Washington: Sameer Lalwani is senior fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington DC and a non-resident fellow at George Washington University’s Sigur Centre of Asian Studies. A widely respected policy voice in the US strategic community on defence ties between India and the United States (US), he is the co-editor of Investigating Crises: South Asia’s Lessons, Evolving Dynamics and Trajectories. Lalwani, who completed his doctoral work at MIT, has extensively researched New Delhi’s defence relationship with both Moscow and
Washington: Sameer Lalwani is senior fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington DC and a non-resident fellow at George Washington University’s Sigur Centre of Asian Studies. A widely respected policy voice in the US strategic community on defence ties between India and the United States (US), he is the co-editor of Investigating Crises: South Asia’s Lessons, Evolving Dynamics and Trajectories. Lalwani, who completed his doctoral work at MIT, has extensively researched New Delhi’s defence relationship with both Moscow and Washington.
In a conversation with Hindustan Times, in the run-up to the 2+2 dialogue between the two countries, where defence is expected to be a key focus area, Lalwani laid out the context of the relationship. He spoke about India-US ties in the wake of Russian invasion of Ukraine, the expansion as well as the limits of the India-US defence relationship, the US’s Indo-Pacific approach with a particular focus on Taiwan, India’s capabilities in the Indian Ocean, Quad, and offered a possible roadmap for future ties.
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, what changes – and what doesn’t change – in India-US ties?
The foundations are still there. The central argument for the relationship with India is about creating a balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. And what is happening in Russia and Europe has never been a central part of what the US has sought from India. So the general logic holds. The question is what preferences are being revealed by India in this episode that should cause US to rethink its position on whether India would employ the same approach in the Indo-Pacific. And I don't think we have enough evidence to make a conclusion either way. There is some concern about the accommodation that India has shown with respect to Russia, expressed by the administration and the Congress. But there is an understanding as to why that's the case. Ultimately India's decisions when it comes to China will be much more consequential and revealing of the prospects of how durable this relationship is going to be.
We have seen a fairly measured assessment of India's position here in Washington. But there has also been criticism. What do these different voices suggest?
The measured side is, again, the strategic side of the US policymaking apparatus that understands India’s desire not to isolate Russia, India's critical role in the Indo-Pacific, and India’s material dependence on Russia. The barometer for measuring the relationship with India will be about China. But I think there is also an element of confidence in the US’s position. This comes from an assessment that Russia is its own worst enemy in this circumstance, that they are doing the most damage to the relationship in terms of undermining their own reliability – be it in terms of accessibility and availability of spare parts, or their ability to actually follow through the existing contracts, but also the larger way they have waged this war in Ukraine and questions it raises about their strategic judgment, their intelligence apparatus, their civil-military relationship. That's why the US can afford to be measured right now.
However, there are some potential consequences if the war continues for an extended period of time. Abstaining on UN Security Council votes, or buying a certain amount of energy from Russia that it normally does, is one thing. But if it looks like India is starting to undermine the sanctions regime, the technology denial regime, have a more advanced rupee-ruble trade, that's when you're going to start getting more concerns being expressed from the administration. You are already hearing it from the Congress, from long-time advocates of the US-India relationship who are asking what's going on here, and expressing a desire for evidence that India is actually making a sincere effort at transitioning away from its dependency relationship on Russia.
We have also just seen the Bucha massacre. And I think how India responds to increasing numbers of atrocities will be something that the Congress will weigh. The most obvious one is the possibility of Russia using chemical weapons. If they do that, I think you will see a much tighter hardening of the position lines in the international system. And there won't be a lot of grey area under those circumstances.
India’s dependence on Russia
You have worked extensively on India’s relationship with Russia. What is the nature of India's military dependence on Russia?
There are three components. The first is that India has a lot of material that's acquired from Russia over 60 years, and that stock of material needs to be serviced, upgraded, maintained and requires spares and parts. I saw a public figure reported last month, of how the total value of sustainment costs paid to Russia is $500 million a year out of Indian defence budget. So it's a pretty substantial amount of stock, and there is not a lot of substitutes that are easily available.
The second component is the ongoing contracts that India is in the midst of acquiring. And so there is the S-400 air defence system. There are the stealth frigates. There's, intended at least, a nuclear submarine potentially to transport helicopters. And a cruise missile system that India believes is its best chance of exporting to other countries, the Brahmos.
