New Delhi shows Washington's shared values ring hollow: China Daily editorial

US President Joe Biden sought to sweet talk Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with the claim that "the root of our partnership is a deep connection between our people, ties of family, of friendship and of shared values".

But New Delhi is no doubt well aware that the root of the Indian-US partnership has been the readiness of the two countries to scratch each other's back when they deem it beneficial to do so.

New Delhi will have been acutely reminded of this over the past month as Washington has constantly built up its pressure in its bid to persuade New Delhi to abandon its neutral stance on the Ukraine crisis.

Although Biden told Modi in their video conference on Monday that his administration could help India diversify its oil imports, and US officials have told India the US can sell it weapons, the US side is overestimating the strength of the partnership.

Russia has been India's long-term partner in security, energy and geopolitics. New Delhi simply does not have the same level of trust in Washington as it has in Moscow. Since India became independent, Washington has never stopped trying to manipulate the situation in South Asia, ignoring India's appeals time and again. Washington pays lip service to India's interests, all the while requiring New Delhi to fall in line with US diplomacy.

Instead of reaching a consensus, the "candid" meeting between Biden and Modi served to expose their divergences. As India's External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said in a news conference after the meeting, the US focus should be on Europe, not India, with regard to energy purchase from Russia as "Probably our total purchases for the month would be less than what Europe does in an afternoon".

Although Biden has made a similar promise to Europe that it would ensure alternatives to Russian energy supplies, the oil and natural gas that the US can provide would be far from enough to make up the shortfall. That explains the haste with which Washington has approached other major energy producers, including Venezuela and Iran, urging them to increase production, despite those two countries themselves being subject to harsh US sanctions.

New Delhi surely has its lessons to draw from such an irony, and it will certainly not bet the future of its nearly 1.4 billion people on the "promise" of US politicians. The US will not succeed in using India's status as "the largest democracy" as moral leverage. India is not obliged to act as the US dictates. The diplomatic course New Delhi has followed for more than 70 years will not be lightly discarded. On the Ukraine crisis, India will judge "the situation in its entirety, not just in a one-sided way".