INDIA-RUSSIA TIES POISED TO GATHER PACE

Putin's Delhi visit highlighted a relationship adjusting to shifting global power equations. Modi and Putin stressed long-term strategic trust, economic ambition, and a quiet defiance of external pressure

- M K BHADRAKUMAR

HE state visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin to India drew heightened international attention, which gave it the colouring of a geopolitical event. Three European ambassadors assigned to Delhi from France, Germany and the UK even resorted to pamphleteering to smear Russia, compelling a rare rebuke by the government. In the event, though, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Putin kept the focus on the bilateral content, with a long-term perspective.

Although the presence of the ghost at the banquet would have been on their minds, neither Modi nor Putin showed any signs of it. In fact, Putin embarked on the journey to Delhi right after his momentous 5-hour negotiations in the Kremlin with US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, which have held out hopes that guns may soon fall silent in the battlefields of Ukraine and promises a historic breakthrough in the adversarial Russian-American relationship that has posed formidable challenges lately to Indian diplomacy.

To be sure, the Delhi summit was held in the backdrop of a tumultuous shift of tectonic plates in the alignment of major powers, especially Russia and India. In his first public remarks with Putin, Modi went straight to the point, saying India was anything but ‘neutral’ in the Ukraine situation and stood for peace. It was a bold articulation of support for the coordinated efforts by Putin and Trump to bring the war to an end, the diabolical moves by the European Union and the Kiev regime to smother the nascent peace process notwithstanding.