Last week marked a month since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainian president made an appeal for people who loved freedom and democracy to come out into their cities, their streets and their squares bearing symbols of support for Ukraine. In India the day passed without anyone doing this as has every day since Vladimir Putin began his horrifying war against the people of Ukraine. It is so evil a war that maternity homes, hospitals, and shelters marked ‘children’ have been bombed. Flourishing, beautiful cities have been reduced to rubble. But these atrocities evoked in India barely audible noises of sympathy, condemnation, or concern.
It is not just the Government of India that has seemed unmoved by the horror of what is happening in Ukraine. Ordinary Indians seem equally impervious. It is my unhappy task to spend some time every day on Twitter because it is today’s public square. And what has astounded me is the number of people who are not part of the BJP’s troll army who have expressed hatred of the West and deep sympathy for Russia. Putin’s argument that he was forced to invade Ukraine because NATO was inching too close to Russia’s sphere of influence has more support in India perhaps than in any other democratic country.
Having spent my formative years in an India that was deeply anti-American and passionately pro-Soviet, memories of that time have returned in floods every time I made my excursions on social media. I cut my political teeth when Indira Gandhi was prime minister and remember that there was not a single newspaper office in Delhi then in which you could express admiration of the Americans without being called a CIA agent.
At the same time, it was considered perfectly acceptable to be quite literally in the pay of the Soviet Union. People who sent their sons and daughters to American universities were not ashamed to expound hypocritically upon the ‘evils’ of capitalism in the drawing rooms of Delhi. This had something to do with the East India Company mindset that developed collectively under the British Raj. Then came our shift from grim socialist economic policies to more liberal ones and India changed. Or so we thought.
It appears now that the change was illusory. Beneath our obvious affection for American colleges, culture, food, airport novels and Hollywood appear to remain intact political ideas that have a more definite connect with autocracies than democracies. While trying to make the case on social media that we should at least be horrified by the way Putin has attacked civilian targets, I have found myself subjected to an avalanche of tweets that order me to shut up because there is no difference between what the Russians are doing and what the Americans did in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But there are differences. Big, vital differences. It was the American media that attacked its own government for its wars. In Russia journalists who criticise Putin end up jobless or dead. It is the strength of American institutions that halt the possibilities of an autocrat taking charge. We saw this most recently when Donald Trump tried to cancel a general election to stay in power.
What has disturbed me most in the past month is to see the number of young Indians on social media who seem to believe that autocracy is a better idea than democracy. So, I have not only been told to shut up about my sympathy with Ukraine but to remember that the Prime Minister knows best what is in India’s national interest and a ‘presstitute’ like me has no right to question this.
This contempt for dissidence has been manifesting itself for a while on social media. It is not just well-known BJP trolls who screech their hatred of ‘libtards’ and liberal values but genteel housewives, doctors, teachers, writers, and students. It is as if they have not noticed that as a country that proudly claims to be the world’s largest democracy, liberal values are to be cherished and not treated with disdain. Could it be possible that in the ‘new’ India it is autocrats like Putin and Xi Jinping who have become the new heroes?
Ukraine’s only crime was that it demanded the right to be a free and democratic country instead of one bullied into submitting to the will of autocratic Russia. It is extraordinary and very sad that Indians, with no known political allegiances, do not see where India should stand. Millions of Ukrainians have been displaced in the past month. Women and children have died horribly in shelters that would not have been attacked under the international rules of war. And, yet the only voices of sympathy for Ukraine I hear in India’s public square are those that say that we cannot speak out openly against Putin’s atrocities because we rely on Russia for our military supplies.
Dissent is so absent from the conversations in India today that there are not even questions asked about why we have not moved away from our debilitating dependence on Russian armaments decades after the Soviet Union died. Putin’s ugly war has revealed a side of India that proves those international watchdogs of democracy right when they label ‘new’ India as being only ‘partly free’. Listen to voices on social media and you will discover that most Indians wear this label as a badge of honour.
