Indo-US Relations in Historical Perspective | P. S. Jayaramu

July 31, 2024

Analysis of Indo-US relations has reacquired prominence after the first visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Russia after returning to power for the third time. Modi’s timing of his Moscow visit has come to be debated in the Western capitals, as it coincided with the 75th celebration summit of the NATO at Washington D.C.Though PM Modi said in his meeting with the Russian President that peace cannot be established in Ukraine when fighting goes on in the battlefield, the Western leaders felt that Modi was in a way bolstering Putin’s image, at a time the West wants to isolate him in the global arena. But, Modi was perhaps using his Russia visit so soon after his assumption of office to signal to the Western world that India continues to attach primacy to Russia in its foreign policy scheme and considers Russia a time-tested friend in world Politics. Quite naturally so, given the fact that the decades-old steady relationship has served the interests of both the nations during and after the Cold War.

An analysis of the importance India attached to Russia, the then Soviet Union, during the Cold War era, is necessary in order to provide a setting to the understanding of Indo-US relations starting from the Cold War era. Prime ministers from Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and those after them had realised that India had established a special relations with the Soviet Union, because the West, the US in particular, looked down upon our policy of Nonalignment as being ammoral in its fight against Communism and therefore propped up Pakistan as its ally in South Asia, by providing military assistance to it from the 1950s inwards. It is well known that in the1971 Bangladesh Liberation War between India and Pakistan, the US President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissenger sided with Pakistan by sending the Seventh Fleet to the Indian Ocean. The situation led Indira Gandhi to sign the famous Indo-Soviet Treaty, with defence overtones to it, to come to India’s rescue if the US intervened in the war in favour of Pakistan. Needless to say, the Treaty served as a deterrent to the US from openly intervening in the war .

US antipathy towards India heightened when Indira Gandhi ordered the Peaceful Nuclear Explosion, by its decision to stop aid to India. On the other hand, the Soviet Union stood by India, only to demonstrate that it valued highly its relationship with India.

However, the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the USSR brought about a paradigm shift in Indo-US relations. No wonder, when India became a nuclear-weapon State in 1998, though Washington imposed sanctioned against India, it was a short-lived one. To cut the story short, the wheel took a full circle when India under the Prime Ministership of Dr. Manmohan Singh signed the Nucler Deal with the US in 2008, signalling the end of India’s nuclear -apartheid in the World.

Indo-US military-strategic relations grew steadily in the first two decades of the 21st century as a counterweight to the rise of China as a potential Superpower, posing a threat to US hegemony over the world. A certain convergence of interests between India and the US led to the entry of India into the network of alliances against China in the Asia-Pacific, fueling expectations in the US Establishment that India would stand by it firmly in its Containment of China.

It was the Russian invasion of Ukraine on on the 24th of February 2022 and India’s nuanced policy towards it that began to cause some displeasure to the American leadership about India’s independent Policy towards the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its continued manifestation.

Let me deal with the so-called timing of Modi’s recent visit to Moscow as an issue. The US and Western Governments felt that the timing was bad as a summit meeting was scheduled in Washington DC to celebrate the 75 th anniversary of the NATO and that Modi’s visit to Moscow at that time amounted to a certain bolstering of Putin’s image. On his part, Modi wanted to convey to President Putin a message that India accords a prime place to her relationship with Russia even in its troubled times and to the Western world that India likes to enjoy strategic autonomy in deciding about its foreign policy decisions. In fact, the American Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti made a somewhat rare public criticism of India’s Russia policy. He said: “there is no such thing as strategic autonomy in times of conflict ; we will, in crisis moments, need to know each other†. The US State Department too expressed ‘concerns’ over India’s ties with Russia. The US National Security Adviser Sullivan went a step further and warned India of Russia’s deepening partnership with China and its possible implications for India and America. Two weeks after PM Modi’s Moscow visit, the US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia told a US Congressional Hearing in Washington that the US was “disappointed†about the symbolism and timing of Modi’s Russia visit.

The above pronouncements from the US Government provide an opportunity to clarify whether we should allow the American leadership to decide about the place and time of visit by our Prime Minister. Though it is undeniable that the overall trajectory of India’s strategic relations with the US is positive and gaining momentum, the details of what is strategically good or not so good for us should best be decided by us, even on matters relating to how to respond to China’s growing challenge. Prime Minister Modi might have calculatedly taken the decision to visit Moscow, perhaps with the objective of requesting the Russian President to keep India’s concerns while steering his country’s relations with China. Foreign Minister Dr. Jaishankar rightly said in at a Quad foreign ministerial meeting : “we have a problem with China and that it is for two of us to talk it over and find a way†,

Coming back to be strategic autonomy that India wants to exercise, PM Modi is reportedly going to visit Ukraine soon to ally be apprehensions of President Zelensky as he had expressed his strong condemnation of Modi’s visit to Moscow. Modi stands by his earlier pronouncement of ‘war not being a solution to problems in the 21st century’. Irrespective of whether India would be able to nudge Putin and Zelensky to a dialogue to resolve the complex issues which have led to the war, India would, in all likelihood, be one of the actors, as and when a resolution of the Ukrainian imbroglio takes place.

Finally, on the issue of Indo-US relations, strategic autonomy, which essentially means the practice of Nonalignment is going be both the norm and the strategy in the conduct of our relations. Irrespective of whether Modi and Jaishankar use the phrase Nonalignment or not, the term coined by the farsighted Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru is extremely relevant and holds the key to the successful conduct of India’s foreign relations in these complex and troubled times.

(Author: Dr. P. S. Jayaramu is former Professor of Political Science, Bangalore University and former Senior Fellow, ICSSR, New Delhi)