Indo-Russian Relations in the Post-Cold War Era

Abstract

Outside the Soviet imperium, India was one of the non-Communist countries perhaps most seriously affected by the sudden demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Since the middle of 1980, India had presented a strange paradox. The decade of the 1980s had witnessed a steady expansion in India’s defense capabilities making it a formidable military power in the region. The previous investments in defense production and technology had matured to give India impressive conventional and strategic capabilities. By early 1992, India was a nuclear weapons capable state on the threshold of its own missile production program. However, these same years had also seen a steady decline in India’s political stability. It had become increasingly vulnerable to external interference, and separ-atist challenges to its territorial integrity. These trends were only exacerbated further by the developments in the 1990s. How can one explain this paradox of weakness and strength?