Outsiders often fail to understand what drives democratic India’s intimate ties with authoritarian Russia because they don’t see the world as viewed through Indian eyes and minds. The history of India’s relations with Russia can be divided into three broad periods. In the first, from independence in 1947 to the end of the Cold War, the growing bonds between India and the Soviet Union were based in conjunctions of political, military and economic interests. In the second, from the time the USSR imploded in 1990–91 to 2022, India scrambled to readjust to the changed unipolar world and recalibrate relations with the US while still heavily dependent on Soviet military supplies. In the third period, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, India’s stance has both puzzled and irritated Western friends and commentators but is consistent with the trajectory of India’s foreign policy that seeks to balance a range of interests and principles in bilateral relations and multilateral forums. The US is India’s single most important global partner and there is a broad national consensus underpinning that. Yet it is also in India’s interest to remain engaged with other non-Western countries and groupings in pursuit of strategic autonomy.

When India’s Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi visited Russia on 8 July and embraced President Vladimir Putin even as President Joe Biden hosted the NATO summit in Washington, the BBC featured an analysis under the title ‘Modi’s balancing act as he meets Putin in Moscow’. Six weeks later, Modi went to Kyiv on 23 August, the first visit to independent Ukraine by an Indian PM. The BBC headlined it as ‘Diplomatic tightrope for Modi as he visits Kyiv after Moscow’. The Russia visit included mutually beneficial substantive agreements but was symbolically damaging for India in key partner countries. The Ukraine visit was important largely for the symbolism. Taken together, the two visits underline how as India’s global profile rises, it must balance its different international relationships and at the same time ensure that the pursuit of material interests (economic, military, geopolitical) remain anchored in foundational principles and global norms – and vice versa.

The history of India’s relations with Russia can be divided into three broad periods. Changing state attributes and international profile help to explain the shifting balance of interests that have shaped bilateral Moscow–New Delhi relations and India’s policy towards Russia over the three periods. India’s Ukraine stance both puzzled and irritated Western friends and commentators but is consistent with the trajectory of India’s foreign policy since independence that seeks to balance a range of interests and principles in bilateral relations and multilateral forums.

I. 1947–91: The Cold War bipolar order

In the first period, from independence to the end of the Cold War, Indo–Soviet relations were the most successful bilateral relationship for both countries. Indian and Soviet rhetoric on international issues often turned out to be mutually reinforcing. The intimacy of the Indo–Soviet relationship was based on conjunctions of political, military and economic interests. The focus of this paper is analysing the relationship from India’s perspective.

The year 1955 was a crucial one in the development of bilateral relations. In addition to the successful exchange of visits by Nikita Khrushchev and Jawaharlal Nehru, there was the agreement for the construction of the Bhilai steel plant in the public sector and the first visit of Soviet oil experts. The Moscow–New Delhi relationship that developed thereafter was broad, deep and durable. A host of framework agreements, treaties of cooperation and joint committees gave organisational structure to the relationship. Diplomatic skill and reciprocal political sensitivity ensured that the good relations survived the vicissitudes of personal and party fortunes in the two countries.

An important catalyst for turning Indian eyes towards the Soviet Union was the integration of its local enemy Pakistan into the Western alliance system against the Moscow–Beijing axis. The western and eastern wings of Pakistan linked it geographically to both the Middle East and Southeast Asia theatres of the Cold War. CENTO (Central Treaty Organization, 1955–79) brought Pakistan into a treaty alliance with Turkey, Iran, Iraq (1955–59), UK, and the US as an associate member from 1959. SEATO (South East Asia Treaty Organization, 1955–77) linked Pakistan militarily to Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, Thailand, France, UK, and the US. US arms to Pakistan were used in wars against India. The twin developments in 1955 undermined the whole rationale of India’s organising principle of nonalignment, brought the Cold War to peninsula India’s western and eastern flanks and created the strategic logic for a military relationship between Moscow and New Delhi that proved more durable and substantive than the ineffectual and short-lived CENTO and SEATO pacts.

