Welcome to Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief.
The highlights this week: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits Moscow, a former prime minister of Pakistan forms a new political party, and massive floods hit India’s state of Assam.
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The Modi-Putin Summit Wasn’t All Bad News for Washington
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Moscow this week underscored a long-standing point of tension in U.S.-India relations: India’s deep partnership with Russia, forged during the latter decades of the Cold War and still formidable today.
Indian officials—including Modi—frequently describe Russia as India’s most trusted and dependable friend. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, India has increased its imports of Russian oil and maintained defense cooperation with Moscow. Modi’s visit reinforced the bilateral relationship and produced several new agreements, including initiatives on science, trade, and climate change.
The Biden administration signaled its concern about the trip from the start. Washington is particularly worried about New Delhi’s embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin. On Monday—a day when Russia struck civilian targets, including a children’s hospital, across Kyiv—a beaming Modi enveloped Putin in a bear hug. The United States also fears the security implications of transferring arms and sensitive military technologies to an Indian defense sector that is still receiving Russian military equipment.
Despite all of this, Modi’s visit—and the broader India-Russia relationship—doesn’t bode quite as badly for Washington as some may think.
First, Modi’s visit, with all its pageantry, was meant to boost a partnership that has less favorable trend lines than it used to. Russia remains India’s largest arms supplier, but in recent years, India has decreased its share of Russian arms imports while increasing its share from the United States. (Notably, no new arms deals were announced during Modi’s visit.) India is also diversifying its pool of arms suppliers through stepped-up arms trade with France and Israel.
Additionally, India and Russia are diverging on their geopolitical alignments. New Delhi is moving closer to the West: It’s pursuing unprecedented levels of security cooperation with Washington and embracing its Indo-Pacific strategy, which Moscow rejects. Russia, by contrast, is moving closer to China, India’s main strategic competitor, and flirting more frequently with Pakistan, India’s perennial rival. Moscow is also trying to assert more leadership in groupings such as BRICS (which also includes Brazil, India, China, South Africa, and four recently added nations) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which aim to counter the West.
India straddles these divides through its long-standing principle of foreign-policy balancing: It belongs to BRICS and SCO as well as the Indo-Pacific Quad, and it aims to serve as a bridge between the global south—which generally has good relations with Moscow—and the developed world. But as Russia is increasingly bogged down in Ukraine and facing isolation from the West, the reality is that India will find more opportunities for global engagement without Russia than with it.
Furthermore, India opposes Russia’s war in Ukraine. The conflict has hurt India’s food and energy security, brought Russia closer to China, and tested India’s policy of balancing ties. Although New Delhi has not condemned the war, it has repeatedly called for it to end—a message that Modi delivered directly (and not for the first time) to Putin this week. Putin won’t heed Modi’s pleas for peace, but they still strengthen international pressure on Russia to de-escalate.
Finally, the India-Russia partnership actually serves as a modest check on a growing Russia-China relationship—a development that worries Washington as much as it does New Delhi. India is one of Russia’s few powerful friends that isn’t China. Even as it becomes more reliant on Beijing for economic and defense support, Moscow can’t afford to jeopardize its time-tested commercial and defense ties with New Delhi. That means there will be limits to what Moscow and Beijing describe as their “no limits” partnership—including, most likely, an unwillingness from Russia to back China in the event of an India-China conflict.
The Modi-Putin summit made for an awkward few days for U.S.-India relations. But it also provided a reminder that the Russia factor is a manageable challenge—and not a paralyzing problem—for the partnership between the world’s two biggest democracies.
What We’re Following
Massive floods convulse India. It’s become a common pattern in South Asia: soaring heat waves giving way to punishing rains and floods. In recent months, large parts of the region—especially Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan—have experienced devastating heat waves. This week, the rains have come. India has been hit especially hard: Mumbai, the country’s financial capital, saw major disruptions to transport as roads and rail lines were submerged; schools and universities were closed in parts of the city. On the opposite side of the country, the northeastern state of Assam has suffered some of its worst flooding in years. At least 79 people in the state have been killed, as well as more than 130 animals at a national park, including six rare rhinos.
