Selective Outrage, Strategic Amnesia: Policing Indian Power in a post-Western World

The Putin-Modi meet revealed that to a West accustomed to narrative monopoly, India’s independence of thought and action feels like apostasy.

There is a familiar ritual now whenever India exercises independent foreign policy. Visceral outrage erupts on Western social media, with a section of their commentators, policy experts, journalists and even some historians suddenly transforming themselves from calm (and condescending) rational Western ‘liberals’ into foaming-at-the-mouth Cassandras, while forming a rolling tribunal of instant moral judgment.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to New Delhi last week and his bonhomie with Prime Minister Narendra Modi triggered precisely that reflex. All of a sudden, for the Western intelligentsia, India is not merely wrong in hosting Putin but morally delinquent.

Ironically, this angry absolutism on their part is applied with exquisite selectivity. When Western leaders meet the same Russian president - who has routinely been dubbed the “worst mass murderer since Adolf Hitler” following his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 - it is framed as “engagement for peace”, “hard-headed realism” or “keeping channels open”.

But when India hosts Putin, it is treated as some moral revolt against civilisation. The unspoken rule here is that any Western power – no matter how second-rate it may be - may negotiate with whomever it chooses but a non-Western power must seek absolution for doing the same.

And this is not simply about Putin and Ukraine. It is about who gets to define legitimacy in a world that no longer belongs to one pole.

Selective Memory

Let us keep the Modi-Putin meet aside for a moment. The history of Western media (European and American) is littered with instances of such narrative elasticity. In 2018, when U.S. President Donald Trump met Vladimir Putin in Helsinki (during the former’s first term as President) standing beside him, publicly questioning his own intelligence agencies and extolling the Russian leader’s strength, the meeting was framed as a “historic engagement.” While anti-Trump editorials may have fretted about American credibility, none went so far to declare the United States being complicit in Putin’s oppression. No one certainly demanded America's diplomatic excommunication.

The same pattern repeated itself during the Trump-Putin meeting at Alaska earlier this year.

Emmanuel Macron hosted Putin repeatedly at Versailles and Brégançon before the Ukraine war, extolling the need for a new European security architecture with Russia at its heart. Olaf Scholz spent months phoning the Kremlin after the invasion, urging de-escalation. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has remained Putin’s most consequential diplomatic interlocutor throughout the war, brokering grain deals and defence coordination without being anathematised by Western moralists.

Israel coordinates militarily with Russia in Syria. Saudi Arabia partners Russia through OPEC+ to manage oil supply and prices. The United Arab Emirates has become one of Russia’s foremost financial transit hubs. But none of these relationships triggered the sort of theatrical outrage now reserved exclusively for India.

Strategic Convergence

India’s relationship with Russia was not summoned into existence by the war in Ukraine. It is the product of seven decades of strategic convergence born of necessity. During the Cold War, when Washington and London armed Pakistan with abandon, Moscow became India’s principal diplomatic shield and military supplier.

In 1971, as India intervened in East Pakistan to halt one of the twentieth century’s most grotesque genocides, it was not the so-called ‘liberal order’ that came to its aid. In fact, the United States under Richard Nixon sent the USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal to intimidate Delhi. Britain followed suit. It was the Soviet Union that signed the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with India and quietly neutralised external coercion. Bangladesh was thus born under Soviet diplomatic shelter.

For decades afterward, nearly 70 per cent of India’s military arsenal came from Soviet and later Russian platforms – be it fighters, submarines, tanks, missiles, nuclear propulsion. Vital technology sharing with Russia continues to this day.

Nor did Moscow ever cultivate religious proxies against India, the way Western alliances enabled Pakistan’s jihad infrastructure during the Cold War.

Trump recently cast India’s post-2022 oil purchases from Russia as a moral scandal. All those so-called Western liberals, who never tire of pompously extolling their Greco-Roman civilization while writing ‘I Stand with Ukraine’ on their X handles, fail to sufficiently excoriate the European nations for their dependency on Russia.

For decades, Germany, Austria and Italy constructed entire industrial strategies upon cheap Russian gas. Nord Stream was not conceived by despots but by elected liberal governments. When pipelines were intact, the trade was pragmatic. Only when the tap was turned off did morality acquire urgency.

Britain played its own version of this double game. While lecturing the world on Russian aggression, London became the favoured sanctuary of Russian capital. Its property markets absorbed oligarch billions with the discretion of a private vault. Townhouses in Belgravia, penthouses in Knightsbridge and shell companies in the Cayman Islands formed the shadow infrastructure of ‘Londongrad.’ Lawyers, accountants and public-relations firms built entire revenue streams on laundering reputations as efficiently as fortunes. British football clubs, newspapers and luxury assets all found Russian patrons.

But none of this troubled the guardians of liberal virtue until tanks rolled into Ukraine.

Europe did not merely tolerate Russia’s rise. It profited from it. German industry fed on its gas. British finance fed on its money. Southern Europe fed on tourist and energy flows. The Russian state was not an external barbarian at the gates but a robust commercial partner embedded deep within Europe’s economic bloodstream.

One-sided Conscience

On the other hand, Ukraine’s appeal to India to desist from deepening ties with Russia conveniently omits the fact that Kyiv has repeatedly aligned itself with Pakistan, a terrorist state that has waged multiple wars against India, continues to sponsor cross-border terrorism and remains under international scrutiny for extremist financing.

Ukrainian defence exports have reached Pakistani inventories. Ukrainian diplomats echo Pakistani claims at global forums. At one point, Ukraine’s own defence ministry social media chose to mock Hindu religious imagery. In moments of Indian crisis, Ukrainian sensitivity to India’s security anxieties has been conspicuously absent.

So, India is asked to feel Ukraine’s pain while Ukraine embraces India’s adversaries.

During Pakistan’s repeated fiscal collapses, European institutions funnel IMF assistance that frees Islamabad’s domestic resources for military spending and proxy warfare. During India’s terror crises, European urgency has been muted at best. But India buying discounted oil is treated as some civilisational emergency.

Trump’s indulgence of Pakistan’s security establishment, his repeated photo-ops with its generals and leaders, and Washington’s long history of subsidising its military infrastructure even as that same infrastructure bred terror networks targeting India has never provoked any sustained Western outrage.

In this narrative, Pakistan merely remains a ‘difficult partner’ but India becomes a ‘moral problem.’

What truly unsettles the West is not Putin’s presence in Delhi but India’s refusal to ask ‘permission.’ What these performative ‘liberals’ fail to grasp is that India is too large to be coerced and too self-aware to be shamed into obedience today. It will buy energy where it is affordable, weapons where they are reliable and partnerships where they endure.

To a West accustomed to narrative monopoly, India’s independence of thought and action feels like apostasy. The favourite weapon of the online moralist is false equivalence. To greet a leader is to become his accomplice. By this logic, every diplomatic channel in history is a confession of guilt. America negotiated with Stalin, Mao, the Taliban and North Korea without becoming morally indistinguishable from them. Europe traded with apartheid South Africa, revolutionary Iran and post-Tiananmen China without declaring itself complicit in their crimes.

But India alone is expected to practice moral absolutism at the price of strategic paralysis. Well, good luck, you moral monopolists - you can howl into irrelevance for all we Indians care about!