India's freedom from global blocs is the future

The case for autonomy in a fractured world

India has been criticised by Donald Trump and Western leaders for refusing to fall into line, from buying Russian oil to resisting pressure to choose sides between Washington and Beijing. But what looks like defiance may be foresight: Narain D. Batra argues that India’s commitment to strategic autonomy, maintaining relations across rival powers while safeguarding its own interests, is not an anomaly but a blueprint for a world moving beyond rigid blocs. As Western states quietly recalibrate their own China policies, India’s much-maligned independence begins to look less like exceptionalism and more like an early response to an emerging multipolar order.

2nd February 2026

Early December last year, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomed President Vladimir Putin to New Delhi with visible warmth and embrace, the reaction in Washington and European capitals was immediate and resentful. The symbolism, many argued, spoke for itself. At a moment when the West sought to isolate Russia economically and diplomatically, India appeared to be doing the opposite. The announcement that the two governments would ensure “uninterrupted” Russian energy supplies only hardened that judgment.

What the West interpreted as defiance was, from New Delhi’s perspective, continuity. India did not alter its Russia policy in response to the Ukraine war. It simply reaffirmed a position that has been consistent for more than three decades, one rooted in strategic autonomy, an avatar of Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-alignment, diversification of partnerships, and resistance to binary choice. The failure lies not in India’s conduct, but in the West’s assumption that a crisis in Europe should automatically reorder strategic conduct in India. This assumption is neither historically grounded nor analytically sound. India’s engagement with Russia long predates Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi. It survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the rise of U.S. unipolarity. In the 1990s, when many expected India to pivot decisively toward Washington, New Delhi instead pursued a dual-track strategy, deepening ties with the United States while preserving its relationship with Moscow. That approach was not hedging born of uncertainty. It was a deliberate effort to avoid dependence on any single great power.

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India is not a treaty ally of the United States. It has never sought to be one.

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Strategic autonomy, in the Indian context, is not a new rhetorical posture. It is a doctrine that evolved from India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-alignment policy that developed during the Cold War. Today, as India’s minister of external affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has argued in The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (2020), strategic autonomy reflects the structural realities of India’s geopolitical and security environment, not ideological nostalgia. Those realities have only sharpened in recent years. India faces an unresolved and increasingly militarized border dispute with China, its principal long-term strategic challenger. Since 2020, the Line of Actual Control has witnessed continued deployments, infrastructure buildup, and lethal clashes. No responsible Indian government can afford to weaken its deterrence posture during such a confrontation. Russia remains vital to that position, supplying military systems that cannot be replaced overnight without operational risks. It might seem like constraint, but it is also a choice that enhances India’s options.

The West’s misinterpretation of the Modi–Putin meeting also reflects a tendency to personalize organizational and geopolitical policy. Modi is depicted as unusually accommodating toward Russia. This argument doesn’t stand historical scrutiny. India’s Russia policy has been remarkably stable across governments led by the Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party alike. Modi nonetheless made it more flexible and adaptable. In recent years, U.S. foreign policy discourse has increasingly equated partnership with alignment, expecting partners not merely to share interests, but to adopt common strategies and moral framework. This expectation may be realistic within formal alliances such as NATO. It is misplaced when applied to non-allied powers operating under distinct security imperatives.

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India is not a treaty ally of the United States. It has never sought to be one. The U.S.–India partnership has advanced precisely because it accommodated this reality rather than denying it. Attempts to impose alliance-like expectations on India now risk unraveling that progress.

The deeper flaw, however, lies in the strategic enclosure of the Ukraine war itself.

For Europe, the conflict is existential. It unfolds near NATO’s borders, invokes historical ordeal, and straightforwardly implicates continental security. For the United States, under President Trump, the war is consequential, no doubt, but secondary to the long-term challenge posed by China. For India, Ukraine War is seriously disturbing, nonetheless, geographically a distant conflict whose primary relevance lies in its impact on the balance of power in Eurasia.

India’s calculus revolves around geopolitical outcomes. Chief among those outcomes is the accelerating alignment between Russia and China. Since 2022, Moscow’s economic, technological, and diplomatic dependence on Beijing has deepened dramatically. China is now Russia’s largest trading partner, its major energy customer, and its primary gateway to sanctioned goods and financial arrangements.

From New Delhi’s perspective, this trend is destabilizing. A Russia fully absorbed into China’s strategic orbit would strengthen Beijing’s hand across Asia, including along India’s contested borders. Preventing that outcome, any which way, is a reasonable Indian interest.

It is also a primary American interest as many scholars have argued. Henry Kissinger warned repeatedly that the gravest danger to U.S. interests would be the consolidation of China and Russia into a single strategic bloc. In On China, he argued that U.S. diplomacy should aim, wherever possible, to prevent such alignment. That warning is now being realized in reverse. Western policy is doing what the Kissinger diplomacy sought to avoid.

