In one of the most short-sighted phrases used in diplomatic history, the US Secretary of State James Baker III said of the Balkans wars of the 1990s that, “We don’t have a dog in that fight”. Yugoslavia was falling apart, and Europe, supposedly celebrating the victory of the “free world”, dithered in the face of some of the worst crimes against humanity committed on the European continent.
In the end, to their credit, it was the Americans that finally intervened to end the violence, but not before Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Hercegovina, endured 4 years of siege, and the Bosnian Serbs murdered around 8,000 men and boys in the city of Srebrenica.
India is not America, and the Russian war on Ukraine is not a replay of the Balkans war – although it is justified by some Russians a response to the expansion of US and NATO activities that started with the bombing of the Serbs. Nonetheless, for most Indians, most importantly our foreign minister S Jaishankar, India does not have a dog in that fight, although he used different words, saying in June 2022 that, “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problem is the world’s problem but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problem”.
For students of Indian diplomacy, this seemed simply an unacknowledged rip-off of Nehru’s 1948 address to the UN General Assembly. But the distance between the two speeches is vast, and what Nehru said was in the exact opposite direction of what Jaishankar’s line of reasoning seems to suggest: that India only cares about its own strategic interests. Nehru’s speech is worth reading in full, but the operative phrases are worth talking about as India resolutely ignores the challenges of the war in Ukraine.
Speaking in November in France, Nehru said:
“May I say that we are equally interested in the solution of European problems; but may I also say that the world is something bigger than Europe, and you will not solve your problems by thinking that the problems of the world are mainly European problems? There are vast tracts of the world which may not in the past, for a few generations, have taken much part in world affairs. But they are awake; their people are moving and they have no intention whatever of being ignored or of being passed by.”
This is not an isolationist point of view. Nehru was saying that India, and other post-colonial countries, were profoundly interested in European problems, and was drawing a strong link between handling wars in one place and those of another. This is the exact opposite of Jaishankar suggesting that the challenges India has with China are separate, and solving problems in one area has little or no connection with problems in another.
Jaishankar’s views do not seem to be shared by Vladmir Putin or Xi Jinping. As the leader of China left Moscow in March 2023, he told his Russian counterpart, “Now there are changes that haven’t happened in 100 years. When we are together, we drive these changes.” Something to which Putin agreed.
What changes could these two countries be talking about? The most obvious seems to be what both Xi and Putin seem to define as their spheres of influence. In the case of Russia, the larger area under Soviet control, and in the case of Xi – the reclamation of what is defined as the larger Chinese areas. And as China has indicated with the renaming of areas in Arunachal Pradesh, this includes what was once the areas under Tibetan control.
India stoutly rejects these claims, but both Chinese and Indian claims are just that, claims. They have little legal validity. The Chinese claim rests, frankly, on the conquest of Tibet, and a reading of history that ignores any Tibetan independence. India’s claims rest on the fact that, as the inheritor state of British India, treaties between British India and other entities, such as Tibet which agreed to the McMahon Line as the boundary in the Shimla Agreement of 1914, are legally binding.
There is only one problem. China never recognised the McMahon Line, or Tibet’s authority to determine boundaries. And in 2008 the British government formally stated, “Like every other EU member state, and the United States, we regard Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China.”
In blunt terms, there is no legally recognised border between India and China. That is why it is called the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
There is only one way that a border can be recognised, and that is by a treaty. But the path to that treaty can either be through diplomacy or by force. In Ukraine, Vladmir Putin has determined that he will carve out a new treaty by force, one that will ensconce Russia as one of the major powers of Eurasia. Through its actions in Hong Kong, on the South China Sea, against Taiwan, and on the LAC, China seems to be doing something similar. Frankly the two leaders have said so publicly.
Nehru, in 1948, recognised that there were no such things as problems to be solved by Europeans by themselves. He knew that the post-colonial countries had a role to play in global governance, and had, “no intention whatever of being ignored or of being passed by” because the outcome of such problems impacted them. He was speaking in the aftermath of the Second World War, in which millions of Indians were forced to serve, and during which European decisionmaking played a key role in the Bengal Famine, leading to about 3 million Indians dying of starvation.
More than 75 years later, New India, it seems, wishes to say the opposite, that we have no dog in this fight. But then maybe the question is a different, and it is that despite its privation and weakness, the huge challenges left after decolonisation, India had a lot of fight. New India, it seems, is a dog with no fight left in it.
Omair Ahmad is an author and journalist.