These weather patterns illustrate another new trend in the region: early monsoon rains. This is what triggered Pakistan’s catastrophic floods in 2022, which submerged a third of the country. This trend means that South Asia faces the risk of extreme flooding for a longer period each year—with troubling implications for economic growth and public health, due to the region’s dependence on agriculture and the heightened risk of waterborne illnesses, such as malaria.
Pakistan’s new political party. On Saturday, former Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi announced the creation of a new political party, Awam Pakistan. (“Awam” translates to “common people.”) Several other prominent politicians, including former Finance Minister Miftah Ismail, are affiliated with it. As its name suggests, the party aims to put more power in the hands of the masses and fight for economic justice. Abbasi and Ismail are former senior members of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), the party that leads the country’s current governing coalition. Both had much-publicized differences with the PML-N leadership. Still, they come from the very political class that they claim has let down the Pakistani people.
Much remains unknown about the new party, though it is expected to release a vision statement in the coming weeks. A key question will be its relationship with Pakistan’s powerful military. Given that its top leadership parted ways with the PML-N, a party now closely aligned with the army, that relationship likely isn’t a warm one. However, political parties in Pakistan struggle to gain traction without buy-in from the military. Additionally, the party will need to counter the perception that it’s simply new wine in old bottles: Its message of empowering the masses has been promised by many Pakistani parties, most recently former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), arguably the country’s most popular party today.
Nepal’s political crisis deepens. Nepali Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal continues to resist calls for his resignation more than a week after the CPN-UML, a key partner in his coalition, threw its support to the rival Nepali Congress Party and backed out of the coalition. The leaders of the Nepali Congress Party and CPN-UML—the first- and second-largest parties in parliament, respectively—reached a deal to form a new government, suggesting that Dahal’s CPN-MC party would soon be out of power.
Nearly a dozen ministers, including eight with the CPN-UML, resigned following the deal between the CPN-UML and Nepali Congress Party. The CPN-UML has called on Dahal to step down and facilitate the formation of a new government. But despite mounting pressure, he has refused to stepped down and has decided instead to hold a vote of confidence, which is now scheduled for Friday.
Under the Radar
India’s new government has retained many top officials from Modi’s previous term, including most of its cabinet ministers. But there has been a notable change in the External Affairs Ministry. Vikram Misri, India’s deputy national security advisor, has been appointed as the foreign secretary, a post that reports to the external affairs minister and is typically held by the foreign service’s top civil servant. Misri will take up his post on July 15. He will replace Vinay Kwatra, who is expected to become New Delhi’s new ambassador to Washington, according to sources that spoke with the New Indian Express. Kwatra was in Moscow with Modi this week.
Rarely, if ever, has an Indian senior official moved from the National Security Council to the External Affairs Ministry; the reverse is much more common. Yet Misri, himself a foreign service officer, was formerly India’s ambassador to China and Myanmar. This diplomatic experience in key countries—one India’s core strategic competitor, the other a war-ravaged neighbor—may help explain his appointment.
Furthermore, New Delhi is still reeling from allegations made by the United States and Canada last year that Indian intelligence was involved in plots to assassinate Sikh separatists on their soil. Because those allegations are now a top challenge for India’s diplomacy with several key partners in the West, New Delhi might have concluded that it benefits from having someone with high-level national security experience serve in a top diplomatic post.
FP’s Most Read This Week
Regional Voices
An editorial in Kuensel decries Bhutan’s worsening brain drain, arguing that it could threaten the nation’s long-term development plans: “[T]his is happening when there are grand plans for Bhutan to aspire to become a developed country. An unprecedented outflow of human resources, in our case, educated, trained and skilled free of cost, could jeopardise our visions.”
Writer Muhammad Ali Alvi asserts in Pakistan Today that Pakistanis need more democratic training: “The people of Pakistan are said to lack civic and political sense. … But, in reality, people have not been trained to develop social and political wisdom.”
Badri Narayan argues in the Hindustan Times that it’s important to thoroughly investigate the reasons for a deadly stampede at a large Indian prayer meeting earlier this month. The incident, he writes, “raises many questions about all that went wrong that day—more due to negligence and thoughtlessness among key actors than any freak occurrence.”
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