President Trump recently rolled out punishing trade tariffs against India mostly for the Indian persistence in purchasing Russian oil and arms despite their egregious behavior in the Ukraine invasion to pursue an unconscionable war.
The land of Gandhi has become a vassal of the new Stalin.
India and it’s leaders has failed in their delicate balancing act between the border disputes with China and Pakistan, the promotion of Hindu nationalism, the trade dispute with the USA, their treatment of women as well as their unholy alliance with Russia.
They have fallen on the first principle of not being all things to all men. Over half of the population have had repeated peaks of distress with femicide, rural rapes, rapes of students and most prominently, a sleeping trainee doctor at her college. The government has not responded nationally or internationally in a significant manner.
Targeted assassinations of critics and Sikh nationalists at home and abroad has only thrown more shade on a geriatric leadership which has more similarity with the Russian, North Korean,Cuban and Nicaraguan autocratic regimes than a modern, forward thinking democracy.
The outside world cannot rely on the beleaguered Indian opposition or a powerless population to turn one of the most spiritual and fundamentally blessed tourist destinations away from being a support arm of the Russian killing machine in Ukraine.
It has fallen on President Trump to provide the stiffest response to what has become the Ukraine outrage but he must be followed by an army of boycott. Boycott of India as a tourist destination, boycott off Indian goods and boycott of any other Russian trading partners.
The war or the Ukraine Genocide is in the third year and Putin is determined to kill off the citizens of Ukraine one by one as the world sits on the sidelines in disbelief.
There is no need to send another bullet or missile to Ukraine.
Each and every one of us can take a decision to say no to anyone who supports Russia starting with India and then let it be a cascade until peace is achieved.
To do otherwise is to be blind to the truth of today and insult the great non-violent sacrifices of Mahatma Gandhi, the disappointed father of the Indian nation.
Peter Polack is a former criminal lawyer in the Cayman Islands for several decades. His books are The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War(2013 ) , Jamaica, The Land of Film (2017) and Guerrilla Warfare: Kings of Revolution(2019). He was a contributor to Encyclopedia of Warfare (2013). His latest book is a compendium of .Russian espionage activities with almost five hundred Soviet spies expelled from nearly 100 countries worldwide 1940-88.