AT A MEETING between senior Indian and American officials this week, both sides emphasised their growing co-operation on defence. But warm diplomatic words hide an awkward feature of Indian procurement: the country, which imports more arms than any other, has long been Russia’s biggest foreign buyer of weapons.
A relationship that has lasted for decades is now under pressure from the war in Ukraine. Doing business with Russia is getting harder and India could speed up its trend in recent years of diversifying its military imports. From 2017 to 2021, almost half of India’s arms by value came from Russia, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), a think-tank. That marks a significant drop from 69% between 2012 and 2016.
France, America and Israel are leading that diversification. The value of their arms transfers to India in 2021 was double those in 2017, and eight times higher than in 2012, according to SIPRI. France has recently delivered 32 Rafale jets, 15 Mirage combat aircraft and three Scorpene submarines to India. And the value of defence trade between India and America rose from $200m in 2000 to $6.2bn by 2019. The increase has mostly been driven by a mutual distrust of China, a country that is growing ever closer to Russia.
India’s air force and navy, in particular, are reducing their dependence on Russian hardware. The Russian-made share of India’s total number of aircraft, fell from 81% in 2000 to 67% in 2020, according to research by Sameer Lalwani, a senior fellow at the Stimson Centre, a think-tank. For navy ships the share declined from 58% to 44% over the same period. Its army, however, remains keen on Russian imports. In 2020, 98% of its stock of many inexpensive armoured vehicles was Russian-made.
The poor performance of some Russian military hardware in Ukraine might give India pause for thought. So too could sanctions that complicate transactions, as well as Russia’s closer ties with China. Still, arms deals create significant dependencies on Russia for training and parts: India is thought to import over 10,000 types of spare parts from Russia, annually. Switching to new providers altogether will be hard work. As Siemon Wezemen, a senior researcher at SIPRI, puts it, it’s “like switching from Mac to Windows, but on a larger scale”.