Indo-Soviet friendship appeared to become “old hat” that looked to be fraying fast in the wake of the collapse of the USSR in the early Nineties.
Anti-communist ideological frenzy was palpable in Moscow. In India, many sections couldn’t help gloating, although the government of P.V. Narasimha Rao was more circumspect in its response to the epochal transformation. In America and Western Europe, the mood was to make New Delhi pay for its earlier friendship with communist Russia.
With Russian President Vladimir Putin’s day-long working visit to India on Thursday, it was emphasised that all that is truly history. Indeed, not too long after the Soviet collapse it became evident that the New Delhi-Moscow relationship had less ideology and more geo-politics to it.
The more than favourable attitude of the Modi government, BJP’s first with a majority of its own in Parliament, to Moscow underlines the natural affinity given geography, state of development, and the contours of world politics between the two countries which underpins their “special strategic partnership” that was spoken of during Mr Putin’s sojourn in the Indian capital.
With the Modi-Putin summit on Thursday, a clear success by any yardstick, the India-Russia relationship can be said to have acquired a truly bipartisan legitimacy as far as this country goes.
(That Moscow was communist in the earlier period is not quite germane.) The historical flowering of the relationship had occurred under Congress governments.
It cannot be overlooked that the Indian PM’s warm references to this country’s ties with Russia, especially in the defence sector (Mr Modi called the Russian connection India’s “most important” relationship in the defence field), come just weeks before President Obama is to arrive in India.
It should also be borne in mind that the Modi-Putin tango was unfurled, with its emphasis on defence and energy, when the Russian leader is virtually a “wanted” man in the US on account of deteriorating US-Russia ties in the wake of the developments in Ukraine.
Both Mr Modi and Mr Putin are expected to be conscious that apart from the strong bilateral nature of the India-Russia relationship, the two countries may just be fated to partner one other in Afghanistan following the end of the West’s combat mission in that country as a necessary component of a regional framework taking the place of the present US-led Western coalition.
This is likely to impart a new quality to the ties, in a sense the re-emergence of the spirit which saw Moscow stand behind New Delhi on the Kashmir question in the UN Security Council for decades when the Western powers leaned Pakistan’s way.
