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Time for EU to talk more about human rights in India
There is one region the EU has been shamefully silent about for so long and it is not only a geopolitical issue regarding the two biggest powers in South Asia but it is also a human rights catastrophe: Jammu and Kashmir.
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Men collect lotus roots from the waters of Anchar Lake on a cold winter day on the outskirts of Srinagar in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. (Reuters/Danish Ismail)
D
iplomacy is the art of nuanced and carefully worded messages but on occasions, frankness and straightforwardness take primacy. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the Indian external affairs minister, knows exactly how to excel at it.
At the end of April, during the Raisina Dialogue, the premier foreign affairs talk shop in India, Jaishankar directly rebuffed a question by Jean Asselborn, the minister of foreign and European affairs of Luxemburg, relating to India’s position over the Ukrainian conflict.
Interestingly enough the European Union was accorded a very special status during the entire summit with Ursula von der Leyen presiding over the opening together with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Last week at the GlobSec Forum in Bratislava, once again Jaishankar remained true to himself when he asserted that “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that its problems are the world’s problems but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.”
Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukrainian, Jaishankar has been consistently under pressure to explain the lack of formal condemnation by India of Moscow. Unsurprisingly, considering his mastery at defending his country’s position in the conflict, Jaishankar has been successful at framing the non-alignment stance so far held by New Delhi.
It is not a lack of shared and common values, India says, but plainly economic and geopolitical interests that are driving its response to the crisis, necessity in short.
In many ways, New Delhi’s position is more than comprehensible considering its historical bonds with Moscow and its dependency on Russia in matters of arms procurement and hydrocarbons, elements that clearly frame the extent of the relationship between the two countries.
