Western media and leaders have repeatedly suggested that India, the world’s largest democracy, should condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Not much, however, is said about how the West takes positions on international issues solely on the basis of national interests, whether in Iraq, Libya or in abandoning the people of Afghanistan to the Taliban. For long, the West turned a Nelson’s eye to China’s egregious actions in the Indo-Pacific, blinded by its trade and economic interests.
The West’s sermons that India should bandwagon in taking positions on the war in Ukraine have been met with befitting ripostes by India. In the recent past, foreign minister S. Jaishankar has frequently reminded his interlocutors of India’s own values, historical experience and strategic moorings that guide it in navigating an uncertain world.
History is replete with examples of exceptionalism practiced by the West. It failed in its assessments of both China and Russia largely because it subordinated strategic challenges to economic interests. It failed to democratise these authoritarian states and mainstream them into the West’s liberal order, though not for want of opportunity or effort. Within months of the Tiananmen crackdown on civilians in June 1989, the US had mounted secret visits to Beijing by senior administration officials to normalise ties. Europe had followed suit.
China’s aggressive policies notwithstanding, Germany’s Indo-Pacific vision hinges on a China Plus policy in order to protect its huge trade and economic interests in China, with security issues at a lower ebb. France, which regards itself as a resident Indo-Pacific power, has become the first country to join China recently in building seven infrastructure projects worth over $1.7 billion in Africa, South East Asia and Eastern Europe.
It’s little wonder that in recent weeks, Indian foreign minister Jaishankar had to call out many of the contradictions in western positions. Speaking at the press conference at the end of the India-US 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue in Washington, he stated that the EU probably buys more energy from Russia in one afternoon than what India buys in a month. It was an apt rejoinder to those obsessed with India’s energy imports from Russia. Less than two per cent of India’s energy imports were of Russian provenance whereas Germany, Italy and France accounted for the bulk of the EU’s massive off-take of Russian gas. Interestingly, at a time when the US administration warned India of “consequences” of bypassing sanctions, the US Treasury had just declared a new policy to firewall US imports of Russian mineral fertilisers from possible sanctions.
Western Double Standards
The current “rules-based international order” alludes to the international order sanctified by the United Nations (UN) Charter and represented by a plethora of institutions such as the UN Security Council (UNSC), the UN General Assembly and affiliated bodies. The antediluvian UNSC, which favours the victors of the Second World War, has no foundations in 21st century realities.
Western-style democracy and liberalism inevitably informed the new world order that emerged from the ashes of the Second World War. However, there were blemishes. The arrogation of permanent membership of the UNSC, with permanent privileges, was anything but democratic. The US had used nuclear weapons to bomb the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing the Second World War to an end. It emerged as the most powerful country, with an economy and military to match its proselytising policies. The UK, France, the USSR and the Republic of China made the cut in the UNSC as members of the winning team. In the case of the Republic of China, which was replaced in the UNSC by the People’s Republic of China in 1971, the abiding qualification was also its identity as a large, populous Asian country. Its presence in the UNSC was a modicum of inclusiveness in an otherwise “whites only” group.
The West may be entirely justified in condemning Russian “war crimes” against the Ukrainian people, but one cannot help wonder if a similar logic ever applied to the deliberate use of nuclear weapons against densely populated civilian centers in Japan, regardless of the reasons. President Truman’s administration simply justified the use of the atomic bombs as the best option available to America for ending the war in the Pacific, avoiding a bloody invasion of Japan and saving hundreds of thousands of American lives. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg may well have been justified in trying leaders of imperial Japan and Nazi Germany respectively, for crimes against humanity. But if German aerial blitzkrieg against Londoners was inhumane, so was the controversial Allied bombing of Dresden and other German cities.
War is highly condemnable, but it is a dirty business in which the end usually justifies the means. History, as the saying goes, is written by victors.
Confident India Charting Its Own Path
Today the hypocrisy in some quarters in the West is made worse by a sense of entitlement. It has roots in a colonial age, compounded by the privileged positions many western nations occupy in the global system. None of the erstwhile colonial powers have ever stood scrutiny for their rapacious depredations across Asia, Africa and Latin America, not to speak of the exploitation of island nations and communities. Even today, the UN lists seventeen “Non Self-governing Territories” (NSGTs) as deemed to be under colonial-era rule even though the countries concerned, such as the US, UK and France, have taken on the more respectable label of “administering power”.
For some in the West to imagine that Prime Minister Modi’s government might wilt under pressure on policy issues is a chimera. Such a calculus reflects serious infirmities in the current rules-based international order and the UN system, the reform of which has long been thwarted by those that created it. There are many past instances of permanent members of the UNSC exhibiting double standards and exercising veto power to block uncomfortable UNSC resolutions on pressing humanitarian issues, however unconscionable such action was deemed to be by the majority of people around the world. The ending of apartheid, long resisted by a few powerful nations, comes to mind.
Ironically, the corroding of the current order today is from within, as privileged powers checkmate one another. Hoist with its own petard, the UNSC can do little to maintain international peace and security.
The world today needs neither the illiberal authoritarianism of communist systems nor the West’s unilateral interpretation of democracy, human rights and the liberal order. The international rules-based order must rest on more egalitarian principles and inclusive foundations.
Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a confident India has demonstrated leadership in carving out its own path and destiny in keeping with its ancient culture, its values of peace and non-violence, its democratic credentials and, above all, its national interests. In refusing to join any western posse against Russia, the Modi government has wisely avoided making an unctuous folly.
The author, a former Ambassador, is Director General of the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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