The developing relationship between Moscow and New Delhi shaped the previous geopolitical order in Asia. The Vietnam war has left enduring scars in the US foreign policy and security establishment. Following the 1954 Geneva accords and until 1973, India was a ringside observer, alongside Canada and Poland, as chair of the three Indochina control commissions in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Canada, the US and the West more generally concluded that India had aligned too closely with Soviet perspectives and interests. But India approached the war essentially as another front in Asian nationalists’ anticolonial struggles to gain independence and defend territorial integrity.

Two other defining events in the period earned lasting Indian gratitude for Moscow’s role in protecting India from global censure and coercion. Soviet veto of draft Security Council resolutions were used in December 1961 to defeat attempts to demand immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of Indian troops from Goa, and again a decade later to defeat US and China-led efforts to thwart Indian military action to liberate East Pakistan from the Pakistani military engaged in a genocidal killing spree followed by the establishment of Bangladesh as a sovereign country. Soviet justifications of the former in the language of anticolonialism and the latter in the language of stopping genocide fit Indian narratives precisely. The despatch of the USS Enterprise task force to the Bay of Bengal in December 1971 also left a lasting impression on public consciousness and was internalised in the security elite’s corporate memory for a generation. In general, nevertheless, India has not usually been reliant on the Soviet veto as it is itself one of the most influential swing state in the UN system outside the five permanent members of the Security Council.

The bilateral military relationship was built in part to counter common antagonists. It peaked in 1971 with a bilateral treaty that came close to constituting a defence pact against the backdrop of the looming India–Pakistan war that was midwife to the birth of Bangladesh. The treaty provided political cover for India in the UN while buying it military insurance against the Nixon–Kissinger move on the geopolitical chessboard to detach China from the Soviet embrace.

Soviet economic and military assistance and diplomatic support strengthened the Indian state apparatus domestically, regionally and internationally. The Soviet Union acquired a dominant position among India’s major arms suppliers in the 1960s that survived its demise in 1991. In the second half of the 1980s, India was the major Third World and Asian purchaser of weapons in the international arms bazaar. India was the biggest market for Russian military hardware and also offered good prospects for a new base from which to export jointly manufactured equipment to third-country markets. The close military cooperation between Moscow and New Delhi was maintained until the very end of the Soviet Union. Their economic relationship too was dynamic and multifaceted and India became the Soviet Union’s largest non-communist developing-country trading partner.

Yet, the relationship was an ideological misfit from the start. One country was the world’s largest democracy with a bewildering myriad of political parties (including several variants of the communist party), competing trade unions and a robust press. The other was the most powerful communist state where the party claimed a monopoly of political and trade union activity and the press was entirely subservient to the interests of the ruling regime. Marxist ideology is the antithesis to the caste-dominated majority Hindu society of India. Culture and education turned Indian minds to the West rather than to the Soviet Union. India’s mixed economy produced a genuinely thriving class of entrepreneurs and a large middle class heading towards a consumer society.

Soviet trade with India plateaued in the 1980s as India’s needs entered a new phase of searching for Western technology, markets and credits. Indian repayment to the Soviet Union began to exceed the value of Soviet deliveries and financial credits extended by the Soviet Union remained severely underutilised. Sectors of the Indian economy also suffered painful dislocation because of export variability caused by Soviet import volatilities. India, wanting friendly relations all round, has historically rejected the notion that good relations with any one major power are directed at third countries.

II. 1991–2022: From post-Cold War unipolar moment to polycentric order

When the Cold War ended in 1990–91, India would have been one of the few countries in the world longing wistfully for a return to the comforting familiarity of the old world order. The Soviet role in developing India’s economic and military potential may have been historically progressive but had exhausted productive potential by the time the USSR imploded. The disappearance of the Soviet Union created an economic, strategic and policy vacuum for Indian foreign policy. An acute balance of payments crisis in 1991, and the total discrediting of the command model of the Soviet economy from which India had borrowed heavily, added to the panic caused by the collapse of the Soviet superpower. India scrambled to readjust to the changed unipolar world and recalibrate relations with the US while still heavily dependent on Soviet military supplies.

