India’s propensity in recent years to focus its diplomatic efforts on building short-term transactional relationships with other countries while maintaining strategic silence on broader moral questions has left it increasingly isolated in the world.
India’s latest abstention from a United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, a release of prisoners and for Israel to meet its obligations under international humanitarian law reflects this isolation. India was one of only 19 countries that abstained from this latest resolution. Much of Europe, including allies of Israel like the UK, France and Germany voted in favour of the resolution.
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
The evolution of India’s position on a ceasefire in Gaza has been confusing at best. In October 2023, India abstained from a ceasefire resolution at the UNGA. Two months later, in December 2023, India voted for a ceasefire at the UNGA. In April 2024, India abstained from a Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolution demanding a ceasefire and an arms embargo on Israel and now India has abstained from a resolution calling for a ceasefire and the end of the starvation siege of Gaza. While Indian diplomats might point to technicalities in each resolution, the overall impression generated is of a country unwilling to take a principled position against Israel. Taken in conjunction with India refusing to associate itself with a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation statement condemning Israeli strikes on Iran this week, this implication becomes unavoidable.
Some in India will frame this latest abstention as a gesture of reciprocity for Israel being one of the handful of countries that offered direct and categoric support for India’s recent strikes on Pakistan. It is however important to remember that Israeli diplomatic support is of limited value without American backing. Israel’s impunity to repeatedly violate territorial sovereignty in the name of counterterrorism does not come from its own assertions. It comes from American diplomatic support of those assertions, and the U.S. has already made it clear that their relationship with India will not come at the price of their relationship with their old South Asian ally, Pakistan. In a recent statement before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, the Commander of U.S. Central Command termed Pakistan a “phenomenal partner in the counterterrorism world”. Pakistan today serves as the vice-chair of the UN Security Council’s Counter Terrorism Committee and chair of their Taliban Sanctions Committee.
While the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s fascination with Israel is no secret, Indian diplomacy in recent years has been crippled by a broader cross-party tendency to side-step questions of principle altogether and focus on immediate Indian interests. Leaving aside the question of Palestine, India has also abstained from UNHRC resolutions condemning Sri Lanka’s human rights record and Myanmar’s gross human rights violations against Rohingya Muslims. India has also abstained from UNGA resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Syria, condemning Myanmar’s brutal military junta, and condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
While this has been credited in some circles with keeping India insulated from global crossfires, our inability to provide meaningful support to others has arguably contributed to our inability to marshal meaningful international support for ourselves in times of need. It has also meant that India no longer seriously influences geopolitical positions in the Global South.
The overall impression generated is of a country unwilling to take a principled position against Israel.
Reversing this current isolation will take more than symbolic outreaches – it will require a strategic reset that considers both India’s historical role in the post-colonial world, and the requirements of a world fundamentally altered by October 7 and the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Anti-apartheid and the Cold War
In the immediate aftermath of the World War II, newly independent colonised states banded together on issues pertaining to colonisation, race and national liberation movements. Despite several internal differences on the definition of colonisation itself, there was a sense that banding together on moral grounds offered the best chance of any global influence. The anti-apartheid movement in South Africa was perhaps the best example of the successful use of this influence.
The issue of race relations, and South Africa’s treatment of South Asians was first raised by India at the United Nations in 1946. In 1948, when South Africa left the Commonwealth and proclaimed apartheid as a state policy, the post-colonial states ensured that South Africa was kept on the agenda of every UNGA meeting. The newly liberated African states, backed by both India and Pakistan, were at the forefront of the intellectual push at the UN to classify apartheid as a threat to global peace and security.
These efforts were redoubled after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre where 69 unarmed protestors were shot dead. On November 6, 1962, the UNGA adopted a resolution requesting members to individually and collectively impose sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. The measures proposed included breaking off diplomatic relations, closing ports to all vessels flying a South African flag, prohibiting ships from entering South African ports, boycotting all South African goods, and refraining from exporting all goods (including all arms and ammunitions) to South Africa.
The resolution was backed by India, China, the USSR, Pakistan, all the independent African member states and all the Arab states. Pursuant to this resolution, the post-colonial states as well as the Soviet bloc by and large broke off diplomatic, commercial, economic and other relations with the apartheid regime. The numerical strength of the post-colonial states in the general assembly meant that the West couldn’t stop the resolution from passing, but the voluntary nature of implementation of general assembly resolutions meant the West could reject the resolution and continue to maintain normal relations with the regime, which continued until the late 1980s.
