Roll up the red carpet

which even the Russians are not nostalgic about. In fact, the only people in the world still nursing romantic notions of this type are many Indians who expect this downsized state to restore the international balance of power in a manner we may find more comfortable. It will be stupid if our leaders were to now relate to Putin like that.

The Putin visit is not like Khrushchev, Brezhnev or even Gorbachev coming to India. We can give him more than he can give us. Russia is no longer a captive market for third-rate Indian shoe uppers or tea dust. Nor can it give us any largesse, military or economic. It is a country more dependent on the multilateral lending institutions than even India. It is more unstable than we are, has a messier economic situation, more crime in its capital than we have in ours, is fighting more popular insurgencies than we are, is more at odds with militant Islam than any other country in the world, has no democratic institutions worth the name and carries little international clout. In fact, if we forget our traditional inferiority complex for a moment, we might be flattered to find that we probably have more clout on the international stage than this Russia. Funny, but this allegedly unipolar world is that kind of a place. It is in a hurry to leave history behind. It mocks at nostalgia.

The Russians have a real problem relating to the globalised new economy. As John Sculley, formerly of Apple, put it the other day, the Indians do software, the Chinese do hardware, the Russians do nothing. Richard Nixon predicted this in his futuristic treatise 1999: Victory Without War when he compared the fortunes of the immigrants of various nationalities. The children of the Indians and the Chinese who emigrated as labourers, he said, have become doctors, engineers, lawyers, entrepreneurs. The Russians and the Poles are now second generation plumbers and electricians.

There is no reason for India to celebrate the decline of Russia as a world power or even as a partner in trade, technology and in the multilateral equations. But we cannot deal with Putin’s Russia as equals unless we realise that the country has spent the past few years repudiating and destroying almost everything it inherited from its Soviet past except, perhaps, its bloated armament industry. Part of that rejected inheritance is also the old Cold War power equations and linkages, particularly with client states. It is also necessary for us to accept that bitter reality. For all our protestations of non-alignment, the Soviets saw us as a client state, an impression the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty did very little to correct. In 1971, the year of the infamous treaty of peace, friendship and cooperation, it was the Soviet pressure more than the presence of the Seventh Fleet that persuaded Mrs Gandhi not to move forces from the eastern to the western front and finish the Pakistani threat for ever. Even 15 years later,Rajiv Gandhi confirmed that unequal relationship when he decided to make an unscheduled stopover in Moscow to brief Gorbachev on what had transpired in what was then hailed as a particularly successful visit to Washington. And let us not forget our record of supporting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The Soviets may have given us arms and technologies — such as they had — in exchange for masses of low-quality goods. But the days of barter economies are now over. The Russians still have similarly old, though rugged, hardware to sell us. But now they want hard cash in return. In the past you at least knew they were unlikely to flinch under Western pressure from continuing supplies during a war. Today you can’t be so sure. Russia is more vulnerable to IMF/World Bank pressures than even Pakistan. Its own waning global influence can be assessed from the kind of say it has been able to have in its own neighbourhood, say, in Kosovo. It has watched helplessly the world gang up on its fellow Slavs without being able to do anything to defend them except protest.

All this is not to belittle Russia, the size and potential of its economy, the quality of its population, the enormity of its nuclear stockpile and the commonality of some of its interests with India. But in terms of what it can do to "rectify" the balance in this unipolar world, it carries even less weight than India and a minor fraction compared to China. In the past we needed its veto on Kashmir as the issue came to vote at the Security Council, every now and then. Today we have enough clout to ensure that won’t happen. And if it did, are we sure the Russians will follow the Soviet voting pattern at the UN? Have they been doing it on the other issues of late? How did they respond to Pokharan II, did they matter at all during Kargil?

Russia’s consumers prefer Western goods — they unfortunately still remember us for the barter trade shoddiness of our products. It has very little to sell to India except armaments. And there too the equation is very different from the past. The Soviet Union gave us arms as a favour. Russia has almost nowhere it can sell these armaments in large enough numbers to create any economies of scale except India. The end of the Cold War has consumed most of the despots and clients who bought Russian hardware. The ones that remain prefer the cheaper Chinese copies of the Soviet products instead. It does India no favours by selling it rocket technologies or even nuclear power plants. Which other country in the world can it hawk these products to? Which other economy is large enough to build rockets but is encumbered by Western sanctions? Many of the others have green movements so strong they won’t ever let them buy nuclear reactors from an establishment that built Chernobyl. Russia needs hard cash. It needs a marketlike India for its weapons. Russia needs India more than India needs Russia.

The Russians themselves are no longer nostalgic about India. The Raj Kapoor, Aawara Hoon generation is gone with Communism. The new Russian relates to India as a cheap market to buy and sell and far too many of the latter day Russian travellers to Delhi choose a seedy Paharganj hotel as their favourite destination rather than the Stalinesque ITDC monsters their parents frequented on state-funded visits. If you have doubts on how much residual warmth remains among Russians for India, please try to obtain a visa to visit their country. The Russian consular officers would make their German counterparts sound friendly in comparison. Or fly to Moscow and enjoy the cold stares and suspicion of the immigration policeman.

If we are smart enough to break free from a past that the Russians themselves have buried and forgotten, we might find that our new, bilateral equation is not only more even, it is a bit tilted in our favour. From that point on, it may be more comfortable to deal with Putin and his Russia as equals. It may then even be possible to ask him some hard questions on why he is so desperate to buy peace with Pakistan.

Blurb 1:

The Russians are no longer nostalgic about India. The Raj Kapoor, Aawara Hoon generation is gone with Communism. The new Russian relates to us as a cheap market

Russia does India no favours by selling it rocket technologies or even nuclear power plants. Which other country in the world can it hawk these to?