A lot of research on international relations revolves around words – declarations of governments, statements by ministers, the sweet talk of envoys. A lot of foreign policy research is wasted in pouring over stacks of memoranda of understanding, on declarations that are as proud as they are vague, and which are often never translated into meaningful action.
The problem with words is that they are not measurable. Can we gauge the truth in a statement that two countries are “willing to cooperate”? Can we count how much relations between two nations are “friendly”? Is there an equation to establish if there indeed is “bonhomie” between two heads of state?
All of this vagueness does not mean that words are not important in foreign policy – they obviously are. Yet, words typically need to be analyzed in a different way than data and for each statement, there can always be more than one interpretation. Data can be interpreted in more than way, too, but at least it is much more specific and concrete. And so, the trick of the game is to be able to weigh words and actions to reach original conclusions.
What happens if we only look at the data? What can be gleaned by mapping out India’s current relations with the world by numbers alone?
The first set of statistics would be those summarizing India’s international trade. In recent years – in the period of 2006-2022 – one country has stood out as the biggest source of Indian imports (in value) and thus one of India’s top trading partners: The People’s Republic of China. China’s share in imports to India gradually rose from the level of 7-9 percent to the level of 15-17 percent in recent years. No other country came even close to the latter result.
This is thus one of the paradoxes of India’s current position: The nation that remains India’s biggest rival – China – is also India’s largest trading partner and its biggest source of imports.
After China, India’s other most important sources of imports in the same period were the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arabic Emirates, and Switzerland. Iraq makes a few appearances in the top five, and the group was recently joined by Russia (in 2022-2024), due to the surge of petroleum crude imports. As we shall see, the same countries (apart from Switzerland) will also appear as important for India in other statistics.
Within these imports, the most-imported item in value was petroleum crude. This energy resource represented as much as 16 to 31 percent of the value of Indian imports, depending on the year, in 2012-2022. Again, no other item came even close. This presents us with three conclusions: First, that one of India’s most crucial dependencies are its the imports of petroleum crude (about 82 percent of petroleum crude used in India comes from imports). Second, while China is the biggest source of imports for India, the item that takes up the largest part of India’s imports, petroleum crude, does not come from China. Finally, the countries that are the most important for India in terms of importing crude are the Gulf states – and now also Russia (since 2022).
Similarly, about 45 percent of natural gas used in India comes from imports. Just like with petroleum, all of these imports are delivered by sea, through liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipments. India is not connected by pipeline with any country.
In the case of natural gas, India’s top source is Qatar. This brings us to two more conclusions: The Middle East is a particularly crucial region for India, as a source of both crude (mainly from Saudi Arabia and the UAE) and gas (mainly Qatar), and India’s dependence on imports is also mostly a dependence on imports by sea, not by land.
Also striking is the realization that India’s South Asian neighbors are not that important for India as trade partners. And here is something that economic data alone will not show – countries like Sri Lanka or Nepal are not that important as destinations for Indian exports, but for them, imports from India are crucial. Yet their great significance comes from the fact that they are India’s neighbors, and thus they affect India in a number of ways, including in regard to security.
Another aspect that the economic data alone cannot show is the strategic value of products – a value that cannot be expressed only through market prices. For instance, in the period of 2012-2021, as in seen the graphic above, Russia was not even in the top five sources of Indian imports. However, what Russia exported to India in that period included weapons. Russia also helps India build nuclear reactors.
Both energy resources and arms are items of strategic value. Yet, while the importance of petroleum crude can be seen in the India’s import statistics, the importance of weapons imports is not so visible. Even though India is one of the world’s largest arms importers, the value of these imports is marginalized in statistics by India’s other imports. This makes Russia seem much less important for India than the country really is (since Russia has hardly anything to offer beyond energy resources and weapons, and thus before 2022 remained an overall small trading partner of India).
