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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi receiving the Order of St Andrew the Apostle from Russian President Vladimir Putin (Sergei Bobylev, RIA Novosti)

Modi’s Moscow miscalculation

Despite the bluster about foreign policy independence, the Indian PM could have kept Putin at a distance.

Ian Hall

10 July 20244 min read

Narendra Modi’s recent summit with Vladimir Putin was met with understandable outrage. Pictures of the Indian Prime Minister bearhugging the Russian President and receiving Russia’s highest award, the Order of St Andrew the Apostle, were widely shared and widely criticised. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke for many when he called the meeting, which took place on the same day Russia bombed a Kyiv children’s hospital, a “huge disappointment”.

Predictably, these criticisms were met in India with indignant responses underpinned by the widely held view that New Delhi is right to stand by an “all-weather friend”. The visit was praised as a demonstration of India’s “strategic autonomy” and capacity to juggle “diverse partners who are often at odds with each other”.

It is not at all clear, however, that the reputational costs of Modi’s trip was outweighed by the supposed benefits of showcasing New Delhi’s ability to make “independent foreign policy choices”. India gained little of substance from the talks. Nine agreements were signed, none of them significant. Most concerned trade and investment promotion and many were simply framework agreements or in-principle deals.

“All-weather friends” (MEA Photo Gallery/Flickr)

To be sure, Modi secured a commitment to facilitate the return of about 35 Indian citizens deceived into fighting for the Russian army in Ukraine. But this deal can hardly be seen as an expression of Russian care for the bilateral relationship. The plight of these people has been known since March, if not before, and India has made several public demands for their return. For months, these pleas went unheeded Moscow and at least two Indian citizens appear to have been killed since the issue was first raised. That it took a prime ministerial visit to persuade India’s “all-weather friend” to ensure the safety of the survivors should be a matter of deep concern for New Delhi rather than a cause for celebration.

Of course, India has derived and still derives significant benefits from its longstanding ties to Russia. For 50 years, India has received plentiful supplies of mostly reliable weapons, diplomatic cover at the United Nations, and assistance with civilian nuclear technology. These have served India well, as it grappled with the twin challenges of securing its northern and western borders while developing the economy.

And since the start of the Ukraine war, India has also been able to buy up large quantities of cheap Russian oil with rupees and to on-sell it into other markets for dollars. This has allowed India to keep inflation down at home and boost its foreign exchange reserves.

That Modi decided to change tack suggests another logic at play – a domestic political calculation for a prime minister under some pressure.

Yet this somewhat exploitative arrangement, which has seen unusable rupees pile up in Russian banks, highlights broader truths: a shift in relative power in the bilateral relationship and Russia’s diminishing usefulness to India. The latter is now the dominant partner, with an economy soon to be twice the size of Russia’s, positive demographics, and strong strategic partnerships with multiple major powers, including the United States and Japan. By contrast, Russia is mired in long-term decline – a process accelerated by Putin’s strategic folly in Ukraine. For this reason, Moscow is becoming less and less useful to India and New Delhi has turned to other partners to meet its various needs.

Some Indian analysts argue that the Modi-Putin summit was nevertheless necessary to maintain what Ved Shinde writing in The Interpreter terms a “continental balance in the Eurasian heartland”. India needs to arrest Russia’s slide towards becoming a Chinese vassal, something they think has been hastened by the West’s unreasonably harsh response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But this argument does not pass muster. The causes of Russia’s estrangement from the West, which began more than two decades ago, are complex, and are as much to do with Russian actions than American or European ones. So too are the reasons for the convergence of Chinese and Russian interests.

But above all, it is not clear that New Delhi possesses any instrument that might be used to prevent that estrangement and that convergence. Certainly, none is visible in the agreements signed by Modi and Putin in Moscow.

In this context, Modi’s visit to Moscow, and the propaganda win it has apparently handed to Putin, looks like a miscalculation. India’s Prime Minister might have continued to keep his distance. After all, in recent years Modi has restricted contact with his Russian counterpart. The two have met at BRICS or Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summits, but regular bilateral and Russia-India-China trilateral leaders’ meetings have not been held, despite Russian enthusiasm, partly but by no means exclusively due to Sino-Indian tensions.

That Modi decided to change tack suggests another logic at play – a domestic political calculation for a prime minister under some pressure. Russia remains popular in India, including in significant sections of the Hindu Right suspicious of the West and what they see as Western global agendas. Meeting Putin plays well to this gallery and may boost Modi’s position at home. But whether the summit strengthened India’s relationship with Russia and standing in the world is not obvious. Indeed, in showing how little New Delhi might accept in exchange for a controversial meeting, it might have undermined both.

About the author

Ian Hall

Ian Hall is the acting director of the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University and a Professor of International Relations at Griffith University, Australia, and an Academic Fellow of the Australia India Institute at the University of Melbourne.

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