India's Position Over Ukraine Like "Dancing On Tightrope": Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor said with Russia, India has the "dependency" on military relationship, but with the West, we have a "warming relationship" and "we can't antagonise them. We are a member of Quad and we don't want the US to take its eyes off the Indo-Pacific and focus purely on Europe," he said.

India has gone through a very "complicated and challenging time" in negotiating its diplomatic stand on the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and because of its multiple interests with other countries, it's been a "bit of dancing on a tightrope," Lok Sabha member Shashi Tharoor has said.

He was responding to a question during an interaction held in Delhi on Tuesday after inaugurating a three-day photo exhibition, 'Ukraine Untold (Glimpses)', on how the country looked barely a month before the war began.

"India has gone through a very complicated and challenging time in negotiating as it were its own stand on the (Ukraine-Russia) crisis. There is no doubt that India in its very first statement seemed to be a little unwilling to say anything that the Russians will be upset about," he said.

A former UN under secretary-general, Mr Tharoor, on the likely visit of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to India this week, said, "He will have a tough cause to defend and I am sure the talks that he is going to have in New Delhi will be very interesting".