To demonstrate the importance of weapon imports to India, they need to be shown through separate data. Until the 1980s, nearly all of Indian arms imports came from the Soviet Union. During the past two decades, this tendency has been gradually changing. According to SIPRI, Russia remained India’s top arms supplier, but imports from the United States, France, and Israel have grown. For instance, as of 2018-22, 45.1 percent of arms imports (in value) to India came from Russia, 28.6 percent from France, 11.1 percent from the U.S., and 7.7 percent from Israel.
However, what such statistics will not show is that arms, once bought, remain in service for years and decades, and that their purchase also includes maintenance (often, the company that sells a military product is bound by contract to provide spare parts and service for years to come). Thus, even though Russia now sells less weapons to India than it used to, over 80 percent of the arms that India possesses are still Soviet- or Russian-made, and some are still being serviced by Russian companies. Overall, however, India’s dependence on imports of military products from Russia is slowly decreasing, while exports from the U.S. and France are growing.
Indian exports also show the significance of the United States for New Delhi.
While China is India’s top source of imports, the United States is a top destination for Indian exports. Moreover, the U.S. is India’s second largest trade partner (after China), and also one of the countries with which India has a positive trade balance.
Other statistics confirm that India is a country where more than half of the population works in agriculture and lives in the rural areas, a country where millions of people are still poor, and a country that is behind the West and China in terms of technological advancement. These are some of the reasons why India so badly needs foreign investments. Hence, another way to measure New Delhi’s core national interests in dealing with other countries would be looking at statistics on foreign direct investment (FDI) into India.
Mauritius’ first place on this list may seem strange, but it is explained by the fact that many Indian companies are formally registered in the island country, from where they invest in India (officially as foreign firms). Thus, attracting so much FDI from Mauritius can hardly be considered a particular achievement for India – more so, this fact represents a failure, since so many Indian companied decide to formally shift their operations to Mauritius. Yet what we can see even here is the importance of the wider West for India – although direct investments from Western countries like the U.S., U.K., and the Netherlands separately only accounted to several percent of FDI into India.
One more factor I could add here is the importance of the diaspora. India and China are the world’s top recipients of remittances by value. According to the data of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, the Indian diaspora – a general term that comprises people of various statuses, many of whom no longer hold an Indian citizenship – is largest in regions such as North America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the U.K., and Australia. In the U.S., the Indian diaspora exceeds 10 million people; in Canada and Malaysia it numbers over 5 million, and nearly that many in Saudi Arabia. In the U.K. the Indian diaspora is over 3 million strong, and in Australia, over 1.5 million. Such people are also very valuable to the Indian economy, although that value is very uneven. For instance, Indians going to work in the Middle East are mostly poorer laborers, while an important part of the Indian diaspora in the U.S. belong to the middle class.
Thus, what this data adds up to is a conclusion that the countries and regions particularly important for India (beyond South Asia) are: the U.S. and the broader West (particularly Western Europe), Russia, China, and the Middle East, followed by Southeast Asia. All of this is hardly surprising; this statistical approach merely offers a way of confirming what we already know. However, where the focus on such data is particularly useful is showing which countries or regions are more important than others – and it is the United States that ticks the largest numbers of boxes here.
The U.S. turns out to be all-rounder for India, by being: an important source of imports, the most important destination for exports, an important provider of arms (second to Russia), a fairly important source of FDI, and a home to the largest chunk of India’s diaspora.
And these are just the numbers – without factoring in aspects such as the fact that unlike with China, India does not have a border dispute with the U.S. (and hence does not see the country as a direct threat); that New Delhi and Washington have increasingly cooperated against Beijing; or that New Delhi sees its dependence on imports from China as a liability it wants to decrease, while the same is not true for India’s trade with the United States. Thus, despite a whole host of other irritants, disagreements, and challenges in India-U.S. relations (and despite the fact that at the same time New Delhi retains a partnership with Moscow), India-U.S. relations will certainly be deepening in the coming years.