Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (Image: Sanjeev Kumar/Hindustan Times/Sipa USA)

The outcome of the virtual Quad meeting between Joe Biden, Narendra Modi, Scott Morrison and Fumio Kishida wasn’t much. The only reference to Ukraine was an agreement to “a new humanitarian assistance and disaster relief mechanism which will enable the Quad to meet future humanitarian challenges in the Indo-Pacific and provide a channel for communication”. Sounds like even the diplomats had trouble devising something to fill out the 166-word statement.

The Quad was held back by the unwillingness of the Indian leader to say anything to offend Russia. Modi has refused to criticise the Putin regime, on which he is heavily reliant for military equipment. So reliant, in fact, that the Biden administration is considering imposing sanctions on India to protect US military technology.

It’ll be more like a Trio Plus One than a Quad if that happens.

Australia, meanwhile, is happy to criticise China for failing to impose sanctions on Russia but is deathly silent on India’s failure to do so (it’s a similar line at The Australian, where Greg Sheridan pleaded for India not to be “hemmed in” or “bullied” on Russia). A similar hypocrisy exists in relation to Israel, which has also refused to impose sanctions — indeed, senior Israeli figures have lobbied the US to weaken sanctions. Even Israeli newspapers have ferociously condemned Israel’s failure to criticise the Putin regime.

Like apartheid Israel, however, India is not in a strong position to criticise Russia’s brutality. Lynchings, vigilantism, legalised discrimination and hate speech targeting Muslims are openly encouraged or practised by Modi’s own party (or even celebrated). There are now open calls for the genocide of Indian Muslims, leading to warnings of a real possibility such calls may be heeded.

Australia has had little to say about the Modi government’s failure to criticise hate speech and increasingly systematic violence against Indian Muslims, presumably for fear of alienating what we hope will be a powerful ally against China.

Such hypocrisy is an easy target for critics of the West who eagerly point out how selective we are in which atrocities we condemn, and what appears to be a bias towards people “like us” — whether Israeli or Indian (shared British heritage, cricket, etc) — even when they engage in policies of brutalisation of Muslims.

Foreign policy “realists” insist that that is perfectly acceptable: we should pursue whatever serves our interests, rather than let small matters like consistency or morality dictate our foreign policy actions. If that means condemning Russia for its brutality while avoiding mentioning that of the Bharatiya Janata PartyBJP in India, so be it. The fact that one set of victims is white and European and the other Muslim and brown is, they’d suggest, completely coincidental. It doesn’t do much for their credibility. Nor ours.