When 20 Indian soldiers were killed in a recent border clash with China,the military hardware New Delhi sent to bolster its Himalayan frontier wasmostly Russian-origin, showing not for the first time its closeness to”longstanding and time-tested friend” Moscow.
Facing an increasingly assertive China closer to home, these ties helpexplain Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reluctance to criticise VladimirPutin — a regular visitor — over the Ukraine invasion.
India has abstained on UN resolutions censuring Russia and continues to buyRussian oil and other goods, despite pressure from Western countries.
US President Joe Biden this week called India “somewhat shaky” on Russia.
In the Cold War, officially non-aligned India leaned towards the SovietUnion — in part due to US support for arch-rival Pakistan — buying itsfirst Russian MiG-21 fighter jets in 1962.
These military ties were cemented by two watershed events: India’shumiliating defeat to China in a 1962 border war and the war with Pakistanin 1971 that led to the creation of Bangladesh.
During the latter, the USSR sent ships to the Indian Ocean to deter adirect US intervention to help Pakistan. Shortly before the two had signedthe landmark Indo–Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation.
Russia “always remained immune to external pressure and supplied us when weneeded it, and have not slipped,” Nandan Unnikrishnan of the NewDelhi-based Observer Research Foundation told AFP.
“The Ukraine war doesn’t change our neighbourhood situation, so why shouldwe even consider replacing our long-tested and trusted supplier without anypractical replacement?” he said.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, 70-85 percent of the Indianmilitary’s hardware was Russian, and in recent years India has sourced morefrom elsewhere — notably France, the US and Israel — and made more itself.
But according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, notonly does Russia remain India’s biggest supplier of major arms but NewDelhi is also Moscow’s largest customer in this field.
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From 2017-21, India was the world’s largest importer of major arms, and 46percent of them were Russian. Some 28 percent of Russia’s arms exports wentto India, and account for the lion’s share of the two countries’ overalltrade.
Almost all of India’s estimated 3,500 battle tanks are Russian-made ordesigned — built in India on license — while the bulk of its combataircraft are Sukhois and MiGs.
India’s sole operational aircraft carrier is the refurbished Soviet-eraAdmiral Gorshkov, four of its 10 destroyers are Russian-origin, as areeight of its 14 non-nuclear-powered submarines.
India also has large Russian orders pending including a $5-billion deal forS-400 air defence systems — the first deliveries began last year — fourfrigates and one nuclear-powered submarine.
“With that kind of a dependency it is very difficult for India to take anyother stand on Russia,” Manoj Joshi, an author and former member of agovernment task force for reforms in national security told AFP.
But he said that the dependency doesn’t end with buying equipment. Forsometimes decades afterwards, it needs upgrades, maintenance, spares andother support from Russia.
India and Russia are also cooperating in defence, for example in makingBrahMos cruise missiles, one of which India claims to have accidentallyfired at Pakistan this month.
Russian kit is also relatively cheap, and Western countries are much morereluctant than Moscow to transfer technology to allow arms to be made inIndia, experts say.
“The US sells everything with an end-user condition and still won’t sell usa certain class of weapons — unlike Russia,” said Joshi. -APP/AFP
