A region in search of regionalism
South Asia’s narrative has for too long been dictated by external forces in
coordination with Pakistan. In the first phase it was America plus Pakistan, today it is China plus Pakistan. For a country that accounts for three-fourths of the region, India has never been able to shape the
narrative and has remained a reactive power.
Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, products of the European renaissance, searched for sea routes to India. And it was Indology as a field of study that thrived during the colonial era. In short, the locus and point of reference was always India. It is for the same reason that we get the names Indian Ocean, the West Indies, the East Indies, and Indo-china.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, there was an intense tussle in the United States over how to define this space. Scholars working on India contended that any framing of South Asia must remain Indo-centric. The U.S. strategic community, driven by rapidly crystalising Cold War exigencies, held the contending view that Pakistan must be accorded greater salience. As a potential ally, Pakistan was expected to contain the expansion of Soviet influence in the “South Asian” region. In a classic and telling conversation that took place in 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told the journalist Walter Lippmann: “Look Walter ... I’ve got some real fighting men into the south of Asia. The only Asians who can really fight are the Pakistanis .... We could never get along without the Gorkhas.” When Lippmann reminded Dulles that the Gurkhas were Indian, not Pakistani, Dulles replied: “Well, they may not be Pakistanis, but they’re Moslems.” Lippmann had to correct Dulles once again: “No, I’m afraid they’re not Moslems either, they’re Hindus.” Dulles merely replied, “No matter”, and proceeded to lecture Lippmann for half an hour on how the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) would plug the dike against communism in Asia.
INDIA-PAKISTAN STRATEGIC DIVIDE
During the Cold War, the strategic divide between India and Pakistan was total. Thrice they went to war (1947, 1965 and 1971). In the 1950s, Pakistan was an active conduit for the U.S.’ anti-soviet strategy. In the 1960s, as the Sino-soviet rift started surfacing, Pakistan and China drew closer. Pakistan contributed critically to Sinoamerican rapprochement in the early 1970s. In contrast, India remained non-aligned throughout this period, which drew not just American but also Pakistani ridicule. Chaudhry Sir Muhammad Zafarullah Khan, Pakistan’s first Foreign Minister, famously sneered at the idea, declaiming that four zeroes still only added up to zero (each zero naturally representing a non-aligned country). The India-pakistan divide widened in the 1970s, when India moved closer to the Soviet Union. Following the dismembering of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh, in which the Indo-soviet strategic alliance played an important role, the Pakistan-china friendship became even stronger.
INDIA-PAKISTAN RELATIONS
The end of the Cold War had little impact on Indiapakistan relations. In 1999, the two countries once again crossed swords along the frozen heights of Kargil (Jammu & Kashmir). Fears of potential escalation now included the spectre of a nuclear war since both belligerents had by then tested nuclear weapons (in May 1998).
The global community became so nervous that U.S. President Bill Clinton had to use arm-twisting diplomacy and compel Pakistan to withdraw its forces. Shortly thereafter, India was convinced of Pakistani complicity in the terror attacks on the Jammu & Kashmir Assembly (on October 1, 2001) and on the Indian Parliament (on December 13, 2001). On November 26, 2008, Pakistansponsored terrorists carried out a concerted and brutal attack on Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, leading to hundreds of casualties. To draw global attention to Pakistan’s terror tactics, India has indulged in its own brinkmanship, first in 2002 and then in 2008, by amassing troops along the Pakistan border. Each occasion, unsurprisingly, was accompanied by a flurry of diplomatic activity between Washington and Islamabad and between Washington and New Delhi. War was avoided.
Cross-border firings and shelling along the Line of Control (LOC), however, have become routine and keep both countries close to war. Mutual accusations about interference in domestic politics—pakistan in Kashmir and India in Balochistan—have also become commonplace. In January 2016, Pakistan-origin terrorists attacked the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot, causing much embarrassment to the Indian security establishment. On February 14, 2019, the Pakistan-based Jaish-emohammed deployed Adil Ahmad Dar, a 20-year-old Kashmiri Fidayeen, to explode an Rdx-laden SUV on a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) convoy in Pulwama in Kashmir, killing 40 jawans. India retaliated on February 26, when the Indian Air Force (IAF) targeted a Jaish camp in Balakot in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Although little physical damage was done, the idea was to send the message that India reserved the right of ‘hot pursuit’, much in the way the U.S. had pursued Osama bin Laden to his hideout in Abbottabad in Pakistan.
