By Mazdoor Inquilab
In February, the Russo-Ukrainian war entered its third year. Until this point, there has been at least 1 million casualties, and verifiable death estimates of soldiers and civilians amount to over 300,000. This makes the war the deadliest war in Europe after the Second World War, far surpassing the death and destruction of the Yugoslav wars.
As things stand, Russia has the initiative on the battlefront, and while the war is no longer a stalemate, it retains its attritional quality with both Russia and Ukraine waging an exhausting campaign against each other. In such a war, the side with the more resources has the greater advantage. That is without a doubt the Russian Federation.
This war would not have been so one-sided, had the West been earnest in their support of Ukraine with arms and munitions, and had the nations of India, Iran, and China not been steadfast in their support for Russia’s military machinery. India stands out as one of the key pillars of support for Russia. Not only has India retained its purchases of cheap Russian oil, but it has also been an indirect supplier of oil to European nations, undercutting the value of sanctions on Russia.
In December of last year, India’s Reliance Group signed a $13 billion contract with Rosneft for the supply of 500,000 barrels of crude oil per day. This mega-contract covers a period of 10 years and represents the largest single energy deal between India and Russia. As of now, Russia accounts for a third of India’s oil supply, and has given India windfall gains as it re-exports processed Russian oil to Europe and elsewhere.
This deal highlights the critical role played by India in Russia’s war on Ukraine. India has been one of the economical pillars of Russia’s war economy.
The Indo-Russian alliance
Indians have had a largely sympathetic view of Russia and the Soviet Union since before independence. Since the actions of Bhagat Singh popularized socialism in India, much of the country’s youth looked to socialism, communism and the Soviet Union rather than to Gandhi or the United States of America for inspiration. The Congress Party’s leadership came into the hands of the Subhash Chandra Bose, who along with Nehru formed its left wing in the Congress Socialist Party. Despite the eventual defeat of the party to the conservative pro-Gandhian forces, the impact of socialist ideology and the appeal of the Soviet Union remained.
This sympathy was carried on over after independence, when India formulated a system of central planning modeled on the Soviet Union’s five-year plans. India’s first Prime Minister, Jawahar Lal Nehru, was not a socialist, and the Soviet Union did not view him as an independent puppet but as a comprador at the service of foreign capital. Despite this, India and the Soviet Union received aid and investment. Critically, the Soviet Union’s aid served to deflect and reduce dependence on American aid, and helped India build capacity in vital scientific sectors. Soviet aid helped India build the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), helped modernize its military, and helped establish heavy industries. The Soviet Union lent political support to India at the UN, aiding its occupation of Kashmir against Pakistan’s protests.
Relations generally improved after the death of Stalin, and the Soviet Union’s de-Stalinization under Khrushchev. By 1960 India had received over a $1 billion in Soviet aid, outpacing Soviet aid to China. The improvement in relations continued over the decade under the leadership of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, culminating in the Indo-Soviet treaty of friendship. This treaty formalized India’s alliance with the Soviet Union, and became a keystone in its relationship with the Russian federation.
India and Russia’s geo-political calculations
India’s closeness to the Soviet Union was mirrored and contrasted with Pakistan’s growing alliance with the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China. While India became the main recipient of Soviet aid in Asia, Pakistan joined SEATO to access high-grade American weapons. While India embarked on a development model that followed the Soviet example, Pakistan embarked on an open free-market model closer to the West than to China. The contrasts only deepened as Ayub Khan took power, becoming Pakistan’s first military dictator while India remained a bourgeois democracy, albeit effectively controlled by one party, the Congress Party.
It was the Soviet Union’s policy to counter American influence in Asia, for which India and China were its lynchpin. In the aftermath of the Sino-Soviet split, relations with China became increasingly strained, and pivoting to India thus became an obvious choice, given the USA’s influence over East Asia and the relative strength of India compared with other nascent Asian republics. China and the United States found themselves working together, quite unintentionally so, to prop up Pakistan as a counter to India.
Soviet attempts to counter Chinese and American influence over Pakistan by providing arms to them largely fell flat. Rather than risk alienating India, Soviet arms to Pakistan were suspended entirely, and India became the main recipient of Soviet military aid after 1965. For India, the Soviet Union provided several acts of critical assistance; on the one hand, they helped build the foundations of the Indian economy with aid to build its heavy industries, technical institutes, and modernize its military. On the other hand, the Soviet Union could be relied upon to support India’s positions at the UN and provide a superpower’s shield to India against the machinations of the USA and China.
The alliance with the Soviet Union was thus an almost perfect match, based on the material interests of both parties. The destruction of Pakistan’s military in the aftermath of the Bangladesh liberation war entrenched India as the military and political hegemon over South Asia. This aligned perfectly with the Soviet Union’s geo-political goal of shutting the USA out of the region, or at least weakening it there, while also giving the USA a geo-strategic defeat.
