Power of Norms – or Norms of Power?: India’s Response to the Ukraine Crisis

In the days after Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the Ukrainian separatists' regions of Donetsk and Luhansk on February 21, and one week after he declared war to demilitarize and “denazify” Ukraine, India has abstained from all international efforts to condemn the Russian invasion. This included votes at two emergency sessions of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), a special session convened by the UN High Commission for Refugees, and a rare emergency session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA). 

The optics around India's silence on the egregious violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity and Russia's utter disregard for international law and norms ill behoove the world's largest democracy. In the liberal rules-based order, its moral standing and status as an emerging power that believes in the rule of law have suffered greatly. Veteran diplomat Richard Haass, president of the US Council on Foreign Relations, lamented that India remains "unprepared to step up to major power responsibilities or be a dependable partner." Even influential sections of India's strategic community have expressed dissatisfaction with New Delhi's diplomatic maneuvering. "All those wrongs do not make one giant right for Putin" to defy "the principles (of sovereignty and territorial integrity) which we hold dear," argued former foreign secretary Nirupama Rao.  

India's dilemma is, however, not simply of morality and principles. Like Putin, China does not recognize large chunks of Indian territory along their common frontier in the high Himalayas, also called the Line of Actual Control (LAC). And just like Putin, Beijing also believes in military coercion and unilateral use of force to achieve its territorial ambitions. Just two years back, the Indian Army and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) engaged in the Galwan Valley in northern Himalayas, where 20 Indian and several Chinese soldiers lost their lives. The crisis is yet to be fully resolved, with the PLA is still holding parts of what India considers to be its side of the LAC. The military pressure from Beijing continues unabated, with almost 200,000 PLA soldiers posted along the India-China border. 

A straightforward explanation for India's continued hesitancy is its most immediate interests. Thousands of Indian students are trapped in the conflict zone. New Delhi requires Russian, Ukrainian and Eastern European support to evacuate its beleaguered citizens. India's defense dependence on Russia is another. Though New Delhi has aimed to diversify its military imports in the post-Cold War period by buying equipment from the US, France and Israel, Moscow still holds substantial sway over India's defense necessities. According to one study, 86 percent of the equipment in the Indian military is of Russian origin, most of Cold War vintage. The legacy of these assets requires Moscow's constant support for spares and maintenance. 

Russia, however, has also been a very profitable partner in India's quest to obtain cutting-edge weaponry and highly classified technological help for its indigenous defense production. The S-400 air defense system, central to India's deterrence requirements against both China and Pakistan, has no comparable alternative even in the West. India's nuclear submarine program would have remained a pipedream without active Russian assistance. And as India aims to build better and bigger ballistic nuclear submarines, Russian help is more necessary. 

Such immediate causes hide rather than reveal India's more profound calculations. First, whereas the West wants to reinforce the “power of norms” against Putin's blatant disregard of the post-Second World War global order, New Delhi's choices underline that it values the “norms of power” instead. Such appreciation of power and interests, over the morality of international behavior, is evident in how India sorted the blame for the current crisis. In its very first statement in the UNSC on February 22, India's ambassador apportioned responsibility to both parties and omitted any reference to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. India's stand was motivated by an expectation that Putin was only engaging in military coercion without any real intention to walk the talk on his military threat. Since then, as the war proceeded, Delhi began to appeal to the norms of sovereignty and territorial integrity. Prime Minister Narendra Modi specifically asked Putin to stop all hostilities. 

The West may believe that India is on the wrong side of history, but New Delhi understands that it is just on the wrong side of geography. Ukraine may be central to Western interests, and the US and its partners and allies may have the power to exert some influence or at least bog Russia down on Ukraine's cost. Still, India's geopolitical situation does not afford her the same luxury.

