September 22, 2024 - 4:30pm

Is India arming Ukraine? A report this week in Reuters claims that, for over a year, Indian munitions have been making their way to Ukraine. The quantities are almost negligible: India is the source of less than 1% of all the armaments imported by Kyiv. But what makes this significant is not the volume of the weapons. It is the fact that ordnance produced in India, whose own defence for decades has been reliant on imports from Moscow, is being used against Russian soldiers

India has been Russia’s closest partner in Asia for more than half a century. And as Prime Minister Narendra Modi emphasised in an effusive speech in July to the Indian diaspora in Moscow, Delhi has long regarded Russia as its all-weather friend.

The Russo-Indian relationship was forged during the Cold War, when the United States sought to isolate India, shook hands with Mao’s China, and patronised Pakistan with weapons, aid and membership to security alliances. Moscow, on the other hand, deployed its veto power to shield India at meetings of the UN Security Council when necessary, maintained a vital trade relationship, and supplied essential military hardware to Delhi in exchange for goods. Indeed, the Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev once told Indians that “if you ever you call us from the mountaintops we will appear at your side.’’

Indians made that call in 1971 when Pakistan’s military junta, backed by the US, perpetrated a genocide in what is today Bangladesh, slaughtering three million Bengalis and displacing 10 million people. When India authorised military action after Pakistan’s pre-emptive strikes on Indian airfields, the US and Britain dispatched naval fleets to the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India. Moscow sent a rival fleet to defend it. Bangladesh was liberated in days, but that experience — during which fellow democracies had lined up behind a genocidal regime — served to shape the worldview of a generation of Indians. I have never met an Indian official who has not spoken with profound affection for Russia.

So why would India allow 155mm artillery shells manufactured in its factories to end up in Ukrainian mortars? Any transfer of Indian weapons to Ukraine, Indians maintain, would have happened in violation of the end-user agreement it signed with European buyers. If so, has Delhi lodged protests or threatened to terminate sales? On this question, officials are taciturn.

The demand for 155mm shells and the components that go into them has surged exponentially since the war in Ukraine began. The West is unable to meet it, partly because of the choices made by those countries’ leaders in peacetime. The decision by the United States to phase out trinitrotoluene — the explosive that is poured into the shells — for a more “environmentally friendly” alternative frustrated its ability to produce ordnance when it was needed. Russia is thought to be manufacturing three million artillery shells a year — almost three times the number produced by the US and Europe combined. And so Ukraine’s backers in the West have been forced to search for producers elsewhere.

India, aggressively modernising its defence sector, has relatively abundant stockpiles of artillery shells. Germany held covert talks with India at the beginning of the year to persuade Delhi to transfer some of its hoard to Ukraine. It did not succeed, because Delhi was not willing to alienate Russia.

Since then, however, India has increased sales of defence products to private intermediaries in Europe. Delhi, for all its denials, cannot be unaware of their final destination. That it is now public doesn’t necessarily hurt India. If anything, it is a relatively low-risk affirmation of the country’s independence. The numbers are low enough not to antagonise Russia, but the conduct is novel enough to show to the West — especially as Delhi seeks a mediating role in bringing the conflict to a close — that India is not beholden to either side.


Kapil Komireddi is the author of Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India (Hurst)

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