The death of Naveen Shekharappa Gyanagoudar (another student is reported to have died of illness) in the bombardment of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv has brought home the war in that country in a manner that India was fervently hoping to avoid. The 21-year-old Gyanagoudar, who was studying medicine in Ukraine’s second-largest city, was holed up in a bunker with several other students and had stepped out to buy food when he was killed in the shelling in the city’s main square. From the start of this conflict, India has emphasised the concerns for the safety of its citizens at every forum, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s phone conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy and with leaders of bordering countries in eastern Europe. The evacuation from Ukraine of about 20,000 Indians, most of them students, which began last week has been a formidable effort of diplomacy and logistics, dedication and professionalism.
Indian diplomatic missions have faced such challenges earlier but as the country realised during the ISIS’s war against Iraq, the limitations on rescue efforts in foreign soil under difficult, even impossible, circumstances are real. Prime Minister Modi was right to shore up India’s effort to bring the students back home with the heft of four ministers and mobilising a fleet of aircraft and personnel. The immediate challenge is the estimated 4000 students stuck in conflict zones in eastern and north-east Ukraine. This gets complicated given the ongoing Russian military operations and sabre-rattling by Moscow that shrinks the space for conflict resolution. Kharkiv is over 400 km east of the Ukrainian capital and once the fighting began, it became increasingly more hazardous to undertake the journey west. This is why a large number of those who are still stuck in Ukraine are from the eastern part of the country. Russia’s assurance of a humanitarian passage for the students into its own territory is encouraging — the Russian border is under 40 km from Kharkiv.
New Delhi will need to continue working the phones knowing that tragic losses in a conflict in a faraway land test its carefully crafted neutrality, striking a balance between principles and national interest, more difficult. In addition to the increasing isolation of Russia — from the economic to the sporting spheres — and the consequences of this for India, the weight of domestic opinion may have to be factored into New Delhi’s position that has so far evolved within a broadly neutral frame. As it does this, India will do well to remember that it has no enemies in this conflict.
This editorial first appeared in the print edition on March 3, 2022 under the title ‘Safe passage’.
