India makes it clear it's not interested in a Western alliance

A meeting Wednesday between India's Narendra Modi and China's Xi Jinping in Kazan, Russia was the first in five years, and will likely be viewed with dismay in Washington, Ottawa and other Western capitals.

While it probably doesn't mark the beginning of a new Beijing-New Delhi axis, it does seem to signal that India is not about to sign on to an anti-Beijing Western alliance either, despite the best efforts of the U.S. and some other countries to persuade it to do so.

"Would the U.S. be disappointed? I imagine," said Sanjay Ruparelia, a close observer of the Modi government who teaches at Toronto Metropolitan University. "I don't think publicly they would express it, but privately."

Ruparelia said U.S. relations with India have always been complicated, and that complexity has always required the U.S. to split the relationship into silos.

"On the one hand, ties have grown despite many disagreements, and quite serious ones. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, most importantly," he said.

"But you know, we've seen in the last year a new agreement on critical emerging technologies. You've seen growing defence and security partnerships. [U.S.] President Biden was reportedly the third leader in history to have his Indian counterpart at his own private residence. And that was this year — after the FBI foiled the plot  to allegedly kill Mr. (Gurpatwant Singh) Pannun."

Most recently, the U.S. signed a deal to sell India Predator drones, the primary weapons used by the U.S. in its own campaigns of extraterritorial killing targeting such groups as al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

"And I'm not surprised by that," said Ruparelia. "I mean, the U.S. is the great power and they practice realpolitik more than any other power in the world."

Ruparelia said that while he takes the RCMP's statement that they have evidence linking agents of the Indian government to homicides and other acts of violence in Canada "seriously," the U.S. government clearly has "compartmentalized the issue" in order to continue working with India.

There are multiple factors at work in Modi's decision to seek rapprochement with China. But the tensions with the West over India's alleged program of assassinating dissidents in Canada and the U.S. could not have helped to sell him on the idea of ditching India's traditional non-alignment and jumping into an alliance with the countries that have accused him.

At the same time, the geopolitical stakes between nations as large and powerful as the U.S., India, China and Russia all but ensure that the assassination allegations will end up taking a back seat to other, bigger considerations.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, host of this year's BRICS summit, will be delighted with the meeting between Xi and Modi in Russia and may seek to take some of the credit.

Putin was careful to seat himself between the Indian and Chinese leaders, offering a visual symbol of his role as facilitator of their coming-together, said Prof. Ho-fung Hung of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

"This kind of photo-op meeting, in which Putin is showing up side by side with all these world leaders, is a win for Putin because it's a kind of defiance of the U.S. attempt to isolate Russia," he said. "Putin can show to people back home that actually [he has] friends, and Russia has friends, despite all these U.S. efforts. So the U.S. is failing in isolating Russia."