New Delhi: Congress Lok Sabha MP Manish Tewari Sunday said that India should approach the conflict in the Middle East, which has escalated with the United States joining Israel’s war with Iran, with “extreme circumspection” and a “degree of exceptionalism” given that the rules-based liberal democratic international order has “collapsed”.
In an interview to ThePrint, Tewari, who serves as general secretary of the Congress party’s foreign affairs department, said India must also tread carefully due to what he called a “new dynamic” developing between the US, Pakistan and China. “I think we need to be extremely careful. We should feel the stones as we go along, because only fools rush in where wise men fear to tread,” Tewari said, pointing to the new dynamic “at play again”.
What complicates the situation for India, he said, is unlike during the Cold War era, New Delhi has no Soviet Union to fall back upon, while Chinese influence has grown over the past decade, especially since Xi Jinping took over as president of the neighbouring country.
“Under those circumstances, India must approach the situation with a degree of exceptionalism, whereby we engage with situations and problems on our own and not really try to play ‘vishwa guru’. Not that we have tried to mediate in any of these conflicts which have very complex historical and geopolitical roots. However, after this latest escalation. You know, circumspection and extreme circumspection should be the order of the day,” Tewari said.
While the Congress, the principal opposition party, is yet to issue a statement on the US bombing of Iranian nuclear sites, it had on 15 June accused Israel of violating Iran’s sovereignty and encroaching on its rights.
Tewari said the Congress’s position was correct from the public international law perspective.
“Because there has been a violation of Iranian sovereignty. And albeit unprovoked because there is no empirical evidence to substantiate that Iran was close to actually acquiring a nuclear bomb for a nuclear weapon. In fact, the only de facto nuclear weapon state in the Middle East is Israel, which purportedly has 90 warheads,” said the Chandigarh MP and former Union minister who recently travelled to Egypt, Qatar, South Africa, and Ethiopia as the member of a multi-party delegation formed by the Centre after Operation Sindoor.
In an opinion piece on the Middle East crisis published in The Hindu Saturday, Congress parliamentary party chairperson Sonia Gandhi criticised the Modi government’s “silence on the devastation in Gaza and now on the unprovoked escalation against Iran,” saying it reflects a disturbing departure from “our moral and diplomatic traditions,” and amounts to a “surrender of values”.
Tewari endorsed that line, underlining India’s historic position with regard to the two-state solution as Israel and Palestine was concerned and also with regard to respecting the sovereignty of independent countries.
“These are templates or postulates of Indian foreign policy which stretch back into time, and we have repeatedly called out such transgressions and invasions … this has been a consistent position. So is New Delhi really going to be taking a revisionist view on this position?”
“Also there is a domestic imperative. We have a large, diverse, heterogeneous population—a population which, notwithstanding their religious affiliations, does believe in a semblance of equity and fair play and so under those circumstances, even people would be very close to watching the positions which India would take,” Tewari, a three-term MP, said.
Sharing his assessment of the geopolitical situation, Tewari said the world order and frames of an international rule of law stand completely and absolutely upended with concurrent conflicts playing out across the globe.
“In Europe, it is Russia versus Ukraine. In the Middle East, it is Israel versus Hamas versus Hezbollah versus Iran, and then you have the India-Pakistan standoff, which may have lasted a few days, but has lingering implications. And then you have the continuous militarization of the East China and South China sea as a consequence of the not too peaceful rise of China.
“What you are really witnessing is that the liberal democratic international order, built post World War II undergirded by the principles of public international law, has completely collapsed. The irrelevance of the United Nations and even the United Nations Security Council could not be more stark in what we are seeing today.”
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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