Vladimir Putin, as expected, chose to visit China immediately after getting sworn in as Russia’s president for a fifth time. The growing proximity of Moscow and Beijing, expressed through renewed vows and pledges, is one of the most pressing challenges facing New Delhi today. The solution to this geopolitical quandary – ‘best friend sleeping with enemy number one’— can be found neither in the historicity of India-Russia ties nor in the self-fulfilling prophecy of multi-alignment. Remember, the latter is a means, not an end.
One of the major fallacies in Indian strategic thinking today is under estimating the forces that embed Moscow with Beijing. The well-meaning but simplistic arguments vary from ‘Russia being a historical friend’, to ‘Russia will never accept a junior partner status’.
These assertions are rooted, at best, in perceived historicity. They pin their logic on an image of Russia, not its unfolding reality.
The contours of the Russia-China bonhomie began to appear much before the war in Ukraine. The conflict, in fact, became the tipping point that manifested and accelerated this friendship. For the record, Chinese President Xi Jinping is the only leader Putin has met more than 40 times in the last decade.
On average, it means more than four times a year.
There was no Russia-Ukraine war then.
Subverting global order
Xi’s ascent to power showed his ambitions for re-founding a middle kingdom (China’s self-symbolism) that cannot be realised without altering the global order created after 1945 – cartographically and normatively. India is not trying to subvert that order. It is trying to justifiably rectify the narrative building, in line with its textured indigenous discourse and rich cultural capital, set in New Delhi and not decided in other capitals.
Russia’s resurgence under Putin, especially after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 that landed it the first set of half-hearted sanctions by the West, found a natural fit in another revisionist power – China. Just as Beijing started to drop veneers from the real intent of its economic statecraft, it began claiming land and maritime territories of other sovereign nations in sheer irredentism. Russia, on its part, was doing the same. It created a self-fulfilling narrative where the Russian state was in perpetual attack from the West; Moscow was simply taking away parts of its neighbours’ territories to stop them from joining NATO.
What truly binds the two nations is their fundamental disregard for international law and the United Nations Charter. Both consider international borders and sovereignty as malleable according to home-grown imperial claims. And to keep at it, they need each other, along with satellites like North Korea and Iran, who operate on a similar hatred for the West, although for different reasons. China and Russia’s vow to subvert the global order will prevail, regardless of whether Russia wins or loses the Ukraine war.
Everything we see in Russia-China jointness — hydrocarbon sales, weapons sales, dual-use tech, fiscal support for the ruble and enabling international trade in Yuan — flows from a fundamental desire to paint the world in a subverted international order where leaders of the state, not written treaties, decide what territory belongs to whom.
India is already embroiled in a convoluted battle with China along the world’s longest disputed border. It has fought wars, lost territory and been stabbed in the back for honouring written agreements. Beijing, on the other hand, conveniently decided to switch the interpretation of those written agreements and perpetrated a Galwan.
Russia would never do that to India, but it is doing that to its neighbours. And for continuing to do so, it needs China, not India. As discomforting as it may sound, that is how the cunning of history is unfolding.
Every single argument made to undermine this unnerving proposition today operates on strategic romance, not strategic realism. It does not offer any solution to grapple with it except wishful engagement. What is often missed in this insistence is that engagement is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for preserving India’s interests.
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De-risking multi alignment
New Delhi needs to have a grand strategy for protecting and pursuing its national interests. The inherent value of multi-alignment notwithstanding, India has to de-risk its currently omnidirectional multi-alignment, which runs a greater risk of landing in messy-polarity than strengthening multi-polarity.
De-risking of multi-alignment entails not only differentiation but also the stratification of India’s imminent and long-term interests. The first step is to chalk out the verticals of its comprehensive national power (CNP) and not get preoccupied with whataboutery or smart explanations. New Delhi does not owe an explanation to anyone – neither Washington nor Brussels nor Moscow. The only explanation India owes is to its vox populi.
A derisked multi-alignment should focus on four Ns. The first is ‘national interest’, which is not fixed but evolving. The second is preserving India’s ‘neighbourhood’, which is overpowered by China’s sinister loans and string of pearls. The third is ‘norms’ to reinforce the ideational capital of India’s core worldview, commitment to reformed multilateralism and UN charter. The fourth and last N would be the ability of ‘nimble navigation’ across contesting worldviews and chasms.
Modi 2.0 navigated the country through the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war, both black swan events. Modi 3.0 will need to be bolder and more pragmatic about pursuing CNP at home and abroad.
At home, the country needs to bring efficiency in outdated agriculture and labour laws, a feat attempted but suspended. India also needs to brainstorm the reasons for falling net FDIs amid an ongoing China+1. It is one thing to have good relations with affluent economies and another to get them to invest in India. For fostering international trade, the government has done the right thing by focusing on trade in services, an oft-neglected area of India’s erstwhile Free Trade Agreements.
As a skilled, educated workforce of professionals, India’s push for trade in services will bring the right FTA utilisation that has evaded the country so far. Apart from boosting the manufacturing sector, trade relationships with export surplus need to be underscored and nurtured. Out of its top 10 trading partners, India only has it with the United States. While the India-US FTA is lying dormant due to Washington’s protectionism, India should focus on the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies (ICET) for partaking in the emerging web of critical and emerging tech. The US is also one of the largest investors in India.
FTAs such as with the United Kingdom are also low-hanging fruits that will bolster a trade already to India’s export advantage. India must also review its insistence on not giving bilateral guarantees to international investments. Such inhibitions are holding up all the accumulated capital, which is channelled elsewhere. The unprecedented FTA with the four European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries, which has made promises to facilitate $100 billion investment in India, is a major step ahead but only pertains to four developed nations. The EU-India FTA cannot be signed in its current form because of highly controversial issues like the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). The EU-India bilateral investment treaty has more potential to reach fruition if resilient measures are adopted by both sides.
Several researches have shown that India’s weapons dependence on a single source Russia will reduce drastically. While India has moved to different partners like France and the US for key weapon platforms, ultimately the magic lies in the golden balance between diversification and indigenisation. The latter, a beautiful word replete with amour propre, remains a rocky path in banal reality. Almost oblivious of the complicated balance of maritime capabilities of China and Pakistan, India’s conventional submarine project is once again struggling in a new stunde null; the government is only delaying acquisition by attaching fresh conditionality. The same could be said of India’s long-standing drone programme, which has been shelved due to a lack of government investments. We need to commit ourselves to outcomes to make a transition from a buyer’s armed forces to a builder’s armed forces. And that goes beyond issues of transfer of technology and lowest bidder deals.
Today’s ambivalent world order with power transitions offers itself to India’s strategic imagination. The permutation and combination of strategies will continue, and so will engagement. Of course, Russia continues to be an important partner. Its utility, however, in the light of its deepening embeddedness with China, should be assessed continuously in the larger pursuit of India’s CNP.
The writer is an Associate Fellow, Europe and Eurasia Center, at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)