CONTEXT

Recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin has asserted that both the Indian and Chinese Prime Ministers are “responsible” enough to solve issues between their countries, while underlining the need to debar any “extra-regional power” to interfere in the process.

QUAD FACTOR AND INDO- PACIFIC STRATEGY

• • Putin’s remarks can be seen as reinforcing China’s claim that the Quadrilateral or Quad (comprising India, the United States, Japan and Australia) is aimed at containing Beijing’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
    • Despite India’s effort to maintain amicable ties with Russia, Russia has continued to criticise Indo-Pacific and the Quad.
    • This gives ample evidence of the divergent perspectives of New Delhi and Russia on how to deal with China’s rise to global prominence.

• Russia has rejected the Indo-Pacific construct in favour of the Asia-Pacific on the ground that the first is primarily an American initiative designed to contain both China and Russia.

• • On the contrary, India holds the view that incorporation of the Indo-Pacific concept in Indian diplomacy means that India can no longer be confined between the Malacca Strait and Gulf of Aden.
• Though the recent diplomatic romance between Russia and Pakistan has generated some unease in India, it is Russia’s uncritical advocacy of China’s global vision that seems to have left New Delhi overly confused.
  • New Delhi has become particularly concerned with Moscow downplaying China’s display of coercive military pressure against India.

BEGINNINGS OF LOOKING WEST

• • The decade following the disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a period of great turbulence in global politics.
    • A bewildered India soon realised Russia was much weaker than the erstwhile USSR and incapable of helping New Delhi balance potential threats from Beijing.
    • Hence, it began to diversify its sources of external balancing.
  • On the other hand, Russia began to cast Moscow as the leader of a supposed trilateral grouping of Russia-India-China against a U.S.-led unipolar world.
    • Leaving behind the bitterness and mistrust between Moscow and Beijing during the Cold War, Russia became an early proponent of the ‘strategic triangle’ to bring together the three major powers.
    • Aware of the emerging international system as an expression of western expansion, India’s fear of the unipolar moment too made it easier for New Delhi to become part of this initiative.
    • But China’s dismissive attitude toward Indian capabilities, coupled with an emerging China-Pakistan nexus, prevented the success of this trilateral.
  • Hence India, instead, invested its diplomatic energies in rapprochement with the United States.
  • Further, unlike Russia, which tried to build an alternative international economic architecture, India decided to get integrated in the economic order it once denounced.
    • Economic liberalisation also allowed New Delhi to buy sophisticated weapons from a wider global market that included suppliers such as Israel and France. This also boosted New Delhi’s bargaining capacity with Moscow.

• As the logic of intensive engagement with the West was effectively established, strategic partnership with the U.S. was a logical end result.

INDIA’S STRENGTHENED COOPERATION WITH WEST BLOCK

• India’s cooperation with the U.S. has strengthened further, be it in part against the perceived terrorism threat, or in light of China’s growing assertiveness.
• Further with Russia’s ability to influence the India-China relationship being doubtful, India has been searching for other major powers to balance against China.
• But in the deficit of sufficient means for hard balancing, India has deepened its ties with Japan and Australia in a way that is close to soft balancing.
• Nevertheless, among all of India’s balancing efforts, the remarkable growth in ties with the U.S. has been the greatest source of concern for China which views the India-U.S. rapprochement as containment.
• Hence, despite India needing Russia’s partnership for its defence needs, New Delhi cannot endorse the Russian perspective on the Indo-Pacific and the Quad.

MISCALCULATIONS BY RUSSIA

• With the current scenario it is clear that all major powers are going to have an impact on the ‘strategic triangle’ in the maritime domain between New Delhi, Washington and Beijing.
• But Russia is yet to realise that it will gain immensely from the multilateralism that the Indo-Pacific seeks to promote. Being China’s junior partner will only undermine Moscow’s great-power ambitions.
• But the Putin regime is making things unnecessarily hard for Russia as well as for India with its flawed assessment of the current situation.
• Hardening of this Russian attitude into permanent has an inherent danger for India, as an increasingly pro-Beijing Russia might adopt more aggressive blocking of India’s policy agendas.

INDIA EFFORTS TO ALLAY THIS DANGER

• India is particularly interested in a normalisation of relations between Washington and Moscow.
• This will help it steer ties among the great powers and also diminish Moscow’s inclination to closely coordinate its South Asian policies with Beijing.

INDIA CHINA TIES

• There is no doubt that shared identities and beliefs in the principle of non-alignment, painful memories of colonial subjugation, opposition to great-power hegemony, and strong beliefs in sovereignty and strategic autonomy have been the key influencers in shaping India’s and China’s engagement with each other as well as the western world.
• But this has begun to change as Beijing is asserting its hegemony over Asia, leaving multilateral forums such as the Russia-India-China (RIC) grouping and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) with little practical value for Indian diplomacy.
• Hence, without China’s reciprocity, options before India are limited.

CHINA ACT AS IRRESPONSIBLE POWER

• • Beijing seems to be acting as it is immune not only to the strategic consequences for its actions but also to all the conventional rules of international politics.
  • China is undoubtedly the most powerful actor in its neighbourhood but it cannot simply have its way in shaping Asia’s new geopolitics.

• Beijing’s policies will still be constrained and altered in fundamental ways by India which cannot be expected to adopt a hopeless stance of remaining peripheral in its own strategic backyard.

Reference:

1. https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-comrades-and-their-divergent-perspectives/article34874054.ece