THE CHINA FACTOR
South Asia’s inter-state reality cannot be understood without reference to China. Although it is not a part of the region as per international relations (IR) literature, it shares a border with Afghanistan, Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan, five of the eight South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries. It is now the world’s second largest economy (largest in terms of purchasing power parity, or PPP). By contrast, South Asia remains one of the poorest regions of the world. China’s money, therefore, matters to each of these regional states, especially the smaller ones. Since India, given its regional dominance, thinks that its neighbours should properly belong to its sphere of influence, Sinoindian mutual suspicion is structural. Problems arise when India tries to convince its neighbours about China’s ulterior motives. Any warning about perpetual debt traps is potently countered by pointing to India’s own growing reliance on China. After all, India, which claims to be standing at the gates of the great power club, has made China its biggest trading partner, a position that the U.S. held until recently.
The gap between the Chinese and Indian economies
has widened significantly over the past two decades. China’s gross domestic product (at $ 15.2 trillion) is more than five times India’s ($2.6 trillion) now. In the information technology sector, which one can take as a proxy of future power, India is barely a match for China. Despite all the brouhaha about India as an emerging global IT power and Bengaluru as the IT capital of the world, the reality is sobering. In 2017, of the world’s 10 largest Internet companies by revenue, four belonged to China: JD, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu. India’s Flipkart made it to the top 25. In 2019, Baidu’s search engine commanded 850 million active mobile users. Chinese companies such as Huawei, Lenovo, Xiaomi and Tencent have acquired a huge global presence, including in South Asia. By contrast, in recent years Bengaluru has earned headlines not as an IT incubator but as India’s principal Hindutva lab. Claims to IT superpower status will soon be a fast-fading memory.
India-china relations have entered a difficult phase lately, and the reverberations will be felt on the international system and by extension on the South Asian subsystem as well. As India’s image has gone for a toss within the region, its neighbours are busy recalibrating their equations with the two Asian giants. In response, feeling especially cornered by Pakistan and China, India has sought to balance things by building closer ties with the U.S. How far India will succeed in its diplomacy will depend on how the U.S. reads the situation. The Biden administration is under increasing domestic pressure to not ignore India’s deteriorating anti-minority record. India’s neutrality at the United Nations during the Ukraine crisis has only fuelled the West’s disappointment and further added to U.s.-india tensions.
By contrast, China considers the U.S. its chief adversary in the struggle for global leadership. It views India as an impediment, not a rival, to its territorial ambitions in South Asia. The Hindu’s China correspondent Ananth Krishnan noted in his book India’s China Challenge: A Journey Through China’s Rise and What it Means for India (2020) that although “India sees China as an equal ... the Chinese strategic thinkers ... see it as somewhat insulting that [Indians] ... dare to think of themselves as being at par with a five-times-larger economy and a country that spends at least four times more on its military. For many Chinese strategists, it is the reluctance to acknowledge this power differential that is at the heart of the multiple problems confronting the relationship” (p. 158, emphasis added).
THE CHINA CARD
China’s proximity to the region and its growing power makes it an attractive partner for many of India’s neighbours. The China card also comes in handy when bargaining with India. Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, and to some extent even Bhutan and Maldives, have played the card to neutralise India’s predominance in the region. In May 2016, the K.P. Sharma Oli government in Nepal was on the verge of collapse. The Maoist leader Prachanda had threatened to withdraw support to the government. A reported “intervention” by China, which persuaded Prachanda to retract his threat, saved the day for Oli. According to some analysts, this was the first time that China had “expressed a firm opinion on the domestic political situation” in the country.
India is aware that China has greater capacity to extend development assistance in South Asia. In many instances, this assistance is too attractive for the targeted recipients to reject. All that India can do, therefore, is to issue warnings against falling into a debt trap. Speaking at the 58th Munich Security Conference (MSC) in February 2022, at which Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Dr A.K. Abdul Momen was present, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar could not have been more candid. “We’ve seen countries, including in our region, being saddled with large debts, we’ve seen projects which are commercially unsustainable, airports where aircraft doesn’t come, harbours where the ship doesn’t come. I think people would be justified to ask themselves about what they are getting into.”
INSTITUTIONALISATION OF THE REGION
Within the region, South Asia is viewed primarily in institutional terms, that is, through South Asian Associ
ation for Regional Cooperation. Established in 1985, SAARC consists of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Is this institutional definition enough to establish South Asia as a region? Theoretically, there are five ingredients that constitute a region, namely, shared history and culture, political semblance, economic cooperation based on complementarity, power balance, and strategic congruence. South Asia fails on all counts.
The region’s so-called shared history is contested as both India and Pakistan teach different histories to their schoolchildren. In India, a massive project is under way to rewrite history to glorify India’s Hindu past, particularly at the expense of periods of Muslim-dominated rule. The element of “political semblance” works at cross purposes because politics in each state is religion-centric, pitting the majority and minority religions against one another. For example, Islam versus Hinduism in India and Pakistan and, to a considerable extent, also in Bangladesh. In Sri Lanka, the divide is not merely religious but also ethnic, with the majority Sinhalese (who are Buddhist) pitted against the minority Tamils (who are mostly Hindu). Efforts for “economic cooperation” are still far from achieving any meaningful economic integration and intra-regional trade remains minuscule. As for power balance, the mismatch between India and the rest of the region is glaring. Strategically, the biggest obstacle is the unresolved tension between India and Pakistan, which is further complicated by China’s growing presence in the region.
Since neither India nor Pakistan was keen to establish SAARC, one can say that the organisation was doomed to failure from the very beginning. Having joined reluctantly, each saw to it that no political or contentious issue was taken up for collective deliberation. With such a handicap, SAARC meetings were reduced to low-stakes junkets. Their one redeeming feature was that they at least provided regional leaders the opportunity to meet regularly, but even that has been subject to the status of specific bilateral relations. As a result, SAARC has wasted its time on minor matters and skirted every issue of significance. A comparison of SAARC’S record with that of the European Union is especially instructive in this regard.
Here is a sampling of SAARC’S half-hearted commitments: Regional Convention on Combating the Crime of Trafficking in Women and Children for Prostitution, the SAARC Consortium on Open and Distance Education, SAARC Agricultural Information Centre (Dhaka), SAARC Tuberculosis Centre (Kathmandu), SAARC Documentation Centre (New Delhi), SAARC Human Resource Development Centre (Islamabad), SAARC Cultural Centre (Kandy), SAARC Information Centre (Kathmandu), SAARC Chamber of Commerce and Industries, South Asian Federation of Accountants, SAARCLAW, SAARC Federation of University Women, SAARC Association of Town Planners, etc. The list goes on. After the establishment of SAARC, a SAARC Audio Visual Exchange (SAVE) programme was launched. The idea was to broadcast on national television channels programmes of general interest produced across the region. But the programme collapsed because of competition from the cable TV.
Indo-centricity and the fraught international terrain are not the only factors that come in the way of South Asian regionalism. The texture of domestic politics in the region also contributes to the malady. Today, majoritarian politics rules the roost in the region. India was the lone exception until recently, but of late it has transformed into the region’s most vociferous champion of majoritarian politics. Ever since the rise to power of the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014, the country’s 1,100 million-strong Hindu community (80.5
percent of the population) has been conned into believing that it is under threat. The object of its fears is India’s largely impoverished and politically crippled Muslim minority community, which constitutes about 14.5 per cent of the population, that is, approximately 200 million. During elections, which are virtually round the year, “Hindus-in-danger” and “Muslim-bashing” appear as two sides of the same campaign coin. In a worrying escalation, such campaigns are now accompanied by increasingly brazen acts of violence.
Given that four out of the eight South Asian countries are Muslim majority—afghanistan, Bangladesh, Maldives and Pakistan—it is not a question of if but rather when domestic politics in these countries will witness retaliatory rhetoric and action. Such developments will make it impossible for the region to work towards a common security architecture. Especially difficult might be the situation in Bangladesh, whose Hindu minority population is fairly large at 9 per cent, that is, about 15 million of 166 million population. Every time a BJP politician uses inflammatory language and refers to Bangladeshi “migrants” as “termites” eating away at India’s scarce resources, he or she adds to the anger across the border. Eventually, such unwarranted humiliation will provoke reprisals, most likely from Bangladesh’s powerful and increasingly influential Islamic fringe.
