Discounted Sovereignty: Oil, Arms and India Between Washington and Moscow

• PRATHEESH P

  St. Michael's College, Cherthala (Kerala, India)

This article examines India’s post-2022 crude-oil trade and defence relations with Russia and the United States, focusing on how India has navigated sanctions, asymmetric interdependence, and competing geopolitical pressures. Drawing on official trade data, defenceprocurement records, policy documents, sanctions measures, and multilateral evidence, the study argues that India’s responses are shaped primarily by sector-specific material conditions rather than geopolitical or ideological preferences. In the energy sector, discounted Russian oil, market flexibility, supplier alternatives, and domestic energy-security requirements enabled relatively rapid adjustment. In contrast, defence diversification has remained gradual because of technological dependence, established platforms, maintenance and training requirements, supply-chain linkages, interoperability constraints, and high switching costs. These findings demonstrate that similar external pressures can generate different policy outcomes across sectors. The article conceptualises this pattern as bargained autonomy, whereby India preserves policy space through selective diversification, negotiation, calibrated accommodation, and management of asymmetric dependencies. It challenges conventional understandings of strategic autonomy as insulation from major-power influence and questions explanations centred primarily on geopolitical symbolism or ideological affinity. The article further develops discounted sovereignty to demonstrate that formal sovereign choices may remain available while their effective exercise entails varying economic, technological, logistical, financial, and regulatory costs under conditions of weaponised interdependence. The study consequently highlights the importance of sectoral variation in explaining how major Global South states exercise strategic agency within unequal and coercive global networks.

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