Modi holds Putin close, but he will make up with Trump

In a year of striking diplomatic images that sum up just how much the world has turned upside down since Donald Trump re-entered the White House, the footage of Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi holding hands as they entered the room to meet Xi Jinping was right up there.

At a time when the rest of the west had slowly been coming to the obvious conclusion that the US was no longer a reliable ally – indeed, possibly now an adversary – here was visual evidence that a new alliance was emerging on the other side of the world.

This week, Putin and Modi will engage in more hand-holding, joke-sharing and big-man camaraderie when the Russian president flies to Delhi for the first time since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In between the public shows of bonhomie, the two leaders will discuss arms deals and oil purchases – and probably engage in a dig or two at the west. For diplomats watching from Washington and London, Brussels and Berlin, there will be concern that India under Modi has decisively moved into the orbit of autocracies and illiberal democracies.

Part of the shift is personal. In the wake of the four-day conflict between India and Pakistan in May, Trump tried to take credit for the ceasefire. Modi, though, made it clear that the US had nothing to do with it.

Modi’s refusal to suck up to Trump – in stark contrast to Pakistan, which effusively thanked him and publicly nominated him for the Nobel peace prize – clearly angered the US president. In the months since, he has repeatedly criticised India for continuing to buy Russian oil and responded to Modi’s refusal to stop in the only way he knows – hitting India with tariffs of 50%.

“I don’t care what India does with Russia,” Trump said in July. “They can take their dead economies down together.” But he does care. According to German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the US president tried to speak to Modi four times in recent weeks, but on each occasion the Indian prime minister refused to take his call.

Part of India’s shift away from the west is also strategic. Russia provides India with weapons and oil – why should India turn away a reliable friend over a war that Delhi believes doesn’t affect them?

And like other nations that have relied on the US in the past, Modi understands that the world has changed. India will always share a border with China and a hemisphere with Russia. The US will not always be by its side.

Finally, the shift is also about Modi’s own status. The meeting in Shanghai and the summit in Delhi help the Indian prime minister to promote himself as a leader on a par with Xi and Putin, said Shanthie Mariet D’Souza, founder of the Indian thinktank Mantraya. “He thinks that India has arrived in the ‘great power’ league.”

The full impact of this new world was on display earlier this month at the Cop30 climate summit in Brazil. India, Russia and China – helped by another regional power, Saudi Arabia – ganged up to prevent the final agreement even acknowledging the role of fossil fuels in causing the climate crisis.

It would be a mistake, though, for the west to assume that India is now allied with its adversaries. India’s goal is to maintain its strategic autonomy, D’Souza argues.

It doesn’t want to rely on one partner, or one part of the world. India can use Russia’s weakness to drive a deal on arms and oil, while also showing Washington that its tariffs and tantrums won’t make a difference in Delhi. But it does not want to rely on Russia and certainly not on China – there will be times when Modi’s actions similarly frustrate Moscow and Beijing.

What should worry western liberals is that Modi’s worldview may be correct. That the postwar international institutions are over, that multilateralism is dead, that we’re returning to a world divided into spheres of influence where power transcends values.

This, ultimately, is why Trump and Modi will make up: their vision of the new world order is the same.

Photograph by Getty Images