No country is ever fully sovereign. Cold War era taught India its real meaning

India’s fraught neighbourhood places multiple constraints on its strategic choices. It leaves no time to take a deep breath, lean back and reset.

Illustration: Shruti Naithani | ThePrint

It’s early days in 2026 but the word ‘sovereignty’ is the most likely front-runner for word of the year. In Indian politics, it’s now a key buzzword. And it gets radioactive whenever Trump makes any reference to India. Or even when something normal and reciprocal happens, like his ambassador Sergio Gor visiting the Western Command HQ at Chandimandir.

Trump has brought sovereignty back in fashion. He’s broken three decades of globalisation consensus that persuaded nations to see benefit in sharing sovereignty with their friends and allies, in groupings and alliances. This is over. Trump has persuaded every nation, especially ally or partner, from Canada to India, to rediscover that ‘S’ word.

In India, it reawakened only lately latent emotions. You could see it as the end of the era of complacency, or a test of our national wisdom. India’s short era of strategic pragmatism is being put to test.

You can attribute it to our history of colonisation. Or subsequent victimisation by the West (read America) as Pakistan became its treaty ally. Later, the wounds were made deeper and the fortress mentality stronger as India faced successive sanctions and technology denial after the two Pokhran tests in 1974 and 1998.

All of the pressures on our nuclear and missile programme in the infamous “cap, rollback and eliminate” era also came from Washington. India’s larger, philosophical concept of sovereignty therefore came to be defined as defiance of America. This lived experience produced a nationalism that was as thin skinned as the suspicion of the US was deep.

The ‘foreign hand’ was always American. Its adversaries, the Soviet Union and its allies, were natural friends. Until one day in 1990-91, the Soviet Union and its bloc vapourised. Since then, India has been exploring the new, unipolar world and steadily building a perch for itself in this unfamiliar terrain. The larger result has been a steady but decisive tilt towards the West. From PV Narasimha Rao to Narendra Modi through Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, every Indian leader has wrestled with the same strategic dilemma: How to build relationships in the post-Cold War era without joining any camp.

India’s fraught neighbourhood places multiple constraints on its strategic choices. Broadly, let’s look at a dual constraint. Because India is always in a hair-trigger situation with Pakistan and always worries about when the Chinese make the Line of Actual Control (LAC) active, it leaves no time to take a deep breath, lean back and reset. Americans like to underline the challenge of walking and chewing gum. For India, the China-Pakistan alliance produces a much greater complexity.

Here’s the reason we call it a dual constraint. The first is, India needs its armed forces to be always battle-ready, and significantly deployed. A lot of the hardware is still of Soviet/Russian origin and that dependence can’t be wished away. Further, Russia is critical to some of India’s most sensitive and strategic programmes, the nuclear submarines (SSNs) for example. The second is, to avoid a two-front challenge it needs stable ties, even trade compromises with China.

Managing this relationship means it can’t say anything rude about Russia over Ukraine or even publicly accept Trump’s claims that it has committed to stop buying Russian oil. The complexity is evident in the fact that, before the Ukraine war when Europe and America wanted India to buy Russian oil at a price ceiling to help maintain global energy prices, India was buying almost no crude from Russia. Forget being critical to India’s energy security, it did not even figure in the conversation. Now there’s pressure from public opinion to not stop buying. Tell them you are sovereign.

The defiance Indian governments of the past showed to American pressure is being invoked often, reminding us how Indira Gandhi showed Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger their place. That’s a reality, but only half the story. 

The other is, that while Indira Gandhi defied one bloc, she made India nearly (or partly) a member of the other. From 1969 when she needed the pro-Moscow Communist Party of India (CPI) MPs to keep her minority government in power, her tilt to Moscow became pronounced. From 9 August 1971, India became a treaty-bound ally of the USSR. It wasn’t your vanilla security treaty, but buried in much text of platitudes was also Article IX, which amounted to a mutual security guarantee.

It came handy as the US 7th Fleet sailed to foil India, guaranteed a Soviet veto in the UNSC and enabled India to stock up military hardware very quickly including several hundred T-55 tanks from Poland. This while China, the new friend of the US, rearmed Pakistan.

The 1971 victory was the peak of glory for Indira and India, and a humiliation for the Nixon administration as their ward was dismembered. But, did this mean India had total sovereignty? On one issue after another, it had to side with the Soviets, whatever the moral argument. Kampuchea/Cambodia and Afghanistan tested India’s claims to morality. At least one of these, Afghanistan, created a strategic mess for India. It revived the US-Pakistan alliance, seeded the jihadi culture and created space for Islamabad to nuclearise.

Did this phase in our history, say from 1969 to 1989, see our sovereignty compromised? The answer is no. Sovereignty is not something hallmarked like gold. Sovereignty for any nation, the US and China included, is relative. In essence, it means a nation must have the space to make its choices, even compromises. In the Cold War India’s sovereign choice was to tilt towards Moscow. Afterwards, there’s been a slow linkage with Washington. At the same time the relationship with Russia is nursed, stability sought with China and deterrence built with Pakistan, even as the same Russia becomes an iron-clad China ally. That’s because Putin makes sovereign choices too. No country is ever fully sovereign, not even neutral Switzerland. They all make their choices and compromises. Opportunism becomes a valid tool in the hands of the wise and there’s no shame in it.

The upshot is, in the Cold War era, India had to put up with Soviet misdemeanors—Afghanistan being the most important. Some of our responses to the US are a mirror image of that.

So strong was our anti-Americanism that in no city of India was any landmark named after an American until Revanth Reddy decided to name a road after Donald Trump in Hyderabad. In New Delhi, even now, there’s none but Roosevelt House, the US Ambassador’s residence. We didn’t even name an avenue after Martin Luther King.

Today we live in a globalised world of inter-dependencies and the idea of sovereignty needs greater flexibility. All nations are searching for new alliances, and shared vested interest is the only guiding principle. Ideology and morality are out. A good personification of this change will be seen in New Delhi in a week as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney comes by, repairing a relationship his predecessor tore up. His choice: put up with Trump’s threats to Canada’s sovereignty, or hedge with relationships elsewhere.

As a student of Indian politics, one of my most memorable Walk The Talk interviews was with then CPM general secretary Harkishen Singh Surjeet. You’ve backed governments that continued improving ties with the US, I asked. How do you justify that?

“Dekhiye,” (please see), he said, India needs technology. We used to get it from the Soviet Union which now doesn’t exist. So we need America. We have to do what our national interest demands.

This is a short tutorial on sovereignty from the great Left ideologue. I could’ve simply told you this story upfront rather than make you read 1,200 words.