalance China. After all, Russia extends across 11 time zones and possesses huge reserves of natural resources, an enormous nuclear arsenal, increasing space prowess and veto power at the UN Security Council.
Moreover, Russia and China are natural competitors, with sharply diverging interests in Central Asia, Northeast Asia and the Arctic, which each country regards as part of its strategic backyard.
Even so, Russia and China have been growing progressively closer in the past few years — and it is largely the US’ fault. This alliance of convenience — which Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) have termed a “no-limits partnership” — threatens not only to accelerate the relative decline of an overstretched US, but also to erode Indian security.
Already, China has leveraged its position as an economic lifeline for Russia to gain access to advanced Russian military technologies, which were previously sold only to India. No country is profiting more from the Ukraine war than China.
Someone must drive a wedge between Russia and China. With the US unwilling to take the lead, it is up to India to convince Moscow not to align itself too closely with Beijing.
Fortunately, this is hardly an unrealistic proposition: Although Russia’s promise to provide North Korea with immediate military assistance in the case of war is not good news, its new defense pact with China’s estranged client does suggest that Putin is willing to chart his own course.
The first step for India must be to try to mediate an end to the Ukraine war. This would allow the US to focus on bolstering security in the Indo-Pacific region, thereby improving Taiwan’s chances of survival.
Brahma Chellaney is a professor emeritus of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
On April 19, former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) gave a public speech, his first in about 17 years. During the address at the Ketagalan Institute in Taipei, Chen’s words were vague and his tone was sour. He said that democracy should not be used as an echo chamber for a single politician, that people must be tolerant of other views, that the president should not act as a dictator and that the judiciary should not get involved in politics. He then went on to say that others with different opinions should not be criticized as “XX fellow travelers,” in reference to
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
Taiwan People’s Party Legislator-at-large Liu Shu-pin (劉書彬) asked Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) a question on Tuesday last week about President William Lai’s (賴清德) decision in March to officially define the People’s Republic of China (PRC), as governed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as a foreign hostile force. Liu objected to Lai’s decision on two grounds. First, procedurally, suggesting that Lai did not have the right to unilaterally make that decision, and that Cho should have consulted with the Executive Yuan before he endorsed it. Second, Liu objected over national security concerns, saying that the CCP and Chinese President Xi
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS