The Abstentionist Trap

<< This post-print was originally published in the Indian Express (2022). The version of record is available on the newspaper’s website and is archived on Academia.edu (incl. keywords). Citation can be downloaded on Hal. The text is co-written by Christophe Jaffrelot.

It has reduced the war to a territorial conflict between two comparable evils, invisibilising civilian resistance and diluting the responsibility of Russian aggression.

In a paradoxical turn of events, the brutal invasion of the democratic state of Ukraine by Russia has, despite its many international condemnations, fostered a certain convergence of views in India between the government, opposition, and various sections of the intelligentsia. For instance, the argument that NATO’s expansionism is comparable to the Russian invasion has found common resonance.

Besides, promoters of Hindutva also find in the conflict an opportunity to project their version of ethnic nationalism. The Hindu Sena, for instance, organised a march in Delhi on March 6 to praise Putin’s attempt to recreate “Akhand Russia”. In popular right-wing media, warmonger Putin is not just an executive head, he is seen as the global leader of a virilist mode of governance, characterising what scholars term populist authoritarianism.

Even more troubling is the ambiguous stance of several Left parties, which justify Russia’s invasion on grounds that Ukraine might be a “puppet” of American imperialism. In continuity with Noam Chomsky’s line of thought, US interference would be epitomised in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, a social movement in Ukraine that led to the election of pro-European President Petro Poroshenko. CPI(M)’s official communiqué on the Russian offensive stated that “NATO would pose a direct threat to Russia’s security” and CPI general secretary D Raja claimed that the Russia-Ukraine conflict was forced by the “US’s expansionist tendencies.”

The “Western imperialism (NATO) vs threatened nation (Russia)” argument is grounded in a selective reading of the postcolonial order. Colonial rule by European nations should exhort us to identify similar power relations in history and condemn infringements of self-determination. Instead, many prefer to see the conflict as a possibility to avenge and mitigate the European democratic appeal in Ukraine by terming it imperialist, while a true military empire — Putin’s Russia — invades, bombards, kills and terrorises. By reducing Ukraine’s war to a territorial conflict between two comparable evils, abstentionists invisibilise civilian resistance, dilute the responsibility of the Russian aggression, call for international passivity and make the struggle for justice by “smaller” nations appear illegitimate.

As indicated by historian Klaus Richter, states situated in the Russian borderlands were not “seduced” into accessing NATO. Instead, they sought membership to protect themselves against history repeating itself. Experienced hardships include military occupations (those of Abkhazia and Crimea are recent instances — India preferred to abstain and not condemn Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014), loss of sovereignty (e.g., USSR’s crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956), politically motivated famines (1932-1933 Holodomor in Ukraine), Gulag terror and deportations (population transfers of Poles in 1939–1941). Emergency applications to the European Union by Georgia and Moldova are testimony to these aspirations to security, with Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili declaring on March 3: “You can try to frighten countries, but that does not mean that you can change their determination to keep their independence.”

Yes, Ukraine is not a “perfect” democracy; its nationalist movement entails Neo-Nazi elements, such as Mariupol’s Azov Battalion. Today, however, it is the exacerbated nationalism of the Russian state that has unleashed its despotism on a non-belligerent country. Putin has claimed in his pre-invasion television address that Stalin’s historical mistake was not the “creation of a tightly centralised and absolutely unitary state”. Rather, it was his unwillingness to dispose of the federal varnish that Lenin (and then the Central Rada in January 1918) introduced, which served as the constitutional framework for the secession of former Soviet republics in 1990-1991.

According to writers Vladimir Sorokin and Catherine Belton, the Russian President’s willingness to restore parts of this empire against the will of its neighbours is not only a denial of statehood, it is also a by-product of Tsarist-cum-Soviet nostalgia and KGB capitalism.

Our ability to tolerate, nuance and divert such colonial and predatory attitudes in the name of either NATO’s expansionism, ethno-nationalism or diplomatic realism is not only cruel, it belittles the agencies of “small” nations by obliterating their democratic aspirations. It is not NATO’s troops or agents of Western interests that are fighting Russian occupation, but common Ukrainians moved by wider aspirations for freedom, independence and self-rule. Let us not forget that those principles were also, in their own way, at the core of India’s freedom struggle.

If realpolitik finally prevails and overdetermines India’s foreign policy, New Delhi may change its discourse because of push and pull factors. First, the Russia-China rapprochement may lead to some qualitative change during this crisis — if, for instance, Beijing sends arms to Moscow, India cannot ignore it. Second, the West may appreciate less and less India’s abstention in the UN if the war lasts for months, resulting in a humanitarian disaster, geopolitical destabilisation and an economic crisis, that will not spare India. An equidistant form of plurilateralism, then, may not be tenable.