By 1990 there was a perceptible fin de siècle sense about the Indo–Soviet relationship as Moscow began to treat India as just another Third World client. There was much anguish in India as a result of the post-glasnost critical attention in the Soviet media to Indian opposition to the NPT, the lease of a Soviet nuclear-propelled submarine to India, soft-currency trade and debt repayment arrangements and the fragility of the Indian government. The importance of nonproliferation objectives was elevated in the weakened and beleaguered Russian foreign policy goals and it joined the West in putting pressure on India to renounce the nuclear option and stabilise the nuclear-free status of South Asia. Economically, India now had to deal with a Russia that was Eurocentric, dependent on Western largesse, with neither the interest nor the resources to prop up Third World regimes. Russia’s new friendships would be guided by calculations of commercial profits rather than political dividends.

India had become a leading second-rank military power with significant Soviet assistance. The basis of the military relationship frayed in the 1990s. The Gulf War was a blow to Soviet doctrines, weapons and credibility as a security guarantor. The corresponding three lessons for India’s national security were inimical to the Delhi–Moscow military relationship. The previous history of uninterrupted delivery of Soviet arms during a war was no assurance any more of continued deliveries in future conflicts, Russian war-fighting doctrines had critical flaws and the technological gap between its and US weapons systems was widening to dangerous dimensions for Indian security. India became more strongly interested in diversifying sources of arms purchases.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic chaos characterising the successor-states, India and Russia found themselves competing for scarce resources in the world’s capital markets. The disintegration of USSR had a five-fold adverse impact on India’s defence posture. To assuage Western criticism and help to reduce economic impoverishment caused by over-ambitious military buildup, defence was reined in as an instrument of Russian foreign policy. With defence production organised on a one-market basis, the breakup of the USSR disrupted defence production and deliveries to foreign customers. Moves towards an open economy and currency convertibility meant that the method of payment had to be renegotiated with those countries, such as India, that had conducted barter trade. Negotiations had to be conducted also to work out to mutual satisfaction how India’s previous defence debt was to be apportioned among the new republics and how the value of the rouble debt would be recalculated with the rouble in free-fall. Parts from the former Soviet Union were failing to reach mothballed construction sites. The ending of traditional supplies of crude oil on a rouble-rupee barter basis added to India’s hard currency bill. India was also losing hard currency in net terms by importing intermediate components from world markets to make products that were saleable only in the Soviet market for nonconvertible currency.

The 1999 Kosovo War rattled India and Russia. NATO, portrayed as a purely defensive alliance, waged its first war on an enemy that had not attacked any member. Both India and Russia were shaken by the ease with which NATO evaded the requirement of UN authorisation for the international use of force, took note of the gap between the military capacity of the US and the rest and challenged any emerging doctrine of humanitarian intervention that can result in splitting asunder the target country.

Policy drift and incoherence saw India trying to maintain relations with the Soviet Union even as the latter disintegrated. It was as though New Delhi was viewing events through a freeze-frame. Although India was understandably jolted by all this, there was also empathy with a country undergoing the throes of partition. Among many Indians there remained goodwill in its hour of need towards a country that stood by them through good times and bad. Moreover, the double mismatch – of a parliamentary democracy-communist regime and a mixed economy-command economy – was attenuated with the collapse of the USSR.

Still, Russia and India had common interests in stabilising the situation in the interconnected regions of Afghanistan and Central Asia. As governmental authority crumbled in Afghanistan and it descended into civil war and then Taliban rule, India worried about Pakistan’s rising influence and spillover effects in Kashmir. Moscow soon reversed its declining role in the global arms market in order to earn hard currency and salvage a contracting defence industry.

