“A Passage to India” — Breaking the Ice
The long awaited visit of President Kuchma to India came to an end with promises and hopes of a new beginning, new windows of opportunity and vistas of cooperation. Lavish with levels of meetings, ranging from the President, Vice President, Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, Speaker, Opposition leader to Ministers of Human Resources, Foreign Affairs, Steel, and Science and Technology, it deserved more media exposure within India. In such a short time, they managed to go Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India and the Taj Mahal in Agra. Add to it the Ukrainian food festival in New Delhi’s Sheraton Hotel and you have it all in one go — politics, business, technology and culture — little bit of all. One could well imagine the emotions running high with all the hospitality under the soft warmth of the October Sun. The President referred to it as a historical breakthrough, businessmen hoped for new contracts, albeit in the public sector companies. Law enforcement officials sighed with relief that they finally have treaties of extradition and legal assistance. Terrorists and criminals will not be able to hide in respective countries. As one of my diplomat friends said, “this was extremely important for India, as it is in constant search of terrorists escaping the subcontinent.” And this was a step in the right direction following the cooling of relations after the tank deal with Pakistan. The same friend joked that shhh...”tanks” will be a taboo, a forbidden word now during this visit, even though the Minister of defense of Ukraine will have high hopes for new deals.
Inside Ukraine, there is a debate whether India could be the strategic partner as declared during the visit. As Anatoly Hritsenko of the Razumkov Center says that the word strategic has been overused and is thus getting devalued. Counting the number of times the term had been used, he says that India perhaps is the 20th strategic partner of Ukraine. One may both agree and disagree with him. Certainly, the word “strategic” has been converted into a diplomatic rhetoric in the post-totalitarian de- ideologised inter-state relations, when you cannot talk of anti-imperialist solidarity for peace or socialist brotherhood as in the past. Hence its use so often. On the contrary, strategy consists in doing and not just telling. Both the countries had long drawn institutional inertia since the past. Non-aligned India was largely tilted toward Soviet Union during the cold war and Ukraine was part of the USSR. Both of their defense industrial complexes were by-products of the cold war. These past ten years were hardly enough to undo this hangover and a lot of the successes and the failures in the bilateral relations of these countries stem from this fact. Even after independence Ukraine could not but look at India as a developing nation, who would gladly buy a few of the defense items and support the material bases for European integration of Ukraine. India also thinks of Ukraine as a source for some overhauling of old equipment and some new purchases, which are a lot cheaper than their western equivalents. It is in this sense, in the sense of defense cooperation, that the ties are described as strategic and also perhaps to remove any apprehension of future alliance with Pakistan. In the political context, Ukraine needs allies, and not only in the West. The first step toward this is to strengthen and build confidence. Ukraine could not ignore the huge market and the economic opportunities that India is to most of the Western powers. Thus in terms of a presidential visit, Ukraine preferred India to Pakistan.
On the contrary, the word strategic could also have been used in a broader dimension. All other ties being remnants of the Soviet past, this defense-centric anachronistic policy led to limited economic, business and cultural ties, left to the mercy of individual enthusiasts and fans of India. It is unreasonable to ignore the fourth largest economy and the largest democracy of the world. As one may have noted, meeting the leader of the opposition is a norm for any visiting head of state. Even if it is home to the world’s poorest people, India carries the best traditions of constitutional reform, parliamentary democracy and building of a civil society. They have the best experts on constitution, law and jurisprudence. The strong school of Indology that once Ukraine could take pride in is almost non-existent. Before the visit, as requested by a friend from the Indian Embassy, I was looking for works in Ukrainian about India and vice versa. It was a pity to note that most poets and writers are from the past. Worse that there are no centers in India to practice Ukrainian studies. I was struck when I visited India last February, people still referred to Ukraine as “oh, you are the one who stay in Russia?” I was equally struck when a reputed Ukrainian journalist friend of mine asked whether Indira Gandhi was the daughter of Mahatma Gandhi. And we all will agree that we need to change this: not through the soap operas and Hollywood commercials but by scholarly exchanges, at high academic levels. A new dimension is the information technology development, which could give a boost to the Ukrainian programmers’ capacities in case of successful launching of training programs. However, it is clear that during the visit everyone noticed the pitfalls, the stark contrast between the poor and the rich, and the problems lying before India. And that gave an opportunity for the Ukrainians to look at India with an open eye, without illusions.
Finally, the truth of strategic partnership does not merely lie in how many times the word “strategic” is used in the negotiations, but what policy package a country undertakes at the follow-up stage vis-З-vis any particular state after the visit is over. So far, I have never seen any unclassified unbiased policy paper produced by the government or even better by a think tank vis-З-vis a particular state. In the absence of such a framework document, free interpretations are likely without ethical constraints. And here comes the ethical component, which becomes even more important in the backdrop of the internal situation in Ukraine and the awkward situation with the alleged and suspected sale of the Kolchuha to Iraq. Coincidentally, the visit started October 2, a memorable day in the Indian calendar, the birthday of the father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi. Symbolic too is that, barely a month ago, Kuchma was attending the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, a place where Gandhi started his career as a lawyer. First exposed to the horrors of apartheid and injustice, Gandhi’s search for the kingdom of truth led him to be the architect of the best philosophy of non- violence and the ethics of politics. Gandhian ethics in politics is a category, from which both Ukraine and India have shifted away, especially in the Machiavellian arms market. However, if by Gandhism, we mean moderation, Ukraine will have to carve its consistent policy towards India, balancing between the defense and the non-defense sectors. In the defense sector, it will be in partnership with Russia. But in the civil sectors, more attention could be paid to investments, private enterprises, pharmaceuticals and education, that is sectors which will not drain India’s budgetary resources to defense items only, but extend jobs and opportunities to people.
