Putin’s visit to put India, Russia ties on a realistic footing

The last is a Russian offer on nuclear safety to modernise and renovate India’s nuclear power plants and, perhaps, build additional units at Kudamkulam, Tamil Nadu, where two light water reactors are now being constructed under IAEA safeguards.

On the cards also is a frank discussion of the devastating impact of Taliban’s terrorism — from Kashmir to Russia’s underbelly in Chechnya via Central Asia — and the reasons for the visit to Islamabad last week by Putin’s envoy, Sergei Yastrezhembsky.

Moscow has frankly admitted that Islamabad has leverage over the Taliban and wants to engage all the parties which can persuade the hardline Afghan group to stop sending jehadis into Central Asia and Chechnya.

The timing of the Pakistan visit has certainly not been appreciated here. Analysts pointed out that Moscow, even during the best years of the bilateral relationship, had often sought to play the “Muslim” card, perhaps in deference to its own vast Muslim population.

The then Pakistan prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan was invited to Moscow before Nehru was, for example, and soon after Moscow brokered the Tashkent agreement between India and Pakistan in 1965, it supplied arms to Pakistan for at least two to three years. In the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union was getting ready to finally withdraw from Afghanistan, it was then Pakistan foreign minister Abdus Sattar who midwifed the Geneva accords which let Moscow leave Kabul.

Moscow, on the other hand, would like New Delhi to play a more active part in curbing the terror of the Taliban, going beyond the humanitarian supplies that are so far given to the Taliban’s chief opponent in Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Masood.

Final touches are still being given to the defence agreements to be signed during the trip, the price factor believed to be the main obstacle in the purchase of the T-90 tanks as well as the refitting of the aircraft carrier, Admiral Gorshkov.

Sources in the Government pointed out that the defence purchases from Russia possibly formed the backbone of the relationship between the two sides, especially since bilateral trade amounted to only about $1.5 billion annually, and of that, $900 million was still being utilised through the rupee-rouble route.

Putin, in an interview with the Indian and Russian media last week, emphasised that his visit would go beyond such a buyer-seller relationship. It is believed that Moscow has offered the possibility of India investing in Russian defence factories, as a precursor to the defence equipment being manufactured in India.

The Russian offer, if it is accepted, seeks to cement the relationship, providing the Russian military-industrial complex with the guarantee of at least some money for the future.

On the other hand, New Delhi would have a stake in the procurement of assured defence supplies. Government sources pointed out that if India was one of the chief defence clients of Russia, then the alternative was also true. “Western governments either refuse to sell sophisticated defence equipment to India or they are much too expensive. There is mutual benefit in the Indo-Russian defence relationship,” the sources said.