Talking to all but tilting to one: India’s voting pattern at the UN
Talking to all but tilting to one: India’s voting pattern at the UN
WRITTEN BY BASHIR ABBAS
2 May 2022
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, India’s unwillingness to vote against Russia at the United Nations, or to condemn Russian aggression, has puzzled Western governments and commentators. Partly, their surprise stems from India’s centrality in the Indo-Pacific, where China’s assertiveness is on the rise. India, among others, says its position reflects its ‘strategic autonomy’ which, semantics aside, is effectively a continuation of non-alignment, mutatis mutandis.
Scholarly work has already outlined that non-alignment casts a long shadow over India’s present behaviour, which goes beyond mere arms dependency on Russia (India is one of the largest purchasers of Russian military equipment). However, across the history of official non-alignment too, India has tilted towards Russia, in both soft and hard terms. Since 1947, whenever India has chosen to take a tough stand against a great power it has almost invariably been against the United States. Contrary to this, when Russian actions have been morally, politically or legally untenable, Indian criticism has been muted, if not absent entirely. A brief non-exhaustive overview of India’s public stances, especially at the UN, during major conflicts since World War Two, reveals precisely this.
The pattern in its nascence: India balances
The trend began gradually. During the Korean War, India opposed resorting to the UN General Assembly even as the USSR forced the Security Council (UNSC) into a deadlock. While the US actively sought to circumvent the Soviet veto through a specially-crafted resolution, India believed it would be detrimental to great power unity. However, when Egypt, a fellow non-aligned state, was besieged by British forces (and subsequently by France and Israel) in 1956, India actively sided with a US-sponsored emergency session of the UNGA. It voted in the affirmative to place the UN’s first peacekeeping force in Egypt, which was then commanded by an Indian General in both phases of its operations.
India’s abstentions during the present Ukraine crisis are occurring during the rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose right-wing credentials are well established.
Notably, this pragmatic phase of India’s diplomatic manoeuvring occurred alongside the structural development of the Non-Aligned Movement and was reinforced by the colonial tinge palpable in British action in Egypt, which was unpalatable to India (and the US). Interestingly, the Indian tendency to condone Soviet activity internationally through marked silences was being sculpted in parallel to the Suez crisis, in Hungary. The 1956 uprising in the country was brutally put down by Soviet troops, triggering a different UNGA resolution to condemn the action. India abstained. It could certainly be argued that Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian prime minister, was preoccupied with developments in the Suez, but when he finally made the first statements favouring Hungarian self-determination, at least three weeks had passed since the uprising. India restricted itself to informal communications of “displeasure” with Soviet policy, possibly due to growing military ties between the US and Pakistan. This attitude became characteristic of India-Moscow relations in subsequent years.
The trend in full shape: India tilts
Failed Security Council resolutions often offer more insight than those which pass. When India was serving its second term in the UN’s apex body in 1968, the Warsaw Pact launched a military intervention into Czechoslovakia, its own member state. India abstained from a Council vote condemning Soviet aggression against a popular national movement, which became known as the Prague Spring. The growing closeness between Moscow and New Delhi made it more difficult for India to navigate the crisis. The Tashkent Declaration, formally ending the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, was signed in the Soviet Union just two years earlier. But when the invasion began, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi stated in the Lok Sabha (India’s Lower House) that “the right of nations to live peacefully and without outside interference should not be denied in the name of religion or ideology”. The Western press pounced on this as a call for Soviet withdrawal.
However, India’s position in the UNSC evinced its official position, which the same press then vociferously criticised. Domestically, while part of the political Left supported Gandhi, the rest marched in the streets in support of the Prague Spring. The sustained silent support for the USSR added more grist to the Indo-Soviet mill, which eventually yielded the 1971 treaty of friendship. During the 1965-75 decade, which witnessed the bulk of the Vietnam War, India launched perhaps its most scathing criticism of the United States for its military intervention. In October 1970, Foreign Minister Swaran Singh even demanded a firm timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from the Southeast Asian nation, and consistently categorised the escalation as unjustified, in his speeches to Parliament. India’s negative appraisal of the situation varied over the years but never lost its fundamentally critical character. It was toned down during the food aid programme under the Richard Nixon and Gandhi administrations but picked up steam again after the bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong.
By 1971, 90 per cent of India's imported arms were of Soviet origin, compared to a relatively meagre 10 per cent a decade earlier. This relationship wavered little till the end of the decade. During the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, India practically condoned the USSR’s presence in the country. The rapidly spiralling conflict triggered the sixth emergency session of the General Assembly, which “strongly deplored” the armed intervention in a resolution from which India abstained. However, a speech at the UN by Brajesh Mishra, India’s permanent representative, went a step further. He announced that India had been “assured that Soviet troops will be withdrawn when requested to do so by the Afghan government”. The US representative had openly expressed disappointment with India’s position, which had little to no effect. The trend was now firmly in place. Following the turn of the century and the beginning of the global war on terror, India vehemently condemned the US invasion of Iraq. This followed on the heels of Indian support to coalition forces in Afghanistan, when India joined most of the world in sympathising with the United States. However, in 2003, the Indian Parliament unanimously adopted a resolution "deploring/condemning" US policy right before the fall of Baghdad.
