There’s no comparison between the consequences for Russia’s security from Ukraine’s military ties with NATO and China’s with respect to India’s military ties with the US. Unlike Ukraine, India isn’t clandestinely hosting the foreign military (including biological weapons) infrastructure of a bloc whose publicly proclaimed mission is literally to contain its neighbor. This makes these pairs of relations qualitatively different and thus impossible to seriously compare.
Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi inadvertently revealed in an interview with actor Kamal Hassan that his foreign policy perceptions are shaped by the West and not his country’s objective national interests. According to this politician, whose party’s electoral track record in recent years shows how unrepresentative its views are of the majority of the population, China is allegedly treating India the same way that he believes that Russia is treating Ukraine.
In his words:
“Essentially, what the Russians have done in Ukraine is that they have said we do not want Ukraine to have a strong relationship with the West and they have basically told the Ukrainians that if you will have a strong relationship with the West, we will alter your geography.
That is the exact same principle that can be applied to India. What the Chinese are saying to us is that be careful with what you are doing, because we will alter your geography. We will enter Ladakh, we will enter Arunachal (Pradesh), and what I can see is them building a platform for that type of an approach.”
Both observations are factually false.
Regarding the first, Russia was forced to resort to military means for defending its national security red lines in Ukraine after NATO crossed them there. Its resultant special operation wasn’t a reaction to Kiev’s strong relationship with the West per se, but the dangerous way in which this manifested itself in the security dimension. As the Kremlin said a year ago when sharing its security guarantee requests, no state should advance its security at another’s expense like Ukraine was doing vis-a-vis Russia via NATO.
As for the second observation, there’s no comparison between the consequences for Russia’s security from Ukraine’s military ties with NATO and China’s with respect to India’s military ties with the US. Unlike Ukraine, India isn’t clandestinely hosting the foreign military (including biological weapons) infrastructure of a bloc whose publicly proclaimed mission is literally to contain its neighbor. This makes these pairs of relations qualitatively different and thus impossible to seriously compare.
Several supplementary points serve to further discredit Rahul’s ridiculous rhetoric, the most recent of which is that US officials still went through with their preplanned two-day visit to China several days after the People’s Republic once again clashed with India in early December. This diplomatic development proved that America regards India’s security interests as expendable, unlike Ukraine’s, otherwise it would have delayed the visit out of solidarity with its first and only Major Defense Partner.
Building upon the above, the reason why the US still went through with the visit was because it’s actively exploring the parameters of a New Détente with China. Details about this can be read in the preceding paragraph’s hyperlinked analysis but generally concern the scenario of mutual compromises between them aimed at delaying the end of the bi-multipolar order that the Sino-American superpower duopoly has a self-interested stake in preserving as long as possible.
This description of the global systemic transition’s latest phase is also shared in spirit by the New York Times (NYT), which just published a piece acknowledging the role that India played over the past year in bringing everything to this point despite also throwing shade on its newfound role in world affairs. Rahul, however, is completely oblivious to the fact that India became a globally significant Great Power as a result of its leadership’s masterful balancing act in the New Cold War.
Instead, he describes that same leadership in his latest interview as supposedly having “completely miscalculated”, so much so that he declared that it’s presently presiding over “a weak economy, a confused nation without vision, hatred and anger and the Chinese sitting in our territory.” The NYT’s piece discredits his claims about a lack of vision while the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) report from late November proves that India grew at twice the pace of China.
The only connection between his views and the NYT’s piece is that he embraces the latter’s weaponized skepticism about the viability of India’s growing role in global affairs by obsessing over what he claims are its deep domestic divisions. This self-interested narrative is meant to fearmonger that his party’s indisputable electoral unpopularity in recent years is supposedly a national security threat that China is allegedly attempting to exploit, ergo the innuendo that the ruling party must make concessions to him.
It'll never do so no matter what conspiracy theories he concocts in a desperate bid to coerce it to that end since this scenario would discredit the people’s democratic will after they voted in a landslide to retain the ruling party’s leadership of the country. Nevertheless, the means through which Rahul wants to scare his compatriots into falling for his weaponized narrative are copy-and-pasted from the Western perception management playbook by falsely comparing Russia and China vis a vis Ukraine and India.
Truth be told, it’s actually an outdated approach too since the NYT’s just changed the “official narrative” by making its anti-Indian attacks a bit subtler than before after realizing that its previously direct approach had proven to be counterproductive since it lost hearts and minds instead of won them. In any case, it’s clear to see that Rahul is operating based on foreign policy perceptions that are shaped by the West in contravention of India’s objective national interests.
The irony is that this means that it’s not the ruling party that poses a national security risk like he implies, but he and the rest of the opposition that he represents. Rahul is shamelessly misleading the same people in whose name he dreams of one day governing by getting them to misunderstand their country’s objective national interests. Whether he’s conscious of it or not, he’s playing the role of a Western “agent of influence”, but thankfully he’s so unpopular that he doesn’t pose a major threat.
Rahul is right.
INDIRA Ghandi, former USSR good friend shoud be very disappointed with her offspring...