PUTIN'S GURU CALLS FOR POLE-TO-POLE' INDIA-RUSSIA RELATIONS

Known in strategic circles as the guru and brain behind Russian President Vladimir Putin, Aleksandr Dugin, a Russian political scientist and philosopher, is an ardent nationalist and an admirer of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

- MANISH CHAND

In this conversation, Dugin, the author of The Fourth Political Theory, and GROUND LEVEL WORK Theory of Multipolar World, argues for a new type of India-Russia relations, based on traditional civilisational values. The traditional Russia, unknown to India, and the traditional India, provide a new opportunity and basis for rebuilding the time-tested relationship, said Dugin, who visited India recently.

Excerpts from the interview:

Q: You have written about a new type of relationship between India and Russia, based on civilisational states. How can India and Russia rebuild their time-tested partnership on the basis of civilisational values? A: In history, traditionally, good relations between Russia and India were based on the concept of progress. Russia was the Soviet Union, and Russia thought that socialism represented the future for humanity-it was anticapitalism and anti-western.

Somehow, India, led mostly by left political parties like the Congress Party, shared this progressist attitude.

So, everybody was united, everybody was thinking beyond capitalism, but still within the main western narrative.

There were two variations or deviations from the liberal capitalist narrative of the West: the Russian Soviet socialist model and an independent Indian model. But all these groups, countries that didn’t join either the communist or capitalist blocs, shared this linear progressist vision. That was the common basis for mutual understanding between the Soviet Union and post-colonial India, as well as post-colonial India with the liberal West.