German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s empathy for the suffering masses in the poor and developing world in the wake of the Ukraine war, and call for India’s help in securing critical supplies to Asia, Africa and Latin America, is a course correction on Berlin’s part aimed at getting the support of the ‘Global South’ to isolate Russia.
Since the war began, the United States and most countries in the West have tried to project the conflict as a fight between democracy and autocracy. However, beyond the rich and developed countries, there have been few who accepted the framing of the Ukraine war as such.
India, the largest democracy in the world, is one of the countries that has refused to jump on to the Western bandwagon against Russia.
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Bilateral cooperation
During Scholz’s three-day visit to India, which ended on Sunday, Germany and India signed agreements on cooperation in innovation and technology and cooperation in green and clean energy technologies.
Germany is India’s largest trade partner in Europe and also a major investor in India. There was also discussion for cooperation in areas such as digital transformation, fintech, information technology, telecom and diversification of supply chains. Defense and security were other areas where both sides were keen to increase their cooperation.
Ukraine pitch
But Ukraine was one area where the German Chancellor was keen to get India’s support. Scholz discussed the ongoing war in Ukraine with the Indian leadership but India stuck to its well-known stand on the war.
After his talks with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday, Scholz said he wanted India to support, or at least not block, Western efforts to isolate Russia for waging a devastating war against Ukraine.
Pointing out the suffering of developing countries, Scholz said they were being negatively impacted by energy and food shortages resulting from the war and sought India’s help to secure critical supplies to Asia, Africa and the Americas.
Since India is a close and strategic partner of Russia, the West wants Delhi to use its influence to convince Moscow to allow supply of food, energy and fertilisers and other essentials from the war zone to reach the larger part of the world to ease the current crisis.
Prime Minister Modi refrained from making any critical remarks against Russia but emphasised that India wanted the conflict to end through dialogue and diplomacy.
“India is ready to make its contribution to any peace initiative,” Modi told the German Chancellor and his delegation.
Scholz’s remarks about the suffering in the developing countries could have been prompted by a recent debate in the West on why the developing world has not been keen to support the western effort to isolate Russia.
Until recently, neither the United States nor European countries had focused on how the poor in developing countries were struggling under the disruption in the supply chain of food, energy and fertiliser due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
This was mainly because they were too engaged in seeing a Ukrainian victory and Russia’s global isolation. And they had expected developing countries to rally against Moscow.
No buy-in from the Global South
But surveys have shown that though the rich and developed economies in the world have united behind the US, the majority of the countries of the ‘Global South’ — the world’s poor countries, in Latin America, Africa and Asia — have refused to do so.
Numbers crunched by different agencies indicate that more than two-thirds of the countries in the world refused to break their links with Russia. The support for Russia gathers more salience in view of the disruption of food, energy and fertiliser chains, which has affected poor and developing countries more severely than the rich countries of the Global North.
The poor nations’ situation had worsened as the war came when they were trying to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic and the consequent global lockdown and disruption in supply chains.
Pandemic experience
Experts say their reluctance to respond to the West’s appeal may have come from their experience during the pandemic, when rich countries cornered the majority of vaccines while the developing world was struggling against the deadly virus without any effective medicine.
In addition, these countries have seen how the US invaded Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan, mostly without the United Nations mandate.
Significantly, the appeal to stand behind Ukraine came barely a year after America’s hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, leaving people in the war-torn country to deal with disease, malnutrition, hunger and the Taliban fundamentalists.
The trust deficit between the developing world and the West was part of a report submitted at the recent Munich Security Conference as leaders from around the world gathered to discuss Ukraine as the war entered the second year.
Though Christop Heusgen, the chairman of the conference, described the Russian invasion as “the most brazen attack on the rules-based order,” he also stressed on the need to address the resentment that countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia feel towards the international order.
“We will struggle to win the fence-sitters as allies in the defence of key rules and principles unless we address their resentment to the international order,” he said. Scholz's empathy with the suffering of the developing countries is an attempt to ensure their support in isolating Russia.
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