One could argue that in the long run, the Indo-Soviet alliance aided India more than the Soviet Union, with India benefiting from long-term Soviet assistance and the creation of a modernized military—which allowed it to dominate the region—while the gains of the Soviet Union were lost once they collapsed and fragmented. However, the benefits of the Indo-Soviet alliance continue to play out, now between India and the Russian Federation.
Indo-Russian relations and the Ukraine war
The Indo-Soviet alliance, which had been a bedrock of Indian foreign policy in the decades from the late 1960s, effectively ended with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The fall of the Soviet Union happened at the same time that India suffered a balance of payments crisis, leading to the adoption of the IMF-backed neo-liberal economic policy.
In the first decade of the 21st century, the worst period of the counter-revolutionary restoration of capitalism had ended. The war in Chechnya had largely ended, military reforms and modernization had improved Russia’s armed forces—updating its equipment and military industry to the 21st century—and Russian corporations were emerging as major exporters of capital. At the same time, India had gone through a chaotic period of political and economic changes in the 1990s.
In the aftermath of India’s adoption of neo-liberalism, Indian capital took the fullest advantage of the protectionist state capitalist policies in the five decades preceding it. By the second half of the early 2000s, India became an exporter of capital, with its main monopoly companies becoming multinationals, thanks to acquisitions of corporations in the imperialist metropolitan countries. At the same time, India emerged as a nuclear armed nation, after having successfully tested a nuclear weapon at Pokhran.
While Russia emerged from better material conditions, their trajectories pointed upwards, and grew parallel to each other. Once more, there was a basis for Indo-Russian cooperation, but now under a completely different geo-political conditions.
Russia was rich in raw materials and sought a market for its goods, especially where it was competitive. India was a large growing market, still focusing on internal expansion into its Eastern and Central hinterland. Both these economies complimented each other, with Russian capital finding a market for its raw materials and military goods in India, while India found a reliable partner in Russia for the supply of oil, natural gas, minerals, and as a geo-strategic ally to check China’s influence and balance its relations with the USA.
Today, both India and Russia cooperate with Iran to form a sort of détente against Pakistan in South Asia, against the influence of China in Central Asia, and to keep the USA contained in Western Asia. This relation would find itself tested in the Russo-Ukrainian war, where India and Iran emerge as two of the main supporters of Russia’s invasion. For India, it is through its help in subverting sanctions on Russian oil, and for Iran through its steady supply of military hardware, including drones.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian oil was heavily sanctioned, leading to a collapse in prices. In the two years since then, India’s annual purchases of Russian oil have increased 13-fold, to $31 billion in 2023. Russia today accounts for 40% of India’s oil imports, while Iraq fell to 20% of India’s oil imports. At the same time, the sanctions have inadvertently made India a major exporter of Russian oil to Europe. India has the world’s largest refinery, and significant oil refining capabilities; until the Obama-era sanctions on Iran, India controlled about 40% of Iran’s refined petroleum needs. In 2023, India sold almost $20 billion worth of oil to the Netherlands alone.
At a more fundamental level, the Indo-Russian cooperation remained steady in the military sector, despite the fall of the Soviet Union and India’s turn to neo-liberalism. Even as ties with the United States improved, and India became a major destination for U.S. capital exports, India retained its position as the main importer of Russian weaponry. Over the last two decades, Russia supplied arms worth $60 billion to India, and they continue to cooperate in space research and jointly manufacture the Brahmos missile, one of the most sought-after systems in the world.
With the signing of the latest agreement between Reliance and Rosneft, there is very little sign of India changing course on its position over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If one analyses India’s positions on wars involving the Soviet Union, this reflects a continuity rather than break, and has little to do with Modi’s own personal choices. Since the war, Russia’s value in checking China’s rise has been severely limited, but its value as a source of mineral resources for India, and likewise for India as a large market for Russian goods, remains intact. Both these imperial powers are aiding each other’s rise, fueling and supporting each other’s expansion, and having to navigate around the complex challenge thrown by the rise of China, a challenge that is especially critical for both as they are both neighboring countries to China.
How the Ukraine war affects India
For most Indians, the war in Ukraine is a distant conflict; interest in it has waned and nearly disappeared since its early days. To talk of the war more often feels like a distraction, and yet the war impacts the lives of every Indian in many profound ways, and it all comes down to the oil trade.
