China’s recent mediation efforts to resolve the Ukraine crisis have once again spotlighted India’s approach to conflict resolution. By holding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s eastward expansion responsible for instigating the war; by painting America as the biggest obstacle to ceasefire; by exploiting the differences among western countries regarding the extent of support to Ukraine; by further cementing the Beijing-Moscow relationship, and ensuring the survival of the Vladimir Putin regime, China has effectively positioned itself in opposition to the American approach. This is not how India views its role in resolving the conflict.
India has increasingly used varied symbolic instruments of power to enhance its soft power appeal. Prime Minister Narendra Modi now projects India as the “mother of democracies” and as a “moral force” to enforce global peace.
In sharp contrast to the Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first outreach last month to the Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, since the Russian invasion, Mr. Modi has spoken to Mr. Zelenskyy many times. In October and December last year, Mr. Modi, in his telephonic conversation with Mr. Zelenskyy, had expressed India’s solidarity with Ukraine while extending support for peace efforts. And in September, Mr. Modi had publicly told Mr. Putin that “today’s era is not of war” — a remark that seemed to be a reprimand to Moscow. Even the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, felt compelled to describe this widely-reported remark as “significant”. Washington understands the importance of India’s continuous engagement with Ukraine because that is an important way of bringing New Delhi’s response to the Ukraine war into alignment with its own. The geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific and the Ukraine conflict are in many ways inter-connected.
