SPEAKING
FREELY Reviving the India-Russia
partnership By Zorawar Daulet
Singh
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to
have their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
It has been six
years since Russian President Vladimir Putin
visited India and signed a Strategic Partnership
of Friendship and Peace. Then-prime minister Atal
Bihari Vajpayee and Putin
expressed their support for
the formation of a multipolar order, one based on
equality and mutual benefit.
This was an
important declaration, and its rationale was clear
- US power at the time was at its peak, and its
hierarchy unchallenged in the international
system. The subsequent sequence of geopolitical
events has, however, re-altered the distribution
of power globally and therefore provided Indian
security managers another opportunity to
re-evaluate their world view.
And an
important element of this introspection is due to
the immediate relevance of Indo-Russian relations
to the US-India nuclear deal and more generally to
India's overall military and energy security and
its quest for great-power status.
The US
invasion of Iraq and the unrelenting insurgency
that ensued imposed enormous military and
budgetary costs on the United States. Recent
estimates have projected costs of more than US$1
trillion to American taxpayers by the time
operations are terminated or scaled back to an
"over the horizon" force some time over the next
two to four years. While the incremental costs
since the 2003 invasion have risen tremendously,
the United States' major geopolitical adversary -
Russia - has focused on rebuilding its own state
power.
The Putin administration, on the
back of supernormal hydrocarbon prices, has
greatly accelerated the economic resurgence of
Russia. Some brief statistics may be instructive.
Russia's foreign-exchange reserves recently
crossed $270 billion; its Oil Stabilization Fund
will exceed $150 billion by late 2007, funds that
are meant to augment the diversification of the
Russian economy. Finally, Russian gross domestic
product is projected to cross $1 trillion by 2007.
Such an extraordinary economic revival by Russia
since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is
historically unprecedented.
To be sure,
Russian power is still nowhere close to its former
might. Russia 's current military spending of
about $30 billion per year is still a fraction of
the US budget, which is about 24 times as high.
Yet the fundamental underlying strengths of Russia
- its exceptional endowment of natural resources,
scientific knowledge base, military potential and
capability particularly in the strategic-weapons
domain - have ensured that Russia continued to
possess the attributes of a great power even
during the tumult of the 1990s.
To this
can be added the unique geographical position that
Russia occupies on the Eurasian continent, which
allows it to influence multiple theaters on the
geopolitical chessboard. Today Russia is
controlled by a combination of old KGB Russian
nationalists who have displayed immense pragmatism
and an unwavering set of foreign-policy
innovations designed to restore Russian influence
in its traditional spheres of influence in Eastern
Europe, the North Caucasus, Central Asia, and
Northeast Asia.
Internally, aside from
restoring political stability, Putin's
administration is reviving its entire
military-industrial and natural-resource complex -
energy (oil and gas and nuclear), aerospace,
defense and high technology.
That the
international system no longer resembles anything
like the late 1990s is obvious. The United States'
unipolar pretensions have been dispelled by its
own folly in Iraq. The concurrent resurgence of
Russian power has once again brought to the fore
the issue of the stability and management of the
international system.
Russia's
geostrategic leverage has ensured that US strategy
of first isolating Iran and attempting to follow
that up with punitive sanctions and/or a
unilateral military solution does not materialize.
To be sure, while Chinese support is important to
Russian efforts that seek to counterbalance an
offensive US, it is more important at a political
level in the United Nations Security Council than
at a geostrategic level.
Nonetheless, the
adoption since the mid-1990s by the US of a de
facto dual containment of both Russia and China
prompted an even greater degree of strategic
coordination in both their foreign policies. More
recent evidence of Russian-Chinese coordination is
the North Korea nuclear issue, where both ensured
a watered-down UN resolution to block any
US-Japanese efforts to punish North Korea further.
Next month the US plans to test the final
stage of its strategic missile defense program by
attempting to intercept a ballistic missile in
space. If successful, this would likely further
strengthen the Russia-China alignment, since only
Russia possesses the appropriate countermeasures
(ie, assured penetrability of its ballistic
missiles), albeit asymmetric, to immunize itself
and its allies against a potentially deployed US
anti-missile system.
India-Russia
relations have been traditionally based on a broad
convergence of interests. Formal cooperation
between India and Russia began in 1960, when the
two countries agreed to a program of
military-technical cooperation, which culminated
in a formal alliance in 1971. Since the Treaty of
Peace, Friendship and Cooperation of that year,
Soviet power ensured substantial economic,
political and military cover for India during the
Cold War.
India's military inventories are
still composed largely of Russian-made weapon
systems. Recent statistics indicate that India was
the leading buyer of Russian made arms in 2005. At
present, acquiring advanced foreign technologies
and licensing the manufacture of military
equipment are receiving priority in Indian
military imports. Again, Russia is the leading
partner of India in this sphere.
A
successful model of this type of collaboration is
BrahMos Aerospace, a $300 million Indo-Russian
joint venture to manufacture 1,000 supersonic
cruise missiles over the next decade for domestic
and export markets. As India's Defense Research
and Development Organization looks to market
several of its products internationally,
military-technical cooperation with Russia's
state-owned Rosoboronexport, which performs the
international activity for the Russian defense
industry, could greatly improve India's chances of
making a dent in the highly competitive global
arms bazaar.
Another dimension that has
gained salience is Russia's emerging position as
an energy superpower as the world's largest gas
producer and second-largest oil producer and
therefore its importance to India's energy
security.
