There is a number that decides how angry your monthly budget makes you, and you do not get to see it. It is the average price India paid for a barrel of crude oil last month. India imports more than eighty percent of the oil it burns. Every rupee on that barrel travels, within weeks, to the petrol pump, the diesel that moves your vegetables, the cost of the bus, the price of almost everything that has to be carried from where it is made to where you are.
After 2022, that barrel got cheaper from one direction. Russian crude, shunned by the West, started trading at a discount. India bought it. A lot of it. Within a couple of years Russia went from a minor supplier to one of India’s largest.
The West asked India to stop. India did not stop. And, notably, India did not apologise.
This piece is about why that is not the scandal it was sold as, and not the act of defiance it was also sold as. It is something duller and more important. It is a poor country doing its sums in public.
The arithmetic, first
Begin with the maths, because the maths is the whole story and everyone skips it.
India consumes an enormous and growing amount of oil, and produces very little of its own. That makes the import bill one of the largest single pressures on the rupee, on inflation, and on the government’s room to spend on anything else. When the imported barrel is expensive, everything from fertiliser to airfares tightens, and it tightens hardest on the people with the least slack.
Now put a discount on a large share of those barrels. Even a modest saving per barrel, multiplied across the volume a country of one and a half billion people burns, is a serious number. It is the kind of number that shows up as slightly cheaper diesel, slightly softer inflation, slightly more fiscal space for a fertiliser subsidy or a road.
A government that turned that down to please a foreign capital would be making a choice. It would be choosing the approval of others over the grocery bills of its own people. No Indian government of any party was going to make that choice, and it is not clear why anyone expected one to.
Not love, not defiance
The story got told two wrong ways.
One way, mostly from the West, was betrayal. India was funding a war, propping up Moscow, failing a moral test. This reading assumes India had taken a side it was now abandoning. It never had. India’s position on the war has been consistent and unglamorous: it has not endorsed the invasion, it has called for talks, and it has declined to join sanctions that were not its own. You can find that position too cautious. You cannot call it a betrayal of a commitment that was never made.
The other way, mostly at home, was defiance. India stood up to the West, refused to bow, asserted itself. This reading is more flattering and just as wrong. There was no act of bravery in buying cheaper oil. There was an act of obviousness. A finance ministry that can subtract did the subtraction.
The truth is in between and less exciting than either. India behaved like what it is: a large, still-poor country that has spent seventy years refusing to be anyone’s junior partner, and that treats its energy supply as a question of survival rather than alliance.
The name for this is strategic autonomy
We wrote in an earlier piece that India practises strategic autonomy, which is the polite name for trying to be friends with people who are not friends with each other, and to be the only one in the room not picking a fight.
Russian oil is that doctrine in its purest, least romantic form. India buys Russian crude and American defence equipment and Gulf gas and talks to all of them. It refuses the demand to choose, not out of cleverness, but because a country this size with this many poor people cannot afford the luxury of a side.
This frustrates everyone who wants India on their team. That frustration is, in a quiet way, the point. The doctrine is working precisely when it annoys every capital a little and satisfies none completely.
What to watch
The next time the Russian-oil story flares, skip the moral language in both directions and watch three things.
The discount. If Russian crude stops being meaningfully cheaper than the alternatives, India’s purchases will fall on their own, no lecture required, because the only reason they rose was price.
The basket. Watch whether India keeps widening its sources, Gulf, American, African, Latin American, rather than leaning on any one. A wide basket is the real insurance, and it is the thing a serious energy policy is always quietly building.
And the rupee payment plumbing. The unglamorous machinery of how India actually pays for oil outside the dollar, in rupees or other currencies, tells you more about the long game than any statement at a summit.
A closing note
We are not pro-Russia. We have said we are not anti-America. We are, on this page, pro-arithmetic.
A poor country with a long coastline and a billion and a half people to keep moving does not get to choose its century. It gets to choose its barrels, and it should choose them the way a careful household chooses anything: by what it costs, and who it leaves beholden to no one.
