- Monday, March 10, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
In its formative years after Independence, India under the prime ministership of Jawaharlal Nehru had chosen the path of non-alignment, which meant not allying with any of the two blocs — the Capitalist and Socialist — that had dominated the global affairs then.
Today, 75 years since Independence and in the era of prime minister Narendra Modi, New Delhi might not be pursuing the same policy as it was seven decades ago but it certainly does a balancing act when it comes to its foreign policy as the world is witnessing yet another deep polarisation between the West and Russia.
India has not taken a firm stand supporting any of the two sides and has focused on maintaining good relations with both to serve its own interests.
Prime minister Narendra Modi is currently in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, to attend the summit of the eight-member Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) which features countries such as Russia and China that are constantly at loggerheads with the West over various reasons — economic or geopolitical. And therein, lies a challenge for him to avoid looking too friendly with either Moscow or Beijing as the West would be watching closely.
Modi was set to meet Russian president Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the summit on Friday and also shared the same stage with Chinese president Xi Jinping, whom he hasn’t met in person after the border clashes happened between India and China in eastern Ladakh in 2020. India has not condemned Russia like the West over the Ukraine war and the US-led West has not pressured New Delhi over its close ties with Moscow, a key supplier of weapons and energy to the South Asian nation.
The US has an interest in this and that is to keep India on its side in the Quad, a four-nation group also including Australia and Japan to keep the Chinese under check.
PM Modi and his team have so far managed to do the balancing act well. India has sought cheaper oil and weapons to counter China’s mission along the Himalayan border and more investments from the US and its friends so that the supply chains are diversified away from Beijing.
The Indian leadership has been found attending summits of bodies featuring Russia and China such as SCO and BRICS that look to resist a US-led world order while also shaking hands with the western leaders at platforms such as G7.
The question is how far could India keep this up.
According to one Bloomberg report, the early tolerance for New Delhi’s position, along with its stance that it would take time to unwind its deep relationship with Russia in terms of security, is facing a greater resistance as the West is ramping up efforts to impose a cap on the price for Russia-supplied oil in order to curb its income.
“India’s neutral public positioning on the invasion has raised difficult questions in Washington DC about our alignment of values and interests,” Richard Rossow, a senior adviser on India policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC, was quoted as saying by Bloomberg.
“Such engagements — especially if they trigger new or expanded areas of cooperation that benefit Russia — will further erode interest among Washington policy makers for providing India a ‘pass’ on tough sanctions decision,” he said.
It said while the US has shown that it is not interested in sanctioning India over its decision to buy the S-400 missile defence system from Russia, Turkey, another country that did the same, found its ties with the superpower getting badly damaged.
But that doesn’t mean that friction would not arise ever. While India has been pushing back on the West’s insistence on putting a price cap on Russian oil as its crude imports went up by five times to cross $5 billion in the three-month period ending in May, it was not happy with the US recently approving a package worth $450 million (£395 million) to upgrade the F-16 fighter jet fleet of Pakistan.
There have been issues with Japan as well. Tokyo recently expressed disappointment over New Delhi joining the Russia-led Vostok-2022 military exercises held around a group of islands known in Russia as the southern Kurils and in Japan as Northern Territories. The two nations have a territorial dispute over it dating back to the end of the Second World War in 1945. India scaled back its participation in the war games and stayed out of the naval drills, yet Japan was irked.
One Japanese official even asked on the condition of anonymity whether India would be happy if Japanese troops took part in drills with Pakistan’s military forces but skipped exercises in Kashmir, the Bloomberg report added.
“The challenge for India is managing a declining relationship with Russia, nurturing a growing relationship with the US and securing its interests on all sides as a growing power,” said Indrani Bagchi, chief executive officer of the Ananta Aspen Centre, a research group on international relations and public policy in New Delhi, told Bloomberg.
“No matter how much India wants to maintain the Russia relationship, this is going to get more difficult as time goes by,” she said.
Modi, it is said, deliberately flew to Uzbekistan for the SCO summit late on Thursday to miss the official dinner marking the beginning of the event where he would have plenty of photo opportunities with Xi and Putin.
The West is watching and Modi knows it.
