Russia brings to the 18th BRICS summit in New Delhi something few other partners can claim: a relationship with India that has repeatedly adapted to changing times without losing its strategic core. Its roots can be traced back to long before the establishment of diplomatic ties on April 13, 1947, four months before India’s Independence.

In 1469, Russian merchant Afanasy Nikitin travelled to India, spending three years in Bidar. His travelogue, Journey Beyond the Three Seas, was the first published Russian account about India and attracted wide interest. In the 17th century, Gujarati traders built a thriving community in Astrakhan, at the mouth of the Volga, supplying fine textiles to the Tsar. By the mid-19th century, Sanskrit was being taught at three leading Russian universities. In the 1890s, Vladimir Haffkine developed and self-tested cholera and plague vaccines in Bombay that saved countless Indian lives. The 1909-1910 Leo Tolstoy-MK Gandhi correspondence influenced India’s non-violent freedom struggle. By the time India became independent, the two countries were building on deep historical and human ties.

Following initial ideological caution, ties between the two evolved after 1947 into a well-grounded partnership that was neither transactional nor episodic. Soviet aid contributed to India’s industrialisation, symbolised by the Bhilai Steel Plant, while defence cooperation developed steadily. The partnership acquired a strategic dimension with the 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation. During the Bangladesh Liberation War, Soviet naval presence and the country’s repeated use of its UN Security Council veto helped deter western intervention.

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The relationship survived the........

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