Why Delhi must rediscover Moscow

During the Cold War, the Indo-Soviet alliance was built around the basic objective of limiting American and Chinese influence in Asia. The Soviet tensions with China and the US and India’s own problems with Washington and Beijing formed the political glue that held Delhi and Moscow together.

For all the mutual goodwill that exists between Russia and India, there is no big political idea that now binds the two nations together. Usually there are two big forces that draw nations together. One is commerce and the other is balance of power.

On both fronts, India and Russia are quite close to becoming less and less central to each other’s interests. Economic ties between the two countries remain at embarrassingly low levels.

If we remove India’s arms purchases from Russia, there is little that is worthy of note on the commercial front. India’s annual trade with Sri Lanka (at around US$ 2 billion) is larger than that with Russia that hovered around US$ 1.8 billion in 2004-05.

In contrast, China is emerging as a major trade partner for both Russia and India. China will be the largest single trading partner of India in a couple of years. Its trade volumes with Russia are rapidly rising. Indo-Russian trade in comparison is a pittance. Beijing’s trade with Moscow and Delhi is about ten times larger than Indo-Russian trade.

While the old Indo-Soviet trading order built around monopolies, corruption and state patronage is dead, there is no vibrant relationship between the new economic forces in both countries. As both countries began to look to the western markets, technology and capital, Delhi and Moscow have had little time to build a credible trading relationship.

Boosting the Indo-Russian economic relationship might require a larger political understanding between Delhi and Moscow that is focused on shaping a new balance of power in Eurasia.

After the Cold War, both Delhi and Moscow gave higher precedence to their bilateral ties with Washington and Beijing. As a consequence, the Indo-Russian relationship has increasingly become marginal to the Asian balance of power. Reversing that should be the first order of business for Singh and Putin.

For one, they could initiate a frank discussion between the two establishments on the implications of a rising China, the potential American response to it and the consequences for the Asian balance of power. As an increasingly powerful China asserts itself in Eurasia and America scrambles to deal with the consequences, Delhi and Moscow still hold many cards.

Despite the widespread perceptions on Russia’s relative decline in global affairs and questions on India’s ability to compete with China, Moscow and Delhi along with Tokyo could tilt the Eurasian balance of power one way or another.

Instead of maximising their leverages in the region, Russia and India have sought to cloak their inadequate strategic dialogue in the rhetoric of “multipolarity” and a “strategic triangle” with China.

This kind of sloganeering might get kudos from Delhi’s unending seminar circuit with its undying nostalgia for the Soviet Union, and the Indian Left parties which would love to see the formation of an “Eastern bloc” against the big bad bully, the US. But that rhetoric makes no impression on the chancelleries of the world; least of all in Beijing where realism has always been the dominant mode of foreign policy thinking.

The rhetoric on multipolarity was a useful device to signal discomfort with the preponderance of American power in the post Cold War world. But Russia and India now confront the potential of a “unipolar Asia” built around China. As two neighbours sharing a large border with China, India and Russia would surely want as much of a multipolarity in Asia as they do on the global stage.

While the talk of a strategic triangle involving Delhi, Moscow and Beijing continues, a rising China rightly sees itself as a peer of the US. It would welcome followers in the effort to marginalise the US in Eurasia; but Russia and India can hardly claim equality with China.

Meanwhile Sino-Indian relations and Sino-Russian relations have become thicker than those between India and Russia. Delhi and Moscow might not like it, but it is Beijing that has emerged as the fulcrum of Eurasia’s new geopolitics. The challenge for Delhi and Moscow is to reinject themselves — jointly and vigorously — into the new power game in Asia.