And the third dimension is the one that we don't talk about that much, but is actually quite important, which is specifically strategic systems for India. The idea that India is given access to nuclear technology is a little bit of an overstatement because they only get to lease it, and it's not clear whether Indian personnel have access to the nuclear reactor on the nuclear submarine that Russia has leased India in the past. But, at the same time, there is a lot of evidence that suggests India was able to build its own SSBN, its own nuclear powered ballistic submarines, based on its experiences and technical and engineering support from the Russians, particularly in the 1990s. And so its possible India believe the future of its second strike deterrence is contingent upon its future cooperation with Russia because there is now a sort of path dependence. They can't go to the French for nuclear submarine technology. It's a totally different system, so there's not an easy path to switch. And so, for strategic deterrence, so long as India believes that an SSBN programme is critical to its second strike capability, it could be locked in with Russia.
You seem to suggest that Russia is fairly indispensable in India’s strategic calculus. So where is that India can diversify in the short term and in the medium term?
The short term is spares and parts for its existing Russian-origin or Soviet-origin platforms. And there's been a lot of talk about how the Indians could obtain this from other Eastern bloc countries that also maintain Russian or Soviet hardware but no longer have a strong relationship with Russia –Poland, Romania, Czech Republic. I have never seen how developed that process is. Clearly those other states have found ways to service their own MiGs and Sukhois, but it is not clear if India has made a serious effort to obtain this. I imagine the US has extended an offer to help India with this process. For a long time, what India was counting on was the Russians to transfer the know-how to domestically produce a lot of this servicing capacity. But I have seen these claims going on for almost a decade now. The Russians had a clear incentive to keep India on the hook and now India doesn't really have an easy alternative. So, in the short-term, if the US can facilitate and broker these agreements, that would probably be the first and obvious thing to do.
The second is what if Russia can't follow through on its existing deals with the Indians, if it can't, for example, provide additional battalions of the S-400 system. It’s possible that because of the technology-denial regime, whether because of chips or other sort engineering components that come from Europe, Russia may not be able to actually put together the S-400 systems that they are supposed to sell India. It's already transferred one, but there are four more units to go. If they can't do that, another natural move the US could help with is a re-offer of the things they had offered in the past, THAAD and PAC-3. I don't think India is actually interested in that, but the more important alternative is to revisit a programme that the India expressed an interest in almost a decade ago, which were the Israeli programmes, David’s Sling, which is another air defence system that is comparable to the S-400. My understanding is that because some of the technology originated from US-equipment manufacturers, they had a veto over it – maybe because they were interested in selling other systems like Patriot-2. I think that should be reopened. This is another way for the US to broker a deal between India and Israel. It's getting them a capability that is comparably as good, and serves a particular deterrent function on the Line of Actual Control.
The longer term move obviously is building a defence technology partnership with India, which in theory has been underway for a decade with the DTTI (Defence Trade and Technology Initiative), but hasn’t really gone very far.
It would be useful for India, as they are introspecting on their exposure to Russia, to also get a true accounting or audit of what technology they've actally obtained from Russia over the last 60 years. Because when I look at it, India has been license producing Russian fighters for 60 years; they've had a Brahmos joint venture program with the Russians for 25 years. What do they have to show for it? They still can't produce their own engines in a fighter aircraft. In the Brahmos joint venture programme, again, the propulsion system is totally imported from Russia. That's the central part of the cruise missile. There are some estimates that as much as 65% of the Brahmos missile -- probably in terms of value – comes from Russia directly. So that to me is not really a transfer of technology. If this is the flagship of the Russian partnership, then it speaks to very good Russian branding, but not necessarily a substantive transfer of technology. So I think India would be wise to do that and then see if they can find better partnerships.
The India-US defence partnership
At Stimson Center, you convened a track-two dialogue on the India-US defence relationship. What has enabled the deepening of this relationship and what has inhibited it, both from Delhi and the Washington end?
The traditional explanation for what's enabled the deepening of the relationship is usually this story about natural allies, shared values, greater economic integration, and a shared defence interest. Over the last five years, defence has been the driving factor in deepening the relationship. Values are important, but they seem less imporant in recent years. The economic relationship has always been the engine of the relationship, and it remains steady, but it hasn't been expanding as rapidly as some expected. On the defence side, the biggest driver is China’s behavior in the region. And that's really galvanised support on both sides to deepen this relationship.