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The fundamental mistake in much Western commentary is to treat pluralism as a lack of commitment rather than as a strategy of resilience.

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India’s renewed strategic engagement with Russia does not reverse this trend. But it complicates it. By providing Moscow with economic alternatives to China, albeit limited, India helps preserve a degree of Russian autonomy. That autonomy may be narrow at present, but it is not meaningless. The Modi–Putin meeting, then, should not be read as a diplomatic equivocation. It should be understood as a signal of continuity. India will pursue its interests as it defines them, not as others prescribe them. The real question is not why India refuses to isolate Russia. It is why the West assumed it ever would. If Washington wishes to build durable partnerships in a multiplex-multipolar world, it must learn to distinguish between disagreement and betrayal. India has not abandoned the West. It has merely reminded the West of a reality it prefers to ignore that India’s autonomy is not antagonism.

Emerging Realities

The debate over India’s engagement with Russia ultimately exposes a deeper fault line in the West strategy, the tension between a NATO-centric worldview inherited from the Cold War and a pluralistic reality shaped by multipolar power distribution. The United States no doubt remains by far the world’s most powerful state, as eminent political scientists William Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks have discussed in Foreign Affairs, but it no longer operates in a system where alignment is a binary choice, or compliance is assured. Power today is diffused, interests are overlapping, and strategic behavior is increasingly situational. India is not an outlier in this world. For much of the postwar period, American strategy relied on a relatively clear hierarchy of relationships. Allies aligned closely, adversaries opposed, and nonaligned states occupied the margins and struggled for relevance. That architecture is collapsing. Rising powers today seek influence without entanglement, partnership without subordination, and autonomy without isolation. They hedge not because they lack conviction, but because they face multiple, simultaneous risks. India’s foreign policy reflects this reality with unusual clarity.

New Delhi’s engagement with Russia, its deepening partnership with the United States, its competition with China, and its participation in institutions ranging from the Quad to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization are often portrayed as contradictions. In fact, they are expressions of a single logic, how to maximize strategic options in an uncertain environment.

This logic unsettles Washington because it resists categorization. It does not fit neatly into alliance theory or containment doctrine. Yet it may be better suited to the world the United States now confronts, where it must maintain its primacy to assure that the rule-based global order is sustained. As India’s Jaishankar explains, “To the uninitiated or the anachronistic, the pursuit of apparently contradictory approaches may seem baffling. How does one reconcile a Howdy Modi gathering [the Houston rally where Modi campaigned for Trump in 2019] with a Mamallapuram [named after the small town where Modi met with Xi Jinping also in 2019] or a Vladivostok Summit? Or the RIC (Russia-India-China) with JAI (Japan-America-India)? Or the Quad and the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization)? An Iran with the Saudis, or Israel with Palestine? The answer is in the willingness to look beyond dogma and enter the real world of convergences. Think of it as calculus, not just as arithmetic.”

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India’s choices should be judged by whether they weaken or strengthen the balance of power vis-à-vis China, not by whether they align with Western moral narratives in every instance.

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The fundamental mistake in much Western commentary is to treat pluralism as a lack of commitment rather than as a strategy of resilience. India’s refusal to sever ties with Russia does not negate its convergence with the United States on China, technology governance, maritime security, or supply chain resilience. Nor does its engagement with Moscow imply indifference to Ukraine’s sovereignty. It reflects an effort to compartmentalize issues rather than collapse them into a single axis of alignment. This compartmentalization is not unique to India. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, and Indonesia pursue similar strategies, calibrating relationships across competing powers. What distinguishes India is not the strategy itself, but its scale and significance. As the world’s most populous country, the fourth major economy growing 7-8 percent annually, and a pivotal Indian Ocean power, India’s choices shape the international system rather than merely responding to it. For the United States, the implication is clear but uncomfortable that its influence will increasingly depend on accommodation rather than enforcement.

Demanding alignment on every issue creates risks, shrinking the coalition Washington needs most today. Accepting divergence on some issues, while consolidating convergence on others, may preserve strategic balance. This is not a call for relativism. It is a call for prioritization. The prioritization, from an American perspective, aims at China. Every major U.S. strategy document identifies China as the greatest challenge of the 21st century. That challenge cannot be met without capable partners across Asia. India is the most consequential of those partners.

India’s engagement with Russia contributes to the very outcome Washington seeks, preventing the consolidation of a Eurasian bloc dominated by Beijing. By preserving alternative channels for Moscow, India checkmates China’s effort to transform Russia into a junior partner. India’s choices should be judged by whether they weaken or strengthen the balance of power vis-à-vis China, not by whether they align with Western moral narratives in every instance. Seen through this perspective, India’s Russia policy is not an aberration. It is an adaptation. India will remain strategically autonomous, regionally focused, and globally engaged.

Narain D. Batra
Contributor

The Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI) is a British philosophy organisation. It runs the HowTheLightGetsIn philosophy and music festival.

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