New Delhi: In 2021, the year before the Russia-Ukraine war erupted, Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance bought Russian crude worth USD 85 million. As the war intensified, the purchases grew. The year 2023 witnessed a peak when Reliance bought USD 11.7-billion worth of crude, according to data sourced by The Washington Post.
The Post’s Pranshu Verma and Khadija Sharife decode what has, of late, become the thrust of US President Donald Trump’s messaging against India—it is “funding” the Russian war machine.
This year too, “roughly half” of Reliance’s crude oil has come from Russia. There are 17 tankers that have made 29 trips to Reliance’s Sikka Port, the report says.
“Reliance has purchased about $33 billion in oil from Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a previously unreported sum that accounts for roughly 8 percent of Moscow’s crude sales over that period, according to internal government data obtained by The Washington Post,” write Varma and Sharife.
Neither Trump nor his top economic officials, who have taken the lead in lashing out at India, have singled out Reliance for criticism, they write.
“Yet it is India’s top buyer of Russian oil, according to data from the ship tracking company Kpler, and is likely to remain so for years to come. In December, the company inked a 10-year deal with Rosneft, Russia’s sanctioned state-owned oil company, which provides Reliance with 500,000 barrels of crude oil per day in an agreement valued at $13 billion annually,” says the report, which also looks at the ostensibly close relationship between Ambania and Modi.
This makes things awkward, analysts tell The Post. The tension between Modi and Trump is centered around Russian oil and—as Varma and Sharife write—”Ambani has attempted to make inroads into Trump’s orbit”.
In a statement to The Post, Reliance Industries said its “purchases of Russian oil do not reflect a political position on the conflict”, adding that the purchases “have always been fully compliant with international regulations”.
The New York Times analyses how the Gen Z movement in Nepal impacts India and its ambition of becoming a superpower.
The Nepal uprising was the latest youth-led explosion in India’s neighbourhood–– Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have also similarly upended their governments through powerful, public protests. The tenuous nature of governance in South Asian countries does not work in India’s favour, Anupreeta Das and Hari Kumar write.
In fact, they argue, it “distracts India from focusing on its ambition to be a global superpower,” because it cannot ignore what is happening in its backyard.
“It already faces accusations from its smaller and poorer neighbors that it switches between ignoring them and bullying them, postures driven by self-interest rather than helping their development,” says the piece. “Neighbors such as Nepal have occasionally found themselves depending on India for humanitarian assistance and their economic stability, while chafing at its meddling in their domestic affairs.”
Letting power vacuums develop in adjoining countries or failing to show leadership only risks further harm to India’s interests, analysts told The New York Times. “It also emboldens China, which is edging its way into India’s traditional sphere of influence, from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, by providing India’s neighbors with funding for energy, construction and other infrastructure projects.”
While India’s neighbourhood first policy seeks to build a bonhomie based on claims of civilisational ties, the neighbourhood itself is a complex web of countries who have individual bones to pick with India.
It already has a hostile neighbour, Pakistan, to its west. To its east lies Bangladesh, a country of 170 million that has sheltered anti-India insurgents, and which has a longstanding conflict with India about undocumented migrants crossing their shared 2,500-mile border, says the report. Sri Lanka, to its south, invited China to finance a port along a strategic waterway, just a few hundred miles from Indian shores, threatening India’s national security.
Trump’s 100,000 dollar H1-B thunderclap is going to make things difficult for India’s IT firms, who are already dealing with the AI onslaught, notes The Economist. Although, the situation might not be as bleak it sounds, and can be used to India’s advantage.
“The new visa fee could, therefore, accelerate the shift by multinationals to expand operations in India. (Smaller startups, though, may find it harder to hire.) Research by Britta Glennon, of the Wharton School, examining restrictions introduced in 2004, found that firms heavily reliant on H-1Bs increased their overseas employment by about a quarter compared with those less dependent on them. R&D-intensive jobs were among the first to move, and the main beneficiaries were Canada, China—and India,” says the magazine.
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)