With Moscow, India has always prioritized its interests over its values. Even in January 1980, when the UNGA condemned the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan, India declined to stand publicly against Moscow even when then prime minister Indira Gandhi vehemently expressed her personal disapproval to Soviet authorities. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, the Indian response was highly guarded. The reticence is rooted in classic geopolitics. India has suffered when Russia is weakened by external adventures and cannot act as an independent power pole in Eurasia. Russia's involvement in Afghanistan strengthened the US-China-Pakistan axis, which provided perfect conditions for Pakistan to build its nuclear capability. 

Western sanctions after 2014 have helped create significant convergence between Beijing and Moscow. Russia became an enthusiastic partner in China's flagship foreign economic policy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It has also differed more and more with India on the Indo-Pacific and strengthened its military relationship with Pakistan. The current crisis and the Western response will not only cripple Russia, but it may well also end whatever autonomous agency Moscow may have vis-à-vis China. An alliance of Eurasia's authoritarian continental powers will portend great dangers not only for India but the rest of Indo-Pacific's maritime democracies. 

Balancing the combined power of Russia and China will be extremely difficult. Russian oil and gas reserves could effectively end China's Malacca Strait dilemma, and its military-industrial complex can help accelerate China's military modernization. Japan and Australia are still not only once-removed from Chinese power through vast swathes of water, but they are also American alliance partners. 

New Delhi enjoys no such privileges. Russia's interests are, however, independent of India's interests, and Indian diplomatic gymnastics may not stop the emergence of a tight alliance between the two. India's muted response toward Russia over Ukraine is, therefore, driven by its need to account for the emerging dynamics of Eurasia's balance of power and the impact on national security.

Second, Western entreaties over “alignment of values” between the liberal world and the world's largest democracy do not trump India's cold-blooded calculations of national interests. Not without reason, India and the US were estranged democracies during the Cold War. Much water has flown down the Ganges and Potomac in the last 30 years, however. 

The India-US relationship is far more robust than ever. Still, it would be a mistake to believe that an appeal to values is responsible for transforming Indo-US relations. Instead, India's judgment on the “value of alignment” has primarily directed its embrace of the US and its security partners in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. In the post-Cold War world, at the height of US unipolarity, India jumped on the bandwagon of American power because of prospective gains it could make by aligning with the US. As the high-level Group of Minister's report submitted to the Indian government in 2000 stated, "meaningful, broad-based engagement with the United States spanning political, economic, and technological interests and commonalities, will impact beneficially on our external security concerns with a resultant albeit less visible impact on our internal security environment. Conversely, an adversarial relationship with that State can have significant negative repercussions across the same broad range of issues and concerns." 

In the last decade, India's growing military alignment with the US has been driven by China's rise and India's need to maintain a favorable balance of military power in the Indian Ocean and the Himalayas. Containing Beijing is the lowest common denominator in the Indo-US relationship. However, New Delhi's calculation is that such Beijing-driven “value of alignment” does not extend to Russia and the European theatre.

Because of India's strategic behavior premised on “norms of power” and “value of alignment”, however, its relations with the US will not suffer from Delhi's current disposition on the Ukrainian crisis. The pessimism in the analytical community notwithstanding, both states fully understand the fundamental raison d'être of their strategic partnership: the need to deter China. It would be hard to forecast, but India's reaction were there a similar Chinese onslaught on Taiwan would not be as dispassionate. A successful invasion of Taiwan would leave China highly emboldened and fundamentally alter the Indo-Pacific's balance of power. In such a case, India's alignment with the West will be far stronger than we have seen in the last three decades. 

Washington has shown a remarkable understanding of New Delhi's difficulties in geopolitical navigation. The US State Department has gone on record stating that its relationship with India is not affected by the Russian crisis and "stands on its own merits." The logic of continued partnership was underlined in the ongoing Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on India-US relations. Donald Lu, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian Affairs, argued that "every piece of defense equipment we sell to India is something that we will not have to field ourselves in Asia." Within India, too, Putin's gambit has underscored the need to move away from its military dependence on Russia. The uncertainty of Putin's Russia has constrained India's strategic choices rather than augmented its strategic autonomy.