Rebalancing Great Power Relations in India

of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s participation in the sixth summit meeting of the four leaders in Wilmington, Delaware, USA on 21 September 2024 raised further hopes of consolidating security cooperation between the “four leading maritime democracies of the Indo-Pacific”. However, it was India’s National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval’s trip to Russia in early September for the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) NSA meeting, which included a high-level personal meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which needs further analysis. Mr. Doval also conducted a one-on-one negotiations with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yiwhich was equally important as India was leaving no stone unturned to resolve the four-year-old military standoff with China on the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

India is currently busy bargaining with China and protecting its interests while trying to keep the US engaged in maintaining a rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific. The main idea behind the Quartet (Australia, Japan, India and the US) is to create a strategic consortium of principles, interests and goals that will not only strengthen each country individually, but will also be able to jointly counter the revisionist challenge to an existing world order. row This is where India’s relationship with Russia becomes important, as Moscow is a fierce opponent of the Quad.

Role of peacemaker

It is not easy for Indian security managers and diplomats to make this complex game work in New Delhi’s interest. Mr. Doval, however, has a reputation for being imaginative, nimble and persuasive. The Doval-Putin meeting, in which Mr. Doval conveyed Mr. Modi’s peace plan for Ukraine, could be interpreted as India’s attempt to cross the psychological Rubicon in great power diplomacy.

There is no doubt about India’s willingness, as an aspiring global power, to take responsibility for peacemaking, which may include the significant role of dialogue facilitator or interlocutor, if not mediator. The Doval-Putin meeting followed Mr Modi’s first visit to Ukraine in August and to Moscow in July. In particular, the visit to Russia drew sharp criticism from Ukraine. But despite its criticism of Indian policy, Ukraine has on many occasions asked New India to help resolve the conflict.

Mr. Doval subsequently met French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris, on the sidelines of the annual India-France Strategic Dialogue, to brief him on India’s mediation efforts. Many factors have prompted India to engage in global peace initiatives and India’s Russia dilemma is the most important of them. While India’s strategic relationship with the US is relatively new, the relationship between India and Russia spans more than six decades, and New Delhi has no appetite to give up the military advantages that come with that relationship. But since the war in Ukraine has caused Russia’s total break with the West, Moscow’s turn to China has become even more pronounced. Functioning more or less as China’s junior partner, Russia has struggled to maintain its partnership with India as its influence over China continues to shrink due to Ukraine’s fierce military resistance.

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From the Indian perspective, this needs correction as Russian-Chinese economic and military ties become too close for New Delhi to ignore.

The West may have come to terms with India’s purchase of Russian oil at discounted prices, as well as New Delhi’s silence on Russian aggression in Ukraine. Nonetheless, India’s display of an independent foreign policy comes with a normative price. The West has come to view India as apparently indifferent to issues so central to the reshaping of the global order after the conflict in Ukraine shattered the remnants of the post-Cold War landscape. By attempting to play a significant role in resolving an intractable conflict of epic global proportions, India may hope to recalibrate its terms of engagement with the West and Russia. While some voices would treat it as an attempt to please Washington, others would sound equally convincing in the argument that India is simply emphasizing its strategic autonomy while upholding its position as a ‘Vishva Bandhu’ or friend of the world.

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China’s embrace of Russia

What has been the hallmark of India’s foreign policy under Mr Modi for the past decade has been a friendly, cooperative and sometimes commercial relationship with the US and a non-adversarial, non-ideological and impartial relationship with Russia. However, Russia’s foreign policy under Mr. Putin is primarily driven by two key objectives: a deepening the Moscow-Beijing relationship and the promotion of a multipolar world order that would counter the hegemonic dominance of the US-led Western bloc. Mr. Putin’s anti-Western strategy includes China and India as close allies. But India is reluctant to comply because its strategic priorities do not fully match those of Russia or China.

Russia’s apparent reluctance to reduce its partnership with India should have been based on maintaining a reasonable balance of power between India and China and avoiding any major conflict between them. But the Russians failed to give the same concentrated attention to India that they gave to China. The reason is not far to seek. If Moscow’s pursuit of closer ties with Beijing is driven by a general geopolitical competition with Washington, Russia’s ties with India have no similar motivation.

Consequently, New Delhi is increasingly finding that Moscow’s usefulness is largely exhausted by Russia’s deepening ties with China. China not only creates many of India’s security difficulties on their Himalayan borders, but also tries to profit from them. Most damaging was the active support for Pakistan in elevating terrorism as a legitimate instrument of statecraft. According to the Indian worldview, China’s prioritization of Russia in its foreign policy has given Russian diplomacy an irritating character.

Russia’s severing of relations with the US has pushed Moscow into a closer embrace with Beijing at a time when relations between India and China are yet to normalize. Moreover, Russia’s ambitions to seriously challenge American hegemony by asserting a leadership role in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS also remain unsatisfied. With the war in Ukraine, Russia’s task of managing its relations with India has become significantly more complex. And this is what makes India worry about what is leading to a rebalancing of relations between major powers in India.

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From the past to the present

This bold rebalancing does not necessarily require something as far-reaching as a full-fledged Indo-US alliance. This requires our collective ability to increasingly turn away from nostalgic images of Russia protecting India from the machinations of the Pakistan-US-China nexus in the Bangladesh war. There is much skepticism about the merits of India’s peace efforts when the war between Russia and Ukraine shows no sign of de-escalation. The argument is that New Delhi doesn’t really have the leverage to push either side to the negotiating table. Nor is the Indian leadership accustomed to incurring the displeasure of both sides in mediation efforts. But that shouldn’t be the excuse for not trying to play the mediation game. Symbolically as well as practically, Mr. Doval’s publicized and skillful diplomatic interactions with Mr. Putin and Mr. Macron herald a new foreign policy dynamic in which conflict resolution efforts are seen as a vital component of India’s strategic autonomy.

Ultimately, the US desire to see Russia destroyed is something that India cannot accept. It is also imperative for New Delhi to preserve the gains of the past two decades by strengthening its strategic partnership with the US. While the US is undoubtedly the key player in the Quad, India also understands its core agenda and embraces its fundamental characteristics. New Delhi is aware of the structural obstacles that stand in the way of any comprehensive development of India-China relations, and has no emotional commitment to their early improvement at a strategically prohibitive cost.

Vinay Kaura is Assistant Professor, Department of International Relations and Security Studies, Sardar Patel University of Police, Security and Criminal Justice, Rajasthan and Foreign Scholar, Middle East Institute, Washington