In the village of Nikunja Sen in West Bengal, far removed from the geopolitical manoeuvring of Caracas or Washington, stands the Bagu Primary School. In 2005, the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, during a visit that captured the imagination of Kolkata’s leftist intelligentsia, donated a significant sum of money to this modest institution.
In return, he requested that a new wing be named after El Libertador Simón Bolívar, a Venezuelan military officer who led the defeat of the Spanish colonialists in South America in the early 19th century.
Today, an otherwise unremarkable structure of brick and mortar, that wing of the school stands as a testament to a vision of South-South cooperation that transcended the transactional. It is a bond built on the shared memory of colonial struggle and the aspiration for autonomy, a bond characterised by flashes of ideological intimacy, yet historically hamstrung by vast geographical and geopolitical distances.
On January 3, news broke of the dramatic American military intervention in Caracas and the abduction of the Venezuelan president. The brazen violation of sovereignty echoes the grim days of Operation Condor in the 1970s and ’80s, when the United States-backed military dictatorships in eight South American countries cracked down on political opponents.
New Delhi’s reaction has been characteristically cautious. The Ministry of External Affairs, guided by the prudent realism that defines the Raisina Hill doctrine, has largely retreated into silence. It is likely viewing the event through the prism of strategic insulation.
However, a critical reflection on the past century of Indo-Venezuelan relations suggest that this silence is an aberration and a strategic blunder. In the light of this existential crisis for the Venezuelan state, a cursory overview of the past 100 years reveals that India’s relationship with Venezuela was never just about oil: it was about the slow, painful construction of a post-colonial order.
To abandon Venezuela now is to dismantle that very architecture. India must stand by its partner, not necessarily to endorse a regime, but to defend the principles of sovereignty and multipolarity upon which India’s own rise is predicated.
Continents apart, a familiar struggle
For the bulk of the 20th century, India and Venezuela existed in parallel solitudes. While India forged its identity through the Gandhian struggle, Venezuela wrestled with the “gomecismo” dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez (1908-1935). Both nations were peripheries serving imperial centres – India feeding the textile mills of Lancashire, Venezuela fuelling the automobile boom of Detroit.
The formal architecture of their relationship began in 1959, when diplomatic ties were established. This was a seminal year: the Cuban Revolution, which overthrew the Fulgencio Batista military dictatorship and paved the way for Fidel Castro, had just sent shockwaves through the hemisphere. Yet India and Venezuela chose a path of formal South-South recognition.
This spirit was codified in 1960 by Venezuelan visionary Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, the minister of mines and hydrocarbons, who co-founded the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Alfonzo saw oil as a tool for Third World leverage, a philosophy that echoed Jawaharlal Nehru’s use of non-alignment as a moral lever against the Cold War blocs.
When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited Caracas in 1968, the first such high-level visit by an Indian leader, it was an acknowledgment of this shared struggle against neo-colonial economic structures. In a joint communique with President Raúl Leoni, Indira Gandhi spoke of the problems developing nations face in common, explicitly linking the economic disparity between developed and developing nations as the primary threat to world peace.
This was the nascent language of the New International Economic Order, driven by the rhetoric of the Non-Aligned Movement. Yet, the tyranny of distance and the Cold War alignment, where Venezuela remained firmly in Washington’s “backyard” while India tilted toward Moscow, kept the two giants apart. Trade remained negligible.
The end of the Cold War and the rise of Hugo Chávez in 1999 shattered this inertia. For the first time, history, economics and ideology aligned. Chávez, a voracious reader of history, saw India not just as a market, but as a civilisational pole in a multipolar world. This period marked a distinctive shift from diplomatic cordiality to strategic symbiosis.
In 2008, India entered Venezuela’s crucial oil sector when OVL, the overseas arm of the Oil and Natural Gas Limited, acquired a 40% stake in the San Cristóbal project. Petróleos de Venezuela, the state-owned company held the rest. This was a strategic partnership that allowed an Indian state entity access to the heart of sovereign Venezuelan resources.
By 2012, India had replaced the United States as one of Venezuela’s preferred customers. The geology of the Orinoco Belt, rich in heavy sour crude, found its perfect metallurgical mate in the refineries of Reliance and Essar in Gujarat.
The “Chavista” era resurrected the spirit of the 1955 Bandung Conference. When Chávez visited New Delhi and Kolkata in 2005, declaring that the 21st century is the century of the South, he was articulating a vision that went beyond the barrel. He was proposing an alternative to Western hegemony, a vision of South-South cooperation, rooted in the shared history of the colonised.
From a passive observer, India was now a stakeholder in Latin America.
Historical amnesia
The current US “stabilisation operation” in Caracas is being framed as a necessary corrective to tyranny. However, for others it is the return of the Roosevelt corollary of 1904 to the Monroe doctrine, the assertion of US police power in the western hemisphere.
India’s muted response betrays a historical amnesia. The argument for standing by Venezuela is not an endorsement of the errors of the Maduro administration, which are undeniable. Rather, it is an argument based on three historical imperatives.
First, India’s post-1947 foreign policy is built on the sanctity of sovereignty. From India’s stance on Vietnam in the 1960s to its refusal to endorse the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the country has historically understood that if sovereignty becomes conditional on Western approval, no developing nation is safe.
If New Delhi accepts the legitimacy of a foreign military removing a sovereign government in 2026, it erodes the legal shield that protects its own strategic autonomy.
Second, history shows that regime changes imposed from the outside rarely honour the debts of the past. India has nearly $1 billion in pending dividends and sunk costs trapped in Venezuela. If India remains a passive spectator, it will be swept aside in the post-crisis scramble as US energy majors move to monopolise the Orinoco.
Solidarity is the only leverage India has to ensure it is not written out of Venezuela’s reconstruction.
Third, relations between states are often cynical, but they are also cumulative. Venezuela stood by India on Kashmir in international forums when few others would. It offered oil at preferential rates when global prices spiked. To treat these historical credits as worthless is to signal to the rest of the Global South that India is a fair-weather friend.
The children studying in the Simón Bolívar wing of the Bagu Primary School may not understand the intricacies of crude oil benchmarks or the Monroe doctrine. But the building they sit in is a physical reminder that globalisation can also be reciprocal rather than just predatory.
The crisis in Venezuela is a test of India’s historical memory. If the last 100 years are seen merely as a prologue to inevitable American dominance, then silence is the correct policy. But if the last century is looked upon as a slow march toward a genuinely multipolar world, a vision shared by Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Chávez, then silence is a betrayal.
India must speak up, not just for Venezuela, but for the idea that the Global South is more than just a resource colony for the North.
Niladri Chatterjee is a senior lecturer at the department of cultural sciences of Linnaeus University, Sweden.
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