President Boris Yeltsin paid an official visit to India in January 1993. The most important diplomatic outcome was the signing of a new friendship treaty as well as several other agreements for strengthening bilateral ties in a number of fields. Unlike the 1971 Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation, the 1993 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation did not contain any clauses (a) requiring military consultations in the event of a threat to Russia’s or India’s security, (b) proscribing the parties from joining military alliances directed against each other and (c) forbidding each party from providing assistance to a third party engaged in armed conflict against the other party. Instead it called vaguely for regular consultations on all matters and coordination in dealing with any developing threats to peace. But each party undertake to refrain from actions that might damage the other’s security. The treaty also envisaged cooperation on trade and economic relations; environmental protection; arts, culture, education, sports and tourism; health care and social security; and combating crime, drug trafficking and terrorism.

Yet time stood curiously still in the bilateral relationship after Yeltsin’s visit. The main reason for this was the different agendas and priorities that preoccupied the two governments. Moscow and New Delhi found themselves embroiled in an escalating dispute with Washington over the sale of rocket technology. Having already put several satellites into orbit, often with Moscow’s help, India had ambitions of rivalling the major Western powers in launching satellites – an ambition that has come close to being realised by now. A more modest goal of space autarky was to be able to place satellites in a geosynchronous orbit permanently above India. In January 1991 India agreed to purchase Russian technology and equipment for its space program. The US put pressure for the rocket deal to be cancelled and imposed trade sanctions on both Russia and India in punishment for alleged violations of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), even though neither was a signatory. India argued that US sanctions were motivated by commercial compulsions since India’s lower launch costs made it a potential threat in the multi-billion dollar space market. (Ironically, India joined the MTCR in 2016 with US help.)

Russia capitulated to the intense US pressure in July 1993, demonstrating to India Moscow’s vulnerability in the post-Cold War unipolar moment. India was forced to draw lessons for its own autonomous foreign policy. The 1990s completed the triumph of the US political and economic systems. Russia and India gave higher priority to relations with the US than with each other. While legacy relations with Russia have continued, India has not really looked back since those days. Instead, after the nuclear tests of May 1998 and a self-proclaimed status as a nuclear weapons possessor state, India too turned its full attention to repairing, cultivating and nurturing ever closer ties with the US. The culmination of this was the unilateral waiver of the ban on exporting US materials and technology to assist the development and growth of India’s civil nuclear program and US-led efforts to break India’s pariah status with the Nuclear Suppliers Group towards the same end.

Resource-rich Russia and resource-hungry India are well matched economically. But there’s even greater historical inertia to India’s defence procurement from Russia. India and the US have been trying to promote increased Indian purchases of US defence systems, both to reduce dependence on Moscow by diversifying and to deepen India–US ties.

Putin paid a two-day visit to India in October 2018. Among the documents signed were agreements to develop six new nuclear power projects and a contract for Russia’s S-400 Triumf air-defence system worth US $5 billion. The latter was especially significant because India ignored repeated warnings about triggering the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (2017) which mandated US sanctions on entities engaged in ‘significant’ defence transactions with Russia. Every year in the 2012 to 2017 period, with one exception in 2015, and cumulatively for this six-year period, India was the world’s largest arms purchaser. For the same period, the US was the biggest arms seller. The source of the bulk of India’s purchases over the six-year period was Russia (67%), followed by the US (12.4%), Israel (9.9%) and France (3.8%). But if we compare 2012 with 2017, Russia’s share fell from 86.5% to 60.1% while the US increased from 3.1% to 7.5% and Israel from 3.7% to 21.3%.

Disrupting this trendline by imposing CAATSA sanctions on India was not in the US economic or security interest, especially in light of the stated intention to court India ‘as a major defence partner’ that has ‘an indispensable role in maintaining stability in the Indian Ocean region’. In July, US defence secretary James Mattis urged the Senate to empower the secretary of state to waive CAATSA sanctions: ‘Doing so allows nations to build a closer security relationship with the US as they continue to transition from reliance on Russian military equipment.’ Imposing sanctions on India as punishment for buying the S-400 missile system risked damaging bilateral relations and impeding Indian purchases of US equipment, which would defeat a primary purpose of the CAATSA legislation. In turn India, in particular the Modi government, was invested in consolidating a strategic partnership with the US but had little interest in an exclusive alliance-type relationship with Washington. India was among eight countries issued with a temporary sanctions waiver by the US in November 2018 for purchases of Iranian oil. Similar good sense prevailed regarding India’s defence supplies from Russia.

