Russia-Ukraine Conflict | India’s foreign policy shows its exceptionalism

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Those at home and abroad who want India to end its policy of abstaining from Ukraine-related resolutions on international platforms are the same people who did not want India to test nuclear weapons in 1998.

Prime Ministers PV Narsimha Rao and IK Gujral gave in to pressure from such people and chickened out from exercising India’s nuclear option. When Atal Bihar Vajpayee, who succeeded them, defied duress and discharged New Delhi’s sovereign right to declare itself a nuclear weapons State, there were doomsday predictions from the very same people who now want India to take the side of Ukraine in the ongoing conflict.

India had shot itself in the foot, they said. Vajpayee had dug India’s grave and there was only darkness and disaster ahead, they asserted; the publicity machine of the West amplifying such messages as they are doing now. In the end, these people proved to be woefully wrong. The United States changed course and the widest-ever consultations by the Bill Clinton administration’s interlocutor Strobe Talbott began with Vajpayee’s designated emissary, the late Jaswant Singh. Every other major country came round to India’s point of view on the nuclear question.

Fast forward to 2003. The people who now want India to end its abstentions on Ukraine at the United Nations lobbied unsuccessfully to get New Delhi to join the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ and send Indian troops to invade Iraq alongside US forces. “The US will offer you one-third of Iraq after it occupies Baghdad,” I remember one very senior Indian official fantasizing in frustration over Vajpayee’s refusal to join the project to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by force. “India’s oil problem will be overcome forever.” The arguments then were only slight variations of what is now being said about Russia.

The same scenario was repeated during the Barack Obama administration, and more forcefully during the Donald Trump administration in the case of Afghanistan. “The war against Islamic radicalism is (y)our war,” today’s anti-Russian campaigners clamoured.” “India has a duty to strengthen Washington’s resolve against Islamism by putting its own boots on the ground in Kabul.” They forgot that whoever is in power in Afghanistan ultimately comes round to working out a modus vivendi in dealing with India as the Taliban is doing now. India should never join any foreign power in spilling Afghan blood.

A common thread runs across all these above narratives. Those who now want New Delhi to take a stand against Russia have historically not been in favour of an India with even a streak of independence, which exercises strategic autonomy. On the contrary, they want to strengthen another country and its military alliance at the expense of India. It is futile to go into reasons why this is so. The rationale may vary, but what is common to this school is that they cloak their arguments in principles and morality — democracy, rule of law, global order, and so on.

Indian exceptionalism in foreign policy is not new. It predates independence and is owed to principles which Mahatma Gandhi preached, and lived by. The most vocal advocates today for joining the condemnation of Russia and support for Ukraine should remember that in the Korean War, the newly-independent India played a creative and constructive role by not joining either side. Its exceptional neutrality carried on right until the 1990s when, as an elected member of the UN Security Council — as is now — India crucially facilitated the admission of both Koreas to the UN.

A forgotten chapter in the annals of Indian diplomacy, which will glitter like gold if it is dug out of the archives of the Ministry of External Affairs, became possible only because India did not join the Western condemnation — like now — of Moscow for the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The Indian embassy in Budapest became a refuge for a large number of high-level dissidents in Hungarian public life, who would otherwise have been summarily executed by the Soviet army. It became subsequently known that India’s then Charge d’Affaires, MA Rahman, smuggled out to freedom in Austria in the boot of the embassy’s station wagon, several Hungarians who were important for Indian interests in Central Europe. If the Soviet border guards knew about the operation, they looked the other way. By its active neutrality, India saved many top-wrung Hungarians, whose lives would have been mercilessly crushed under Soviet jackboots.

When Leonid Brezhnev ordered his troops into Kabul in a midnight operation on Christmas Eve in 1979, and the issue subsequently went to the UN General Assembly, Indira Gandhi supported the Soviet intervention. India was able to play a role in its backyard of Afghanistan during the next decade. That role might have continued till this day if a secret plan to smuggle the deposed Communist President of Afghanistan, Mohammad Najibullah, to India had not gone awry minutes before the Mujahideen takeover of Kabul in 1992.

The history of Indian diplomacy is replete with instances of how, what is often perceived as contrariness, has served the country’s best interests. The Kremlin is said to have prepared a list of countries which it intends to punish for inimical acts when the war over Ukraine is done with. India has no dog in the ongoing fight between Kyiv and Moscow. There is absolutely no reason why New Delhi should make an enemy of Moscow by gratuitously injecting itself into the present conflict as the pro-US lobby in the country would like the Narendra Modi government to do.