Where India Stands on Ukraine, and How It Can Help

Where India Stands on Ukraine, and How It Can Help

On the eve of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Ukraine, the world’s most populous nation’s interactions with Ukraine and Russia deserve an in-depth look.

by Ugo Poletti | August 19, 2024, 12:35 pm Kyiv Post

This week, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India is schedule to visit Poland (on Aug. 21) and Ukraine (on Aug. 23). It will be the first time an Indian prime minister has visited Ukraine. With India in a position to influence Russia, Modi could, in theory, help bring about a resolution to the conflict. India could also be instrumental in Ukraine’s post-war recovery. Kyiv Post spoke to Anastasia Piliavsky, Reader in Social Anthropology and Politics at the India Institute of King’s College London, about the state of India-Ukraine relations. Piliavsky lives between Odesa and the UK.

Kyiv Post: We know little about India, except that its population (1.6 billion) has now exceeded China’s (1.4 billion) and that it is a large country with growing importance for the balance of power, not only in Asia but also increasingly in the wider world, including Europe, what must we take into account to understand India’s global position and its role in Russia’s war against Ukraine?

Anastasia Piliavsky: More people live in India than in any other state on a territory that is only the world’s seventh largest. Unlike China, which has been spilling into Siberia, creating vast de-facto colonies in Russia, India has impassable physical or political borders. Its sheer density presents distinctive political and economic problems, from coordinating elections to managing industrial pollution to providing jobs and keeping everyone fed.

India is young and digital: half of its citizens are under 25 and most are avid mobile phone users, with over 1 billion sim cards in use.

How does democracy work in such a large country full of socio-cultural differences?

This year’s elections in India were the largest democratic exercise in human history, with nearly a billion eligible voters, more than 8,000 candidates and 744 political parties. The logistics are so labor-intensive that the elections were run in seven phases over the course of six weeks. India is also a pioneer of digital democracy: the first country to replace paper ballots with electronic voting machines, beginning in the 1980s.

India is not only the world’s largest democracy, it is also one of its most animated, with voter turnouts and women’s participation going up steadily since the 1990s. It is also an extraordinary example of political nationhood. Like Europe, India contains many regions with different social and political histories, with their own literary, artistic and culinary traditions. Its people practice many religions speak more than a hundred recognized languages. Its intensely liberal constitution, which gives 22 languages national status, has brought this bewildering cultural and linguistic diversity into a single resilient nation. Despite religious tensions and separatist movements, for 72 years Independent India has retained its political integrity. By rejecting the mono-ethnic, mono-linguistic national model of imperial states like France, India offers the world a progressive new model of political nation-building, a model for the new world, one founded on a joint commitment to democratic statehood, not tribal loyalties. Its achievement of democratic unity under conditions of extraordinary ethno-linguistic diversity is a dazzling example for any nation as linguistically, ethnically and culturally diverse as Ukraine.

What are the relations between India and the three great superpowers?

During his recent visit to Moscow, Modi reaffirmed India’s status as Russia’s “special and privileged strategic partner.” Russia inherited most of the Soviet ties with India: a vast network of diplomatic, cultural and intelligence relations, military trade and a deep historical sympathy that Russia still enjoys in India.

China is India’s chief strategic rival. A neighboring superpower with an economy at least twice the size of India’s, with vastly superior industrial and military capabilities, China is India’s looming, perennial threat. Since the 1962 Sino-Indian war, China and India have clashed periodically, with the most recent skirmishes breaking out on the border in 2020-21. China’s deepening relations with Russia strains Indo-Russian relations, pushing India away from its enemy’s friend to China’s chief strategic opponent: the United States.

Over the past decade, as Sino-American tensions have grown and Russia has come firmly under Chinese vassalage, India has moved closer to the US which declared it a “Major Defense Partner,” crucial to countering China in the Indo-Pacific. The burgeoning Indo-American partnership creates opportunities for new strategic relations between India and Ukraine.

What are the characteristics of Modi’s premiership and what are his political objectives? How solid is his leadership?

