New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to sign as many as 25 pacts as well as renew his promise to increase trade with Russia to $30 billion by 2025 in his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the eastern city of Vladivostok Wednesday.
But it is the meeting itself and what it signals that is far more important than the bond paper on which the agreements are printed in two languages, both English and Russian, that is of consequence in a world that is in the middle of great churn.
Modi is keenly aware that he is the keynote at one of Putin’s favourite foreign policy parties, the Eastern Economic Forum — last year, China’s Xi Jinping was the chief guest — and this year’s spectacle will be attended by Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad and Mongolia’s Khaltmaagiin Battulga.
Considering the PM has broken bread with the leaders of the Western world — US’s Donald Trump, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s Angela Merkel as well as UAE’s ruler Sheikh Zayed al Nahyan — less than ten days ago, government sources indicated that the opportunity to demonstrate India’s dedication to multi-polarity with his embrace of Putin is both necessary and important.
The churn
For Modi, this is a key meeting. Russia remains India’s most important defence supplier, having returned to the top spot after being displaced by the US in 2014. Apart from the S-400 air defence systems that are worth $5.2 billion, and for which New Delhi has been willing to absorb the threat of possible US sanctions, India has just leased a third nuclear submarine from Moscow for about $3 billion and bought two stealth frigates for $500 million as well as other Russian armoury.
The submarine gives India’s Navy the potential blue-water edge especially in its dealings with its Asian rival, the Chinese, next door. Considering Moscow and Beijing have a special relationship — apart from the defence arena, Chinese guest workers all along the border inside eastern Russia are beginning to outnumber native Russians — Putin’s decision to loan a nuclear submarine to India is a signal that he is willing to roll the dice in a new great game in which there are no permanent friends or allies.
As for Modi and Trump, there has clearly been much bonhomie between the two at the Biarritz G-7 meeting — note how Modi slapped down Trump’s hand in a particularly affectionate way while Trump took back his offer to mediate on Kashmir between India and Pakistan. Moreover, the US remains hugely important as a source of FDI and Modi is going to pitch the attraction of the Indian market when he meets America’s energy majors in Houston later this month.
But Trump remains open to Pakistani blackmail on Afghanistan. Also, his threat of imposing CAATSA sanctions on India persists if New Delhi buys the S-400 from Moscow. Moreover, India has cut down its oil imports from Iran to zero, for the second time in a decade, under US pressure.
It is in the middle of this ‘manthan’, or churn, that Modi and Putin are meeting in Vladivostok.
Also read: Modi in Vladivostok, India & Russia eye mega defence, civil nuclear & energy deals
What’s on agenda
Modi is back on centrestage at the EEF — at the G7 photo-op, he was relegated to the back row. As he ruminated with Russia’s Tass news agency Wednesday morning: “Nature has joined us with Russia’s Far East. Siberian cranes fly all the way to hibernate in my home state, Gujarat, every December. So they fly all the way to my home state every year, and people from my home state are going to the Far East.”
On the agenda with Putin in Vladivostok is a five-year roadmap for energy exploration and extraction, to build reserves and avoid any further hiccups on Iran imports. New Delhi intends to develop new oil-fields in Russia’s oil-rich Far East as well as sign an agreement on the import of LNG. Russia may also suggest building another six civil nuclear power plants in India, over and above the 12 already committed, as well as joint collaboration in third countries like Bangladesh.
“The intent to develop greater ties in energy between India and Russia is going to be followed by actual action on the ground,” Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale told reporters on the eve of Modi’s visit.
The US-Russia manoeuvring
Certainly, Modi’s enthusiasm to travel the world and push India’s foreign policy abroad is unmatched in recent years. Manmohan Singh was a reluctant traveller and Atal Bihari Vajpayee liked the slow and easy pace.
But what is interesting is that although the India-Russia relationship has stood the demise of the Soviet Union as well as time, it is Modi who has resurrected it in recent years.