Sometimes the relationship is measured in terms of how far we have come. There is a constant refrain that 20 years ago, you could have never imagined the things that we are doing today. That is a useful metric and measure of progress. But we should also be measuring it against the challenge. In that regard, the rising threat and power of China has moved much faster than the pace of India-US cooperation. So measured against that, we are falling short.
From the US side, the strongest argument as to why things have been inhibited is that we don't actually have a great deal of strategic interaction and military interoperability. And what I mean by that is that we can do a lot of things together but if we don't have a shared sense of mission planning and operations, it's hard to understand what is the end-point of all these acivities. What are we doing this for? With other US partners like Australia and Japan, there has been a central shared mission, which has been the defence of that country because there is a security guarantee. And now those conversations are also moving into the defence of Taiwan because that's become identified as a lynchpin. But with India, it's a little more abstract. It's this general idea that India should be able to play an important balancing role against China in the Indo-Pacific. But that is so loose and abstract that it's hard to measure progress. A more specific expectation for planning missions and operations will put a little bit more meat on the bone.
On the other side, Indians have argued the relationship has been held back due to the absence of a joint defence technology-sharing project. And that has been a critical holdup. Now whether that's a fair critique can be debated. But they have been very unequivocal about this for more than a decade, and it's not clear to me that the US has adapted fast enough to that demand signal.
Besides technology-sharing, you mention two other issues in your report as inhibiting factors from the Indian end – pricing and co-manufacturing, especially with India's push for indigenisation. Do you think there is now greater appetite on the US side to work with India on these issues, as some official statements have indicated, or do you think India's position on Russia may actually contribute to a degree of strategic distrust?
It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Both countries want to demonstrate there is forward progress. One way you could do that is announcing new agreements or programme. India could finally announce that they are procuring these 30 MQ-9 unmanned combat aerial vehicles that have been considered for over five years now. But they likely hesitate because of the uncertainty of potential CAATSA sanctions. US sanctions threats are holding up a decision that could be a real momentum generator because India acquiring these systems could not only signal it is diversifying from Russian arms but also that it is able to work closely with the US on anti-submarine warfare in the Indian Ocean.
So CAATSA is holding that up. But the US is inhibited from clarifying a waiver status without a clear understanding of what India's long-term horizon is going to be with diversifying away from Russia. So we're sort of in this cycle, and it is unclear to me how you break out of it. In theory, you could have a quid pro quo on this, or sort of an informal understanding that those things will be announced within quick succession of each other.
But after that, it's tough because there is not a lot of demonstrable evidence that shows India stepping away from Russia. It can't, at this moment, for understandable reasons. Going back to what we discussed earlier, there are can be some spares arrangements, but India is inhibited from doing something like that with the US for a third party because they fear Russian retribution. What if they can only get alternative spares and parts for one airframe, but they can't get them for tanks or infantry fighting vehicles and still need Russia for that? And what if Russia threatens to cut off all sustainments? India is in a really tough spot, and I don't think there is an easy way out of it. The US is probably trying to be as helpful as possible, but India is not the only priority. of The US is backstopping Europe, but there are a bunch of other partners in Indo-Pacific—Taiwan, Japan, Australia, Philippines-- that the US is much more committed to than helping India solve its own Russia problem.
The perceptional gulf in Delhi and DC
What is the role of perceptions as inhibiting factors? In Delhi, there remains a sense of US being a somewhat unpredictable and unreliable partner – and CAATSA brings back those fears. There is also a sense that while the US is important in the maritime domain, it is somewhat unreliable in terms of the continental challenge.
On the reliability question, I get where it is coming from, but the history of US sanctions on India is prior to thestrategic realignment period pre-2000. Since then, India hasn't really been a target. It's been a target of US cajoling. There has got to be a mutual understanding that we have a different relationship now and the US isn't going to resort to sanctions. As I understand it, the CAATSA waiver clause was specifically written for India. So the US system is trying to adapt.
The perception of the continental-maritime challenge is a problem. But this again stems from the problem of not having a strategic assessment process that is closely integrated. The US believes the chief challenge China poses is in the maritime domain because that's the threat to the commons, to freedom of navigation and commerce. That's also where China will project its coercive power. In the continental domain, there is a finite amount of space and geography. I think India is particularly concerned about the continental domain because of Pakistan but those are not existential threats.
Even the land-based challenge China poses to India is over peripheral territory. So China can make some ingress, but India can do the same tit-for-tat and then bargain. It's not like China can actually conduct a blitzkrieg and conquer Indian cities or economic centers – they can't do what Russia tried to do in Kiev. So the scope of political and economic coercion China poses on land is less than what it can threaten at sea.
