Comment: Indo-Russian Summit 1997. (1999, 20 Marks)
The Indo-Russian summit of 1997 was Prime Minister H. D. Deve Gowda’s official visit to Moscow, which began on 25 March 1997, for talks with President Boris Yeltsin and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. It was the high point of the mid-1990s recovery, after a “lost” half-decade, and a bridge to the institutionalised partnership of 2000. Its significance lies less in what it signed than in what it signalled.
The context
- Post-Soviet drift: under Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, Russia had looked westward. Trade collapsed with the rupee-rouble system, spares dried up, and in 1993 Moscow cancelled the cryogenic-engine technology transfer under American pressure.
- Recovery: Yeltsin’s January 1993 visit produced the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation and a debt settlement. P. V. Narasimha Rao’s 1994 visit restored assurances of arms supply.
- The Primakov turn: Yevgeny Primakov, Foreign Minister from January 1996, made multipolarity and Asia Russia’s priorities. The visit came days after the Helsinki summit (March 1997) at which Yeltsin failed to stop NATO’s eastward enlargement, while India, having refused the CTBT in 1996, faced Western non-proliferation pressure.
- Defence momentum: the contract for 40 Su-30MK fighters, worth about $1.8 billion, was signed in November 1996.
Agenda and outcomes
- Defence dominated. Russian estimates put existing contracts at $7–10 billion for delivery by 2000, and defence officials said the visit could open access to newer technologies while settling problems in earlier deals.
- Four intergovernmental agreements were signed, including on the avoidance of double taxation and customs cooperation, giving the economic relationship a legal base.
- Nuclear energy: Deve Gowda declared the deal for two reactors in Tamil Nadu, under negotiation since 1988, settled; Russian officials spoke only of progress. The supplementary agreement for Kudankulam came in June 1998.
- Political signal: Moscow described India as a long-standing partner that had never yielded to Washington, and both sides agreed that summit-level exchanges should continue. Yeltsin’s return visit, expected in early 1998, was put off.
Significance
- Political reassurance: the summit confirmed that Russia again valued India, ending fears of abandonment.
- Multipolar convergence: it aligned India’s search for strategic autonomy with Primakov’s resistance to unipolarity, a month before the Sino-Russian declaration on a multipolar world (April 1997) and preparing Primakov’s “strategic triangle” proposal in Delhi (December 1998). Kenneth N. Waltz’s expectation that unipolarity provokes balancing appeared here in soft, diplomatic form.
- Defence-led partnership: it cemented the arms relationship that kept Russian industry alive and Indian forces supplied for the next two decades.
- A test passed: Russia signed the Kudankulam agreement in June 1998, weeks after the Pokhran-II tests, as Western sanctions fell on India.
Limits
- Episodic, not institutional: each summit of the 1990s was negotiated afresh and hostage to Moscow’s politics and Yeltsin’s health. Annual summits came only with the Declaration on Strategic Partnership of October 2000.
- Thin economics: trade, crippled by the end of the rupee-rouble system, stayed small, and the summit’s tax and customs agreements could not by themselves diversify it.
- Domestic fragility: Deve Gowda lost a confidence vote within weeks, in April 1997, and Inder Kumar Gujral succeeded him.
Conclusion
The 1997 summit was a transitional event. It consolidated defence ties, put economic exchange on a treaty footing and kept the nuclear project alive, but it could not institutionalise the partnership. It fits the pragmatic recalibration of the 1990s that C. Raja Mohan traced in Crossing the Rubicon (2003): Russia was retained, but as one partner among several. Its lesson, that episodic summitry depends on political weather, led directly to the annual summit mechanism of 2000, which has carried the relationship ever since.