Issues with India’s Multi Alignment Stand
Introduction:
- India’s approach to conflict resolution has once again been under the spotlight as a result of China’s recent mediation efforts to address the Ukraine situation.
The stark difference:
- To increase its appeal as a soft power player, India has increasingly exploited a variety of symbolic weapons of influence. India is being portrayed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the “mother of democracies” and as a “moral force” enforcing world peace.
- Since the Russian invasion, India’s Prime Minister has spoken to Mr. Zelenskyy numerous times and has expressed India’s solidarity with Ukraine while extending support for peace efforts. This is in stark contrast to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s initial outreach to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last month.
- Our Prime Minister had publicly reprimanded Moscow by saying that “today’s era is not of war” in front of Mr. Putin.
India’s several alignment strategies:
- In order to achieve security, economic fairness, and the eradication of existential threats like terrorism, multi-alignment is characterised as a series of parallel ties that reinforce multilateral collaborations.
- Despite western criticism of India’s continued energy imports from Russia and export of excess refined Russian fuel to the European market, it may be argued that India’s regular interactions with Ukraine highlight its rising stature and recognition of its unique position in the emerging global order.
- The Indian state has always been impacted by nationalist ideologies, which has helped them spread farther throughout society and the polity. The Modi government’s nationalist foreign policy narrative is at the centre of it, hence the selection of the “Vishwaguru” is not arbitrary.
- The relevance of the Vishwa Guru image today is to draw attention to how unique the nation’s cultural ethos and civilizational ideals are, as well as how’soft power’ differs from other forms of influence in discussions of foreign policy.
The difficulties:
- Soft power is acknowledged as significant yet limited in its influence on policy, and it is both universal and ambiguous.
- Hard power is lacking in India. Such an incident—the Ukraine War—would not have been brought to the attention of the world if India had been sufficiently powerful. This story implies that a strong Indian civilizational state will stand for stability and peace on a global scale.
- India has voiced its opposition to the conflict in Ukraine, although it has refrained from taking a firm stance in numerous UN resolutions. This ambiguity is not appropriate for a country that hopes to join the UNSC permanently, which includes a willingness to speak out against human rights abuses and territorial aggression on a global scale.
- Furthermore, it is impossible for the normative tenets of the democratic, self-assured, and morally superior Vishwa Guru identity to be the same as those underlying the cynical hegemon that seeks to maximise its power at all costs, morals be damned.
- While India’s ambiguous stance on the Ukraine war highlights both India’s historical discomfort with viewing its national interests in binary terms and the importance of Russia from a military and geopolitical standpoint for India’s military readiness, the majority of India’s political elite do not share Russia’s justifications for its military actions in Ukraine.
- India’s ideas on sovereignty align with a widely accepted Westphalian concept and hence fundamentally oppose the’might is right’ political tenet of communist China.
- However, the Ukraine conflict alone is unable to dismantle India’s historical relations with Russia, which are founded on both the military reliance of New Delhi on Moscow and the anti-colonial tenet of India’s strategic autonomy policy.
Moving ahead:
- The government must therefore take care to prevent the perception that India is supporting Moscow by not denouncing Russian aggression and continuing to acquire more Russian fuel.
- While India’s relations with Russia are probably on the decline, the piecemeal separation from Russia will take some time as New Delhi tries to find some room to manoeuvre amid the burgeoning China-Russia nexus.