On Afghanistan and Pakistan, this is where India would do well to do an introspection or an audit. What has Russia done for India on that side? How helpful was it to India's interests in Afghanistan? How helpful has it been in the past decade dealing with Pakistan? I see very little evidence of that. But I think there is an article of faith about this that doesn't seem to be supported by the empirical evidence.
There is also a perception, especially if you go by segments of Indian social media, of a kind of Indian indispensability, how the US will come around, and the wooing of Delhi shows its strength and value in the system.
The US wants the partnership with India. But does it need India, and is it an inelastic demand? I suspect that's a little too overconfident for India. The US needs Japan and Australia. It has treaty alliances with them, but it's also counting on them for basing, joint operations, and mutual involvement in a contingency in East Asia. You can even say that the US needs the Philippines more than it needs India because of the geography of the most critical China challenge. So there has to be an adjustment in that perception. A more accurate way to frame it perhaps is to say that the US really wants a partnership with India, not out of necessity, but for the opportunities it affords.
India is still a target of courtship because it's seen as the swing voter still. It has tilted West in the past two decades, but it is yet to cast its chip. That's why you are seeing a lot of effort to bring India over to the US side. But if India refrains from any choices, I think the US would be perfectly capable, with its existing allies and partners of securing its interests in the Indo-Pacific. So US engagement efforts shouldn't lead to a sense of indispensability in New Delhi. US partnerhsip should be seen as an opportunity for India to create security and opportunity for itself.
So those are perceptions on the Indian side, which don't resonate here. What about the perception in Washington that India is not standing up or India is not reliable?
There remains a concern in Washington that India still might be a little too gun-shy to take more risk in confronting China. What's interesting is that the Indian foreign minister (S Jaishankar)'s book (The India Way), talks explicitly about making hard choices and taking high risks to accrue high reward. I think India is seriously considering this risk/reward ratio but is still uncertain.
Another question is whether India can impose meaningful competitive costs on China in peace time or in crisis or war time. Is it going to be able put itself in a position that will deter or constrain China in any of those environments? On the continental domain, India has been running an experiment for about a decade now via its mountain strike corps. While under resourced, its ground forces in the Eastern and Northern borders have not imposed meaningful costs or deterred Chinese behaviour in any way. From a US standpoint, it's of course important for India to defend itself against China, but it's currently not stressing Chinese behavior in a way that enhances collective deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.
In the maritime domain, there are a lot more opportunities for that. India has natural advantages geographically. It has a lot more capacity to do things in the Indian Ocean if it builds the right force structure, if it enhances funding of its Navy and maritime security forces, if it buys the right systems, which don't necessarily have to be kinds of systems and platforms that China is buying, but just smarter investments. And while the US obviously shouldn’t be telling India what to do here, US policymakers are hoping that India will build a set of capabilities that will be complementary to the Quad partners. I think India is in the process of doing that, but the question is how quickly can India sort its force structure and its doctrine to meet the China challenge.
The Taiwan question
You wrote a piece in Hindustan Times where you persuasively argued that the current confrontation will Russia will not weaken, but help, the US’s Indo-Pacific strategy. I want to delve into the specifics of what binds and divides India and the US here. So both countries say they want a free and open Indo-Pacific. If we break that down, Washington’s top concern in the region is Taiwan; that doesn’t figure high up in India’s calculus. Is there a divergence in terms of what’s really important for the two countries?
There is a divergence on Taiwan, for understandable reasons. The US has certain legal and defence commitments to Taiwan that India does not have. So it has been thinking about the defence of and military support for Taiwan for several decades now. But there is also a different theory as to what poses a threat to global order. In the maritime domain, the US is most concerned because of the threat that China poses to freedom of navigation, which is particularly problematic for small states. Large states like the US will be able to manuever but small states can be coerced. We saw a lot of evidence of this with Chinese claims in the South China Sea, and its harassment and interdiction of both commercial and military vessels in those international waters. The concern that the US has is this: what more coercion China exercise if it retakes Taiwan?
A Chinese invasion would forcibly change borders, which would violate the rules-based order that India has signed up to defend. But the military consequences after an invasion would allow China to project power into the Pacific Ocean and into the Indian Ocean in a far more unfettered way than it has up till now. The conquest of Taiwan would dramatically change that military balance in terms of what China could do. And it should concern India as well because if China is no longer bottled up between the first and second island chain, given its demonstrated behavior towards states that it has disputes with, or just the way it treats small states in general, it can start applying that approach to the Indian Ocean.
