Russia-Ukraine War: Is India Going Against Its Values by Staying Neutral?

Russia’s war against Ukraine is antithetical to every democratic and human value that India and the US hold dear.

Photo for representation. 

(Photo: PTI/AFP)

For the past thirty years, I have devoted much of my professional life to strengthening ties between the world’s two largest democracies. As Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton administration, I helped plan and execute the first Presidential Business Development Mission to India. I was secretary to a coalition promoting the approval of the US-India civil nuclear deal in the US Congress. I have written two books on US-India cooperation and have been active in the India programmes of two of Washington’s leading think tanks. I am a founding director of the US-India Friendship Council. But my involvement with India is deeper than that. I first came to India as a Fulbright Scholar in 1964, and my father before me was a US government official in the Indian P.L. 480 programme and the Green Revolution.

Underlying my work has been a deep belief that the common values of India and the US are the foundation of our relationship and that a strong US-India partnership is mutually beneficial in building prosperity and peace for ourselves and others throughout the world. The greatest of these values is democracy and the basic human rights that it encompasses.

Nuclear War Can be Catastrophic

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, democratic values are faced with their greatest challenge in the past 77 years. The defence of these values is complicated by the widespread possession of nuclear weapons. The strategic use of these weapons will cause death and destruction the likes of which the world has never seen. It is not an exaggeration to say that the use of these weapons of mass destruction in a generalised war would result in the end of the human civilisation as we know it. But defend democracy we must, while doing our best to wage peace.

Russia’s resort to war against Ukraine is antithetical to every democratic and human value that India and the United States hold dear. The use of death and destruction to impose political control on another nation is the essence of the imperialism that India has long opposed.

The rule of law is a fundamental democratic value. The principle that disputes must be resolved within a rules-based system rather than by violence is a bedrock of democracy. Internationally, the rule of law, however imperfect, is the 21st century’s bulwark against the mayhem that has characterised most of human history and reached a zenith in the first half of the twentieth century.

After its founding in 1947, modern India often sided with Russia, in its USSR avatar, on the grounds that it was an alternative to the imperialism that had brought India so much suffering. But make no mistake, the Putin invasion of Ukraine is nothing more than the age-old furtherance of imperialistic ambition by violence.

Russia, having taken control of Ukraine in the late 18th century, is now determined to reincorporate Ukraine into its empire. The most frightening aspect of the invasion of Ukraine is that if successful, it will encourage Putin to try to take back other parts of the former Russian empire, namely, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and parts of Poland. The invasion of these NATO countries will lead to generalised war.

India's Weak Entreaties to Putin

For generations, India has stood for peace. Gandhi’s non-violent values and tactics have inspired the world. Outside weak verbal entreaties designed not to antagonise Putin, where does India stand now? When 141 countries condemned the Russian invasion and military operations, India stood aside.

What could possibly explain such abstention from the condemnation of the infringement of the basic values upon which India was founded? A number of geopolitical factors are cited. The chief among these is the fear of imperilling weapons sales.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Russia supplied about half of India’s arms imports between 2015 and 2020. But these imports are down from about 70% between 2011 and 2015. Among the nations standing against Russian acts in violation of international norms, many are willing to sell armaments while upholding democracy.

Besides, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pointed out, the ultimate goal is for India to manufacture its own military equipment, as China is doing. Thus, the need for arms from Russia seems a weak reed upon which to base India’s standing.

Almost all Indian analysts now agree that China, both directly and through Pakistan, is the major security threat to India. In fact, China lays claim not only to parts of India in the high Himalayas but also a state – Arunachal Pradesh. And who is China’s closest ally? Russia. To illustrate, Russia even agreed with China to time its invasion of Ukraine so as not to interfere with the recent Beijing Winter Olympics. Anyone who believes that authoritarian Russia will assist India in resisting authoritarian China is out of touch with reality. The need for Russian help against India’s chief security risk cannot justify India’s abstention.

Cold War is History, Future Lies Forward

There are those who cite historic reasons from the Cold War for India’s failure to join in admonishing Russia. But the question facing India is not about the past. The question is about India’s present and its future.

Where do Indian values indicate that its future lies? Does India’s future lie with the values now expressed by Putin and acted upon in Ukraine? Surely not.

In his statement to the Summit for Democracy on 10 December 2021, Modi said, “The structural features like multi-party elections, an independent judiciary, and free media, are important instruments of democracy. However, the basic strength of democracy is the spirit and ethos that lie within our citizens and our societies. Democracy is not only of the people, by the people, for the people but also with the people, within the people.” He then concluded, “By working together, democracies can meet the aspirations of our citizens and celebrate the democratic spirit of humanity. India stands ready to join fellow democracies in this noble endeavour.”

India must now decide whether the values expressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and upon which India was founded are best served by a continued policy of abstention in the face of Russia’s use of indiscriminate death and destruction to suppress and acquire a functioning democracy.

(Raymond Vickery is a senior associate [non-resident] for the Wadhwani Chair in US-India Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC. He is also a former US career diplomat and was the Assistant Secretary of Commerce during the Clinton administration. This is an opinion article and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)