THE SECURITY OBSESSION
The region’s obsession with security has virtually put an end to all kinds of intellectual discourse, creating a vacuum that is harmful for South Asian regionalism. So far as India’s role in this regard is concerned, it was during Manmohan Singh’s regime that its high-profile Home Minister, P. Chidambaram, introduced harsh restrictions that virtually put an end to all intra-south Asian exchanges. Particularly affected were the activities of foreign-funded non-governmental organisations (NGOS), which were crucial facilitators of these exchanges. With the enforcement of new regulations, such NGOS were forced to register themselves with the government under the Companies Act, which completely undermined their role as academic and cultural facilitators. As a consequence, their areas of operation were curtailed drastically; some were left with no choice but to wind up their SAARC divisions. Such restrictions and clampdowns on intra-regional contact have multiplied under the Narendra Modi regime.
How might things be different? If SAARC is to be rescued from an ignominious and premature demise, the Indian leadership will have to show statesmanship. For a start, it should withdraw its demand that Pakistan officially renounce terrorism (Pakistan has made such promises in the past, in any case, with little to show for it). Such a gesture will make the situation favourable for Pakistan to summon the 19th SAARC Summit, stalled since 2016. India should accept that it is possible to deal with a terrorism-promoting Pakistan. After all, India has done so fairly effectively in the past. Moreover, India continues to deal with Pakistan in international fora, most notably the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Although the resurrection of the SAARC process may not induce Pakistan to renounce terrorism as a policy tool, it may temper its adventurism. Furthermore, a regular SAARC Summit coupled with a relaxed visa regime will not only boost tourism but also academic exchanges, all of which will contribute to building a regional consciousness. And in case Pakistan does not come on board immediately, let these moves be undertaken by India unilaterally, thereby putting the Pakistani ruling class under pressure to reciprocate.
SHAPING THE NARRATIVE
South Asia’s narrative has for too long been dictated by external forces in coordination with Pakistan. In the first phase it was America plus Pakistan, today it is China plus Pakistan. For a country that accounts for three-fourths of the region, India has never been able to shape the narrative and has remained a reactive power. India would do well to recognise that playing the conventional power card will not allow it to create a new narrative. China will always have an edge and Pakistan will shine in its reflected glory. At the same time, India has three intrinsic advantages that none of its neighbours possess: its plurality, its democracy and its federalism. Through personal experiences in the region, I can vouch that these are values that all South Asians are beholden to. And yet, instead of building on these strengths, India is currently in the grips of high-voltage Hindutva. In this, it is merely following the narrative already established by its Islamist and Buddhist chauvinist neighbours. This is a trajectory that should shame any thinking Indian.
SOUTH ASIA AS A CULTURAL SPACE
South Asian regionalism may have failed at institutional and diplomatic levels, but its potential at the popular level remains untapped. I began this essay by arguing that South Asia is a civilisational space. Let me end by noting that it is at its most coherent as a cultural space. Otherwise, how is it possible that the region can boast of two poets whose nationalistic songs reverberate beyond their national borders.
Rabindranath Tagore wrote not only India’s national anthem but also that of Bangladesh. He even set Sri Lanka’s national anthem to music. Pakistan’s national poet Mohammad Iqbal’s Urdu-language Saare jahan se achchha Hindustan hamara (India is the best among all nations) continues to be sung with full-throated vigour across India, despite the four wars that India and Pakistan have fought. During the Partition riots, the progressive Urdu poet and lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi escaped to Pakistan. But he returned as soon as he found the Islam-centric political climate there not conducive to his type of poetry. After 75 years of failed “high” diplomacy, perhaps it is time to trust people on all sides and give “low” diplomacy a chance. m Partha S. Ghosh is Senior Fellow, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi, and formerly, ICSSR National Fellow, and Professor of South Asian Studies at JNU.
BY MID APRIL, THE RUSSIAN MILITARY HAD shifted most of its focus to the eastern, predominantly Russian-speaking part of Ukraine. The Russian Defence Ministry made an official statement in late March that it had achieved its major military objectives in the rest of the country and was therefore lifting the siege on cities outside the Donbas region, like the capital, Kyiv. It has been clear for some time that the eventual goal of the Russian military operation is to ensure the long-term security of the Donbas republics and the Crimean Peninsula, which had opted to break away from Ukraine.
Speaking to the media in the second week of April,
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pleaded with the West to supply even more weaponry, warning that if the entire Donbas region fell, then the capital would again come under siege. The Russian military and Russian President Vladimir Putin have been reiterating that the limited military operations in the rest of Ukraine are over and that the Russian armed forces are now completely focussed on “the liberation” of the Donbas region.
