Israel -Hamas War: India Shifts Position, Votes in Favour of Immediate Ceasefire
STORIES, ANALYSES, EXPERT VIEWS
India, along with 153 nations, Tuesday voted in favour of a United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolution that called on Israel for an immediate ceasefire, the protection of civilians in accordance with international law and the release of all hostages. A massive 4/5th majority in the Assembly voted in favour of the resolution. Only 10 countries, including the U.S. and Israel, voted against the resolution, and 23 countries, mainly from Europe abstained.
Explaining India’s vote
The resolution did not include any specific reference to the October 7 attacks in Israel by Hamas, the reason India had refused to vote in favour of a similar UNGA resolution on October 27. In the explanation of vote (EoV) delivered Wednesday, India’s Permanent Representative to the U.N. Ruchira Khamboj did not clarify the reason for India’s shift but said that India “welcomes” the fact that the international community had been able to find a “common ground” to address the situation in West Asia, where more than 18,000 people had been killed by Israeli operations in the past two months in retaliation for the Hamas attacks in which 1,200 were killed.
Outlining four “dimensions” to the crisis, Ms. Khamboj mentioned the October 7 “terrorist attack” without naming Hamas, the “humanitarian crisis and large-scale loss of civilian lives” the issue of observing international humanitarian law “in all circumstances”, and the effort to find a lasting “two-state solution” to the question of Palestine.
“The gravity and complexity of what the international community faces is underlined by the Secretary General invoking Article 99 of the Charter of the United Nations,” Khamboj said, explaining India’s vote.
All eyes are now on the explanation by the government of its decision to shift from its abstention two months ago, when 7,000 Palestinians, including 3,000 children, had already died in the bombardment, to the latest vote in favour, and whether this represents yet another shift in India’s stance on the Middle East crisis.
After its vote to abstain from the previous UNGA resolution that had called for an immediate ceasefire on October 27, the Modi government had released a lengthy unofficial note explaining its stand. In it the government had said that the resolution had not included any “explicit condemnation” of the terror attacks of October 7 or of hostage releases. “In the absence of all the elements of our approach not being covered in the final text of the resolution, we abstained in the vote,” the note said, adding that there can be “no equivocation on terror”.
India’s tortuous stand
India’s tortuous stand on the Israel-Gaza conflict, writes Shashi Tharoor (third-term member of the Lok Sabha; former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, former Minister of State for External Affairs, and former Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affaires) “reveals a fascinating portrait of the recent evolution of its foreign policy. For decades after Independence, India’s approach to the world was guided by its historical experience of western colonialism,” that culminated in ‘Strategic autonomy’ which “became an obsession, leading to the birth of ‘non-alignment’, or equidistance between the superpowers.”
In its anti-westernism, India “often found itself ranged alongside the USSR and against the West, even while the country’s steadfast adherence to democracy and diversity at home endeared it to liberals in the West.”
When Israel was indeed established, India duly extended recognition, but kept relations at consular level for more than four decades. In the meantime, recalls Tharoor, “it became the first non-Arab country to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1974, and to formally extend recognition to the Palestinian state in 1988. It was only in 1992 that relations with Israel were also upgraded to Ambassadorial level.”
Today, under PM Modi, India-Israel relationship has appreciably strengthened, with Israel becoming a vital source of defence equipment, intelligence co-operation etc.
The erosion of India’s one-sidedness: So when terror struck Israel on October 7 PM Modi stood in “solidarity with Israel in this difficult hour”. And when the United Nations General Assembly voted by an overwhelming majority to call for an ‘immediate, durable and sustainable humanitarian truce’, India chose to abstain, on the grounds that the resolution had failed to condemn the terror attacks of October 7.
This struck many as odd, to put it mildly, writes Tharoor “that the land of Mahatma Gandhi did not vote for peace, and that a country which calls itself the voice of the Global South took a stand that isolated it from the rest of the Global South. Though a corrective occurred at the United Nations General Assembly last week, when India finally joined the overwhelming majority (153 to 10, with 23 abstentions) to vote, for the first time, in favour of a resolution in the UN General Assembly that demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the conflict, the echoes of the previous vote have not died down.”
At a larger level and with geo-political changes and the interplay of China, US and its allies, Tharoor concludes “Gaza is the latest manifestation of a perceptible change in India’s view of the world."