India’s full-spectrum relationship with Russia is broad-ranging, long-standing and has proven resilient. The ‘India–Russia Joint Statement’ issued at the conclusion of Putin’s official visit to India on 6 December 2021 listed a broad range of cooperation in dealing with economic, trade and energy (including civil nuclear energy) relations, the Covid pandemic, transport connectivity, science, technology and space, military, and UN and other multilateral fora.

By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, India’s dependence on arms imports from Russia had lessened quite significantly. In the 2019–23 five year period, US arms exports comprised 42% of the world total and Russia’s share had fallen to just 11%, 34% of which went to India as its biggest recipient. Looked at from the other side, India was the world’s top arms importer with 9.8% of global share. Russia remained its top source, but for the first time since 1960–64, at 36% Russian arms fell below half of India’s total imports. Just ten years earlier, in 2009–13 Russia had supplied 76% of India’s arms imports. India was also the largest recipient of Israeli (37%) and French arms exports (29%).

III. 2022–present: Russia’s Ukraine war

A continual readjustment of geopolitical frontiers along historical fault-lines and buffer states is part of human history. As NATO kept incorporating former Warsaw Pact members in a steady eastward expansion to Russia’s borders, the repeated proclamation of redlines over Georgia and Ukraine were contemptuously brushed aside. Afflicted by hubris, the US and NATO effectively treated Russia as a permanently defeated enemy instead of one in temporary retreat. When the US Senate ratified the decision to enlarge NATO in 1998, George Kennan, architect of the Cold War containment doctrine, said: ‘I think it is the beginning of a new cold war’. He added: ‘Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are’. The current CIA director William Burns was posted in Moscow when he wrote a memo in 1995: ‘Hostility to NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here’. Burns returned to Moscow as ambassador. On 1 February 2008 he sent a cable to Washington entitled: ‘NYET MEANS NYET: RUSSIA’S NATO ENLARGEMENT REDLINES’. He concluded: ‘While Russian opposition to the first round of NATO enlargement in the mid-1990s was strong, Russia now feels itself able to respond more forcefully to what it perceives as actions contrary to its national interests’. In the event, the ‘no limits’ eastward expansion did not deter but did provoke Russia.

The impressive Western unity on Ukraine stands in stark contrast to the sharp divide from the rest of the world. The latter is a lot bigger and cannot simply be collapsed into the West’s minority worldview. South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa articulated the majority non-Western view when he said on 17 March 2022: ‘The war could have been avoided if NATO had heeded the warnings from amongst its own leaders and officials over the years that its eastward expansion would lead to greater, not less, instability in the region’. ‘There has been a belated, but grudging, acceptance of India’s position within the US administration’, an Indian official told The Indian Express, ‘that may not be visible in the public rhetorical statements’.

A study published in October 2022 from Cambridge University’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy detailed the extent to which the West has become isolated from opinion in the rest of the world on perceptions of China and Russia. Its conclusion was broadly replicated in a study from the European Council on Foreign Relations in February 2023 which cautioned Western decision-makers to recognise that ‘in an increasingly divided post-Western world’, emerging powers ‘will act on their own terms and resist being caught in a battle between America and China’. The rest of the world might not mention it openly but cannot reasonably be expected to join in the West’s amnesia about the US-UK-Australian illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, nor the reality of the US having intervened the most of any power and disrespected the democratic choices of other countries.

In a world characterised by such great-power behaviour, countries outside the rivalry between the democratic West and key authoritarian states judge their own long-term interests lies in minimising the chances of a major power war, protecting the fragile nuclear peace, creating a rules based order that is respected by all powers and in the meantime hedging their bets against geopolitical shocks in their own immediate region. The lodestar of their foreign policy will continue to be the safety, security, prosperity and wellbeing of their own people first.

