Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: It’s really a tight rope walking for India.
A week after it banned all Russian energy imports and then warned China against helping Russia with finance and military supplies, the United States has ‘cautioned’ India also: don’t buy Russian crude and commodities at discounted rates.
India—along with the US, Australia, and Japan– is a partner in the four-nation group, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), which is seen as the emerging ‘Asian NATO’ against China in Asia and the Pacific. But in the changed situation, both China and India may find themselves in the same boat!
Russia’s war in Ukraine has complicated the situation for India, the world’s third-largest crude importer, which imports over 80 percent of its requirements. Of this, its imports from Russia are only three percent of the total, and worth USD 1 billion, which Russia now wants to boost. But more than that, India is also the largest buyer of defense equipment and supplies from Russia.
With the West and its allies’ sanctions biting, Russia had recently offered India crude at discounted rates, which, reports said, New Delhi could consider.
Noting this on Tuesday, the US exuded the confidence that India would not violate the sanctions by purchasing discounted Russian oil. “Such a move would put the world’s largest democracy on the “wrong side of history”,” it remarked, according to the media reports.
Asked about the issue, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in Washington the Joe Biden administration’s message would be for all countries to abide by the US sanctions.
“I don’t believe this (India’s cheaper imports from Russia) would violate that, but also think about where you want to stand,” Psaki said. “When the history books are written now, support for Russia – the Russian leadership – is support for an invasion that obviously is having a devastating impact.”
Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, New Delhi has not condemned Moscow and abstained from the vote at different forums of the United Nations calling out the aggression. The US officials said recently they would like India to distance itself from Russia as much as possible, while also recognizing its heavy reliance on Moscow for everything from arms and ammunition to missiles and fighter jets.
Last week, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak told Indian Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri by telephone that Moscow was keen to increase its oil and petroleum product exports to India and also sought more Indian investments in the Russian oil sector.
“We expect to continue cooperating in the development of peaceful nuclear power, in particular, in building the nuclear power units at Kudankulam,” they quoted Novak as saying in a statement.