Nonalignment’s long shadow: India and the Ukraine crisis

14 March 2022

Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has shocked the international community. It has also led to concerns among observers in the West about India’s aloofness toward the ongoing war. Old questions about India’s suitability for great-power responsibilities have re-emerged alongside new questions about India’s commitment to democracy and calls for the country to jettison its “toxic” relationship with Russia. The general assumption seems to be that were it not for India’s reliance on Russia for military hardware and geopolitical weight, New Delhi would have publicly moved to rebuke Russia. India’s reluctance is thus viewed as undermining its so-called policy of strategic autonomy, according to which India should have been free to uphold the core principles of the liberal international order.

Arms and influence

India is undoubtedly dependent on Russian arms, especially for essential platforms such as main battle tanks, aircraft carriers, fighter aircraft, submarines, supersonic missiles, and the S-400 air and missile defence system. Military dependence, however, is never absolute. While India is hardly expected to sanction Russia, there are lower-order actions available — including a symbolic vote at the United Nations — to exert pressure on Moscow. Any debates about influence thus need to be calibrated to both potential strategies and available resources.

India’s potential influence stems from four considerations. First, India is by far Russia’s largest arms buyer. Between 2010 and 2020, India accounted for almost one-third of Russia’s arms exports, well ahead of the next largest buyer, China (at 13 per cent). It is hard to imagine a state in this position not having any leverage over a supplier country. Second, arguably this leverage evaporates when the risk of a Sino-Indian border war is high, requiring an assured supply of Russian spare parts. However, this view discounts other countries (such as France, Israel, and the US) that would be willing to aid India militarily — not with spares but other equipment — in a clash with China. It also assumes that Russia, now subject to sanctions, would be unwilling to earn market or above-market prices for spares and supplies.

The political relationship between India and Russia is unlikely to suffer greatly. Indeed, it will remain an asset if India is to avert the terminal decline and collapse of Russia, which would make it an unviable pole in India’s preferred multipolar world order.

Third, India has in fact been diversifying arms imports since 2002, when Russia accounted for 88 per cent of imports. The US and its allies increasingly supply a range of high-tech weaponry such as radars, drones, precision bombs, missiles, fighter aircraft, and submarines. In 2020, Russia’s share of India’s imports was down to 35 per cent versus the US and its allies at 65 per cent. Dependence on Russia is substantially lower today and trending downward. Finally, that India can take risks is evidenced by the response to China’s border incursions. India has restricted Chinese FDI, cancelled contracts held by Chinese state-owned firms, and banned numerous Chinese apps. The prospect of economic losses and retaliation by China — with whom India currently runs a trade deficit of USD 69 billion — did not deter India from demonstrating dissatisfaction.

Constantly crossing the rubicon

Despite these considerations, the notion that India would rebuke Russia publicly were it not for ‘dependence’ enjoys remarkable popularity. It arises perhaps from three decades of analysts and scholars convincing themselves that events since the end of the Cold War have jolted India out of nonalignment, ushering in a new era of pragmatism and “multi-alignment” against a backdrop of rapidly deepening ties with the West. While this trend is undoubtedly real, an excessive focus on it has created a blind spot when it comes to the deep preferences that motivate India. Understanding these preferences is important for proposing realistic policy changes. Expecting that replacing Russian equipment with American equipment will align India with the liberal international order is likely to result in disappointment.

Nonalignment 3.0

Quite simply, India is and remains a fundamentally nonaligned nation, but not in the much-maligned common understanding of the term. Its more recent avatar, ‘strategic autonomy’, perhaps better describes the bedrock of Indian foreign policy. Strategic autonomy for India is neither neutrality nor portfolio diversification. Rather, like its predecessor, it is a means to a world where power is more widely distributed and where no single country or group of countries can maintain a grip on the core institutions of international cooperation.

Such an international order is arguably the most hospitable for a country like India to pursue its own rise to great-power status. Not only would India prefer Asia to be multipolar as a way of containing China, but it would also prefer the world to be multipolar as a way of keeping the United States from becoming globally preponderant. Competition between Washington and Beijing achieves both these goals, as does a robust relationship with Russia. It is precisely because India pursues strategic autonomy that New Delhi has chosen not to censure Moscow.

