"Still wiping the egg off my face": Tharoor on India's Russia-Ukraine stance

Congress leader and former MoS for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor has said he is “still wiping the egg off his face” when it comes to his reaction to India’s stance on the Russia-Ukraine war. Tharoor made this statement while participating in a conversation at the Raisina Dialogue in Delhi on Tuesday.

A panelist at the event asked Tharoor, “Given the state of play right now with Russia and Ukraine and this conflict and President Trump's position, are you glad that India took the position it did, it carried on buying Russian oil and gas, for example?”

To this, Tharoor replied, “Yes, I am still wiping the egg off my face because I was one person in the parliamentary debate who actually criticized the Indian position at the time back in February 2022 on the well-worn grounds — and Espen will understand because he and I talked about all this in my UN days — that there was a violation of the UN Charter.”

He added, “There had been a violation of the principle of the inviolability of borders, of the sovereignty of a member state, namely Ukraine, and we had always stood for the inadmissibility of the use of force to settle international disputes. And all of those principles, I said, had been violated by one party, and we should have condemned it.”

However, talking more about his take on India’s stance, the Congress leader said, “Well, a couple of years later, three years later, it does look like an egg on my face because clearly the policy has meant that India has actually a prime minister who can hug both the president of Ukraine and the president of Moscow two weeks apart and be accepted in both places — and therefore India is in a position where it can make a difference to a lasting peace if it was so required in ways that very few countries would be able to.”

Tharoor also said, “Distance helps — the fact that we're not in Europe and we're not directly one way or the other threatened or benefiting from any change in territorial borders, for example, that helps.”