The other thing that China could do is pivot its energy towards secondary disputes. And high on the list of its secondary disputes is its border dispute with India. So it has claims in Arunachal Pradesh, in Tawang, and other parts of the border that are disputed, and can redeploy forces and capabilities for either aggression or control of disputed territory it controls. It can pose a much greater and direct headache to India after Taiwan. So in a way, Washington sees Taiwan as the cork in the bottle because of the precedent setting concerns as well as the military consequences.
So what would the US expect India to do if the Chinese get more aggressive on the Taiwan front?
So I actually don't think we have a clear understanding of this. And this is why I think it's important for the US and India to start talking about this more actively in Track 1 and Track 2 engagement. It is not clear the US has an expectation of India. I think it should. At the very least, we should have some sort of diplomatic and economic coordination on this. But there are probably some military actions that India could take to support the US and Quad partners. And it's better to put them on the table now and discuss what's possible and plan for that contingency rather than stay silent and then hope, in that eventuality, that all the things line up in the right place.
The chief thing that the US would desire of India is to have general skin in the game, economic exposure through trade and investment, and diplomatic investments. India’s voice provides cover to a lot of small states in the region, particularly in Southeast Asia, which want to have a strong economic relationship with China, but also are critical of Chinese military aggression in the region.
Ideally, we would like to see India provide some military skin in the game. And that might mean taking over certain responsibilities in the Indian Ocean so that the US forces could concentrate on the Indo-Pacific. That might mean patrols for counter-piracy or stability of the Persian Gulf,. And if in a Taiwan contingency, there are Chinese ships that are trying to interdict US forces swinging from Europe and the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific theatre, it would be helpful for India to have the US’s back. It’s not necessary for the Indian military to be involved in frontline operations in the Pacific but it would be helpful for India to be tracking and holding at risk Chinese submarines throughout the Indian Ocean.
Frankly, the knowledge that India might participate in some coalitional effort would impose a deterrent effect on China to a degree, the same way we think involving Japan and Australia and other countries would. It's not simply the materiel they bring to the fight, but it's also the fact that China would then be risking war on all these major powers. It requires taking some risk and some exposure in order to collectively deter an event that we think would be catastrophic for the entire world. Ultimately, it is in US interest to at least be discussing this with India. It's understandable India is averse to this, but I think we need to start discussing it and putting some of our cards and expectations on the table.
Indian Ocean and Quad
A lot of what you said entails assumption of greater Indian responsibility in the Indian Ocean. In a recent piece in Politico, you seemed to suggest that Indian capabilities are not necessarily what they are made out to be in Indian Ocean. Why do you think so?
The piece derived of a conversation with some Indian colleagues. I was seeing a pretty significant and dramatic Chinese naval buildup and its spare capacity that could be employed in the Indian Ocean in contrast to a shortfall between Indian projections and objectives. With shipbuilding, you can project capabilities 10-15 years down the line, what ships each country is going to have. India was far short of the mark for what it had hoped to build a decade ago. Just because China moves ships into Indian Ocean may not mean it's a direct threat to India, but we know how China’s navy has behaved in other parts of the world. China at least has the capacity to do things that can be inimical to India's interests. The obtacles to China’s naval power projection are slowly fading away – access to ports, sustainment, carrier aviation. The PLAN is solving a lot of these problems and gaining operational experience in the Indian Ocean.
Over the next decade, this will pose a real challenge and it doesn't look to me like India is, as yet, prepared for it. So India really needs to focus on own maritime security, just to defend its own maritime approaches. Some of that might mean putting more resources into a naval budget, but another part of it might mean spending wisely with the limited resources that it does have. The budget is not going to change dramatically over the next decade. So it has to think more creatively and smartly about where it puts it investments. And so I was suggesting some ideas for the things that India might want to invest in to hold the Chinese navy at risk. That means a lot more attention to sensor networks, long range missiles and munitions, rather than trying to sort of match China pound for pound, carrier for carrier, submarine for submarine. It's never going to outcompete or out-build China and so India, in conjunction with the US and the Quad, will need to out-sense them. It requires greater ability to track and detect where Chinese naval assets are at all times, greater domain awareness, and then a reconnaissance- strike complex to hold it at risk.
In your report of the Track-2 dialogue, you suggested setting up a joint centre for intelligence assessment at the Indo-Pacific command. What is the rationale of that mechanism?