Modi entered politics through a violent Hindu nationalist youth organization, but he made his career, first as Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat and then as Prime Minister, on a platform of economic growth. In the 10 years of his premiership, the Hindu nationalists have often been sidelined and this year’s election showed how little religious identity matters to his electors. Modi’s party lost in the Mecca of Hindu nationalism: the town of Ayodhya, where Modi built a hugely expensive, long-promised temple to the Hindu god Ram. Most of his electorate wants roads and jobs, not religious identity politics.

This year, Modi secured an uncertain victory. His party failed to secure parliamentary majority, losing nearly a third of its seats. For the first time in his life, Modi has had to form a coalition. It’s the disaffected farmers and youths who decimated Modi’s party and it is they he will now have to appease. As global warming brings on drought after drought, Modi will be increasingly hard-pressed to create alternative work for rural India, where nearly 70 percent of the country still lives.

Over the past decade in office, he has done a lot to stabilize India’s economy. Resolving a banking crisis and attracting foreign investment, he helped India overtake the UK as the world’s fifth largest economy. At the same time, unemployment soared (from 3.2 percent to 7.6 percent since 2013) and the small-business sector – the backbone of India’s economy – shrunk from 27.5 percent pre-Modi to 19 percent. Now 65.7 percent of India’s youth are unemployed, private consumption is at a two-decade low, while household debt is at an all-time high. As agricultural profits fall precipitously due to persistent droughts, farmer suicides soar.

Modi’s large-scale personal ambition, which excites his party’s traditional middle-class urban electorate and India’s global diaspora, is to bestow on India superpower status. India’s first moon landing, debut G20 Summit hosting and Modi’s attempt to rebrand India into Bharat were all meant to attract global acclaim. But a true superpower needs to show that it can affect politics in the wider world. Russia’s war against Ukraine is Modi’s opportunity to do just that.

India’s cooperation with Russia is long-standing, but unlike Russia’s alliance with China, which is based on a common enemy, Russia’s relation with India seems more based on questions of convenience. How can we describe it?

Following India’s non-alignment doctrine established by Nehru, the country owes Russia no political loyalties. Today, it is a partnership of convenience: a source of cheap oil, and a large market for Indian pharmaceuticals and steel. While India has been shifting away from Russian weapons (from 62 percent in 2008 to 36 percent this year), it has made a killing on cheap Russian oil. Since 2021, India’s import of Russian crude oil has gone up 20-fold and today the country is importing more than two million barrels a day. A buyer of 37 percent of Russian crude, second only to China, India is now one of the Russian economy’s chief floatation devices.

Anastasia Piliavsky, a Ukrainian academic, teaches at King's College in London-KT

In 2023-24 trade between Russia and India rose to nearly $65 billion, mostly in Russian imports. While Modi’s visit to Moscow was advertised as a peace mission – this resonates with the Indian electorate – it in fact focused on sanction-avoidance, particularly on developing maritime trade routes, like the one between Chennai and Vladivostok. India is working with Russia to find vessels to build its own refineries and export Russian crude in avoidance of sanctions, which the US has done nothing to curb. The SWIFT system shutdown in Russia created a currency crunch in Russo-Indian trade relations. Initially, the countries traded in rubles and rupees, but 8 billion Rupees owed by India to Russia got stuck in the Indian banks. Russians resolved this by investing in the Indian market, much of it in its infrastructure, and more recently by trading in the United Arab Emirate Dirhams.

Such trade is not without reputational consequences, which do serious damage to India’s superpower ambitions. Being called a “dearest friend” by a mass murderer whose missiles demolish a children’s hospital while he hugs Modi does not look good. No wonder the Indian media worked so hard to present the visit as a “peace mission.” Even in the historically pro-Russian India, Russia’s war against Ukraine is increasingly perceived as imperial genocide.

The war in Ukraine may be seen as very distant from Indians, since it is taking place on another continent. How does the Indian ruling class view the war?

