© Mikhail Metzel / TASS / SputnikVladimir Putin and Narendra Modi. October 2018.
Putin and Modi talked over the phone on Monday, the Kremlin said. The Russian leader invited the Indian PM to attend the Eastern Economic Forum in September. The event is held annually in Vladivostok in Russia's Far East, and is aimed at fostering the nation's trade and joint projects with Asia-Pacific. In 2017, Modi paid a visit to a high-profile economic-themed event in Russia's St Petersburg.
The leaders also agreed to work together on fighting terrorism and solving "other relevant world problems." Putin wished Modi luck in the upcoming general elections, scheduled for spring.
Moscow and New Delhi have enjoyed close economic ties since Soviet times. India is one of Russia's main arms buyers. Despite the pressure from Washington to abandon the contract, India sealed the deal to buy Russian-made S-400 air defense missile systems.
In November, New Delhi also finalized the deal on four Russian guided-missile frigates. Two of the warships will be built in Russia, while the other two are to be constructed in a shipyard in India.
India has too many people, and Russia has not enough. I can see, down the road, Indians being allowed to settle in Russia, but not Chinese. China down through history is, and always has been, expansionistic, and the Chinese are racist, but India is not. Once Russia started letting in Chinese, they would overwhelm the native Russians, but the Indians would assimilate and fit in, as they have done in many other countries in recent decades.
This is a far-fetched idea, and is way down the road if it ever happens. Maybe someone who knows Putin could suggest it to him. The stumbling-block is that India cannot make up its mind which sphere of influence it wants to align itself with - the American or the Russian. However, if present trends continue, American influence in the world will wane, (or on the other hand, America may once again miraculously recover itself,) and India may in the future decide to abandon a declining America and join up with a resurgent Russia.
Forget the BRICS alliance. South Africa is a political basket case, heading for poverty and famine the same way Zimbabwe went, and Brazil has fallen under the rule of USA-and-IMF-client oligarchs. China and India remain cautiously suspicious of each other. China is courting Pakistan, India's declared enemy, as a means of gaining an outlet to the Indian Ocean at Gwadar Port in Pakistan, part of China's New Silk Road initiative. The only presently viable part of BRICS that works is Russia and China, and even that is a marriage of convenience. Russia is suspicious of the long-term ambitions of the 1.3 billion Chinese, crammed into an overpopulated country which is half sandy desert, and eyeing enviously the vast, fertile and rich empty spaces of Siberia to the North. Lake Baikal has enough water (a mile deep) to irrigate all the deserts of China.
After 1990 Russia would much rather have had America as an ally and business partner, separated by an ocean, than overpopulated China, on its South-Eastern doorstep. But the Neocons and their co-religionists, who totally rule America, would much rather steal Russia's treasure than develop it together. This has always been the philosophy of that race of people - they have always exploited and stolen from others not of their blood, rather than working together for mutual benefit. This is why they have been universally hated everywhere and in all centuries for 3,500 years.
So America has made its choices: Treat both Russia and China as enemies to be looted, driving them into each others arms. Thirty years from now, I will not be here, but I predict this will be seen as an immense political blunder, the greatest mistake in the history of the United States, when China becomes the world hegemon over both Russia AND America, who together might have arrested its rise to power.
Let us hope India and Russia make friends and start to work together, combining India's people and talents with Russia's resources and land spaces, in spite of the Indo-Chinese hostility and the Russo-Chinese friendship. It would be of immense benefit to both countries, and to the world.
- Lemuel Gulliver.