I don't want to presuppose things that are probably happening at the Track-1 level that I am unaware of. There has undoubtedly been a significant deepening of US-India relationship, particularly on the intelligence side since the Galwan crisis in 2020. But I think there is a difference between sharing finished intelligence products, sharing a steady stream of intelligence like you have with Five Eyes – and I think that's something we should be considering with Quad as well – and an interactive assessment processes which is deeper. So this involves taking sort of bits and pieces of intelligence, putting them into a matrix, assessing what are the likely scenarios and consequences that we can expect to see over the next five to 10 years, and how do we fare? How do our forces, our economy, our political system fare in that environment? This intelligence cooperation is an experiential process. The most common form is a war game or a tabletop exercise, but there are other ways of teasing out these scenarios. In doing so, you unearth some assumptions and you can stress test them with partners who both think differently, but harbour shared interests.
I think we need to be doing a lot more of that, and I don't get the sense that there is an institutionalised process for this. I think it happens in some of the regular engagement or coordination mechanisms, the 2+2 ministerial, the maritime security dialogue, but I think we need strategic assessment with much more regularity, the way that the US has with Japan and Australia,. One path to that is to physically have people co-located in a space where there is a regular stream of officials interacting and learning from each other and red teaming each other's ideas. That was the notional idea we had – this could be something that the US could host at IndoPacom or another location or it could be two facilities. But the objective should be to have a lot more flow of assessments between the two countries. And that then will enable conception of joint missions and joint operations. But until we do the assessment process first, we are hard pressed to get to that next operational stage.
Do you think Quad can be a mechanism for that, more visibly and publicly? Cooperation has deepened in Quad, but this has coincided with a desire to underplay its security dimension and focus on the public goods dimension.
There are two competing schools of thought on this. One is if you can do it quietly, it allows countries that are still a bit uncertain, to proceed forward, build relationships and skill-sets, and undertake activities without the political flak that might come with it. But the flipside is that one of the reasons why you make these things public, why you write them down, is for the deterrence value. If they are so quiet that the adversary or challenger doesn't believe they exist or are meaningful, the adversary can mistakenly initiate conflict while discounting the coalitional response. At some point, publicity it is required.
Public goods, pooling of resources and mutual resilience are important. It's not exclusively a security equation, but we would be lying to ourselves if we didn't think that was essential. You want the awareness of public goods, resource pooling, and resilience in the economic domain to inspire confidence in markets by investors and consumers. Similarly, you would want that confidence in the security domain. You don't want predatory actors to think that they can get away with aggression, like we’re seeing with Russia in Ukraine today. Russia is going to be a very diminished power after this, but not until after a tremendous amount of bloodshed and economic damage. The hope is that China doesn't also make that mistake. And so, at some point, I think Quad needs to be a little more public and visible about the kind of deterrence capabilities that really should shape Chinese behavior in the region.
Path forward
Final question, if you could say three things to Raksha Mantri Rajnath Singh, who will be in Washington for the 2+2, what would you suggest to him?
One, let's start being much more proactive on maritime security, building the capacity to do joint missions and operations together, and ultimately to have handoffs tracking all vessels, particularly Chinese naval vessels, in the Indian Ocean. That's an important sort of skill-set that we ought to develop and be able to burden share, both in peace time and war-time.
Second, to seriously respond to India's demand for defence technology cooperation , we should make, at the apex level, a commitment to a really robust defence technology partnership of the scale of AUKUS. AUKUS should be the template. It's going to require some time to prove that concept and bring it to fruition, but that should be the idea. You have an apex level agreement that shapes multiple lines of cooperation and bureaucratic disentanglement. These are the goals of what we are going to do. And then we set up working committees to achieve that end, with a much greater opening of our defence technology and industrial bases integrating together. Once you set that political goal, then you can unlock all the obstacles like export controls, intellectual property lars, and security disclosure on the US side and capital commitments and private sector support on the Indian side. But you need to have that political momentum. In the 2+2, we should at least be talking about what the path is to get us there.
And finally, on Russia, I think it is in New Delhi’s interest to state right now, in advance, that no party should terrorise civilians or use chemical weapons in the war in Ukraine, as that would be immensely harmful to international stability. India doesn’t even have to name a country but everyone will understand the implications of that statement. That would be a really constructive step that will win them support in the US Congress, and it will be clear, without taking sides, that India seeks to minimise the escalation of this conflict.
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