For India, Russia’s war in Ukraine is being fought on two fronts. The first is the diplomatic response, being mounted at the UN Security Council, where India abstained Monday for the second time on a vote against Russia, this time on a resolution proposing a larger discussion on the invasion at the UN General Assembly. India’s presence at the UNSC may be a matter of chance because its two-year non-permanent membership ends later this year, but it has provided the Narendra Modi government the opportunity to exercise international influence, which it has used effectively.
The second one is the massive Indian effort underway to evacuate 20,000 Indian students studying in Ukraine, via neighbouring nations such as Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. On Monday, PM Modi moved to expand External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s remit on the evacuation effort, by asking urban development minister and former diplomat Hardeep Singh Puri to go to Hungary, law and justice minister Kiren Rijiju to Slovakia, junior road transport minister and former Army chief V.K. Singh to Poland, and civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia to Romania and Moldova to facilitate the return of Indian students home.
And in a hat tip to the mother of all elections going on in Uttar Pradesh, the Ukraine evacuation effort has been named #OperationGanga.
Scindia’s presence at an Air India flight bringing back Indian nationals was reminiscent of the compassion that was once part of Sushma Swaraj’s being and which she so generously shared with every Indian on social media to help them feel they were part of her extended family.
Swaraj certainly wouldn’t have waited for permission to use the MEA Twitter handle to reassure every Indian student in Ukraine to hang on, to point out that things would be tough because they were in the middle of a war, but that the Indian government was constantly watching their back and was doing everything in its capacity to bring them home as soon as possible.
For those trapped in a war zone, that’s half the battle won – to know that someone is out there, on the other end of the Internet, waiting for you, looking out for you. These last few days, however, until Modi took charge on Monday, the MEA social media handles have largely been about the high-sounding strategic stuff – all very, very important, of course – about why India did what it did at the UNSC by abstaining twice over, why and what Modi said to both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, etc, etc.
Also read: India’s abstention on Ukraine resolution risks its democratic stature before the world
Missing Sushma
India’s ambassador to Ukraine Partha Satpathy haltingly spoke on video, that too once — of course everyone can’t be a video hero right off the bat, especially when they are in the middle of a war with no teleprompters. Foreign Secretary Harsh Shringla met the media the day the Russian invasion was launched last week — but not since.
While the cerebral Jaishankar watched out for India’s national interest by keeping the conversation alive with foreign ministers across Europe and, more lately as the horror of escaping Indian students hit the ceiling, with the foreign ministers of Ukraine’s neighbours Hungary and Moldova.
So it was left to Scindia to walk into an Air India aircraft to welcome a special flight of Indian students returning home from Ukraine. Standing next to him in the galley was junior foreign minister Muraleedharan – perhaps he didn’t speak up because he’s a Malayali and his Hindi isn’t great. (That never stopped Shashi Tharoor.) Scindia spoke briefly but reassuringly, keenly aware that the Indian students must have been nervous as hell about getting out alive.
One missed Sushma Swaraj. Perhaps that’s why Modi took charge. This is a war, and Russian and Ukrainian representatives have now met in Belarus to discuss next steps. Modi, like no one else in India, understands the power of social media in managing emotion; he knows that videos of Hindi-speaking students like Garima Mishra (from Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh) or an audio recording of a Gujarati parent consulting an MEA helpline official can change people’s perception about him and his government.
Noted American journalist Thomas Friedman’s piece in The New York Times about why this war is different from what Putin could have imagined is powerful. It tells you about the power of cellphone-wielding individuals who are documenting the impact of this war and posting them on the worldwide web; other Western journalists reporting from Ukraine have pointed out that that’s why Putin has partly shut down Facebook.
We know all this. We know how both wars and elections and riots and other public gatherings are often heavily influenced by social media. None of this is to argue that the Modi government doesn’t care about Indian students stuck in Ukraine – it surely does — but it has lost precious hours by not communicating the message, again and again and again, to the students that even though there was an advisory in January to get out early, the Indian embassy in Kyiv was their passport to safety.
Also read: Stay neutral in Russia’s war. India’s caution follows principle of international relations
The big picture is yet to unfold
Meanwhile, of course, the big picture continues to unfold. The European Union is standing its ground against Russia, expanding the sanctions regime by barring the SWIFT payment system to some Russian entities, although oil and gas flows from Russia into Europe still seem to be exempt. Kharkhiv, Ukraine’s second largest city seems to be holding out. Putin has put his strategic command on nuclear alert. And Ukraine has asked for talks with Russia in Belarus.
Nor should India be surprised about racist comments by several Western journalists on the war in Ukraine. A Twitter thread compiled by @AlanRMacleod of @MintPressNews is pretty revealing. “This isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan..this is a relatively civilized, relatively European city,” said CBS foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata; on Al Jazeera, the anchor talked about how the fleeing Ukrainians “look like any European family that you live next door to”; on French BFM TV, the anchor said, “we are in a European city and we have cruise missile fire as though we were in Iraq and Afghanistan, can you imagine?” While the UK’s Daily Telegraph correspondent wrote, “ This time war is wrong because the people look like us and have Netflix and Instagram accounts.”
Welcome to war. PM Modi has done well by speaking to all parties concerned, both Russia and Ukraine, and now by taking charge of the Indian student evacuation effort. Like the somewhat amended Chinese metaphor goes, “when you live in interesting times, you have to come up with interesting solutions.”
Jyoti Malhotra is a senior consulting editor at ThePrint. She tweets @jomalhotra. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)