The six-day visit by India’s Defense Minister George Fernandes to Russia will not simply cover the possible purchase of armaments, among the more significant of which could be the acquisition of the aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov, strategic bombers and nuclear submarines. The Fernandes trip will also be used to further discuss matters of strategic interest, since his tour comes just weeks after a highly successful trip to India by Russia’s President Putin.
India first formed her relationship with Moscow when she needed to both establish her independence from the former British colonial power and more importantly, counterbalance the once alarming threat of Communist China, which culminated in a full-blown Chinese invasion of India in October 1962. India’s relationship with the old Soviet Union was, however, always an uneasy one, because of her leading position in the Non-Aligned Movement.
The world has changed. Now India is emerging as a significant economic power. If the analysis is correct that this new century will close with the Far East, primarily India and China, established as the most important, if not the dominant commercial region, then Russia is likely to need India every bit as much as India once needed it.
Stripped of ideological differences and unburdened by the danger of disputes over a shared border, these two large countries have much to gain commercially from each other. Both need capital for economic development but each is seeing the emergence of a thrusting entrepreneurial class, impatient with the bureaucracy that afflicts each of them. Russia has a widely established technological base while India is busy acquiring its own specialties, not least in the area of information technology.
India is arguably the more efficient place in which to do business, whereas much of Russian society has yet to cast off the stultifying effects of communist command economics. Indeed one of the issues that Mr. Fernandes will be raising with his Russian hosts, is the problem of obtaining spare parts, as specified in contracts, for Russian military equipment that his country has already bought.
It is the very lack of potential flash points between Moscow and New Delhi which suggest that theirs is a relationship that has immense commercial and maybe also political mileage.
The confrontation with Pakistan is certain to be on the agenda and here the Russians have a particular interest. Until now it has been the United States which has wagged its finger at both squabbling India and Pakistan. US arms also underpinned the overthrow of the Taleban regime in Afghanistan and now pursue its remnants and Al-Qaeda allies in the east of that country. US influence could however be set to decline if it presses ahead with a foreign policy which is seen on the one hand to be unswervingly pro-Zionist and on the other, increasingly anti-Muslim. Though Russia’s shameful resumption of its campaign against Chechen rebels is an initiative that came directly from President Putin within days of his moving into the Kremlin, Russia is not as deeply implicated as the United States in anti-Muslim accusations. Indeed were Putin to accept the inevitable and enter into negotiations with the Chechens and grant even autonomy, Russia’s stock would rise considerably in the Muslim world.
Whatever the ramifications of such a transformation in the Middle East, it is certain that Moscow could speak with considerably greater authority to Pakistan on the question of Kashmir.
It may even be that with Indian goodwill founded on the long-term relationship that seems to lie before herself and Russia, Putin could broker a settlement and bring to an end the dangerous Indo-Pakistani confrontation. This would not only be highly desirable in itself but it would be a major slap in the face for Washington’s highly assertive, even bullying foreign policy. Putin would have pulled off a diplomatic coup without snubbing his new friend in the White House and India would have demonstrated its international statesmanship. And of course, Chechnya could at last be at peace.