India has tried to thread the complex and challenging demands on its diplomacy arising from the Ukraine war. It has abstained on, supported and voted against different resolutions in the UN General Assembly and Security Council in New York and the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Before a vote in the Human Rights Council in 2022, the US State Department sent a cable to its embassies in the 47 member countries on 1 March but recalled it the next day. In the retracted cable, US diplomats were instructed to tell their Indian and UAE counterparts that their ‘neutrality’ on Ukraine put them ‘in Russia’s camp, the aggressor in this conflict’. As with the now-infamous comment from President George W. Bush after the terrorist attacks of 9/11: ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists’, this binary moral judgment is the result of a Manichean reframing of a geopolitical contest as good vs. evil with no room for nuance. For most of the majority non-Western world, it’s a bit odd to hear what is fundamentally a geopolitical struggle for a new European balance of power framed as a ‘battle between democracy and autocracy’.

In reality there are many shades of gray, as indicated by India’s shifting decisions on UN votes depending on the exact language used in any particular resolution. In his statement on one Security Council vote, Ambassador T.S. Tirumurti explained that India had abstained ‘keeping in mind the totality of the evolving situation’. It supported calls for an immediate ceasefire and safe humanitarian corridors while holding fast to the conviction that differences must be resolved through dialogue and diplomacy. Meanwhile India’s ‘foremost priority’ was the safe evacuation of Indians trapped in the conflict zone.

In early March, Putin informed Modi in a phone call that he had ordered Russian troops in Ukraine to protect Indians fleeing the conflict and General Mikhail Mizintsev said that the Russian army had 130 buses and military planes ready to evacuate them to safety. The Washington Post noted that ‘India’s diplomatic position has paid dividends for its citizens in Ukraine’. Several cabinet ministers paid well-publicised visits to European capitals to oversee ‘Operation Ganga’ to repatriate the approximately 22,000 Indians trapped in the conflict, including 18,000 students – around one-quarter of all foreign students in Ukraine. Not surprisingly, the episode boosted Modi’s popularity with boasts of the power of Indian diplomacy.

President Biden described India’s support as ‘somewhat shaky’, a description that certainly applies to his own hold on strategic reality during his trip through Europe in which, on successive days, he said a Russian use of chemical weapons in Ukraine ‘would trigger a response in kind’, suggested that US soldiers could be going to Ukraine and called for regime change in Russia. Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar responded that India’s position has been ‘steadfast and consistent’.

In a joint panel with visiting UK foreign minister Elizabeth Truss at a public seminar in New Delhi on 31 March 2022, Jaishankar made two pertinent observations. Proximity had ensured India assessed the impact of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 with an immediacy absent in European assessments, with the situation now reversed with respect to Ukraine; and whereas India’s major energy supplies were from the Middle East, European countries were the major importers of Russian oil and gas and had bought 15% more in March than a month earlier. Counteracting persistent Western criticisms that India had somehow compromised on moral principles in sourcing oil imports from Russia, India’s Petroleum Minister (and former Permanent Representative to the UN) Hardeep Singh Puri made two key arguments in a CNN interview on 31 October. First, he pointed out that Europe’s purchase of Russian energy in one afternoon equated to India’s energy imports from Russia in three months. Second, he insisted that India’s primary moral duty is to its own consumers. That is, where for high-income populations in the West rising energy prices impose an inconvenience, amidst widespread poverty in India they can have life and death consequences.

Anti-American sentiment had a powerful hold on Indian public consciousness and policy elites until the end of the last century. In this century, a solid pro-US public and bureaucratic constituency has steadily built up, helped by the fact that there would few upper-middle class and upwards families that don’t have a family member living in the West and by the dramatic successes of Indo-Americans in the professional, business and political sectors of American life. Consequently anti-Americanism is no longer a driver of Indian foreign policy, including in relation to Russia. However, official India is still more sensitive to foreign criticism than it should be and the defensive reactions to Western criticisms of continuing Indian links to Russia and silence over Russia’s actions in Ukraine can still bring forth sharp reminders of the numbers of US military bases and troops stationed overseas, the frequency and intensity of US engagement in foreign military conflicts and the US history of regime change in foreign countries.