Russia's increasing influence in
Central Asia and its dominant control of the
pipeline routes implies that only a well-crafted
energy partnership will enable India to access
those oil and gas reserves. A recent trip by
Indian Petroleum Minister Murli Deora to Moscow
seeking Indian participation in upcoming upstream
projects in Russia and cooperation in downstream
projects in both countries is part of an ongoing
objective of diversifying India's import
dependence on the Middle East.
Indian
policymakers should discern that Russia's
long-term energy strategy, evidenced by its public
pronouncements and dealings with the European
Union, China, East Asia and North Africa, is based
on the idea of comprehensive energy cooperation
with all its partners rather than the traditional
paradigm of import-export relationships.
In commercial terms this would amount to
the buyer nation opening its downstream energy
markets (such as refining, petrochemicals,
electricity) for Russian investment in return for
assured supplies and reciprocal access to upstream
Russian assets. Despite all the rhetoric to the
contrary stemming from skeptics in the EU, such an
institutional lock-in will only increase stability
and reliability of energy flows between Russia and
its partners.
In addition to these facets
is the convergence of Indo-Russian interests in
the geostrategic realm. Asian geopolitics and the
emergence of China at its epicenter will require
that India build a stronger strategic relationship
with Russia both for purposes of strategic
insurance and greater stability in Eurasia. Such a
strategy does not preclude an equally constructive
engagement with China or, for that matter, with
the US. But this geostrategic path may be more
beneficial than getting entrapped by the US in
respect of its own possible future confrontation
with China.
Incidentally, China's foreign
policy vis-a-vis the US, where it has maintained
pragmatic economic relations with the US while
seeking strategic support in the form of weapon
systems and energy security from Russia, should
serve as a cue to India's policymakers as they
seek to manage and cultivate their country's
portfolio of bilateral relationships.
The
recent nuclear dialogue and engagement with the
United States are the natural culmination of the
post-1998 (Pokhran nuclear-weapon tests) diplomacy
that was conducted by the previous Indian
government. Since India was outside the entire
nuclear system, it was imperative to engage the US
to dispel the status of a nuclear pariah. It can
be argued that this was largely achieved by the
2005 agreement between Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh and President George W Bush. What the
agreement did in essence was provide a de facto
acknowledgement of India's nuclear arsenal and its
right to conduct nuclear commerce with other
states, albeit under international safeguards.
The recent electoral victory of the
Democrats in the US Congress will ensure that the
Indo-US nuclear deal that already hangs in the
balance may be even more precarious. Given the
current state of flux, it is instructive here to
note simply that it was Russia that supplied
uranium to India's fuel-starved Tarapur reactor
this year, under a special NSG (Nuclear Suppliers
Group) clause, and despite intense US objections.
A possible non-ratification of the Indo-US
nuclear deal or ratification under conditions that
may not be acceptable to India does not
automatically terminate India's options. Russia
and other states could now legitimately replicate
the actions of the US in the matter.
The
policy implications are clear. A nuclear deal with
the United States, while a welcome development,
must be complemented with similar bilateral deals
with other major states in the NSG - especially
Russia, a leading provider of nuclear-power
technology (and the world's second-largest
supplier of nuclear fuel), and later too with
Germany and France.
Given the envisaged
expansion of India's nuclear sector, it is only by
diversification among suppliers that Indian energy
security can be enhanced in the long run. The
current unidirectional policy path of providing a
privileged position to the US in India's
nuclear-sector market will only increase the
country's dependence and narrow the options at a
time when such a situation is completely
avoidable.
I suggest that the Indian state
today is in a position, given the global
correlation of forces, where it can constructively
engage all the great powers in the system to
advance its objectives. It can be argued that
India is the sole rising power that is yet to be
wholly accommodated and reflected in the major
political institutions of today's system (assuming
German and Japanese interests are accounted for
through their proxies in the UN Security Council,
and by their participation in North Atlantic
Treaty Organization and the US-Japan alliance).
It is a system whose rules for all
practical purposes were conceived and executed
several decades ago. In other words, India has,
relatively speaking, the greatest incentive to
restructure the system, but not the accompanying
power to compel change. Hence the persistence of
Indian strategists and policymakers to make their
case for a permanent seat on the Security Council
is not without logic. Only once a state is within
this institutionalized global system can it
seriously begin to influence the critical
geopolitical events of its time.
The
US-India nuclear deal may be seen as the first
stage of challenging this status quo, and that may
well have been enough in a unipolar world.
Systemic changes over the past half-decade imply
that India's great-power ambitions can no longer
be influenced by Washington alone. Moscow's and
Beijing's support is imperative to reforming the
Security Council and other exclusive great-power
arrangements, including the array of international
treaties governing nuclear non-proliferation and
arms control.
It was confirmed recently
that Putin would be the chief guest at the
Republic Day parade in New Delhi in January,
underscoring India's importance to the Kremlin. At
a time when dynamic geopolitical events threaten
to unleash a new diplomatic revolution, it is to
be hoped that India's strategic establishment is
willing to re-evaluate its strategic
predispositions and account for Russia's place in
them.
Zorawar Daulet Singh, who
has a master's degree in international relations
from the School of Advanced International Studies,
Johns Hopkins University, is a strategic-affairs
analyst with a focus on Eurasian geopolitics,
India's energy security, and Indian foreign
policy, based in New Delhi.
(Copyright
2006 Zorawar Daulet Singh.)
Speaking
Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows
guest writers to have their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
