India on Humanitarian Intervention and Responsibility to Protect: Shifting Nuances

Abstract

India’s opposition to humanitarian intervention has been influenced by its colonial experience and its predisposition towards the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention. However, India did not adopt a strident opposition in the post-Cold War due to the changed power configuration. The article discusses how India adopted a cautious approach and yet used every opportunity to remind the international community the baleful effect of intervention in the internal affairs. After securing concession to a considerable extent on the ambitious Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and when most of the countries showed an inclination to accept humanitarian intervention in the form of ‘R2P’ at the UN summit in 2005, India grudgingly went along accepting it. India participated in the deliberation on the implementation of R2P and took its stand on various crises in which R2P was evoked. The experience of NATO’s Libya operation under R2P was regarded as substantiation of India’s apprehension of the misuse of the concept, and India reverted its position to the sceptical view of humanitarian intervention/R2P. By mere complaining about the mixing of peace enforcement with peacekeeping, when the United Nations deployed ‘intervention brigade’ for the protection of civilians, India lost the opportunity to take the initiative to propose a new mechanism to deal with the humanitarian crisis in atrocious internal conflicts.