Will India join the upcoming Switzerland peace summit aimed at ending the ongoing Russia-Ukraine crisis and bringing peace in the region ?
Switzerland is all set to host the summit on 15-16 June. It has invited 160 countries for the conference. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has personally invited the world leaders, including US President Joe Biden, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the summit. In March this year, President Zelenskyy had sent his Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba to New Delhi to discuss his peace plan on the subject .
Narendra Modi will likely get another term as India’s Prime Minister after the results of the Parliamentary elections come out on 4 June. In that case, he is likely to attend the Swiss summit. He is all set to attend the G7 summit which concludes in Italy a day earlier. He may find it convenient to attend the Swiss summit afterwards.
Observers say New Delhi must do whatever it can to end the conflict. Doing so would be in tune with New Delhi’s much-established tradition of working for peace and development in the world. The Russo-Ukrainian war has been catastrophic for the whole world. The ongoing war is believed to have claimed hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian lives.
The war has hit the economies of Ukraine and Russia both. Most nations have suffered from higher energy and food prices because of the war. The economic sanctions slapped by the United States and its allies on Russia in the wake of the Ukrainian crisis have proved very costly to almost all nations, including the US itself. Today, Americans are paying more for gas. Oil and gasoline prices have reached their highest level since 2014.
New Delhi is very much in an advantageous position to help bring peace between Russia and Ukraine. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (February 2022), India has had a balanced, reasonable and pacifist approach to defuse the crisis. New Delhi has called for a diplomatic solution to the conflict. Prime Minister Modi has told Russian President Vladimir Putin, “Today’s era is not an era of war.”
Since the war began, New Delhi has sent to Kyiv around 117 tonnes of humanitarian aid, including “medicines, medical equipment, blankets, tents, tarpaulin, solar lamps, dignity kits, sleeping mats, and diesel generator sets”. At the same time, New Delhi has seen to it that it does not act in a way that might hurt Moscow. But New Delhi has abstained from voting on the US-led UN resolutions critical of Russia. India has also increased its oil purchases from Russia.
Observers say that it is very much in the strategic interest of India to defuse the Russo-Ukrainian crisis. The support the US and its western allies have extended to Ukraine, has pushed Russia closer to China (and North Korea). Now the Russian and Chinese armed forces regularly exchange information, share military-technology, and conduct joint exercises in the Far East and in Europe.
New Delhi must be cautious of the growing coalescence between Russia and China, both nuclear powers. This adds to Beijing’s military prowess. China might use the accretion in its military strength to pose a threat to the territorial integrity of India.
Observers lament that Switzerland has not yet invited Russia, one the main parties to the present conflict, to the peace summit it is going to host. Bern ought to observe its neutrality in the case. It should not look too aligned with North America, the EU, Britain, Japan and Australia.
Jagdish N. Singh is a senior journalist based in New Delhi. He is also a Senior Distinguished Fellow, Gatestone Institute, New York.