India is one of the largest purchasers of Russian oil today, and this is set to grow further as the war continues. It is likely to continue even after the war, when economic relations inevitably normalize between Russia and the rest of the world. For now, the war has caused two immediate impacts on Indians; in the first instance, it has caused food inflation, as prices of wheat increased across the board following the disruption of Ukraine’s vital wheat exports. Second, it cause the rise of oil prices across the world, and caused a worldwide economic crisis, even as the world was recovering from COVID.
Another impact of the war is the enrichment of India’s entrenched oil oligarchy, and in particular, the Reliance group. They control India’s largest refinery, and have been the largest buyers of Russian oil. The reason is simple economics. As the U.S. initiated a stringent sanction regime against Russia, oil prices increased across the world as Russia, a major oil exporter, was shut off from the world market. This conversely forced Russia to sell oil cheaply to markets that would still buy from them. This left only a handful of countries with the capabilities to maneuver around U.S. sanctions that can buy oil and accept Russian shipments. India and China emerged as the largest buyers of Russian oil, and for companies like Reliance this represented a windfall profit.
Even as India was importing cheap oil from Russia, oil prices did not decrease. Government taxes, subsidies, and the profit-driven pricing from private conglomerates like Reliance make the Indian customer pay for their enrichment. The war and its consequent sanctions have helped enrich and empower one of India’s foremost oligarchs, even as the Indian worker suffers from the increasing burden of taxes, and price rises. As the oligarchy strengthens, so does their preferred party, the BJP.
The greatest impact however, can be felt in the falling Indian rupee, one of the many consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian war, and of the financial war by U.S. imperialism on the rest of the world. The demand for dollar-denominated oil purchases not only increases the price of oil, but also the value of the dollar. At the same time, Russia’s strategy of using gold to finance its war and keep its economy afloat adds pressure on gold, which directly affects Indians for whom gold jewelry holds great cultural and economic significance. The war has directly hit the earnings and savings of Indians.
The average Indian worker may not care for the war in Ukraine, but it affects their daily lives and their future. The reality is that we do not live in a vacuum, and the world is more interconnected than ever.
Bourgeois states don’t go by principles
A facile liberal view took hold among some sectors that India, being a “democracy,” would never align itself with Russia and would be naturally disposed to supporting another “democracy” in Ukraine. Likewise, China, being a dictatorial country, would be naturally inclined to support another revanchist authoritarian country in Russia. This view has no correlation with reality, and is especially absurd coming from American commentators, who would willfully ignore the USA’s role in supporting dictatorships with a view to exploiting semi-colonial countries. That is not to mention its historical duplicity towards fascism and colonialism and its own rise to imperialism.
India’s position on Ukraine is a rude shock to facile liberal beliefs in bourgeois democracy, and shows that states foreign policies are first and foremost guided by material conditions and material interests. India’s foreign policy is guided by the material interest of its bourgeoisie, as much as Russia’s actions are guided by the material and class interests of their bourgeoisie, and the same for the USA. Understanding these underlying material motivations can help us see through the illusions that states try to sow into our minds through their propaganda.
Russia might pretend to fight a great anti-imperialist crusade against NATO, but such a claim is rich coming from the country that openly cooperated with NATO nations in their aggression in Afghanistan, hosting an American base in Ulyanovsk. Putin may claim to fight this war to defend the rights of Russians in Ukraine against “Nazis,” while turning a blind eye to the neo-Nazis in his own country, when Russia hosts the largest number of neo-Nazis in the world! The truth is that the nonsensical claim of defending the rights of Russian minorities is just a window dressing to hide the real motivations of the Russian state.
Ukraine is critical for Russia’s geo-political aspirations. Russia seeks to dominate Ukraine politically, as it had been doing until 2014; it seeks to keep Ukraine as a captive market for its energy exports, and use it as a vital transit point for exporting oil and gas to Western European markets. Russia also seeks the resources of Ukraine, particularly its Eastern region. Ukraine has $25 trillion worth of mineral deposits, and this is precisely the interest behind European and American imperialism in investing in Ukraine’s war effort. They at once wish to weaken and contain Russian imperialism, while opening up Ukraine to the exploitation of European and American capital.
It should not surprise us, if Russian imperialism and American imperialism come to an agreement to divide the spoils of Ukraine, to see a situation in which Russia reasserts political dominance over a partitioned Ukraine, while capturing the mineral wealth of Eastern Ukraine, whilst American capital enforces control over Ukraine’s rich agricultural resources.
In the hands of the bourgeoisie, the only certainty is exploitation of the working class and peasants. A truly independent and sovereign Ukraine can only be won through the struggle of workers and peasants. The pious ramblings of liberals, bourgeois propagandists, and their Stalinist jesters, offer no path forward other than sowing confusion and illusions in the minds of the masses.
This is as true for Ukraine as it is for all of the oppressed countries of the world.
References:
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85T00875R001100130127-2.pdf
