For the sake of a few laughs, Ukraine just lost every heart and mind in what’s now the world’s most populous country.
The Ukrainian Defense Ministry mocked a Bharatiya deity in a now-deleted tweet, which placed Kali in the middle of a mushroom cloud over Crimea and framed her in Marilyn Monroe’s famous pose where she’s seen struggling to stop the wind from blowing up her skirt. Senior Advisor at the Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Kanchan Gupta strongly condemned this provocation in a post on that platform, which reads as follows:
“Recently #Ukraine Dy Foreign Minister was in Delhi soliciting support from #India Behind that fakery lurks the real face of Ukraine Govt. Indian goddess Ma Kali has been caricatured on a propaganda poster. This is an assault on Hindu sentiments around the world.”
It was shared as a retweet of this post from the day after Russia’s special operation started last year:
“You take consistent anti-India position at UN. You vote for UNSC sanctions against India after 1998 nuclear tests. You push for UN intervention on Kashmir after abrogation of Article 370. You sell military equipment to Pakistan to use against India. Yet you want India’s help.”
That tweet preceded Bharat’s pragmatic policy of principled neutrality towards the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine, which the latest Pentagon leaks touched upon and the Washington Post subsequently spun in a way that falsely presented Bharat as anti-American. This analysis here clarified the strategic motivations behind its decision to abstain from anti-Russian UNGA Resolutions, which are to retain its hard-earned strategic autonomy in the New Cold War and inspire the Global South to follow its lead.
These goals are unacceptable to the US-led West’s Golden Billion, however, which demands full subservience to its foreign policy demands at the expense of its subjects’ objective national interests. They deeply resent Bharat for not only remaining neutral in the Russian-US dimension of the New Cold War, but for influencing other developing countries to emulate its policy. This places Der Spiegel’s crude caricature of India last week into context, which showed how much condescendingly the West sees it.
It also explains why the Ukrainian Defense Ministry mocked Kali, since Kiev deeply resents Bharat’s refusal to break ties with Russia at the expense of its objective national interests too. One year ago in the days immediately after Gupta’s tweet from that time, reports circulated across Bharatiya media alleging that Ukrainian border guards assaulted, threatened, and even shot at their country’s nationals who were fleeing from that war-torn country. This was interpreted as Kiev punishing them for Bharat’s neutrality.
Even though that fascist regime dispatched its Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova to Delhi last month in a doomed-to-fail charm offensive to win Bharat’s support, she also behaved condescendingly by tweeting that her host’s envisaged Vishwaguru role can only be achieved by supporting Kiev. Bharatiyas are the only people have the right to debate what a true Vishwaguru should or shouldn’t do, however, since this concept is inherently connected to their civilization.
Against the backdrop that was described in the preceding paragraphs, nobody should therefore be surprised by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry weaponizing Hinduphobia in a cringey attempt to make its recent tweet go viral. It wasn’t predictable that they’d stoop so low, but it also aligns with Kiev’s supremacist sentiments that resulted in its regime rightly being described as fascist. For the sake of a few laughs, Ukraine just lost every heart and mind in what’s now the world’s most populous country.
-By Andrew Korybko
(The story was published on Korybko.substack.com on May 1, 2023 and has been reproduced here with permission.)
