Modi-Putin summit in Moscow sends strong message to the West – Firstpost

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi travels to Moscow on July 8-9 for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, anger will temporarily run high in the United States and Europe.

This is exactly the kind of image they don’t want to see as the war between Russia and Ukraine continues. Modi made Russia the first bilateral visit of his third term. This will not escape Western leaders busy putting out fires in Europe as the continent swings to the right and an increasingly weak US President Joe Biden lags behind former President Donald Trump in opinion polls.

What message does the Modi-Putin summit in Moscow send to the West? Putin has been vilified, sanctioned and ostracized by the US-led Western alliance since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

This is the first India-Russia summit since 2021. It is also the first time Modi is meeting Putin in Moscow after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The special relationship between the United States and India remains strong despite India’s growing strategic autonomy. Both countries have more to lose than to gain by loosening their ties.

Washington needs India as a reliable ally in the Indo-Pacific region. India needs the United States for trade and defense technology. Indian and American national interests are broadly aligned. But relations between New Delhi and Washington have cooled since the Nijjar-Pannun affair a year ago. President Joe Biden favors closer ties with India, even as many of his aides, who lean toward the hard left of the Democratic Party, say India needs a periodic reality check.

The Nijjar-Pannun case is one example. The FBI framed Indian businessman Nikhil Gupta for murder based on questionable online posts. Gupta was framed by the FBI in Prague, imprisoned for a year in the Czech Republic, and extradited to the United States last month to stand trial in a New York court.

The evidence against Gupta is so thin that it has not been revealed publicly. American justice can be deeply compromised, as the cases against the recently released WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the ongoing legal battles with Donald Trump make clear.

The US administration has a well-oiled network of NGOs and international agencies working to keep recalcitrant allies on the defensive. One of its favorite targets is religious freedom in India.

The U.S. State Department is often deployed to deliver this message. Last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken personally released the State Department’s “Religious Freedom Report 2023.” He cited violent attacks on Muslims and Christians. The report added: “In India, we are seeing a disturbing increase in anti-conversion laws, hate speech, and demolitions of homes and places of worship for members of minority religious communities.”

This is a direct attack on India’s internal affairs by the top US diplomat who has developed a close relationship with his Indian counterpart, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar.

It is a bit like Jaishankar publishing an external affairs ministry report on racially motivated police shootings of black minorities in the US. This would be a serious transgression of diplomatic protocol. The US sees itself as the leader of a rules-based world order. It breaks all the rules of the world, but expects other countries to abide by them.

The MEA quickly issued a strong rebuttal to the State Department’s report on religious freedom in India: “The report is deeply biased, lacks understanding of the social fabric of India and is clearly motivated by voting considerations and a prescriptive perspective. We therefore reject it. The exercise itself is a mixture of imputations, misrepresentations, selective use of facts, reliance on biased sources and one-sided projection of issues. This extends even to the description of our constitutional provisions and duly enacted laws of India. It has selectively selected incidents to advance a preconceived narrative.”

Revealing India’s new resolve to take the fight to the US when necessary, an Indian media report on the MEA’s rebuttal pointedly added: “In 2023, India has formally taken charge of numerous cases in the US of hate crimes, racial attacks on Indian nationals and other minorities, vandalism and targeting of places of worship, violence and mistreatment by law enforcement authorities, as well as giving political space to supporters of extremism and terrorism abroad.”

Balancing Moscow and Washington

What worries Washington most is the possible resumption of the Russia-India-China (RIC) trilateral, suspended since the clash at the LAC in Ladakh in 2020.

Moscow wants the RIC to become an annual summit between Putin, Xi Jinping and Modi. But this is unlikely in the near future, given the freeze in relations between Beijing and New Delhi.

For Russia, the RIC is another opportunity to show that most countries outside the US-led Western alliance are not boycotting Moscow, which is the stated goal of Washington and London. By freezing $300 billion of Russian assets in Europe and the US and using the proceeds from these assets to finance the war in Ukraine, the West has set a precedent that could backfire in the future.

India is wary of getting drawn too closely into the Sino-Russian dynamic. It is particularly irritated by Moscow’s push to expand BRICS to include several countries, including Pakistan.

BRICS already has five member countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia and Iran). The accession of ten more countries, as Moscow wants, would only weaken India’s position within BRICS, of which it is one of the founding members.

Moscow’s intention is to expand all the platforms on which it operates to counter the West’s attempt to isolate it. But this strategy is not in India’s national interest. As the world’s third-largest economy by 2029, India is positioning itself to play the role of a pivot between the US and China. Aligning too closely with the US-led West or the Sino-Russian alliance is not in its long-term interest.

By 2030, the Indian economy is expected to be worth $7 trillion. Its per capita income in nominal terms will be $5,500. In purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, the per capita income will be $12,000. This is not a high level, but well above the levels at which India was stuck for six decades after independence.

In Moscow, Modi will have a chance to get a first-hand look at the war in Ukraine. Despite the conflict, the Russian economy is expected to grow by more than 3% a year, outpacing all major European economies and slightly above US GDP growth in 2024.

India now buys about half of its crude oil from Russia. Rupee-ruble trade is weak but, despite some difficulties, growing. Moscow and New Delhi have common interests in their struggle to move away from a dollar-based global economy.

Modi declined to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meeting in Kazakhstan last week, sending Jaishankar instead, although Xi Jinping and Putin were present. The message of strategic autonomy was aimed at both the West and the Moscow-Beijing alliance.

The author is an editor, writer and publisher. The views expressed in the above article are personal and those of the author alone. They do not necessarily reflect the views of Firstpost.