This was supplemented by a Ministry of External Affairs statement reiterating “that any move for change in regime in Iraq should come from within and not be imposed from outside”. At the start of the following decade, India, along with China and Russia, similarly criticised the NATO bombing of Libya in 2011. It also abstained from voting in favour of UNSC Resolution 1973 which imposed a no-fly zone over Libya. Three years later, the Russian Federation poured troops into the Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine, starting a powder trail that has lit up in the present crisis. At the time, the General Assembly passed a resolution with an overwhelming majority, declaring the Russian supervised referendum in Crimea invalid and illegal. India, by then, was all but expected to abstain, and it did. Moreover, India’s national security advisor, Shivshankar Menon, also declared that there were “legitimate Russian and other interests involved” in the region, which reaffirmed India’s leaning.
Questioning the pattern: Why did India tilt?
Few of the conflicts delineated above can be compared either in scope, scale, or operating variables. They were different problems with their own merits, each requiring tailored responses. They all pertain to the denting of one state’s sovereignty by one external power or more. However, a distinctly clear pattern of refusal to condemn Russian aggression has emerged in India’s voting behaviour at UN bodies, which has been nourished consistently across decades. This pattern remains alive and healthy today, as evidenced by a string of Indian abstentions across UN meetings whose resolutions sought to take punitive measures against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. India’s tilt toward Moscow is driven by external security perceptions rather than internal political dynamics or ideology. Although it could be argued that the firm anti-US sentiment of some political heavyweights such as Krishna Menon or the pragmatic socialism of Nehru did influence India’s strategic choices, such thinking did not become an enduring feature of the foreign policy establishment.
India’s abstentions during the present Ukraine crisis are occurring during the rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose right-wing credentials are well established. The 2014 vote on Crimea occurred during the rule of its predecessor — the United Progressive Alliance, a centrist grouping with the Congress at its helm. Even earlier, Indira Gandhi’s stance on Czechoslovakia was adopted when Leftist leaders famously held high ranks in her coterie and her own ‘lurch’ to the Left was evident domestically. Across the decades, domestic political churn has not perturbed this foreign policy pattern in any significant way. The United States historically looked at Pakistan as a ‘frontline state’ against the USSR (which manifested in Pakistan gaining a state-of-the-art US systems such as the F-16), as well as India’s growing military import relationship with the Soviet Union, fuelled this trend, although the weight of these factors varied over time. For instance, during the 1965 War when the US imposed an arms embargo on both India and Pakistan, the USSR continued supplying India with equipment and even broadened the list to submarines, destroyers, and patrol craft. This generated subsequent deals that made the Indo-Soviet defence relationship immune to any possible dents due to other Indian deals with the French (for the Mirage 2000) and the British (for the SEPECAT Jaguar).
The Soviets had the lion’s share of trade, which was reflected in a SIPRI study in 1998 showing that by then India was the single largest buyer of Russian arms measured by the number of licences issued. Moreover, as early as 1984, Indian scholars were pointing to China being a major factor in New Delhi’s closeness to Moscow, which was first exemplified in 1964 when the USSR supplied India with the MiG 21 (along with domestic production plants) when even China did not possess the fighter. Although it could be argued that the Soviet veto on Kashmir, which India had secured at the UNSC, has been integral to New Delhi’s positions, it is also true that this support was contingent on the attitudes of successive Soviet premiers. It waned under Stalin, waxed under Khrushchev, and wavered under Kosygin.
Hence, despite raw UN voting data revealing that India has generally straddled the middle line (literally on the graph), such data needs to be qualified with context as not all resolutions pertained to events of equal significance. Moreover, the past instances of strong US counter-criticism of Indian stances are unlikely to be repeated in the current scenario, due to shifting polarities in international politics, and the renewed focus on China and the Indo-Pacific. Such a predicament, though, seemingly ties the sustainability of ‘strategic autonomy’ to an acquiescing United States (and the West). With several experts also repeatedly pointing to the overdependence of India on Russia, especially for military needs, a question begins to vaguely take shape. Is such autonomy mythical? Perhaps inside a room of the United Nations, it is. Perhaps outside, it is not.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Bashir Abbas is a Research Associate at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, New Delhi. He is also a postgraduate candidate in Political Science at the University of Delhi and has formerly worked with other Indian think tanks such as the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, and the National Maritime Foundation. Views expressed are strictly his own. Image credit: Flickr/US Department of State.