As Western pressure mounts on New Delhi to condemn Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar has sought to reiterate India’s neutrality. “If India has chosen a side, it is a side of peace, and it is for an immediate end to violence," he said in Parliament on Wednesday. Dialogue and diplomacy should resolve the dispute, he added. The context, though, has been shifting.
On Tuesday, Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky made the United Nations Security Council squirm for its failure to stop veto-armed Moscow by showing visuals of alleged war crimes by Russian forces. At least one video grab of civilian corpses apparently left strewn on the streets of Bucha (near Kyiv), decried by Russia as staged, found credible corroboration in satellite scans that dated the site back to the Russian occupation of the area. New Delhi has called for an independent probe of these events. But the more grisly this war gets, the worse Indian dissonance over India’s neutral stance will be. The Ukrainian resistance appears to be backed by popular will. It seems earnest in its defence of democracy. It’s, therefore, a fight for freedom that resonates with our founding values. And these values matter.