While calling for more military help from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Zelensky is at the same time continuing to insist that he is willing to negotiate a peace deal with Moscow. He has been saying for
some weeks that his country would no longer aspire to be a NATO member and would embrace neutrality if the West agreed to provide his country with binding security guarantees. The United States, the United Kingdom, Poland and Turkey, all NATO members, were quick to signal that they were amenable to this proposal. It was no surprise that Russia threw cold water on the latest proposal, which would mean a back-door entry for NATO into Ukraine. Zelensky claims that the security guarantees from the West are needed as Ukraine had voluntarily given up its nuclear weapons. It is true that Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal between 1993 and 1996 after becoming an independent country following the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). However, it is also a fact that the de facto ownership of the nuclear weapons was with the Russian Federation. Kazakhstan, another member state of the USSR, also voluntarily gave up its nuclear weapons. It was mainly Russian scientists and nuclear technicians who were in charge of the nuclear installations in the former Soviet Union. The West was happy when the Ukrainians and the Kazakhs decided to give up their nuclear weapons.
IMMENSE DAMAGE TO UKRAINIAN ECONOMY
Zelensky continues to pay lip service to the need to end the conflict, which started in the last week of February and has caused immense damage to the Ukrainian economy. In a recent report, the World Bank predicted that the country’s economy would shrink by a staggering 45.1 per cent this year as a result of the conflict. The Russian economy is predicted to shrink by more than 10 per cent. The rouble has bounced back considerably after the initial shock resulting from the draconian economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the West.
Putin made a prediction in mid April that the U.s.led sanctions would boomerang on the West. He pointed out that Western countries were already feeling “the pain”. Fuel and food prices have registered a sharp increase in European countries. Inflation is rising not only in western Europe but also in the U.S. as a result of the conflict in Ukraine. Putin said that the European Union countries had shown once again that they were acting as a “poodle” of the U.S. Speaking to the media in mid April, Putin claimed that the U.s.-led “blitzkrieg” to humble Russia had failed yet again. “We are not going to isolate ourselves, and it is generally impossible to isolate anyone in the modern world, and most certainly not a country as huge as Russia,” Putin said. He conceded that what was happening in Ukraine was “a tragedy” but once again reiterated that Russia had been left with no option but to invade Ukraine as the West was turning the country into an “anti-russian bridgehead”.
Ever since the U.S. announced its intention to incorporate Ukraine and Georgia into NATO in 2008, Russia had been warning that under no circumstances would it accept such a development. Russia had reluctantly accepted as a fait accompli the incorporation of former Soviet republics such as Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia into NATO but had drawn a “red line” in the case of Ukraine and Georgia, the two countries with which it has close historical and cultural ties.
Lulled by the Russian military’s seeming inability to capture Ukraine’s big cities, the West is pressing the Ukrainian army to go on fighting. However, the hope that the Russian army would be caught in a military quagmire in Ukraine is fading by the day. In the first two weeks of April, the West has funnelled in more lethal weaponry to the Ukrainian armed forces. The conflict in Ukraine has now been virtually transformed into a Nato-russia war at the instigation of the Biden administration.
In the second week of April, Slovakia, a NATO member, announced that it had transferred S-300 Soviet-era air defence units to Ukraine. The S-300 is a surface-toair missile system. The U.S. immediately gifted the Slovaks with its Patriot missile system as a token of gratitude. “To enable this transfer and ensure the continued security of Slovakia, the United States will reposition its Patriot missile system to Slovakia,” President Joseph Biden said in a statement. The Biden administration had failed earlier to persuade Poland to transfer its Mig-29 fighters to Ukraine. Russia had warned that it would consider such a move an act of war. Eduard Heger, the right-wing Prime Minister of Slovakia, hastened to clarify that his government’s move did not mean that the Slovak Republic “has become part of the armed conflict in Ukraine”. U.S. military experts said the decision to send S-300s to Ukraine marked a new phase in the ongoing conflict.
But within days of the announcement, the Russian military spokesman claimed that four S-300 units transported into Ukraine by NATO had been targeted and destroyed in the city of Dnipro. The Russian military has made it clear that it will destroy Western military equipment as soon as it crosses the Ukrainian border. Biden meanwhile continues with his insulting tirade against his Russian counterpart, calling him a “dictator” who has committed “genocide” in Ukraine. In the third week of April, the White House said that the U.S. would be providing another $750 million in military assistance to Ukraine.