Indian citizens tend to care as little about European affairs as Europeans care about the Indian. India is a sub-continent with a population twice the size of Europe’s. Its own political life is so dense and eventful that much of the public interest remains nation-bound. Initially, the war was viewed in very vague terms, through the prism of a long-standing “friendship” with the USSR, which in India is commonly conflated with Putin’s Russia. However, as news of atrocities spread, the Indian public gradually started to rethink the war, with intellectuals and the press speaking out increasingly against Russian aggression. While Russia’s long-lived propaganda channels pressed narratives of an “American proxy war,” of the “NATO threat,” of Ukraine being Russia’s legitimate “zone of influence,” and of this being a “civil war,” the sheer horror of Russian violence in Ukraine is forcing Indian audiences to understand that this is none other than a war of imperial conquest.

How can India help Ukraine now?

India holds a vast arsenal of old Soviet tanks and munitions, which are urgently needed in Ukraine, but for which this will be the last war. These could be gainfully exchanged by Ukraine’s NATO allies for newer NATO equipment. This would in turn help India to speed up transition to NATO systems, in the way that Poland and several other NATO countries have done, by passing dated Soviet equipment to Ukraine.

India could help Ukraine negotiate some deals with Russia, such as the return of Ukrainian children. India’s advances in digital democracy could be of use to Ukraine. Electronic voting machines and experience of using them could help Ukraine conduct elections in time of war.

In the aftermath of the war, Indian companies, with their extensive experience of infrastructural and urban development projects, could provide urgently needed help. The Indo-Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce is already planning such work.

What can India gain in Ukraine?

Ukraine surprised the world by defeating the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Ukraine’s waterborne drones can help India bolster its maritime security, at a minimal cost.

The innovative, low-cost defense technologies developed in Ukraine, like air and waterborne drones, could give India a military upper hand, especially in the control of the vast Indian Ocean.

Ukraine’s future reconstruction holds out many labor opportunities. While Ukraine will be severely lacking in human resources, Indian companies can take up jobs that will give much needed relief to its crisis of unemployment.

Ukraine is a global pioneer in digital governance. Revolutionary apps like DIIA could help India solve persistent problems of managing identification and other government documents.

What skeletons in the closet have made Indo-Ukrainian relations difficult?

Much has been made of Ukraine’s military exports to Pakistan, especially in Russian-sponsored media. In fact, Ukraine has been exporting more arms to India than Pakistan. Between 2018 and 2022, arms sales to India nearly doubled, while exports to Pakistan fell by a third.

The real skeleton in this closet is Russian. Since the embargo on the sale of arms to Pakistan was lifted in 2014, Russia rushed to develop military cooperation with Islamabad, helping Pakistan to acquire large Mi-26 transport helicopters, precision-guided munitions, artillery, air defense, and long-range missiles. Military exports to Pakistan are intrinsic to Russia’s regional strategy. A sale of aircraft to India is always followed by a sale of anti-aircraft systems to Pakistan “to keep the balance in the region.”

A media scandal broke out in the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion when videos of Indian students stranded at the Ukraine-EU border proliferated on social media. Pro-Russian media quickly accused Ukrainian border guards of mistreating the students, and of racism. In fact, it is European, not Ukrainian border guards who blocked students’ passage to the EU, which at that early stage had not yet been secured.

But the biggest skeleton is bigger than this. For decades, Soviet operatives ran anti-Western disinformation campaigns in India, the biggest Anglophone sphere outside the West. The KGB archives exposed by archivist Vasily Mitrokhin, who defected to Britain, showed the agency planting thousands of articles in 10 Indian newspapers and a press agency. In 1972 alone, Russian operatives published more than 3,500 articles in Indian newspapers and in 1983 they used an Indian newspaper, The Patriot, to spread the fake about American military manufacturing AIDS.

Russia has maintained these communication channels and Indian mass media remains severely infiltrated by Russian operatives. Editors in two Indian newspapers I write for told me, and off-record, that they are required to follow each pro-Ukrainian article with a pro-Russian one. Ukraine, on the contrary, has no information network in India. So, while echoes of Kremlin narratives billow through India’s chai shops and sitting rooms, where people still often think that Putin’s Russia is the new USSR and that Russia is an anti-imperialist friend of the post-colonial Global South. At the same time, no one knows that the common slogan “Hindi-Rusi bhai bhai” (Indians and Russians are brothers) was in fact coined by the Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev, under whom Indo-Soviet relations blossomed. Fewer still understand that this is Ukraine’s war of independence from Europe’s last rogue empire⍐.