When he came to power in 2014, the US had already displaced Russia as India’s top arms import destination, in the wake of the Indo-US nuclear deal. Former PM Manmohan Singh believed that friendship with the world’s most powerful nation would result in significant benefits. Sure enough, the Chinese not only went on to blink in 2008 on India’s entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group, but agreed to sign a “guiding principles” pact in 2005 — for the first time since the 1962 Indo-China War — that would help resolve the protracted border issue.
Modi was more than willing to take forward the special India-US relationship that he inherited — until he ran into Trump. Apart from a personality clash, in which Trump barely understood the self-belief that Indian leaders have of representing a unique civilisation, the US president believed New Delhi could have done much more in aiding the US in Afghanistan as well as in rebalancing the trade deficit in US’s favour.
It was in Sochi in May last year, during an informal summit, that the Modi-Putin friendship came into its own. For the best part of the day, Putin shepherded him across this tiny Russian town on the Black Sea, taking him for a boat ride and driving with him right up to the airport. Few outside the charmed circle of South Block know what the two really talked about, but from the photos it seems as if in Sochi, Modi’s smile is brighter, his embrace of Putin a shade tighter.
The first Modi-Putin summit in 2014 — the annual summit between an Indian and Russian leader for the past decade — was titled “Druzhba-Dosti”, the Russian-Hindi word for ‘friendship’, but it was after Sochi in 2018 that the essence began to percolate through.
How the ‘dosti’ has evolved
Old-timers cheered the renewed “druzhba” and “dosti” but it was soon clear that the nostalgia of “Hindi-Russi bhai-bhai” — built on the bedrock of a Cold War in which India had carved out its own brave, non-aligned niche — could hardly be replicated in this new, brutal international order.
Only months before India went to war with Pakistan in December 1971, it had signed with Soviet Union the Treaty of Friendship & Cooperation — both sides promised to come to each other’s aid in case of a conflict. So when the Soviets warned the USS Enterprise, America’s aircraft carrier, from sailing into the Bay of Bengal, and the Americans backed off, the special tie between New Delhi and Moscow was sealed.
Andrei Gromyko — the Soviet foreign minister who exercised the veto at the UN Security Council so often that he came to be dubbed “Comrade Nyet” — as well as his predecessors and successors punched a few of those vetoes in favour of India on the Goa, Bangladesh and Kashmir questions.
In his heyday, former Indian PM Lal Bahadur Shastri agreed to go to Tashkent, then the capital of a Soviet republic, to talk peace with Pakistan after the 1965 war. Arms imports rose to an astronomical level of about 80 per cent. A special rouble-rupee relationship allowed the export of Indian goods, like tea (sometimes sawdust was passed off as tea), shoes (often, the uppers came unsealed at the first brush with Russia’s winter) and jewellery.
But there was something indescribable that connected the two incredibly diverse nations. Russia had a heart beat for Indian star Raj Kapoor. And Progress Publishers brought home the Russian classics in several Indian languages in the smallest towns of the country — not Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam, who were proscribed by Stalin during the Gulag, but Maxim Gorky, Leo Tolstoy and Mikhail Sholokhov and scores of other writers.
When Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature for Doctor Zhivago in 1958 and the Soviets refused to let him go to Stockholm to accept it, it was Nehru who chastised them. (Pasternak wrote to the Swedish academy that he was “Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed,” and one day later, refused to accept the award.)
In the mid-1980s, Rajiv Gandhi ordered the largest temporary export of Indian performing arts and crafts as part of a “Festival of India” across the 15 republics of the Soviet Union. It was an incredible, ambitious event and paid tribute to the unique relationship — a political and strategic bond that was uniquely embedded in a cultural and people-to-people context that hasn’t been replicated since.
