The Comrades And Their Divergent Perspectives

Context: Amidst China’s increasing assertiveness, India’s relations with Russia is witnessing unprecedented challenges.

Key concerns in India-Russia relations

• Russia’s blindness to China’s growing aggressiveness: India concerned with Russia downplaying China’s display of coercive military pressure against India. E.g. Galwan valley clashes in 2020.
• Differences regarding QUAD:
  • Russia is reinforcing China’s claim that Quad is aimed at containing China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
  • Russia has India to have a larger look at Chinese foreign policies” while describing the Indo­Pacific strategy as an effort to revive the Cold War mentality.
• Divergent perspectives on Indo-Pacific: Russia has rejected the Indo-Pacific construct in favour of Asia-Pacific on the ground that the first is primarily an American initiative designed to contain both China and Russia.
  • However, India has asserted that no country could have a veto on India’s participation in Quad.
  • Indo­Pacific concept in Indian diplomacy means that India can no longer be confined between the Malacca Strait and the Gulf of Aden.
• Russia-Pakistan nexus: Generated unease in India.
• Cooperation with the West: Began as a diplomatic necessity for India to diversify its sources of external balancing after the disintegration of the USSR and failure of Russia-China-India ‘strategic triangle’ (due to China-Pakistan nexus)
  • Unlike Russia, which tried to build an alternative international economic architecture, India decided to get integrated into the economic order it once denounced.
  • Economic liberalisation also allowed New Delhi to buy a sophisticated weapon from the wider market.
  • US-India cooperation is furthered by India’s strategic need to balance against China. This can be seen in the changing maritime structures in the Indo-Pacific.
    • The real ‘strategic triangle’ in the maritime domain will be that between India, the US and China, and pro­China Russia might adopt more aggressive blocking of India’s policy agendas.

Conclusion: India’s relations with Russia are thus dependent on Indo-China relations, and without China’s reciprocity, options before India are limited.

• China is undoubtedly the most powerful actor in its neighbourhood, but it cannot simply have its way of shaping Asia’s new geopolitics.
• China’s policies will still be constrained and altered in fundamental ways by India, which cannot be expected to adopt a hopeless stance of remaining peripheral in its own strategic backyard.