(From top) Medvedev with wife Svetlana at a polling station in Moscow on Sunday; Yechury and Raja

New Delhi, March 6: Dmitry Medvedev’s landslide win in the Russian presidential election has pitched the Indian Left on the horns of a dialectical dilemma — it’s downcast at the thrashing the communists have got but it isn’t prepared to damn the election as a “Kremlin-controlled and rigged” affair because the West is doing so vociferously.

Medvedev, 43, became the youngest leader of the world’s largest country earlier this week, sweeping an election widely seen as a command performance effected by his mentor and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.

A lawyer and Putin protégé since his days as a KGB operative in Leningrad (St Petersburg) 25 years ago, Medvedev secured an unprecedented 71 per cent of the vote. His communist rival, Gennadi Zyuganov, ran a far second with barely 17 per cent, a 13 per cent drop since the last election.

Senior leaders of the Indian Left are despondent about the dwindling fortunes of their Russian comrades and privately concede that the Putin regime is, in part, responsible.

“His determination to stay in power and his vice-grip over the Russian economy and state machinery made Medvedev’s election a foregone conclusion,” said one. “Nobody was in doubt that Putin will do everything to consolidate himself, Medvedev’s election means just that.”

It is perhaps of some significance that for a country that has been intrinsic to their consciousness, neither the CPM nor the CPI has chosen to make any official comment on the Russian elections.

However, in the global context, the Left appears to be making a distinction between Putin and Russia; it won’t participate in western condemnation of the elections.

“The West must accept the democratic verdict,” CPM politburo member Sitaram Yechury told The Telegraph. “It cannot choose who the Russian people should elect, that is just like saying they won’t accept Hamas even though they had been elected by the Palestinian people.”

D. Raja of the CPI was even shorter with allegations of widespread rigging. “How can we decide sitting in Delhi or wherever that rigging happened?”

International and Russian observer groups had criticised the elections as “unacceptably heavily Kremlin-orchestrated to transfer power to Putin’s handpicked successor while opening a path for Putin to retain power”.

Apart from being a trusted Putin crony, Medvedev also controls Gazprom, the powerful energy company that Russia has often used as a battering arm of diplomacy, especially with nations like Ukraine and Georgia that have challenged Russian hegemony in the region.

But Left leaders and academics are advising against “toeing the western line” on the elections. Indeed, they appear worried by New Delhi’s low-key response to Medvedev’s election and view it as part of the “increasing pro-US tilt” in India’s foreign policy.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did send out a congratulatory letter to Medvedev, but it was dispatched three days after his victory was announced and without any of the publicity that usually accompanies such missives.

“Such a reaction does not reflect the enthusiasm we have traditionally had in relations with Russia,” said Anuradha Chenoy, a Russian studies scholar at JNU. “It is obvious that Indian foreign policy is trying to attune itself to western positions on major global issues. Whether it is Palestine or Iran or even Kosovo, India seems to be dangerously abandoning its traditional friends and policies in favour of western positions.”

CPM MP Nilotpal Basu said the Indian reaction was “confirmation” of “apprehensions that India is not acting out of national self-interest” in foreign policy matters.

“We know it is becoming a unipolar world but there are multipolarities in it,” he said. “To look at what the West is saying on the Russian election before deciding on your own response is indication of just the kind of things we have been warning against. The minimum required from India was an immediate message of congratulation to the new Russian president.”

Perhaps People’s Democracy will take the lead.