India's growing cooperation with US won't impact Russia ties: NSA Doval

After Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to Washington DC last week, New Delhi has reached out to Moscow to clarify that India’s growing cooperation with the United States in the fields of defence and advanced technologies would not have any impact on its decades-old ties with Russia.

Modi’s National Security Advisor, Ajit Doval, had a phone call with his counterpart in Moscow, Nikolai Patrushev, on Thursday. They discussed “the current issues of Russian-Indian cooperation in the field of security and the prospects for deepening the cooperation within the framework of the bilateral and multilateral formats”, a spokesperson of Moscow’s diplomatic mission in New Delhi said on Friday.

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Patrushev briefed Doval about the situation in Russia. A source said that the secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation also gave an update to his counterpart in New Delhi about the recent aborted rebellion by the Wagner Group, a paramilitary organisation, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin.

New Delhi, however, refrained from making any official comment on the meeting between the National Security Advisor and his counterpart in Moscow.

Doval conveyed to Patrushev that India’s decades-old defence, security and energy cooperation with Russia as well as coordination between the two nations in the multilateral forums would continue notwithstanding its move to deepen its ties with the US.

With Washington DC keen to make New Delhi less reliant on Moscow for military hardware, the Prime Minister’s meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House on June 22 saw the US agreeing to remove regulatory barriers to share advanced military technologies with India and expand defence industrial cooperation with India. The new Defence Industrial Security Roadmap, which Modi and Biden agreed upon, will provide policy direction to defence industries and enable the co-production of advanced defence systems and collaborative research, testing and prototyping of projects. The US also moved to lift restrictions on cooperation with India in advanced civilian technologies.

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New Delhi has been over the past few months repeatedly pointing out that India had to rely more on Russia only because the US and the other western nations had declined to share with it advanced military hardware and technologies. The Modi Government has been putting forward the argument in response to criticism over its refusal to join the US and the rest of the West in criticising Russia for its military aggression against Ukraine – apparently due to India’s decades-old dependence on the erstwhile Soviet Union and its successor state for advanced civilian and military technologies.

The Modi-Biden meeting also saw General Atomics of the United States agreeing to not only assemble in India the armed drones New Delhi would procure from it, but also to set up in the country a global maintenance, repair and overhaul facility. GE Aerospace headquartered in Cincinnati inked a Memorandum of Understanding with the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited based out of Bengaluru for transfer of technology and joint production of F414 fighter jet engines in India for the Indian Air Force.