Why 2022 will go down in history as India's year of fine diplomacy

2022 was a slightly abnormal year in Indian diplomacy: just slight, not much. You’d reckon that given the Ukraine war and the immense pressure on India to follow Western sanctions (and India’s refusal to do so) this would have been a momentous year. Thankfully not. India has had many such experiences in the past and this was normal for the course.

Coming on the back of a string of domestic policy successes in 2021: an economy on the upswing and a successful vaccination campaign that defied expectations, Indian diplomacy had failed quite miserably to spread the message and India continued to attract near uniform opprobrium in the Western, Chinese, Russian (yes the same RT and Sputnik that Indians so gleefully share today that was acting as a Pakistani mouthpiece till January 2022) and Arab media in addition to the usual “Muslim genocide” and “rising intolerance” bogeys.

However, 2022 saw a significant change once Russia invaded Ukraine. Initial US actions were relatively restrained compared to the harsh EU measures which were then mirrored by the US. India of course stood firm in refusing to follow any of these sanctions and indeed did many other countries – be it Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Brazil, and most of Africa and Asia.

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India of course has a history of refusing to go with the flow. Be it in 1990 when India refused to independently sanction Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait (only abiding by UN sanctions), or in 1991 where India refused to join the coalition liberating Kuwait going so far as to term it as “not representing the UN”.

India happily tested nuclear devices in 1974 and then again in 1998 defying concocted “international consensuses” and bucking sanctions on both occasions quite admirably. Similarly, India only condemned the 2001 US invasion of Iraq and the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea in very polite words. While no country had the guts to impose any sanctions on the US for its illegal invasion, they did impose sanctions on Russia in 2014. India’s response to the latter was to get a coy statement supportive of the Russians from then-national security adviser Shivshankar Menon saying that “Russia had legitimate interests in Ukraine”.

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India’s fierce independence and go-it-alone approach can be frustrating at times, but it isn’t some miracle that happened since 2014 but has rather been with us for the best part of 70 years. What helped in 2022 was the fact that the EU is something of a self-important joke and has always been considered as such in South Block. Self-serious European diplomats don’t seem to realise that conversations that happen when they leave the room are very different from conversations (mostly funded by them) that happen when they’re in the room.

In short Indian organisations are past masters at taking European money, telling them what they want to hear and doing the exact opposite when they’re not around. That’s why the EU and European diplomats are the favourite cash cow of NGOs in Delhi who realised very quickly that the EU doesn’t actually want to listen, but just wants an echo chamber that keeps echoing their worldview.

Indian diplomats who were panicking in March 2022 largely seemed to have stabilised and calmed down by April-May 2022 when the realisation dawned that the war was going to be protracted. Moreover, they watched with wry amazement that European leaders while chastising India for not following “common values” while accusing the Modi government of fascism, were whitewashing blatant Nazism and war crimes by Ukrainians and emulating several Nazi traits like state encouragement of xenophobia against average Russians, and enforcing ideological conformity in public. In that respect, Brussels in 2022 was quite like Berlin in 1936.

Perhaps because of the self-satirising self-importance of the EU, the Indian leadership remained calm, and in fact, turned quite resolute when it realised that what the EU and US had done to Russia using the international commons such as currency reserves and investments could be done to India if desired. The government fast tracked several programmes - especially with regards to E-payments and digital transfers that will make India independent of these Western-controlled instruments. While it may be a stretch to claim that this is the end of the dollar as the global currency, it isn’t a stretch to say that this is the beginning of the end of pax occidentalis.

It was precisely because of these realisations by the leadership and actions taken thereafter, that Foreign Minister S Jaishankar suddenly found his voice by July 2022 and was able to start making his glib quips to European think tanks and the press about first practising what they preach. It also tells you a lot about the decrepit state of Western think tanks and journalists that they kept asking him the same question over and over again over the span of 3-4 months, blissfully unaware he’d already addressed the issue. It’s equally telling of the sad state of the Indian press that someone repeating the exact same thing over and over again would produce so many repeat rounds of titillation and pride.

Ultimately as Lenin said “there is no thing as foreign policy - just domestic politics projected abroad”. That is exactly what we saw in 2022, a calm and composed government that was able to stem and roll back panic among diplomats and the public, do its best for India and allow Indian diplomats to find their voice. What we need to realise is what makes it different this time and that is the systematic multi-year effort on Modi’s part.

In his first term he assiduously visited countries that had been ignored for decades and tried to build personal relationships with leaders that would bypass normal diplomacy. He also skilfully managed the re-orientation of relations with the UAE (which is entirely due to Modi) and benefited from Saudi Arabia reorienting its policies. And finally he had the gumption, fortitude and leadership to make the necessary domestic policy changes required. What he reminded us after almost a decade was why prime ministers are considered the country’s top diplomat.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.

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