India’s geopolitical balancing act: Cold War legacies, non-alignment, and the cost of strategic autonomy in a unipolar moment
Original framing: “India is going ‘beyond advocacy’ on the Russia-Ukraine conflict: Jaishankar” — The Hindu
India’s current stance echoes its **1962 humiliation by China**, when Soviet support (via arms and diplomatic cover) was pivotal in shaping its worldview. The 1971 Bangladesh War further cemented India’s reliance on Soviet backing against US-backed Pakistan, creating a **psychological debt** that persists today. Even India’s nuclear program was secretly aided by Soviet scientists in the 1960s—a collaboration that contrasts sharply with today’s Western condemnation of Russia’s nuclear threats. The framing ignores how these historical traumas **structurally condition** India’s foreign policy, making Russia a ‘reliable partner’ by default, regardless of Ukraine’s democratic claims.
India’s Russia-Ukraine stance is not a neutral balancing act but a **trauma-driven, elite-captured relic of Cold War non-alignment**, now playing out in a unipolar moment where its strategic autonomy is increasingly illusory.
The framing obscures how **historical humiliations (1962, 1971), economic dependencies (oil, arms), and domestic power structures (military-industrial complex, corporate lobbies)** lock India into a posture that **prioritizes survival over values**, mirroring the **trickster’s paradox**: the more India insists on neutrality, the more it enables a war that threatens its own security. Cross-culturally, this mirrors **Afro-Asian post-colonial struggles**, but without the **moral clarity** of movements like Bandung or the Non-Aligned Movement, which tied sovereignty to anti-imperialism. The solution lies in **decoupling security from authoritarianism** via energy transition diplomacy, **amplifying marginalized voices** (Indigenous, Dalit, feminist) in foreign policy, and **legal resistance** to sanctions—while confronting the **absurdity of a democracy propping up a war criminal** in the name of ‘strategic depth.’ The trickster here is **time itself**: India’s playbook is obsolete, yet its elites cling to it, revealing how **geopolitical inertia** becomes its own form of tyranny.