Russia aspires to create dependency to use as an instrument of exerting its influence on future Indian foreign and security policies
Given the joint Sino-Pak threat, especially from the sea, the Indian government has the strategic foresight to expand the military capabilities horizontally, i.e., diversification and increasing the lethality of the military assets apart from focussing on significant indigenous inductions such as IAC-1 and INS Vagir. The overall aim is to decrease dependency on defence supplies.
Project -75 was initiated to develop the Air Independent Propulsion (AIP) technology for the Indian submarines. The technology allows the submarines to stay longer underwater and hence are not easily detected by the enemy’s surface assets. The AIP system that the Naval Materials Research Laboratory (NMRL) of DRDO has developed under Project- 75 would be retrofitted from 2024-25 onwards into six Scorpene submarines. On the other hand, a ten-year lease signed with Russia in 2019 for a new submarine will be delivered in 2025. Hence, the period from 2022-2025 is crucial from a naval security point of view.
Given the security challenges from the adversaries apart from China’s naval deployments in Djibouti and acquisitions of naval bases in South Asia, Project 75-I was initiated with an urgency to build six new conventional submarines for the Indian navy. The objective was to enhance naval capabilities. The Project worth Rs 45,000 crore was opened for original equipment manufacturers, and it was France, Germany, Russia, South Korea and Spain that were expected to bid. A mandatory condition of AIP technology in the submarines makes the Project highly tactical in nature.
After Germany and South Korea’s refusal, Russia has recently refused to bid for the Project. Moscow instead has offered to upgrade the previously purchased Kilo-class submarines. The Russian decision has again brought the growing divergences between the “special and privileged partnership”. An important reason for this has been that the component of arms sales in Russia is a “strategic sector” of its economy. By offering India an upgradation, it aims to market its submarines. The financial lucrativeness of selling spare parts and services to the existing and the new weaponry platforms should not be missed either. Thus, Russia aspires to ensure that a path dependency is created that can be used as an instrument of exerting its influence on the future Indian foreign and security policy. This factor becomes essential in the light of the fact that from 2016-20, the Russian arms imports saw a 53 per cent drop.
On the other hand, Moscow is developing state-of-art non-nuclear submarines with China. It has steadily shifted from a transactional relationship of a buyer-seller into a partnership that encompasses joint research, development and production of significant naval assets. Given the current geopolitical scenario, the development upon its materialisation would be inimical to India’s security.
Russia has supplied China with the upgraded Kilo-Class diesel-electric attack submarine. Beijing has successfully convinced Russia to incorporate some of the features of Kilo-class submarines into its own domestically produced Yuan class submarines, which is its first AIP powered submarine. Nevertheless, given the Chinese expertise of reverse engineering and indigenisation to supply military technologies to its recipient countries such as Pakistan, an upgraded version of Kilo-class submarines that Russia has offered to India will most likely not suit India’s naval requirements.
It is so because China has shared the technology with Pakistan and rechristened the Yuan as Type-039B ‘Hangor Class’ submarines for its client state. The deal sees the construction split between China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation (CSIC) and Karachi Shipyard andEngineering Works (KSEW). Further, the submarines constructed by China would be delivered to Pakistan between 2022-2028. With these facts, the upgradation offer of Moscow, if accepted by the Indian government, would tactically mean that all three countries - China, Pakistan, and India- would have Russian submarines or their improvised versions. The consequences of such a scenario can only be visualised by the Defence Ministry and the military experts.
From an Indo-centric perspective, if India successfully gets new submarines with the state-of-art technology, it can bridge the security gap for the next four to five years, thereby ensuring security by the time DRDO’s AIP is retrofitted. Further, this period can also be used for experimentation of different technologies that probably can make the Indian submarines more lethal than that of the arch-rivals of China and Pakistan.
The Russian refusal to bid for Project 75-I was expected and should not be considered a ‘sudden development’. From a geopolitical perspective, Russia’s refusal is significant in the light of an increasing shift from a Sino-Russo strategic ‘partnership’ to an ‘alliance’ and an emerging Russo-Pak bonhomie. The three parallel developments transform the security architecture of South Asia into a new era. Russia has joined China in looking at AUKUS from a Chinese prism. Their joint statement spoke of a “no-limits” friendship and denied any “forbidden” areas of cooperation. The statement without naming Quad criticised the grouping and called it “detriment of the security of others”.
Additionally, it named AUKUS and the nuclear submarine cooperation as “contrary to the objectives of security and sustainable development of the Asia-Pacific region”. At present, the region has been gradually witnessing the culmination of an ‘anti-Quad’ block that comprises Russia, China, and Pakistan, which perhaps would be joined in by Iran. The process marks the beginning of power shifts in Asia for the next two decades.
Sino-Russian convergence on an anti-American stand has been well-spoken. However, within the aforesaid platform, rapid convergences between Russia and Pakistan should be a cause of worry for the defence experts. It probably all began with the Russian sales of Mi-35M Hind-E assault helicopters (2015 and 2017) that soon culminated into a ‘Security Training Agreement’ (2018). The recent advances of Pakistan towards Russia in the shadow of China aim to offset the ‘special’ relationship between New Delhi and Moscow.
India has been accorded Strategic Trade Authorization (STA) Tier- 1 status owing to the West’s strategy of Indo-Pacific, thus, making it eligible to get the much-required technology, or perhaps even a better one. Russia should understand that the greater the depth of its strategic relations with China and Pakistan, the more the chances of losing India. It could be further ‘pushed’ into the U.S. alliance system in the emerging scenario. The carefully crafted balance that New Delhi maintained until now can perhaps be lost. As the need of the hour is to have state of the art technology for the naval assets, a probable French, British or American willingness to share the technology should be taken by Russia in the right spirit.
For Russia, the flip side of this emerging bonhomie is that Pakistan is a minimal market for defence supplies and is financially unstable because of its foreign policy tool of spreading terror in the region. In such a case, Russia should not fall into the trap of China to share the financial burden of keeping a terrorist country like Pakistan functional. Instead, the Russian leadership should well acknowledge the Indian security concerns. Moscow’s vision of South Asian geopolitics should not be primarily confined to an anti-American stand, and other issues such as Islamic fundamentalism, demographic changes, refugee problems, etc., should be genuinely considered. It should understand Pakistan’s manipulative and ‘victim’ policy. An issue and a theatre-based approach, if adopted by Moscow, could perhaps save the Indo-Russian ties from diverging further.
(The writer is an Assistant Professor at Central University of Punjab, Bathinda. The views expressed are personal.)