In 1973, the UNGA acknowledged the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) as the authentic representatives of the South African people. The UN committee on Apartheid (set up by the UNGA) also decided to directly target Western public opinion. This involved reaching out to church groups, journalists, university students and trade unions in countries that maintained friendly relations with the apartheid regime.
But beyond domestic pressure built through civil society, the moral battles of the Cold War acted as a check on what the West could support. To challenge communism, capitalism and the freedom promised by the West needed to stand for more than just free markets. It had to be perceived as standing for a liberal world order where all human life was equal. These optical pressures made the West’s support for the apartheid regime in South Africa increasingly unsustainable, and by the late 1980s, apartheid South Africa stood entirely isolated.
Unipolarity and the impact of 9/11
The end of the Cold War freed the West from these pressures. In the newly unipolar world, the Global South began forging its own tentative alliances with West, and the price of those alliances was often a wilful blindness to the side-lining of the Palestinian cause. The Oslo process, in particular, allowed much of the world (including India) to brush aside the power asymmetries involved and urge both sides to dialogue and restraint. Without the constraints of the Cold War, Western commitment to the liberal rules-based world order also became increasingly erratic.
9/11 and the subsequent “global war on terror” further weakened the Global South’s commitment to decolonisation struggles. In the discourse that emerged, armed conflicts around the world were shorn of their context and specificity and clubbed under the amorphous umbrella of terrorism. Israel successfully used this to delink Palestinian liberation from its decolonial context and reframe it as an issue of Israeli security. This reframing was largely unchallenged. In the post 9/11 years, many countries (including India in the aftermath of 26/11) shifted towards a framing that hyphenated the Palestinian right to self-determination with what they called Israel’s legitimate security concerns.
Many countries in the Global South also found it useful to adopt the universal “war on terror” securitisation framing to suppress separatist movements within their own borders. For example, in the last months of the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009, a UN panel of experts estimated that 40,000 civilians residing in LTTE controlled areas were killed. The Sri Lankan armed forces were found to have repeatedly and deliberately struck protected targets like hospitals and humanitarian food queues. The UN also found credible allegations that several members of the LTTE and members of their families had been executed without trial by the Sri Lankan forces after their surrender. Arguably, this level of brutality would not have been condoned in a pre 9/11 world.
To challenge communism, capitalism and the freedom promised by the West needed to stand for more than just free markets.
October 7
October 7 and the subsequent genocide in Gaza has reshaped this discourse. It has demonstrated the limitations of the idea that all political questions can be reduced to security questions and permanently contained using security solutions. While the cost to Palestinian life has been devastating, the Palestinian question has been effectively removed from the abstract terror framing and returned to its original decolonial context in the Western public opinion. Western diplomacy, outside the U.S., has evolved to recognise this. Norway, Ireland, Spain and Slovenia all recognised Palestine as a state in 2024. UK, France and Canada have announced tentative plans to work towards recognising Palestinian statehood in 2025. Every major European state voted for the latest UNGA ceasefire resolution. And while there are no immediate signs that Europe will back this with more material action against Israel, the trajectory is clear.
China, Russia and most of the Global South have fallen back quickly to their Cold War era positions on the colonisation of Palestine. South Africa, by taking Israel to the International Court of Justice for genocide, has clarified its own position as a post-colonial and post-apartheid state committed to ending both colonisation and apartheid in Palestine. China, by working to broker a unity government between diverse Palestinian factions in 2024 has positioned itself as an alternative, fairer mediator than the US, should the circumstances permit it. Nine other Global South countries, styling themselves The Hague Group, have reiterated their shared commitment to uphold international law in the aftermath of the genocide in Gaza.
The American refusal to stop the genocide in Gaza, or curb Israeli aggressions in the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and now on Iran suggests an emerging world order where international norms are applied selectively on the basis of power and not principle, and where this selective application of rules is not challenged. This does not bode well for countries like India that can neither exercise this level of power on their own nor become American client states. Dealing with this emerging reality requires a strategic reset. India, by refusing to engage on questions of principle, risks cementing a world order that operates to its own detriment.
