Indians share with Americans a fondness for litigation and with Russians a sense of black humor. India is the world's most populous democracy, the United States is the most powerful and one of the oldest, and Russia is one of the newest. A joke making the rounds in India is that the services of the Russian election commission have been called in to clean up the mess of the U.S. presidential election. At last count, the leading candidate was Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In October, Putin paid a visit to India to restore a flagging relationship. Seventeen agreements were signed, including defense purchases worth $2 billion. India finds Russian arms to be cheap, rugged and reliable, whereas Washington's willingness to sell products and technologies fluctuates with changing political winds in the U.S. and the subcontinent.
India and Russia have been struggling to come to terms with a world that has changed fundamentally since the Cold War. Then, ties between them were broad, deep and durable. Now India has to deal with a Russia that is erratic, Eurocentric, economically dependent on Western largess, and has neither the interest nor the resources to prop up Third World regimes. Bilateral trade has collapsed to less than one-third of its 1990 level of $5.5 billion.