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There is a habit in commentary of treating every Indian visit abroad as a signal of which way Delhi is leaning. Lean west, lean east, lean north. The habit misses the point. India is not trying to choose between Washington, Moscow and Beijing. S Jaishankar landed in Moscow on Sunday and called on Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin on Monday evening. Ajit Doval landed in Beijing on Monday morning. Both trips were scheduled months in advance, on separate tracks, for separate reasons.
In Moscow, Jaishankar spent Monday co-chairing the India-Russia Inter-Governmental Commission with First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov, then went to the Kremlin carrying a personal message from the Prime Minister. He named the sectors that have grown: trade, energy, fertilizers and nuclear cooperation. He also named what stands between the two countries and their target of $100 billion in trade by 2030. Market access. Tariff and non-tariff barriers. Payment mechanisms. Business-to-business contact.
The third item is the real one. Since 2022, the ceiling on India-Russia trade has not been political will but plumbing. Sanctions on Russian banks make settlement slow and expensive, and rupee balances accumulate in accounts Russian exporters struggle to spend. Both sides can announce a target. Neither reaches it until the money moves properly.
The most concrete outcome of the day was Putin’s offer to increase fertilizer supplies, framed as support for Indian farmers. Fertilizer is not a headline commodity, but it feeds straight into food prices and rural incomes, and it is one of the supply chains India has learned it cannot assume will always be available. That the offer came this particular week is strategically notable. It is not evidence of coordination.
The calendar matters too. Jaishankar said Modi expects to meet Putin at the SCO summit in Bishkek, hopes to host him at the BRICS summit, and that the annual bilateral summit will follow. Three chances to meet in one stretch.
Then Beijing. Doval arrived Monday for two days. The twenty-fifth round of Special Representatives talks with Wang Yi is due on Tuesday, with a call on Vice President Han Zheng. China’s spokesperson Lin Jian called the mechanism the main negotiating channel on the boundary and said last August’s round produced common understandings.
The mechanism was set up in 2003 to settle a 3,488-kilometre dispute. Twenty-three years and twenty-four rounds later, it has not. Congress said exactly that on Monday, arguing a process built for resolution has slipped into management. It is a fair charge and deserves an answer rather than a dismissal. Here is the answer. Management is not a small thing when you know what the alternative looks like.
Jaishankar himself called the period between summer 2020 and autumn 2024 a particularly bad patch, driven by the border. Galwan and the Ladakh standoff froze the relationship for four years, and getting back to scheduled talks took most of that time. A channel that stays open in bad weather is worth more than a settlement nobody is going to sign.
The ground is not quiet now either. There are reports of increased Chinese military activity in Upper Subansiri. Beijing said on 12 August the border was generally stable. Delhi said on 11 August that peace along the Line of Actual Control was of utmost importance and would determine the whole trajectory of ties. The two sides have also been trading statements after India formally identified 27 places in Arunachal Pradesh by their standard names.
Beijing has not confirmed Xi Jinping’s attendance at the BRICS summit on 12 and 13 September. Officials on both sides expect it. Until it is confirmed, the Doval visit stands on its own terms rather than as preparation for something larger.
The logic of both trips becomes clearer against the last twelve months of American trade policy. In August 2025, India faced 50 per cent duties, half of them a penalty for buying Russian crude. On 2 February, the two governments announced an interim framework bringing the reciprocal rate to 18 per cent. On 20 February, the US Supreme Court ruled that IEEPA, the emergency powers statute underpinning the whole regime, had never authorized tariffs at all.
The 18 per cent rate died with it, after just eighteen days. What followed moved as fast. A flat 10 per cent surcharge arrived four days later by presidential proclamation, under a temporary authority Congress caps at 150 days. It expired in July. USTR announced its replacement on 23 July, and it took effect the next morning, an additional 10 per cent on India under forced-labor findings.
The pattern in that sequence matters more than any single rate. India’s rate moved four times in a year. India negotiated one of those moves. One came from the US Supreme Court. The other two came from the American executive, and India had no seat at either.
The July measure is the instructive one. India could not stop the tariff. It could decide which tier it landed in, and it did, notifying a forced-labor import ban of its own weeks before the deadline and securing 10 per cent while China, Vietnam and Thailand took 12.5. That is the whole method in one move. Not the power to set the terms. The preparation to shape them.
The same method explains this week. India is the third-largest oil importer, a manufacturing destination Western firms want as an alternative to China, and a neighbor Beijing would rather have quiet than hostile. Delhi is not collecting friendships. It is making sure each capital has its own reason to keep calling.
The limits are equally real. The trade gap with China remains heavily tilted against India. Russia’s dependence on Beijing keeps growing. Neither Moscow nor Beijing is a substitute for the American market. But that is precisely why India cannot afford to choose one over the others.
Alignment buys protection on someone else’s terms and lasts until they change their mind. Leverage buys room. India is building that room deliberately, relationship by relationship, so that no single capital gets to decide what India does next.
That is not hedging, and it is not drift. It is a country that has understood it cannot control the terms, and has decided to spend its effort on the one thing it can control, which is how many options it has when the terms change.
Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed in this article/column are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of South Asian Herald.
