Over the past few weeks, I found a significant difference in attitudes toward the Ukraine war between my friends who had spent time establishing New Delhi and those who had not. Delhiites—diplomats, economists, journalists and veterans—were more likely to argue that reports of Russian damage were part of an information operation, the West was to blame for provoking Vladimir Putin, that we depend on Moscow for critical defense equipment. , and India should not take such a stand that will harm Russia. This was the situation in the political and ideological divide: as long as he was a Delhiite, this was more or less his view. Thus I was not surprised when opposition parties reflected on the government’s position on the issue, revealing a rare non-partisan consensus in these polarized times.
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However, the picture was quite different when I spoke to knowledgeable and thoughtful people from Bangalore, Mumbai and Chennai. There was a greater diversity of opinion on how guilty Russia was, but almost everyone agreed that India’s relations with the US and Europe should not fall victim to this war. Many pointed out that the growth and employment engines of the Indian economy are largely driven by customers in the West.
So I asked my colleague Sarthak Pradhan to correlate the votes of India’s trading partners and their UN votes on Ukraine-related issues. Their results surprised me too. The top chart shows that more than two-thirds of our trade is with countries that have explicitly voted against Russia. The abstainers—China, Bangladesh, Iraq, Iran and South Africa—are a minority among them. Except Russia and Belarus, none of our trading partners supports Russia. Therefore, India’s geo-economic interests lie entirely with the West and the rest of the world.
This is why proposals for a ‘Russia-India-China’ bloc make no sense, whether a new Cold War is underway or not. This would mean distancing ourselves from our biggest markets and joining a group where one member is a minor economic participant and the other a major political opponent. It also means bowing down to China and acknowledging its imperialist influence on our economy and our politics.
What about defense? Pradhan made another chart at my request. Second, it confirms the widely held belief that Russia is our largest foreign supplier of defense equipment. But it also shows that over 60% of purchases come from domestic suppliers and almost all of our other foreign suppliers voted against Russia. The numbers don’t tell the whole story; What is more relevant than what New Delhi buys from Russia. Yet, if these purchases prevent India from pursuing its geo-economic interests, they constitute a dependency that mortally undermines our strategic autonomy.
In fact, the present moment gives New Delhi an opportunity to fix the problem. India’s negotiating power will be at its highest until the Ukraine war ends one way or another. This could be the moment for a new strategic deal bigger and better than the talks during the Vajpayee-Bush and Manmohan Singh-Bush years. Recall that the US has decided to supply nuclear submarines and hypersonic missiles to Australia in order to affect the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region. From America’s point of view, India is on that side of the balance. It will be interesting to see if the imaginative minds in Washington can make some game-changing offers during the 2+2 meetings between the foreign and defense ministers of the two countries this week.
In any case, India can no longer tolerate unilateral relations with defense and energy supplying countries. India should buy these strategic goods only from countries with which we trade extensively, and our defense and energy suppliers need to substantially increase their imports from India. This may mean that weapons and energy become more expensive in the short term, but that premium is the price of strategic autonomy.
Almost all my Delhi friends agree that rapid economic growth is in India’s supreme national interest, above the nation’s existence and independence. It follows, that India’s foreign policy should follow its geo-economic interests. As with the trade deal with Australia this month, we need to intensify political engagement with our trading partners. Our geopolitical choices cannot be separated from this imperative.
Let me be clear This is not about Ukraine and its rights and wrongs. It’s not about which side we are on. It is about how to ensure India is in the most favorable position to write the rules for the post-war, post-pandemic world.
Me in 2008. Subrahmanyam where he put realistic calculations very succinctly. Unless we can turn the US-Europe-China triangle into a rectangle, which includes India, he said, “It is in our best interest to help America maintain its superiority. After all, in a three-man game, if America is number one, China is number two and we are at the bottom, it is in our best interest to make sure it is America that remains number one.
Nitin Pai is the co-founder and director of the Taxila Institution, an independent center for research and education in public policy.
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