 |
| Vikrant class Indigenous Carrier (under construction) |
Polina Chernitsa
Recently, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin visited India. As a result of this visit, an agreement was signed, according to which, India is going to purchase a several-million-worth amount of Russian weapons.
At present, India is the country that purchases the largest amounts of weapons in the world – although India’s authorities often stress that their country is not going to attack anyone or join any military alliance. The same is said in a document recently adopted in India, which outlines the country’s foreign policy in the foreseeable future.
The authors of this document believe that in the foreseeable future, the US and China will compete for the role of the country that has the most authoritative say in the world military policy, but in reality, both will not be strong enough to cope with this role. In such a situation, India should not conclude any military alliances with either the US or China, the document’s authors insist.
“In fact, there is nothing new in the idea that lays in the basis of the policy India has now chosen,” Russian expert in Eastern affairs Andrey Volodin says.
“The idea that in the future, countries will unite into military alliances not because of ideological considerations, like it was in the period of the Cold War, but because of their practical interests, was first put forward by France in the first years of the 21st century,” Mr. Volodin says. “If this is true – and there are many reasons to suppose that this is true – this will probably make the world politics more predictable. The Indian politicians are right – at present, neither the US nor China, for all their potentials, are strong enough for the role of the leader in the world’s military policy. The Soviet Union, which once seriously competed with the US for this role, is no more. At present, military alliances concluded on the basis of ideology are a thing of the past.”
However, ideas born in Europe do not always work in Asia. After all, if Europe, to a large extent, has already become one whole, the same still cannot be said about Asia. If Europeans have long forgotten what a real war may be, if large-scale wars are hardly possible in today’s Europe, in Asia, a threat of a military conflict, is, unfortunately, still a reality. One may remember the sharpening of relations between North and South Korea – some time ago, the countries were at a brink of a war, which, fortunately, didn’t break out in the end – or conflicts over disputed islands between some countries of the Asia-Pacific region. In such a situation, military coalitions between countries of this region are still possible, but, while deciding whether to conclude them, Asian politicians would have to take more complicated considerations into account than Europeans do when they conclude similar alliances.
India borders or is situated in proximity with many countries, but it would be wrong to say that it has good relations with all of them. Mainly, this considers China and Pakistan. Bangladesh is still viewed by many analysts as one of the world’s largest hotbeds of terrorism. India’s relations with Nepal are also not always good, because in contradictions between India and China, Nepal often takes China’s side.
India’s economy is still developing, and India’s foreign policy, to a large extent, would depend on the degree of the development of its economy.
One of the main spheres of India’s interests is the Pacific Ocean. After all, the largest part of India’s borders – about 7,000 kms – is its Pacific coast.
Until recent, India has paid more attention to land weapons than to the navy. The majority of weapons that it purchased from the Soviet Union or produced itself were land weapons. At present, India still produces and buys land weapons, but it has started to pay more attention to its navy.
As mentioned, India’s authorities often say that India is not going to attack anyone and that it is not arming itself against any particular country. But it is rather hard to guess how these words may correspond with the slogan which has been put forward by India’s former Prime Minister Atal Vajpayee that “India is responsible for the entire territory from the Suez Canal to Singapore, where the UK once was the only master”, because India doesn’t seem to have rejected this slogan so far. More evidence that India’s military program is not as “peaceful” as its authorities are trying to depict is the fact that India is actively developing nuclear energy.
The document that outlines India’s future foreign policy also says that India is not going to conclude any alliances with the US and still views China as its “strategic rival” because of disputes over certain territories between India and China and because China is actively using the Pacific Ocean for expansion into eastern Africa. At the same time, India is going to use the rivalry between the US and China for their own advantage.
Meanwhile, Russia also has interests of its own in the Asia-Pacific region, and its main interest there is stability and peaceful development. For this, Russia is actively cooperating with India in many spheres, including the military one. Russia is insisting that India, under certain conditions, should be granted the status of a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
This story first appeared on Voice of Russia & is reposted here with permission.