Modi is the first Indian Prime Minister to travel to Poland since 1979.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s talks with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Kyiv must be seen as the beginning of a long overdue rebalancing in India’s relations with Russia and Ukraine. Quite clearly, India is no longer self-deterred by a presumed “Russian veto” in expanding engagement with Ukraine. That no Indian Prime Minister travelled to post-Soviet Ukraine, the second-largest nation in Europe, underlines Delhi’s self-imposed restraint in engaging Kyiv. The political deference to Russian sensitivities also played a role in limiting India’s engagement with former members of the Warsaw Pact. Modi is the first Indian Prime Minister to travel to Poland since 1979.
That no Indian PM has travelled to the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 underlines the long and regrettable political neglect of these countries. In contrast, India’s high-level engagement with these nations was impressive during the Soviet era. Delhi’s political emphasis on sustaining the Moscow links and preventing Russia from engaging with Pakistan at the highest level since the turn of the 1990s may provide some context for this neglect. But it does not absolve its decision to abandon high-level engagement with Central Europe even as the region’s global salience grew after it broke away from Soviet Russia and drew closer to the European Union and the United States.
Even more important is the main outcome from Modi’s visit to Kyiv — the beginning of a long-overdue correction to India’s approach to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Delhi’s hesitation in criticising the Russian invasion reflected a familiar pattern of staying silent on Russia’s unacceptable actions, even when they challenged the core principles of India’s worldview — the sanctity of national sovereignty and territorial integrity. This was true of the Soviet invasion of Hungary (1956) Czechoslovakia (1968), Afghanistan (1979), and Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula (2014).
The political costs of this reflexive silence on Russian aggressions had been mounting and it was a matter of time before Delhi fine-tuned its formal position. There was no better way than the Prime Minister travelling to Kyiv, expressing empathy for victims of the war, listening to President Zelenskyy’s concerns, underlining Delhi’s strong commitment to the principle of territorial sovereignty, exchanging views on potential pathways to peace, and rebooting the bilateral relationship to elevate it eventually to a “strategic partnership”.
Delhi’s rebalancing does not mean a downsizing of India’s relationship with Moscow, which will remain a major power in the neighbourhood and an important partner, but an elevation of its engagement with Ukraine and Central Europe. In pursuing its interests with both sides, Delhi will no longer need to look over its shoulder. Rebalancing Delhi’s ties with Moscow and Kyiv and de-hyphenating India’s engagement with Russia and Central Europe has involved cultivating greater sensitivity to the complex history of geopolitical contestation, economic interdependence, and competing national narratives at the heart of Europe. India’s rebalancing sends a clear signal that Delhi will no longer let the ideological inhibitions inherited from the 20th century guide its European policy in the 21st.