EXISTENTIAL THREAT
Professor John Mearsheimer, an international relations expert who teaches at the University of Chicago, recently said that Russia viewed Ukrainian and Georgian membership of NATO as “an existential threat”, and therefore, this was a “must-win” conflict for the Russian government. Speaking on Russian television, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the main goal of the “special military operation” in Ukraine was “to put an end to the reckless expansion and the reckless course towards complete dominance, of the United States”.
Speaking at the opening of a new spaceport in the Far East of Russia on April 12, Putin said that peace talks had reached “a dead end”, putting the blame on the recent actions of the Ukrainian government, including conducting “false flag operations” in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. Putin said that “British Intelligence” had fabricated evidence about a massacre of civilians in Bucha. He described it as a “provocation” staged by the British government.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was in Kyiv soon after the horrific pictures of the killings in the Kyiv suburb hit international headlines.
Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko, who was also present at the ceremony presided over by Putin, said that there was clinching evidence of British involvement in the staging of the alleged Bucha incident. The Western media glossed over video footage of Ukrainian forces executing Russian soldiers and the arrests of thousands of civilians, prominent politicians and businessmen on the suspicion of being Russian sympathisers or spies.
Putin also said that the inflexible negotiating position adopted by the Ukrainian side during the talks in Istanbul was unacceptable to Russia. He said that the “military operations will continue until its full completion”. He once again specified that the goal of military operations centred around the Donbas region, which has been up in arms against the central government since the U.s.sponsored Euromaidan revolution of 2014. “We will act rhythmically and calmly, according to the plan that was initially proposed by the General Staff,” Putin said. “Our goal is to help the people of Donbas who feel an unbreakable bond with Russia.” The Russian army seems to be on the verge of achieving its military goals in the eastern part of the country. The important southern port city of Mariupol has been the first to fall. More than a thousand Ukrainian marines defending the city surrendered in the third week of April. The capture of Mariupol would allow
Russian troops to move north to link up with the Russian army that is trying to move south from the city of Izyum. If this happens, the bulk of the Ukrainian army concentrated further east will be surrounded by the Russian forces. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city, is also under immense pressure from the Russian military and the Donbas militias.
The U.S. has used the alleged human rights violations by Russian forces in Bucha and other parts of Ukraine to further isolate Russia in international forums. A U.s.sponsored resolution in the United Nations General Assembly to suspend Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) was approved in the first week of April after a majority of member states voted with the U.S. The Biden administration had put considerable pressure on governments to vote for the resolution. Despite this, 24 states voted against it and 58 abstained. India was among the prominent countries having good relations with Russia that abstained. China, as expected, voted against the resolution. Moscow had urged all its friends and allies to oppose the resolution, stating that abstention would be viewed as an “unfriendly act”. After the vote, Russia announced that it was quitting the UNHRC.
The Indian government has been abstaining in all the resolutions on the Ukraine conflict tabled in the U.N. so far. The Biden administration has not hidden its disapproval of the Indian government’s stance and its willingness to do business as usual with Russia. Biden told Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the occasion of the recent 2+2 ministerial meeting in Washington between the Indian Foreign and Defence Ministers and their U.S. counterparts that India should not increase its reliance on Russian oil and gas.
The U.S. was angry with India’s decision to buy discounted Russian oil soon after the conflict in Ukraine broke out. “We share a close and growing major defence partnership,” Biden said in his opening remarks. “The United States and India will continue our close consultation on how to manage the destabilising efforts of the Russian war.”
The Indian side has been pointing out that the U.S.’ European allies such as Germany, Hungary and Italy are against a ban on the import of Russian oil and gas. Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said that the amount of Russian oil India purchased in a month was less than what countries like Germany purchased in a day. Russian oil accounts for less than 1 per cent of India’s energy imports. Top officials in the Biden administration have also been advising the Indian government to wean itself off Russian armaments; 60 per cent of India’s arms imports are sourced from Russia. One senior U.S. State Department official even advised India to loosen ties with the Non-aligned Movement and the G77 group of developing nations. Some U.S. officials are warning of adverse consequences for India if it does not further distance itself from Russia. The U.S. wants to use the Ukraine crisis to force countries like India to give up their strategic autonomy and get further enmeshed into putative U.s.-sponsored military alliances such as the Quad.m