By M K Bhadrakumar
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is virtually peerless. Only a handful of foreign ministers can match him in professionalism honed over decades in international diplomacy. He seldom leaves the ring empty-handed.
However, one such rare occasion came when he boarded his aircraft with his entourage last week and warily began the 6,000-kilometer journey home from Bangalore, the capital of the southern state of Karnataka, where he had attended a meeting of the Russia-India-China (RIC) trilateral format.
Moscow has tried its level best over recent months to draw India and China closer together on a common regional initiative on Afghanistan. The RIC meeting in Bangalore took place against the backdrop of the eight-year war in the Hindu Kush radiating negative energy all across neighboring regions – the Caucasus and Central Asia, China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region, Iran’s Sistan-Balochistan province and Pakistan’s tribal areas. However, Russian diplomats watched helplessly as eddies in Sino-Indian ties began polluting their efforts to bring Moscow and Delhi closer in Bangalore on the core issues of regional security. They finally called it a day.
Russia puts on a brave face
The Russians, whose pet project is the RIC, must have felt exasperated with their “time-tested” Indian friends. But they wouldn’t have been surprised. They could have anticipated that the disequilibrium within the RIC format would impact the Bangalore meeting. Russia and China are intensifying their cooperation; India has largely neglected its ties with Russia in the post-Cold War years, although most recently it has signaled renewed interest in reviving the atrophied relationship; India and China, on the other hand, have drawn closer incrementally over the past decade, but only to pull apart dramatically in the recent period.
Moscow usually generates a lot of hype when a RIC meeting approaches. This time, it adopted a low-key approach. An article in the influential Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper by Vladimir Skosyrev, a leading commentator, underlined that bilateral Sino-Indian problems – border disputes and the activities of the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, in India – were negatively impacting the work of the RIC.
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