India is not a Fence-Sitter. It is the Smartest Player in the Room.

The criticism comes in cycles. India buys Russian oil, so India is funding a war. India sits in the Quad, so India is America’s puppet. India attends BRICS, so India is an anti-West bloc member. Nobody can seem to hold two things in their head at once, which is exactly why India keeps getting misread.

Let me tell you what actually happened, because the numbers tell a cleaner story than the noise does.

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The Oil Move Nobody Wanted to Call Genius

Before the Ukraine war, Russian oil was barely two percent of what India imported. Two percent. Then the war starts, the West stops buying, Russia is suddenly sitting on oceans of crude with no buyers, and they start offering it at a steep discount. India buys it. A lot of it. Within two years Russian oil goes from two percent to roughly a third of everything India brings in.

We are the third-largest oil consumer on the planet. We import nearly all of it. So when someone sells the same barrel cheaper, you buy it. You would be a terrible finance minister if you did not. The logic is that simple, and that is exactly what made it so easy to misread as politics when it was really just arithmetic.

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Then America Did Something Revealing

In 2025, the US had enough. A fifty percent tariff on Indian goods, one of the highest slapped on any country anywhere, officially over the Russian oil purchases. The US Treasury Secretary called it profiteering. Said India was just arbitraging cheap crude.

Here is the part that deserves to be said plainly. America’s own former ambassador to India admitted, on the record, that India was buying that oil partly because the West wanted someone to. If every buyer stopped at once, global oil prices spike and that hurts everyone including America. So the quiet arrangement was to let India absorb some of the supply and keep the market stable. India did exactly that. Then a few years later the same country turned around and punished India for it.

India’s own foreign minister said it flat out. We are not the biggest buyer of Russian oil, China is. We are not the biggest buyer of Russian gas, Europe is. So why come for us. Nobody had a clean answer to that.

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Same India, Every Room, Same Month

This is what people miss. The same India buying Russian oil is also deep into defence and technology deals with America. Sitting in the Quad alongside the US, Japan and Australia, a grouping that exists primarily to balance China in the Indo-Pacific. Then flying to a BRICS summit in Russia to shake hands with Putin and Xi Jinping. Same India. Sometimes the same month.

To the West that looks like confusion. To India that is the entire strategy. Buy from everyone. Depend on no one. Commit fully to nobody. They call it strategic autonomy. I just call it refusing to be anyone’s junior partner. It is the most rational foreign policy position available to a country of India’s size and ambition, and it has worked.

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Smart Is Not the Same as Firm. That Is My Problem With It.

I will be honest here because I think the honest version is more interesting than the proud one.

India’s foreign policy is probably the most sophisticated balancing act anyone is running right now. But sophisticated is not the same thing as firm. And that gap bugs me.

Look at how India handles Pakistan. Pakistan pulls something, India hits back hard and fast. No hesitation, no ambiguity, everyone sees it. Now look at China. In 2020 Chinese troops crossed the line in Ladakh. Twenty Indian soldiers died at Galwan, the worst clash in decades. Four years later India signed a patrolling agreement and called it disengagement. Whether India fully recovered its old access to those patrol points is still argued about. The government says one thing, critics who study that border say another.

The pattern is what bothers me. With Pakistan, India is decisive. With China, the country that can actually hurt us in ways Pakistan cannot, the instinct flips. Manage it, absorb it, wait it out. We are firm with the ones we can afford to push and careful with the ones who can really make us pay. That is understandable. It is also, over time, a position that can get mistaken for weakness.

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