Decoding how the Indian foreign policy is navigating Ukraine war

Commentator Sadanand Dhume and senior fellow Tanvi Madan sparred over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statement at the recent meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) where he cautioned Russian President Vladimir Putin that we do not live in a “era of war”.

With the Congress back in the headlines in recent weeks, thanks to Rahul Gandhi’s “Bharat Jodo Yatra” and the impending elections for the Congress party presidency, commentator Sadanand Dhume has likened the party to one of America’s most well-known reality show families. “One of the mistakes people make is that they think of the Congress like it is a normal political party… but I think of them a bit more like the Kardashians,” Dhume noted on this week’s episode of “Grand Tamasha”, a podcast jointly produced by Hindustan Times and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Grand Tamasha is a podcast jointly produced by Hindustan Times and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (HT Photo)

“It’s an entertainment franchise that happens to be in politics. This particular franchise is connected to the family and has been connected to the family ever since Indira Gandhi split the party in 1969,” Dhume said. He used the analogy to explain why he thinks the party will always control, overtly or covertly, the direction of the Congress.

Dhume, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and columnist for The Wall Street Journal, was joined on the broadcast by Tanvi Madan, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The duo, joined by the show’s host Milan Vaishnav, discussed the future of the Congress, how Indian foreign policy is navigating the Russia-Ukraine crisis, and growing polarisation within the diaspora.

Dhume and Madan sparred over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statement at the recent meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) where he cautioned Russian President Vladimir Putin that we do not live in a “era of war”. The statement was widely perceived to be some of the Prime Minister’s most pointed public criticism of the Russian invasion to date. While Dhume called the statement a “banality” and “cynical”, Madan countered by saying she can’t think of “one Indian interest that has actually benefited from this war”. By Indian standards, Modi’s statement is indeed significant given that “India tiptoes around Russia”, Madan remarked.

On the subject of turmoil in the diaspora, evidenced by recent communal violence in the British city of Leicester, both Dhume and Madan worried about a sense of deepening polarisation. “A lot of this is the politics of India being exported to the diaspora, which is inevitable, and it is natural,” Dhume said. “The distance between domestic politics and the politics of the diaspora has shrunk dramatically.” But the disquiet among the diaspora will not simply be restricted to countries where Indians immigrate, it also poses a foreign policy problem for New Delhi, said Madan. She warned that violence or increased tensions in the diaspora have the potential to negatively affect India’s foreign policy relations with the countries involved.