But the world was changing by the time former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. He accelerated the change with two Russian words — “perestroika” and “glasnost”, restructuring and freedom. Perhaps, Soviet planners didn’t understand anything other than a command economy and the Union was doomed to break up. China’s Deng Xiaoping certainly learnt from his Communist compatriots next door. Even P.V. Narasimha Rao, by then prime minister, indirectly criticised the bruising pace of the “opening up”. (Rao and his finance minister Manmohan Singh were, over the next five years, about to preside over the biggest change in India’s own history through economic reforms.)
The break-up of the Soviet Union into 15 republics meant that the supply chains of India’s arms imports were abruptly cut off — the factories were all littered across the various republics, all of whom were hardly friendly to Moscow. As Russia plumbed the depths of poverty, the former superpower turned to New Delhi and Beijing. India and China’s defence orders helped put the workers back into Russian arms factories and fund R&D into the building of cutting-edge fighter jets. In turn, it also helped build India’s space programme.
The little-told story of how ex-US president Bill Clinton pushed Boris Yeltsin’s Russia in 1993 to invoke a force majeure clause and stop all cooperation between Glavkosmos and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will always remain a gem in the annals of the bilateral relationship. This is because, behind the scenes, scientists from both space agencies worked to transfer truckloads of documents to India that would go on to form the backbone of India’s space programme, said Indian officials.
Also read: PM Modi in Russia, visits Zvezda shipbuilding complex with President Putin
Where things stand today
On 17 August, the eve of the closed door consultations on Kashmir at the UN Security Council, Russian deputy permanent representative Dmitry Polyanskiy in New York tweeted that any resolution on the region should take into account the “UN Charter” and relevant “UN resolutions”.
New Delhi saw red.
There were several rebuttals from high levels in Moscow, including from Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. But India also realised that a junior civil servant’s keenness to play the human rights card, notwithstanding Putin’s own, was a measure, albeit imperfect, of what the rest of the world was thinking on Kashmir.
On the condition of anonymity, Russia-watchers point out the similarities between Modi and Putin. Both are strong leaders, impatient with disagreement. Both are willing to make unpopular decisions — Putin has dealt harshly with his restive southern republics like Chechnya as well as cracked down on protests in the heart of Moscow.
Both are also leaders of economies that are barely out of the red — India’s GDP at around $2.7 trillion is higher than Russia at $1.6 trillion, but with a lower per capita income.
The big differences are that India is a real democracy, and Putin wields a Security Council veto.
A new road ahead?
In Vladivostok, Modi and Putin took a fast-moving boat to the ‘Zvezda’ shipyard, which builds not only frigates but also oil tankers which Russia hopes India will use when it buys Russian crude. Both leaders will also watch a judo championship — Putin, of course, is a judoka and a black belt at that.
The temperature in Vladivostok suits them both fine.
Modi’s presence at the Eastern Economic Forum tells the Western world as well as Russia’s best friend China that you cannot take India for granted. His participation in the bilateral summit, the 20th meeting in the last two decades, signifies that he is willing to stamp his approval on a time-tested relationship.
As for Putin, his invite to Modi is a signal to the world that he will go out of his way to befriend a middle power, notwithstanding the fact that New Delhi’s ambition outstrips its capacity, especially in these post-demonetisation times. Putin knows that India is hardly an ally in his own prickly relationship with the US, and that India and China are at the best of times, warily eyeing each other.
Modi and Putin need each other. Perhaps a brave, new multi-polar world is actually here.
Also read: In Modi era, France has replaced Russia as India’s new best friend
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A two way trade target of $ 30 billion by 2025 is modest. The Russian economy is overly dependent on natural resources, led by hydrocarbons. India’s participation in global merchandise trade is levelling off. So it will be oil, gas and weapons. 2. Our foreign policy had swung too far to the US, so the reset to Russia is timely and welcome. Should India desire it, Russia would be happy to lend a hand with China and – indirectly – Pakistan. Till that happens, President Putin would sell us what we need. Try leasing an Ohio class submarine from the United States.