Modi operandi: How India curries favor with the Kremlin to secure oil discounts

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Russia is closer than Europe or China

Immediately after his re-election to a third term in June, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi attended the G7 meeting in Italy, where he met with Emmanuel Macron, Joe Biden, and Volodymyr Zelensky. However, Modi has since defiantly ignored the Summit on Peace in Ukraine hosted by Switzerland, limiting India's presence there to a delegation led by Pavan Kapoor, New Delhi's ambassador to Russia since 2021. Moreover, Kapoor refrained from signing the final resolution of the summit — explaining the gesture as a signal of India's neutrality rather than as a challenge to the West. After all, Modi was a welcome guest at the G7 meeting, which was well reflected not only in the Indian but also in the Western media. Western leaders still harbor hopes of pulling India to their side — or at least of preventing New Delhi from getting too cozy with Moscow. This setup has given rise to speculation that European states are seeking to make use of India's neutrality in hypothetical Ukraine peace talks.

For India, the image of a truce envoy — a “friend of the world,” as the country was referred to at the Swiss summit) — is bringing direct economic benefits in the form of cheap Russian oil. However, this does not mean that India is pursuing friendly relations with all members of the world community. Modi skipped the July 3-4 Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Kazakhstan in favor of his Moscow visit, a jab directed at the summit’s initiator, China, whose relations with India cooled years ago due to border conflicts.

But Modi's visit to Moscow also sends a message to the West.

A rift with the West

The failure of efforts to “cancel Russia” following the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been well documented. Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited Moscow in 2023, but India’s ties to the West are historically stronger than China's, prompting New Delhi to quite clearly distance itself from Moscow, at least initially. This makes Modi's recent visit all the more defiant. Although India has so far refrained from openly denouncing the Russian invasion through UN votes, leading Indian newspapers condemned Russia’s aggression almost from the very start. India also interrupted the tradition of annual India-Russia summits, which took place every October for over 20 years (the first was organized in October 2000 at Vladimir Putin’s initiative). But at the September 2022 SCO summit in Kazakhstan, Modi told Putin that “now is not the time for war,” expressing his solidarity with Western condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Recently, India's diplomatic rhetoric has undergone another shift: instead of demonstratively staying away from Russia in public, India has joined the Kremlin in criticizing the West. The change of tone happened for a reason: the recent strengthening of authoritarianism in India has drawn criticism from Western countries, and New Delhi has been responding increasingly sharply. On June 28, Indian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal openly condemned the U.S. and rejected charges brought against India in the 2023 report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which shed light on religious intolerance, oppression of minorities, and illegitimacy of court decisions in India.