An unrepresentative order

India’s discomfort with the current order comes through in its leaders’ repeated statements about the need for more representative global governance. India has often clarified that its own willingness to pay significant costs to uphold this order is predicated on the order itself recognising and accommodating India as a leading state. Permanent veto-wielding membership of the UN Security Council is a litmus test in this regard. In the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, in September 2003, Prime Minister Vajpayee argued, “The recent crises warn us that until the UN Security Council is reformed and restructured, its decisions cannot reflect truly the collective will of the community of nations”. Many years later, in a historic address to the US Congress in 2016, Prime Minister Modi pointedly observed that “the effectiveness of [US-India] cooperation would increase if international institutions framed with the mindset of the 20th century were to reflect the realities of today”.

India’s unwillingness to go along with a Western multilateral initiative against Russia says less about Russia’s importance to India and more about India’s own place in an international order dominated by the West. So long as this order does not fully accommodate India as an equal member of the great-power club, India will continue pursuing other paths to multipolarity and recognition, such as founding membership of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), and a 2+2 ministerial dialogue with Russia.

Global and historical context

India’s approach should also be understood in a more global and historical context. Ideal-point estimates of UN General Assembly votes from 1946-2020 provide the best available measure of the revealed preferences of states. The data show that while India hewed to the middle of the ideological spectrum between the USSR and the US for most of the Cold War, its preferences deviated sharply from the US during the 1990s — when the US was globally preponderant — and have since 2000 settled into a pattern very similar to the Cold War, where it is now also joined by Russia (and, since the mid-2000s, China). Most importantly, India’s post-Cold War preferences have been further from the US than Russia’s own preferences, again highlighting the perils of viewing India only through the lenses of competition with China, dependence on Russia, and partnership with the US.

Ideal Point Estimations based on UNGA votes by the US, USSR/Russia, and India, 1946-2020.

The voting record of the UNGA on Russia on 2 March provides further context. While virtually all countries in Europe and Oceania and a very large share of countries in the Americas voted Yes, only 59 per cent in Asia and 52 per cent in Africa did so. Perhaps more telling was that of all countries that did not vote Yes, 67 per cent have no formal alliance with either the US or Russia, and a vast majority of these countries, including India, were members of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War. This is not to say that India disagrees with principles such as sovereignty and territorial integrity. Rather, India, like many members of the erstwhile Afro-Asian bloc at the UN, feels little ownership over these principles, especially in a conflict that is primarily European, with all the history that identity connotes.

Looking forward

What does this all mean for India and its strategic partners? For the Quad, cooperation will continue so long as China remains a shared concern. Geopolitical and economic priorities in the Indo-Pacific will keep India’s relations with the West on an even keel. The Quad meeting on 3 March helpfully reaffirmed the partnership while endorsing different approaches to the Ukraine crisis. The US itself had already signalled acceptance of India’s “distinct” relationship with Russia. Should India worry that not condemning Russian aggression against Ukraine will lead others to not condemn Chinese aggression against India? India has rarely worried about this, given that the test of dealing with Chinese aggression is security cooperation and not multilateralism per se. To that end, the US and its allies will continue supporting India’s defence efforts.

On the domestic front, as Dhruva Jaishankar has noted, the crisis may create a reform moment for defence production, as the 1991 economic crisis did for economic liberalisation. The 1991 analogy is apt because India’s economic reform efforts actually began in the 1980s — the crisis created political support for those who were already changing policy incrementally. It is particularly apt because economic reform was slow, arduous, and remains substantially incomplete three decades later. The same will be true of defence production. The political relationship between India and Russia is unlikely to suffer greatly. Indeed, it will remain an asset if India is to avert the terminal decline and collapse of Russia, which would make it an unviable pole in India’s preferred multipolar world order.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Rohan Mukherjee is an assistant professor of political science at Yale-NUS College. His book, Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in August 2022. Image credit: Kremlin.ru.