Indians also share unhappy memories with Russians and Chinese of US readiness to weaponise trade, finance and the role of the dollar as the international currency. The three share a corresponding interest in building parallel payments systems to offset direct and secondary US/Western sanctions. Interest in the transition to a multipolar currency system by developing countries and emerging markets has been spurred by the addictive weaponisation of the dollar to pursue US foreign policy objectives. Many countries perceive the willingness of Western powers to weaponise their dominance of international finance and governance structures as a potential threat to their own sovereignty and security. It is in their long-term interest to reduce exposure to egregious US monetary policy through efforts to de-dollarise trade, sign bilateral currency swap agreements and diversify investments into alternative currencies. However, the practicality of the efforts is yet to be determined. In the long term, we may experience a new world of currency disorder regardless of the military and political outcomes of the Ukraine war.

A balance of interests

Lord Palmerston famously said that nations have no permanent enemies and allies; they only have permanent interests. Contemporary foreign policy is not about virtue-signalling morality but about acting in the material and value interests, somehow reconciled, of the country’s people. Every country acts on a combination of hard material interests, geopolitical and economic, as well as core values and principles. No country’s foreign policy is based solely on either realism or idealism. And not one country can afford perfect consistency and coherence in its foreign policy either over time or in dealings with all countries across the world. This renders the notion of ‘the national interest’ conceptually incoherent. In a world in which states are no longer the only important actors in global affairs, security is not the only major outcome that they seek and force is not always the best instrument available to achieve those outcomes, we need to study and understand the balance of tools, outcomes and actors. ‘A balance of interests’ is more helpful than ‘the national interest’ in understanding foreign policy behaviour in such a complex world. It also better captures human agency and allows for human error.

When making decisions, governments must strive for a balance among different sectors and groups domestically, among different nations and groups internationally, and between material interests and ethical principles. India resents and reacts irritably to being lectured by Westerners on foreign policy moralism because it is not and never has been prepared to outsource the calculation of its balance of interests on any issue to foreigners. One of Jaishankar’s most widely cited statement as foreign minister was his insistence in June 2022 that ‘Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems’.

India has changed since independence from a shrunken economy into a major emerging economy, the world’s third biggest in PPP and fifth biggest in market exchange dollars; a second-tier powerful nuclear-armed state; the world’s most populous state and functioning stable democracy; and an increasingly self-confident and assertive actor on the world stage that is courted by all and strives to maximise its freedom of action unencumbered by entangling alliances. Yet India remains one of the world’s poorest countries on per capita incomes and also one of the sickest, least educated and most corrupt.

Conclusion

The overriding goal of independent India’s foreign policy across different governments has been strategic autonomy and freedom of manoeuvre. Nonalignment as the organising principle reflected this as did the pursuit of economic self-sufficiency. The scope for strategic autonomy would be constrained in a unipolar world regardless of the identity of the one pole, albeit not equally so. Contrary to public perceptions, even economic policy in the half century after 1947 was remarkably successful in comparison to the half century before under British rule. Until the end of the last century, the US prioritised its own geopolitical interests, was mostly indifferent to India’s democratic values and often hostile to India’s security interests, be it in relation to Pakistan vis-à-vis Kashmir, terrorism and nuclear proliferation or India’s use of force to end the last outpost of European colonialism by retaking Goa from Portugal in 1961 or intervening to decolonise and liberate Bangladesh from the yoke of Pakistani military dictatorship. By contrast Moscow partnered India in defence, many foreign policy issues and trade relations and often had its back at the UN.

India also proved to be on the right side of history in opposition to the US on Vietnam, apartheid and more in tune with the rest of the world on Palestine. Washington became far more sympathetic to India after its own terrible encounter with international terrorism on 9/11 and the transformation of relations with China into strategic rivalry. Even so memories of US opposition and sanctions remain deeply internalised in India’s policy elite. Issue-specific and often resolution-specific differences with the US also persist, from civil war in Sri Lanka to the Iraq war and conflicts in the Balkans, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.

