As the war in Ukraine grinds on, the fissures between India and its friends in the West — especially in Europe — over New Delhi’s refusal to condemn Moscow are only deepening. Last week, the external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, was asked how India could expect the world to stand by it in the event of a clash with China if New Delhi was unwilling to support Kyiv in the current conflict. Mr Jaishankar’s response was simultaneously correct and flawed. He tartly reminded the audience, at a conference in Bratislava, that India’s border crisis with China predates Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and that Europe had, until recently, ignored rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific region. Europe, he said, needed to shed a worldview in which its problems were global but those of others were local. He pointed out how Western sanctions against Iran and Venezuela were robbing the world of crucial oil supplies that could have kept crude prices on a leash despite the Russia-Ukraine war. Amid criticism over India’s increased purchases of oil from Russia, he highlighted the carefully crafted nature of Europe’s own sanctions against Moscow, which allowed for the continued import of limited amounts of gas and crude.
Mr Jaishankar is right to call out the West’s hypocrisy. This is not the first time he has done so, and it should not be the last. However, it is disingenuous of India to suggest that its differences with the West over Russia are the result of an outdated, Eurocentric worldview. In fact, the war in Ukraine has revealed how in a globalised world, major challenges — whether faced by Europe or Asia — impact everybody. Just as a virus in a market in a second-tier Chinese city sent the world into a tizzy, the war in Ukraine is forcing India to import record levels of edible oil from faraway Brazil and Argentina. One of India’s pet peeves against the West for decades was that the United States of America and Europe ignored Pakistan-sponsored terrorism since it did not affect them directly. As India argued then, terrorism was and is a global problem. It is no different with war. While resisting Western pressure, India must not fall victim to the same mistake that Mr Jaishankar accused Europe of making. This is not just Europe’s war, as the skyrocketing inflation in India shows. New Delhi must not pretend otherwise.