The United States is a pivotal ally of India, and a strong partner in the knowledge economy: space cooperation, higher education, collective defence capabilities, cultural property protection, and maritime domain awareness. But – and this is not surprising – the US has repeatedly lectured India about what is best for it; and most of all, recently, lectured India about its current relationship with Russia, after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. India’s polite and dynamic External Affairs Minister, Dr S. Jaishankar, has gently told off the US’s multiple emissaries on this score. This strategy has worked well, because, during the course of her meetings with Dr Jaishankar, the UK’s Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss – in a visibly preemptive and precautionary move – declared she was fully aware that India would always do what was in its best interest. Bien sûr, India has come a perceptibly long way on the global stage.
The US expected India to censure Russia, notably at the United Nations, but India did not: it abstained from voting on every single occasion, and so did a few other countries. More significantly, India has not, so far, voted in favour of Russia either. It has stayed true to its non-aligned core, maintaining its strategic friendship with both the US and Russia. However, it has strongly condemned the Bucha massacre in Ukraine at the UN. The US has not asked China to sanction Russia: it will not, now, or, most likely, ever.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Dr Jaishankar have repeatedly told Russia to work towards the cessation of the violence in Ukraine, as they have often reached out to their Russian counterparts. Modi has urged President Vladimir Putin and President Volodymyr Zelensky to engage in dialogue. India has also sent Ukraine humanitarian aid. The media, for some bizarre reason, chooses not to notice these dialogues or India’s aid to Ukraine. A senior career diplomat states, in a recent article, that if past precedent is what we might go by, India would already have privately expressed its displeasure to Russia.
India’s buying Russian gas is not acceptable to the US. Gas is exempt from sanctions, but who cares? India imports less than 1 per cent of its gas from Russia, per India’s Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas, Hardeep Singh Puri. India’s oil imports from the US will rise by 11 per cent this year, per officials from India’s Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. Since the start of the Ukraine war, European countries have imported several times as much worth of Russian gas as India has, but the Europeans escape US scrutiny and escape its lectures from the pulpit and the dangling of a thread of ominous sanctions. The US is just a smidgen hysterical about India’s recent expression of its intent to purchase a few million barrels of oil from Russia at a discounted price. That total envisaged purchase is a minuscule 15 million barrels, which would take care of India’s oil consumption for only 3 days. In what is rather baffling, and supremely ironical, the US has itself increased its import of Russian oil by 43 per cent since the start of the Ukraine war, and now imports about 100,000 barrels per day, per Mikhail Popov, Deputy Secretary of the Russian Security Council. But, of course, this fact doesn’t figure, owing to the US casting itself in a role, which inevitably bypasses scrutiny.
India has historically been a major buyer of Russian arms and ammunition and depends on cost-competitive supplies from Russia for their replenishment. Russia is an indispensable ally, for reasons relating to both security and geopolitics. India is flanked by two bellicose and capricious neighbours; and, therefore, it cannot afford to be even slightly negligent about military preparedness. During the 1971 Bangladesh War of Liberation, for example, when both the US and the UK were unabashedly on Pakistan’s side, and the Nixon Administration assembled its Second Taskforce 74, from the US Navy’s formidable Seventh Fleet, and sent it to the Bay of Bengal to threaten India, it was the arrival of Russian submarines in the oceans that deterred an escalation of belligerence. India had reached out to Russia on that occasion.
India needs to kowtow to the US’s diktat, the US surmises, failing which, an array of threats and sanctions might follow. This is hardly mature behaviour. In the refined, powerful and cool world of international diplomacy, rookies who suffer from strident logorrhea are abjured. The US recently sent its Deputy National Security Adviser, Daleep Singh, to India, to lecture away from the mount, and his pontification did not go down well with top-ranked Indian leaders and officials. Singh was rather often in unwarranted and strident mode. Singh is also some manner of astrologer, as he stated that Russia would not side with India if there was a war between China and India. We certainly hope that war never actuates, but what Russia will do at that time in the future is not yet known to anyone, save for folks with paranormal forecasting abilities.
The US constantly assigns itself the right to interfere in sovereign nations’ internal matters. India has exercised admirable restraint here – a corollary, needless to say, of being an old and gracious civilization that is several thousand years old – but some US officials continue to be, well, unreasonable.
Have the Americans honoured India’s requests on crucial security issues? This is a question India repeatedly asks. Have they, for example, stopped the relentless and lethal arming of our erratic, terrorist neighbour, while possessing lucid knowledge of the fact that it has waged incessant cross border terrorism against India, for 75 years? This is our neighbour which accepted billions of dollars in US aid, purportedly to fight terrorism and track Osama bin Laden, while it was sheltering him bang next to its army station in Abbottabad. That neighbour, which deploys terror as statecraft, never countenanced what President Obama and the American navy seals would strategize, and effect. Its game was up, and how!
Mahesh Jethmalani, a notable lawyer and leader, has a recent, apposite description for this perennially delinquent neighbour: “It is not a state with an army but an army with a state.”
The US has been my home for several decades: it is a generous, open nation, that rewards quality, intelligence and unstinted effort, as hardly any other country in the world does; and it has afforded millions of bright Indians the opportunity to succeed – in a noteworthy fashion – in multiple, distinguished professions. Yet another Indian has recently been appointed to a prominent position by President Joe Biden: Dr Ashish Jha, a dean at the University of Maryland, from the tiny, artistically wealthy village of Madhubani, in India, now serves as White House COVID-19 response coordinator.
However, the US’s inability to accept the changing dynamics in a multipolar world, with expanding and significant power centres stripped of American imperialism – India being one of the most prominent amongst them – is not one of its more praiseworthy qualities. It has to grapple with the changing shifts of power in a more realistic and gracious way, because its overpowering sense of entitlement, and accompanying condescension, apropos of the rest of the world, frequently cause it to be on the wrong side of history.
India rejects sermonizing, taunts and the repeated threat of sanctions. As a sovereign nation – and the world’s largest democracy – it will do exactly what is in its own best interest, just as the US and the rest of the world inevitably do. It would serve the US well to exercise humility and take cognizance of this fact at a crucial moment in world history – in particular with the threat of a world war looming large – and not destabilize an invaluable, rich and rewarding bilateral partnership. The forthcoming Modi-Biden dialogue, as well as the 2+2 dialogue between India’s External Affairs and Defence Ministers, and America’s Secretary of State and Defence Secretary, will, hopefully, heal misunderstandings, clear obfuscation, and forge stronger and permanent ties between the world’s largest and oldest democracies. We are natural allies: let’s keep it this way.
