A big bear is rattling the open door of his cage. He cannot abide a NATO spear in his belly. Hence Valdimir Putin’s demand for Ukraine to remain out of it, and for the military alliance to stop its advance into eastern Europe.
For 72 years until 1991, Ukraine was a republic of the Soviet Union, and before that for centuries an oblast of the Imperial Russian empire. In 1939, parts belonging to Poland were annexed.
It was during the breakup of Russia following an independence referendum that Ukraine opted to separate. But NATO is another story. After the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact (NATO’s eastern counterpart), Russia had expected the West to do the same. Instead, NATO became a US fig leaf for its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Apparently, everyone in the world saw through this — except the US — as it embroiled itself in both countries, and the bill for the misadventures rocketed from $80 billion to an estimated $5 trillion.
The EU, a path to riches for East Europeans, is a Ukrainian dream, and Russian troops the reality when they wake up. Such are the facts, no matter how much the Ukrainians are trying to ignore them.
If the powerful Russian bear is the Ukrainian bete noire, its polar opposite is the case in India. A powerful Hindutva movement abhors the Muslim minority. It blames them for India’s problems, very much akin to the situation for Jews in pre-WW2 Germany. Not unsurprisingly given the roots of the RSS, which modeled itself after the Nazis, instituting uniforms and drills. A former member assassinated Gandhi for being too soft on Muslims. Post independence, the RSS was banned by India’s first government which was led by Jawaharlal Nehru, a secular socialist.
The current prime minister, Narendra Modi, is a former RSS pracharak — that is an active member who devotes himself full time to promoting RSS doctrine and, like a missionary, in seeking new members. As an ambitious politician, he shed RSS ties when he entered politics and as leader expresses the wish for unity — sentiments not shared by his BHP colleagues.
There is the yogi elected chief minister of India’s largest state, and his undisguised derogatory opinions of Muslims. Worse, at a political event at the end of December, leaders called openly for the killing of Muslims, and India’s leaders kept silent. After general social media outrage at the speeches, the police finally registered a case against some of the speakers for ‘promoting hatred between religious groups.’
Videos show many of the speakers are prominent religious leaders often present with senior ministers in the BJP government. Imagine, calling for genocide in 2021. The world reacted to the effort to eliminate Tutsis in Rwanda where it also began with reviling and dehumanization. Genocide and even incitement to genocide is a crime. Hence the prosecutions. Incitement to genocide is recognized as a separate crime under international law and an inchoate crime which does not require genocide to have taken place to be prosecutable.
The founders of post-independence India, Gandhi and Nehru who took pride in being secular, must be in agony over international outlaws wanting to become the stewards of their child.