India’s exit from the Ayni airbase in Tajikistan has sparked significant introspection and debate in recent weeks, with the focus being the lessons India needs to learn from this adverse development. Hence, the withdrawal can have an outsized influence on Indian foreign policy. However, the present discourse suffers a critical drawback — it falls for the myth that Ayni was ever an Indian airbase. The truth, however, is that Ayni has never been an Indian base — a fact better known to foreign regional experts and governments than Indians.
India’s operational hold over the airbase never matured toward a ‘strategic’ force in being — owing to Dushanbe and Moscow’s strategic calculations as well as the lack of substantive depth in Delhi-Dushanbe ties. In this light, the right lessons from the setback point more toward our own strategic lens.
If there are any lessons to be learnt, they may be the following: The redundancy of abstract assumptions about India-Russia historic friendship and its ability to turbocharge India’s strategic inroads into Central Asia (interests vs loyalties), the limits and pitfalls of triumphant projections of India’s strategic ‘moves’ in regions with very limited Indian influence (strategic overreach), and the need for paying sustained attention to local developments, intra-regional politics, and elite decision-making (realistic and grounded strategic assessments).
How it began
India’s entry into the Ayni airbase emerged from India’s growing presence in Tajikistan in the 1990s, and was based on tacit cooperation between Delhi, Dushanbe, and Tehran in assisting the Northern Alliance vis-à-vis Taliban in Afghanistan. This led to India setting up a small field hospital in Farkhor airfield in the 1990s. As the US-led global war on terror commenced in 2001, it opened yet another door for Indian ambition in the region, based on a tentative US-Russia détente in the region.
Hence, following crises like the Kandahar hijacking and the Kargil War, India decided to reach an agreement with Dushanbe to refurbish the Ayni air base at a cumulative cost of over $70 million. Even as India hoped that such efforts — within the framework of technical and economic assistance — could eventually yield in operational rights, neither side officially acknowledged this idea or talked about it. Meanwhile, it suited both Dushanbe and Moscow to have India undertake such a task — given that Moscow could not spare the funds for such a project. Hence, as the repair work reached completion by 2008-10, Moscow started to step in more assertively and began seeing Ayni as a natural complement to its 201st Motorised Rifle Division military presence in Tajikistan.
The setback years and Russia’s stealth entry
As Catherine Putz, a Central Asia expert, wrote of this dynamic in 2015, “When India was finally ready to proceed with making Ayni fully operational, Russia was having second thoughts. And during the latter half of 2007, Moscow …began pressuring President Rahmon’s administration in Dushanbe to revoke Indian access to the base”.
Under pressure from Moscow, Dushanbe had also discreetly asked India in 2009-10 to remove stationed military personnel from the base — which India reportedly complied with. Notably, even prior to this, India’s ability to station fighter jets at the base required Moscow’s approval. It seems likely that such approvals never came, and hence, India built hangars, control towers, and extended runways. But its own fighter jets could never land or station there. Perhaps in response to Dushanbe’s multi-vector diplomatic pressure, Moscow provided Tajikistan with six attack helicopters and L-39 training aircraft in 2006-7, assets that were frequently placed at Ayni ever since. Notably, the rumour of an Indian airbase in relevant capitals around the world peaked around the same time.
Such assets, in turn, further weakened the prospects for a more operationally substantive — possibly even exclusive — Indian presence or moral claim to the base. In 2012-13, Dushanbe and Moscow came to an agreement to renew the lease for the 201st Division base until 2042. Reportedly, in line with the agreement, Russian deployments of air units — including the Su-25 jets — at Ayni began by 2015.
Also read: India’s exit from Ayni airbase reveals New Delhi’s power projection limits. A key location lost
Ayni was a bargaining chip
At the same time and amid tense negotiations with Russia, Dushanbe asserted publicly that the base belonged entirely to Tajikistan and that it was ‘exclusively’ in talks with Russia regarding its future. It confirmed publicly that it was not considering such talks with India or the US. This was an assertion made repeatedly from 2011 to 2013. Notably, Dushanbe had offered the Ayni airbase free of cost to Russia as early as 2004, as part of an overall security and investment agreement. Russia’s U-turn on its decision to support the construction of Rogun Dam — out of deference to Uzbekistan — arguably buried this prospect.
