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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Moscow hardly comes as a shock. India, maintaining its traditional stance of neutrality, has yet to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine.
In the current global scenario, however, staying neutral effectively means siding with Russia, the aggressor, Dr Anastasia Piliavsky, senior lecturer in anthropology and politics at King’s College London’s India Institute, explained to Byline Times.
Justifying his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin with peacemaking rhetoric, Modi spoke to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, before visiting Moscow on 8 July. While in the Kremlin, where he embraced Putin and was awarded Russia’s highest civilian award, the Russian military launched a strike on a children’s hospital in Kyiv.
A video of a smiling Putin calling Modi “my dearest friend” and telling him that he was “delighted to see him” went viral in India, the BBC reported.
This “peace mission” appeals to the Indian public for several reasons, said Dr Piliavsky. It is consistent with the non-alignment doctrine introduced by Nehru, which states that India will not align with any war or take sides.
The preference for negotiation and agreement is deeply rooted in Indian culture. India’s history, apart from the 1947 partition with Pakistan, has seen little large-scale violence. The lingering nostalgia for the Soviet Union and Russia’s strong presence in the country’s information space also play a role.
The Kremlin’s narrative of peace negotiation dominates Indian media, while Ukraine struggles for visibility. Despite Zelenskyy’s digital diplomacy efforts, Ukraine remains largely absent from India’s political discourse.
Globally, Modi’s friendliness with Putin has been met mainly with skepticism—with notable exceptions.
Who is Modi?
Widely popular in India, Modi, the Prime Minister since May 2014, rose to power from poverty and low caste through the ranks of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, The Indian People’s Party).
The party traces back to a Hindu nationalist strand in Indian political ideological life, said Dr Piliavsky, with “India for Hindus” at the core of the party’s ideology, with demands of Muslims and other religious minorities expelled, killed, absorbed, and converted to Hinduism.
While supporters of the Hindu nationalist agenda are still around, the project has failed. During ten years of Modi’s unopposed rule, no major waves of communal violence occurred, apart from a few terrible incidents.
Modi’s main national opposition is the Congress party. The party of Gandhi and Nehru, started as an anti-British, anti-imperial movement, had a monopoly on power in India for three decades, before losing influence.
Modi’s background sets him apart from the British-educated, wealthy elite Congress leadership. The current international coverage of India, dominated by a Congress-loyal elite fundamentally opposed to BJP and Modi, is unbalanced, noted Dr Piliavsky. Both westernised Indian and western commentators claiming that Modi is a dictator and his government is totalitarian have been proven wrong: Modi has been elected for the third time in a democratic election.
Having very little national opposition, Modi won the first two terms running not on a Hindu nationalist platform but on the promise of economic development, providing jobs, improving the economy, and improving India’s global reputation. Indians, including Muslims, have voted for him in large numbers.
During the last election in 2024, however, Modi gained a weak victory and his party had to form a coalition. The outcome is new to Modi, who, before becoming prime minister, in 2001 – 2014, was the chief minister of Gujarat state enjoying a single-man rule. Now he has to concede and run a coalition, and to stay in power, Modi has to work on his mandate: the economy, said Dr Piliavsky.
Enter Economy
The weak performance of the BJP party is due to the failure to meet the expectations of the crucial electorate group: farmers.
Even though Modi has effectively raised the poorest Indians out of poverty, his domestic economic policy focused on keeping prices, especially food prices, low in cities at the expense of the medium and largest farmers.
Overall, the price of the cost of living has risen. The size of household debt is at its highest ever. Farmers are under pressure due to global warming, with droughts being a perennial threat. They are being debarred from selling at proper market prices because Modi is appeasing his historic electorate, the urban population. The BJP’s main electorate has always been urban: it is not a cast, class, or religious divide but a city vs. village.
Even though macro-economically India is doing well—its GDP and investments are growing, and the major banking crisis Modi had inherited is resolved—the Indian Prime Minister needs a breakthrough to solve the economic problem, noted Dr Piliavsky.
Enter Russia
The weak victory explains the real reason for Modi’s visit to Russia: the discussion of the oil trade and military hardware.
While ties with the Russian Federation at the present moment might present problems to India’s reputation globally, the direct benefits are tantalising.
India-Russia cooperation is not a new development; it spans decades. India exports pharmaceuticals, telecom instruments, iron and steel, marine products, and machinery to Russia while importing crude oil, petroleum products, coal, coke, pearls, precious stones, fertiliser, vegetable oil, gold, and silver from Russia.
In the 2023-24 financial year, due to robust energy cooperation, trade between India and Russia rose to nearly $65 billion, and imports from Russia amounted to $60 billion, while exports from India tottaled $4 billion. Trade development, particularly a maritime