Italian and Czech customers of Indian ammunition makers were diverting their shipments to the government Kiev, and Moscow has protested this to New Delhi at least twice.
The article is strangely written, it’s a non-denial-denial on the part of India, they’re acting offended but saying they’ve broken no agreements with Russia and didn’t do anything wrong but they’re not denying that they’re shipping the Ukrainians shells.
I’m positive they’re going to side with the west enough to matter in the coming struggle. Oh they’ll keep their options open, they’ll pretend to be “independent” because it makes the west court them more and lets them play both sides but when it comes down to it and the west gives them a knife to plant in China’s back for minimal benefit of their own they’ll do it in a heartbeat. They see their rise as tied to destroying China, as a zero-sum calculation, either they take industry from China and become a great power or China retains it and they get nothing.
They labor under the same kind of ignorance that the bourgeoisie of Russia had after the USSR was illegally dissolved, namely that they would be let into the big anglo bourgeoisie club and rise to the heights of it as equals. But that moment where they realize otherwise could be decades away, the west has utility in keeping them a country with a vast gulf between the workers and the wealthy and in keeping them thinking its in their own interest to side with the west enough of the time to cause troubles for China, for Russia, for the emerging anti-imperialist world order.
India is IMO a fair-weather enemy for the anti-imperialist bloc. They’re not like the US or Europe where there is little in common and a direct threat to their hegemony from the rise of BRICS+ but when the going gets tough they’ll assume a neutral pose or do some things to appeal to the anti-imperialist bloc before tacking back again towards sabotaging it.
