London: Indian High Commissioner to the UK Vikram Doraiswami has made it clear that India has a long-standing security relationship with Moscow, rejecting West’s criticism of India’s oil imports from Russia.
Speaking to British radio station, Times Radio, last week, Doraiswami said India’s relationship with Russia goes back to an era when some western countries chose countries in ‘our neighourhood’ over India to supply weapons, NDTV reported.
‘One of these is our long-standing security relationship that goes back to an era in which some of our Western partners wouldn't sell us weapons but would sell them to countries in our neighbourhood that use them only to attack us,’ the Indian envoy pointed out.
Rejecting the West’s insistence that India stop buying Russian oil, Doraiswami said India ‘can't switch off its economy’, and added that many of India’s European partners are buying rare earth and other energy products from the same countries they refuse to ‘let us buy from’.
India, the world's third-largest oil importer, has turned to Russia for oil imports after Moscow started offering huge discounts as it was struggling to navigate West’s sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine.
Indian envoy said that India’s relationship with Russia is based on a ‘number of metrics’, adding that New Delhi has an ‘energy relationship’.
This development, according to him, came after India was ‘displaced’ out of energy markets as ‘everybody else buying energy from sources that we used to buy from earlier’, causing costs to go up.
‘We are the third-largest consumer of energy in the world. We import over 80% of our product. What would you have us do? Switch off our economy,’ Doraiswami asked.
Questioning the West’s loyalty, he pointed out India witnessed other countries maintaining relationship with countries ‘that are a source of difficulty for us. Do we ask you to come up with a little test of loyalty?’
As for Russia-Ukraine conflict, Doraiswami said that PM Modi repeatedly had made it clear to Russian President Putin and Ukraine President Zelensky that ‘this isn't an era of war’.