India's Modi to visit Moscow soon, Russian state media says
cnn.com
cnn.com
There is a generation of Indians who distrust America on account of Washington's Cold War-era support for Pakistan. (Our tepid support during the Sino-Indian War of 1962 didn't help [1].) That generation ages out over the next twenty-five years, which is why we're seeing things so haltingly progress.
[1] https://www.thehindu.com/news/Nehru-sought-U.S.-help-during-...
When my dad was South Block adjacent in the 90s, the IAF was already fairly US and Israeli heavy and was in the process of initiating deals with Lockheed for EWACS, Javelins, and potentially F-16s before the Nuclear sanctions. The Army was already using indigenous guns, ToTed Swedish artillery (that caused another corruption scandal), and rolling out domestically manufactured MBTs.
After that, Israeli, Russian, and French companies were able to swoop in because of ToT and some bribery.
Indian dealflow for greenfield Russian systems already ended by the mid-2010s due to delays, open questions about Russian weapon systems efficacies, and better ToT terms from American vendors like Lockheed Martin (eg. The F-21 project and partial F-16 ToT to Tata Aerospace almost a decade ago). The downing of a MiG-21 by Pakistani F-16s during the Pulwama Crisis in 2019 was the final nail in the Russian defense procurement coffin in India.
India primarily keeps good relations with Russia to prevent Russia from becoming completely pro-China, as India's equivalent of the Atlantic Council points out - https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/the-india-factor-in-c...
This is the same story for Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and other Asian nations.
India-Russia relationship has significantly dwindled, truth is there isn’t much commonality there. You can actually see the propaganda coming from the Russian side to sow distrust between US-India on a regular basis.
India still has to maintain the Russia relationship because they are dependent on them for military spares, due to their own lack of investment in domestic industry.
Also I think they don’t want Russia to become too close to China and have no other outlet because that would be a disaster for India, given India-China border relations.
So these visits are just to maintain the illusion I feel.
Long term India is more aligned with the Western bloc, like you mentioned OP. Examples of alignment can be found in multilateral places such as Artemis Accords, QUAD, etc. not to mention the shared China concerns and people to people relationships, hardly any people to people relationships exists between India and Russia.
India burns coal and oil [1]. It mines 70% of its own coal [2], importing the remaining 30% from Indonesia (60% of imports) and, equally, South Africa, Australia and Russia (10% each) [3].
When it comes to oil, however, the ratios are reversed: 80% is imported [4], 40% of which comes from Russia [5]. Better yet, that oil is cheap [6].
That energy dependency undergirds the modern Indo-Russian relationship. Historically, it was weapons. But given the demonstrated inferiority of Russian weapons technology and their recent suzerainty to China, India's geopolitical rival on both its Chinese and Pakistani borders, that's increasingly just for show. (New Delhi has no influence over Russia becoming "too close to China.")
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_India#/media/File:En...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_India#Consumption
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1237506/coal-import-shar...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_and_gas_industry_in_India
[5] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/russia-makes-up-40-india...
[6] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/indias-may-oil-i...
There is no guarantee India will continue buying oil from Russia in the quantities that it does now once the discount goes away.
Some diversification aside, it is cheaper and faster to get oil from the Gulf, India’s traditional oil supplier, so it remains to be seen just how long Indian oil purchases from Russia will last. So I wouldn’t call it permanent feature just yet.
As far as Indian influence on Russia, there is some, perhaps not as much as Indian strategists would like to assume. But it would be a folly to assume Russia wants to be a client state of China. There is precedent for historic distrust and miscalculation[1]. They too would like options, they did in the end allow for Brahmos missiles to be exported to Philippines ( squarely pointed at the Chinese) so suzerainty is not established yet. China also does not want to get too close to Russia, given its larger economic relationship with the West. You can see the stressors emerging in China driving a hard bargain for Siberian gas pipelines. In the end everyone is balancing here.
[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/xi-jinping-russia-lesso...
https://armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/army-news-2022/in...