India’s decision not to criticise Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked much commentary over its foreign policy, including how India is attempting to retain strategic autonomy between the United States and Russia, among other objectives. Image by Pixabay.
by Sinderpal Singh 23 March 2024
Departing from criticisms by the United States and Europe that the Russian presidential election held from 15 to 17 March was neither free nor fair, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi has congratulated Vladimir Putin on his re-election as Russia’s president. His stance is likely to add to recent commentary about India’s failure to criticise Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its implications for India’s broader relations with the United States and Europe. This paper looks at three strands within such commentary.
India’s decision not to criticise Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked much commentary over its foreign policy, including how India is attempting to retain strategic autonomy between the United States and Russia, among other objectives. Image by Pixabay.
Recently, there has been a significant amount of commentary about India’s public position of not criticising Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its implications for India’s broader relationship with the United States and Europe. Some key strands have emerged within such commentary, and this piece aims to interrogate three of these strands.
The first is that India’s position on Russia is part of an Indian attempt to maintain strategic autonomy between the United States and Russia, a component of a broader historical reflex within Indian foreign policy. The second is that India’s position on Russia is an attempt to prevent Russia becoming, in the medium to long term, a junior partner of China, a development India views as bearing negative implications for India. The third strand represents the public announcements by Indian leaders on foreign policy as a reflection of a more confident assertion of Indian strategic autonomy, which resonates with a broad swath of India’s domestic audiences, who are increasingly critical and suspicious of the United States and Europe while sympathetic towards Russia.
Hypothesis 1: Public non-criticism of Russia is part of a long-term Indian policy of strategic autonomy vis-à-vis the United States and Europe
The key assumption in this hypothesis is that Russia is a viable, long-term, autonomous major power and the India-Russia relationship will balance India’s relations with the United States and its European allies. A close relationship with Russia will help India’s policy of seeking strategic autonomy in the practice of its longer-term foreign and security policies.
In the course of the past decade specifically, India’s relations with the United States and its allies in Europe have been fundamentally transformed. Over this period, the United States and its allies in Europe have been India’s key partners in domains as diverse as military cooperation, defence procurement, economic partnerships, technology transfer for both military uses as well as renewable energy, and cybersecurity. These trends look to continue into the medium and long term.
There are two caveats that are needed here. The first is that India is still highly dependent on Russia owing to the legacy of India’s procurement of Russian military hardware for several decades since independence. But that situation is increasingly changing as India aims to diversify its procurement sources as well as increasingly look to the United States and European states to jointly build weapons platforms within India.
Second, while there are lingering historical misgivings among India’s political class about the reliability of the United States as a partner and the fear of becoming a pawn in the US strategy of containing China globally, these sentiments are increasingly being outweighed by perceptions of China’s intransigence. There is a clear sense that China is not interested in any kind of strategic compact with India that involves stabilising tensions along their common border, and this perception increasingly reduces the options India has in building a durable and stable balance of power within its region. In this enterprise, as Russia lacks both the military and technological heft to be an alternative to the United States and Europe in India’s quest to balance against China’s intransigence and growing strength, India will have to maintain and balance strategic ties to the United States and Europe.
Hypothesis 2: India is not criticising Russia publicly as it does not want an isolated Russia to have no option but to become a junior partner to China
At the recent Raisina Dialogue in Delhi in February 2024, India’s external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, stated that “it makes sense to give Russia multiple options. If we railroad Russia to a single option, then you’re making it a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.” This statement re-surfaced the hypothesis that India’s key driver to maintain strategic autonomy between Russia and the United States and its allies was to make sure Russia did not become a junior partner of China, with obvious negative implications for India.
From India’s perspective, this is a legitimate concern, especially as the outlook for its relationship with China seems increasingly bleak. The spectre of a China-led bloc, supported by Russia as a junior partner, will create greater pressures for India both within its immediate neighbourhood in South Asia and the wider Indian Ocean region.
However, Indian leaders are acutely aware that Russia’s apparent drift towards China is not likely to be reversed by India’s “balanced” position towards Russia. They appreciate that Russia’s medium- to long-term strategic alignments will be determined by the structural nature of its strategic competition with the United States and Europe, something which India cannot significantly influence. Based on the nature of such structural competition, Russia will be left with few choices but to increasingly drift towards China, especially as China’s relationship with the United States shows little signs of significant improvement in the medium term.
The Indian state, therefore, cannot prevent this Russian drift by balancing its relations between Russia and the United States plus Europe. However, Indian leaders, like Jaishankar, have tried to articulate, at various forums, the importance of preventing, or at least slowing down, Russia’s drift towards China, as this is a key Indian interest. India can try to manage its bilateral relationship with Russia in the short to medium term to reduce the direct negative effects on Indian interests.
Indian public statements on Russia are thus a means to manage the country’s bilateral relationship with Russia, by both maintaining a “balanced” position on the Ukraine war as well as trying to reduce Russia’s increasing international isolation.
Hypothesis 3: The “Indian Way” of contemporary Indian foreign policy showcases India’s resolve to maintain strategic autonomy from the United States and Europe even as it pursues closer strategic ties with these countries
Jaishankar has recently articulated certain key tenets of Indian foreign policy within the context of an apparently recently re-discovered sense of Indian self-confidence about its identity and abilities. This foreign policy stance, when juxtaposed with Jaishankar’s public rebukes to Western journalists for criticising India’s position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, provides material to showcase claims about India re-asserting strategic autonomy via-a-vis the United States and Europe.
Domestic public opinion, specifically among India’s middle-class, is increasingly critical of the United States and Europe, while expressing increasing levels of sympathy for Russia’s position on the Ukraine conflict. Similar to public sentiments in various other parts of the world, “Western hypocrisy” has become a rallying cry within India towards perceived criticism of India’s position on the Ukraine conflict.
Despite the BJP’s pro-market and free trade economic philosophy, anti-Americanism runs deep within India’s middle-class as well as large sections of India’s public bureaucracy. However, Indian leaders increasingly face a structural challenge from China, which is affording them fewer choices, especially as India’s relationship with the United States and its European allies has been drastically reframed within the last decade.
In the context of Indian public opinion, closer relations with the United States and Europe on defence, economic, and technological matters have had to be balanced with public assertions of India’s autonomy from the United States and Europe – and India’s failure to criticise Russia is one means of asserting such autonomy. In this respect, articulating Indian foreign policy as “The India Way” (also the title of a book by Jaishankar published in 2020) helps Indian leaders frame Indian foreign policy as autonomous and independent, even as India embarks on a trajectory of closer strategic ties with the United States and Europe.
Sinderpal SINGH is Senior Fellow and Assistant Director of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS), S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS). He is also the Coordinator of the South Asia Programme at IDSS.