India at Ukraine Peace Summit
“India’s position has been vindicated.” Ambassador Asoke Mukerji, India’s Former Permanent Representative to the UN says on ‘The Gist’. That’s because 14 out of the 100 participants in the ‘Summit on Peace in Ukraine’ in Switzerland similarly dissociated themselves from the communiqué. India took part in the conference over the weekend. But did not “associate” itself with the joint communiqué, along with several countries. Also among those who did not sign the communiqué were Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico and the UAE. And, Brazil as an observer, didn’t either. Ambassador Pavan Kapoor, Secretary (West) in the Ministry of External Affairs represented India at the two-day meeting.
Ambassador Mukerji found it “very curious that there was no serious attempt even to produce a document reflecting the sense of the house. There could have been a Chair’s summary. We did that in the G20 when there were differences. But here, they pushed a communiqué as a unanimous document. It was primarily for that reason that India decided to dissociate itself from the communiqué. So in a sense, issuing a communiqué became counterproductive. It would have been much better if the Chair had issued a broad framework. It could have contained the guidelines and signposts of the path to peace. But here there is no signpost of any path to peace.”
India’s Former Envoy to the UN found “it instructive to recall what happened on the 17th of February 2022. That was one week before the current aspect of the war started. The United Nations itself briefed the Security Council. And it’s in the record that the Minsk agreements remain the only viable political framework for a solution of the Ukraine problem. And the Security Council failed to act on that. When you take that perspective into account, to keep one of the belligerent parties, Russia, out of the framework of the peace agreement, appears to have been also counterproductive. Take the example of the Syria peace talks, which Switzerland is also hosting in Geneva. They started with putting the parties in separate rooms and then bringing the two together.”
Ambassador Mukerji, a Distinguished Fellow at the Vivekananda International Foundation (VIF) speaks to StratNews Global‘s Amitabh P. Revi on the deeper nuances, implications and take-aways for India from the Conference. He addresses questions on:
- India’s participation
- The non-implementation of UN Security Council UNSC) resolutions and the Minsk Agreement
- Why the OSCE, of which Russia is a member, has been sidelined
- The CICA (Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia) and China
- The ramifications of ‘might is right’.
- Switzerland’s history and its being a current elected member of the UNSC
- Double standards on weaponisation of food security and
- Lessons for India from history.
