The outcome of Monday’s “informal summit” between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin at Sochi, Russia’s Black Sea resort, which entailed a six-hour chat covering bilateral and crucial regional and international issues, is likely to be evaluated as positive by both sides, and will help a favourable recalibration of slipping relations by both.
President Putin, exhibiting remarkable strategic sense and timing, took the initiative. He is aware his hope of a rapprochement with the United States under President Donald Trump has not materialised. Indeed, recent US actions in disrupting the international nuclear treaty with Iran and hardening sanctions against Russia would have persuaded him that he needed to revisit the international chessboard.
In doing so, he needed to cut India some slack in respect of New Delhi’s regional concerns — Pakistan and the Taliban in the Afghanistan context, as well as Indian sensitivities on China’s overweening ambitions.
The informal summit went well. The seminal importance of traditional ties was reiterated by both sides. Expansion of ties in the economic sphere is visualised through institutional cooperation. But the idea of composing and coordinating ties in Afghanistan — important for India — is obviously in its nascence, and needs working on.
This needs a firmer political underpinning than the one that exists now between New Delhi and Moscow. It is a good start, though, that officially both sides spoke of a “multipolar” world. This means that in the world today all countries will talk to all, and the fluidity of relationships is acknowledged. But in the Afghan theatre, this also offers scope to operate together on some levels.
Just weeks earlier, India agreed to work with China on an economic project in Afghanistan. The essential point is that India is jumping out of the construct of being an American ally in Afghanistan.
India and Russia, while still strong on defence and civil nuclear ties, have been drifting apart in the Narendra Modi era. This is because New Delhi imagined, mistakenly, that tight relations with Washington would answer all its prayers. That has not come to pass.
US sanctions against Iran and Russia also hurt India as these countries are sources of crucial hydrocarbons and defence supplies for us, and their being in the loop with India has an important bearing on regional issues of strategic import — like Chabahar, Afghanistan and the North-South Transport Corridor.
Mr Modi has also evidently come to appreciate that putting all eggs into the American basket wasn’t too clever, and is now calling relations with Moscow “privileged and special, not just strategic”. We saw the “Indo-Pacific”, an American coinage in the context of US competition with China, also being discussed between Mr Modi and Mr Putin, not just the standard stuff, including terrorism.
The Sochi interaction comes just before the SCO summit. Moscow and New Delhi should work to take the spirit of Sochi to this multilateral forum.
