Engaging a new India

A whirlwind of international engagement is on the cards. Brand new proposals to make up a brave, new world are on the anvil. Struggling to make up for lost time (the last four months), an aeon in international politics, US President George Bush is seeking to junk the old nuclear rules the world once lived by. Russia and China have been put on notice, even as India, poor but ambitious, has at first glance chosen to throw in its lot with the proposal unleashed two days ago by Washington.

Within these fluid parameters, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov has arrived in New Delhi. While the bilateral agenda packs in interesting, new ways on how to cope with the terrorism emanating from Afghanistan — both in Kashmir and Chechnya — Ivanov is sure to also sound out the government over the Bush administration’s determination to build new weapons in space.

The significance of Ivanov’s visit also lies in its timing. Ivanov comes to New Delhi having met the China’s Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan — Beijing and Moscow will sign a Friendship Treaty in July — and soon after his return, travels to Washington to meet his counterpart, Colin Powell on May 18. Interestingly enough, Foreign Secretary Chokila Iyer will be in Washington over May 17-18 for New Delhi’s first foreign office consultations with the Bush administration.

Ivanov is sure to want to get a sense of the lay of the land in New Delhi, which, especially after the unusual meeting between Bush and Jaswant Singh last month, seems inclined in favour of Washington. Ideologically attuned to the free market, history has helped the BJP to mend its post-Pokharan fences with the US. In the name of pragmatism, New Delhi has progressively found it suitable to align its mind with Washington.

It is this major change in India at the beginning of the new century that Ivanov will be confronted with. The Indian middle class — just like the Russian middle class — is simply far more interested in the West (read America) than in any other part of the world. With Indian business unable to strike a balance between entrepreneurship and the mafia, unlike its Western counterparts who make roaring profits in Russia, the future seems pretty pessimistic even to an incurable optimist.

And yet, there is too much at stake in the old Indo-Russian relationship for it to be simply discarded like an old sock in last year’s closet. Seventy per cent of India’s air, naval and army equipment is still sourced from Russia. A memorandum of understanding on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, signed during President Putin’s trip last October, includes the supply of nuclear fuel for the Tarapur nuclear plant in the teeth of American opposition; while Western accusations about Russia violating the Nuclear Suppliers Group guidelines because of its relationship with a non-NPT signatory country like India, have been systematically ignored by Moscow.

India’s GSLV programme, meanwhile, has a large number of Russian components and ISRO officials say that Moscow is now willing to sell technology for other parts of its programme.

And yet, if the relationship must be reinvented, both sides must be willing to look beyond today’s ‘‘buyer-seller’’ approach. In the wake of posting a 6 per cent GDP growth last year, Moscow has been desperate to reassure its exhausted population by stabilising key economic indicators.

More significantly, for the first time since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Moscow is beginning to show promise about returning to the international stage. From promising military and nuclear supplies to old friends like Iran and North Korea, to lending a warm ear to Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak last week, to receiving China’s Jiang Zemin in July — to sign the Friendship Treaty — Putin is getting accustomed to the feel of what it could be like to be a big power.

Meanwhile, the horizon is a-splash with a pugnacious proposal made by President Bush only a couple of days ago, a new-age ‘Star Wars’ defence of America and the free world, called the National Missile Defence.

New Delhi’s enthusiastic response, on the eve of Ivanov’s visit, in itself constitutes a major departure from its traditional, cautious approach over the militarisation of space — leading some to believe that it is moving farther away from Russia than ever.

But that may be a simplistic position. In fact, Moscow is believed not to be particularly averse to the new changes in the world’s security architecture. Some say that its very public opposition to Bush’s proposal in recent months has been made with an eye to enhancing its own leverage, especially when the time comes to negotiate with the US.

Security analysts here speculate that Russia’s price for withdrawing opposition to the US project may be the Western affirmation of Moscow’s influence over the territory that once constituted the former USSR. In effect, that would mean a check on the ‘‘insidious expansion’’ of NATO eastwards — something Russia has demanded for at least 8 years and NATO systematically rejected.

Effectively, that would mean that Bush’s reinvigorated space weapons are really targetted at China. Despite the fact that Beijing aspires to be a major power in this century, security theologians insist that China just doesn’t have the capability to take on the US. That a missile race would be an indecent drain on Beijing’s exchequer, taking away from its social commitments elsewhere.

It is in this changing world that Igor Ivanov, the foreign minister of Russia, comes to town.

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