The scope for divergent policies has expanded with India’s broadening and deepening train of global interests as a major emerging power. The United States is unquestionably India’s single most important global partnership and there is a broad national consensus on investing still more heavily in that relationship in security, intelligence, trade, terrorism and countering Islamist fundamentalism. India is the world’s biggest democracy. It is also a key US ally in the West’s growing strategic rivalry with China that is arguably more consequential for the future world order than the historic US–Soviet Cold War. The QUAD (Australia, India, Japan and the US) and bilateral-cum-minilateral military exercises that look to undergird a free, open and rules-based Indo-Pacific testify to this. The growing attraction of Western security elites to the term ‘Indo-Pacific’ is owed in no small measure to the desire to incorporate India into the regional maritime strategic frame of reference. Despite its allergy to military alliances for itself and unlike many other Indo-Pacific countries, India has not indicated discomfort or disquiet about the new nuclear-tinged AUKUS pact linking Australia, the UK and the US in a de facto extension of NATO from its North Atlantic origins to the Indo-Pacific.

However, India sees no reason to pursue these goals of close collaboration with the US and its allies by consciously distancing itself from Russia even while decoupling from the established defence supply chains. Instead it is very much in India’s interest, within the broader cordial and deepening ties with Washington, to remain engaged with and promote variable groupings like the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation alongside Russia, China and other non-Western countries.

This is the larger context in which to understand PM Modi’s complementary visits to Moscow and Kyiv in July and August. Far from incoherence in today’s world, the visits showcase continuity with independent India’s foreign policy. Strong relations with one country or bloc are quarantined from relations with others. Sharp criticisms by foreigners do not derail efforts to improve the living conditions of Indians. It’s a puzzle why India is expected to join Western sanctions that would inflict hardships on poor Indians in response to a war in Europe about the causes of which the rest’s judgments differ markedly from the West. Strong opposition to violations of national sovereignty and territorial integrity is generally accompanied by calls for dialogue and peaceful solutions without direct and harsh criticisms of the offending party. Should the right opportunity arise, undamaged relations with the conflict parties can be utilised to facilitate confidential communications – Modi is one of just half a dozen world leaders to have visited both Moscow and Kyiv while the war rages.

On different issues and at different times, the balance of interests recalibrate and variable geometry of groupings and coalitions emerge. The recalculation of India’s hard interests and core values is not outsourced to foreign capitals and analysts. India will not permit relations with Russia to be damaged in order to placate Western critics. But in addition to the rupture in NATO–Russia relations, Putin’s war on Ukraine has also been the catalyst to highlighting the pivotal agency and salience of central European countries as India strives to deepen its footprint in a changing Europe. Hence Modi’s visit to Poland – the first by an Indian PM in 45 years – and Ukraine six weeks after bilateral talks with Putin in Moscow.

India and Indians are happy with the deepening friendly relations with the West led by the US, France and Israel. However, efforts to discipline India into constraining strategic autonomy on foreign policy choices could prove counter-productive. One reason for the longevity of warm relations with Russia is that Moscow has been skilled enough to avoid falling into this trap of a binary choice.

Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University, Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, and Senior Scholar of the Brownstone Institute. He was formerly Senior Vice Rector of the United Nations University and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations. Educated in India and Canada, he has held fulltime academic appointments in Fiji, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia and been a consultant to the Australian, New Zealand and Norwegian governments on arms control, disarmament and international security issues. Professor Thakur was a Commissioner and one of the key authors of The Responsibility to Protect and Principal Writer of Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s second reform report; a Distinguished Fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Foundation Director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario; Co-Convenor of the Asia–Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament; Senior Research Fellow of the Toda Institute of Peace; and Editor-in-Chief of Global Governance. His books include Soviet Relations with India and Vietnam, The Politics and Economics of India’s Foreign Policy, Global Governance and the UN, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy, The United Nations, Peace and Security, and The Nuclear Ban Treaty.