19 DEC, 2010, 05.50AM IST, BRAHMA CHELLANEY,
The heads of government of the UN Security Council’s permanent members have made a beeline to India in recent months, with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev being the latest. From British Prime Minister David Cameron to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, each signed multibillion-dollar deals during his India visit .
Medvedev will be no exception. Foreign governments have been courting India to try to get a piece of its lucrative, fast-growing market. But Indian diplomacy , oddly, does not lay emphasis on securing foreign contracts for domestic industry.
Russia, however, is the only P-5 state with which India has enjoyed a close, stable, enduring and mutually beneficial relationship over several decades. Unlike the vicissitudes that have characterised Indo-US ties, the Indo- Russia relationship has been relatively steady. The interests of the US and India may converge on larger Asian issues but they diverge on regional matters, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Myanmar.
The vaunted Indo-US strategic partnership has turned into an opportunity for Washington to win major commercial and defence contracts and co-opt India into strategic arrangements, without a concomitant obligation to be on India’s side. By contrast , there is a greater congruence of Russian and Indian national-security objectives.
Which power is willing to sell critical military technologies, not just weapons, to India? Which power is transferring a nuclear-powered submarine on a 10-year lease to India? Which country sells India an aircraft carrier, even if an old one? Which arms supplier to New Delhi does not offer matching weapons to India’s adversaries ? Russia is the common answer to all these questions. Little surprise that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh , calling Russia a “tried and tested friend” of India, admitted in 2007: “Although there has been a sea-change in the international situation during the last decade, Russia remains indispensable to the core of India’s foreign-policy interests” .
For Russia, India is a force of stability in a region where Moscow, as the WikiLeaks’ disclosures have underlined, is deeply concerned about jihadists within the Pakistani establishment gaining control of weapons of mass destruction.
With the US and its NATO partners now announcing plans to start within months to gradually withdraw forces from Afghanistan so as to end all combat operations by 2014, Russia and India need to work together and with countries like Iran, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to frustrate Pakistan’s aim to reinstall the Afghan Taliban in power.
However, even as Moscow tries to restore its influence in the former Soviet republics, its humiliating military retreat from Afghanistan in the late 1980s still weighs heavily on the Russian psyche. Moscow thus seems reluctant to get directly involved in Afghanistan again, with the focus of its concerns centred more on the flow of illicit drugs to Russia, where drug addiction has emerged as a major public health problem.
Medvedev will be no exception. Foreign governments have been courting India to try to get a piece of its lucrative, fast-growing market. But Indian diplomacy , oddly, does not lay emphasis on securing foreign contracts for domestic industry.
Russia, however, is the only P-5 state with which India has enjoyed a close, stable, enduring and mutually beneficial relationship over several decades. Unlike the vicissitudes that have characterised Indo-US ties, the Indo- Russia relationship has been relatively steady. The interests of the US and India may converge on larger Asian issues but they diverge on regional matters, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Myanmar.
The vaunted Indo-US strategic partnership has turned into an opportunity for Washington to win major commercial and defence contracts and co-opt India into strategic arrangements, without a concomitant obligation to be on India’s side. By contrast , there is a greater congruence of Russian and Indian national-security objectives.
Which power is willing to sell critical military technologies, not just weapons, to India? Which power is transferring a nuclear-powered submarine on a 10-year lease to India? Which country sells India an aircraft carrier, even if an old one? Which arms supplier to New Delhi does not offer matching weapons to India’s adversaries ? Russia is the common answer to all these questions. Little surprise that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh , calling Russia a “tried and tested friend” of India, admitted in 2007: “Although there has been a sea-change in the international situation during the last decade, Russia remains indispensable to the core of India’s foreign-policy interests” .
For Russia, India is a force of stability in a region where Moscow, as the WikiLeaks’ disclosures have underlined, is deeply concerned about jihadists within the Pakistani establishment gaining control of weapons of mass destruction.
With the US and its NATO partners now announcing plans to start within months to gradually withdraw forces from Afghanistan so as to end all combat operations by 2014, Russia and India need to work together and with countries like Iran, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to frustrate Pakistan’s aim to reinstall the Afghan Taliban in power.
However, even as Moscow tries to restore its influence in the former Soviet republics, its humiliating military retreat from Afghanistan in the late 1980s still weighs heavily on the Russian psyche. Moscow thus seems reluctant to get directly involved in Afghanistan again, with the focus of its concerns centred more on the flow of illicit drugs to Russia, where drug addiction has emerged as a major public health problem.
(the economic times)
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