Indian presence had become hostage to Dushanbe and Moscow’s inability to agree to terms regarding joint use, financing mechanisms, and growing divergences in bilateral relations. Dushanbe and Moscow went head-to-head over a wide range of issues. Dushanbe pressured Moscow for diplomatic support against Uzbekistan over a dispute related to dam construction, and sought lower energy export duties. Ayni served as a key leverage for Dushanbe as it came under increasing coercive pressure from Moscow — via energy restrictions, disruption to remittance flows.
Rumours and signalling
Even as prospects for airbase control remained unclear, India sought to exploit rumours — very often supported by Indian media — regarding its operational use of Ayni in order to enhance its regional profile, while also keeping Pakistan and China off-balance. This incentivised India to overlook real setbacks and reverses vis-à-vis Ayni, as dividends from the ‘rumour’ itself began to be seen as a valuable asset. The impact of such ‘rumours’ on incentivising Pakistan and China, meanwhile, to put pressure on Dushanbe can also be reasonably inferred.
The present context and the final exit
Russia-Tajikistan security cooperation remains to be guided by the security situation in Afghanistan. Over the last few years, this has taken the shape of renewed agreements on the deployment of Russian military personnel on the Taj-Afghan border, enhanced personnel training, the setting up of new border outposts and joint exercises, CSTO-led arms shipments to the Russia-Tajik border as well as aerial patrols in the region. Most likely, Tajikistan’s decision to formally terminate the halfway house arrangement with India had emerged from this growing trend — primarily a Russia-Tajikistan reset spanning security, economic linkages, and water security. Hence, India’s exit from Ayni represents more of a slow-burn culmination than a rude shock.
Also read: How the Bagram airbase from the 1950s is geopolitically significant in the 21st century
Are there any lessons at all?
The complex story discourages analysis that is based on value-judgment and places blame on Russia, the US or even Dushanbe. India’s own position was based on very weak foundations, especially since India-Tajikistan relations have failed to acquire greater depth over the last two decades. India did not have strong leverages in the region, and in Dushanbe’s desperate multi-vector diplomacy, Delhi became a useful bargaining chip.
Secondly, discouragement and despair may be ill-advised as well. As reported earlier by ThePrint, the initiative to develop the Ayni airbase was a “radical” idea. It was worth the gamble. The factors driving subsequent setbacks were not foreseeable in the early 2000s. Most importantly, Russia-Central Asia ties were in a state of flux at the time — enabling ambitious opportunity-seizing.
In India, there has also been this hope and belief that historic friendship between India and Russia implied a favourable Russian view toward India’s operational use of Ayni. However, this view is both ahistorical as well as innocent of strategic realities. Russia has not been known to be comfortable with such shared use of military bases. Its rejection of joint use with Tajikistan itself has been based on military logic as well as status. From a purely military point of view, Russia would always have preferred exclusive use of Ayni, regardless of ‘friendships’ and ‘positive attitudes’.
Tajikistan means a lot more to Russia than to India, after all. Narratives of strategic partnership or historical friendship cannot be expected to help sort out real divergences on the ground. This applies equally to India-US ties after all.
Finally, Indian power projection and influence will greatly depend on the choices of small powers — or partner countries — that exercise great agency despite power asymmetries. Recent experiences in Maldives and Seychelles attest to the same. India’s projection of the Chabahar Port as an Indian strategic asset also has its own repercussions. Hence, India’s focus needs to be as much on regional politics, incremental developments, and local motivations/transactions as it is on great power-centred arithmetic discourses regarding allies, friends, and convergences.
Sidharth Raimedhi is a Fellow at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research (CSDR), a New Delhi-based think tank. He tweets @SidharthRaimed1. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)