Measure twice, cut once

Is the war presenting only headaches to India, or a golden opportunity, too?

- REKHA DIXIT

OPERATION GANGA IS a high-optics mission to bring back Indian nationals from Ukraine’s war zone. The death of medical student Naveen Shekharappa has brought home the war, underscoring the danger to civilian populations. With four Union ministers dispatched to various border areas to oversee evacuations and Prime Minister Narendra Modi making calls to heads of border countries—Romania, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia—as well as Vladimir Putin and Volodomyr Zelenskyy, India’s immediate concern is to get its people back home, safely.

It is not an easy task, given the massive exodus from Ukraine. Neither aggressor nor defendant, and certainly not the rest of the world, had expected this war to stretch this far. Around 8,000 of the approximate 20,000 Indians are out of Ukraine already. Russia is now working on opening humanitarian corridors from Ukraine for such evacuations.

However, there are bigger headaches facing India in the long run, and not all of them are dependent on what position India takes in this conflict. Call it payback for the steadfast way in which Russia stood by India, call it compulsions of robust military cooperation, but so far, India has not gone against Russia on the international platform. It has adeptly used diplomatese to condemn the war without apportioning blame, yet, refused to vote against Russia at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)—to condemn the invasion, and even to convene a special session of the UN general assembly. It maintained a similar stance at the UN Human Rights Commission. “We take positions based on certain very careful considerations… we will take decisions in our best interests,” explained Foreign Secretary Harshvardhan Shringla.