What is at stake are the bonds that keep India and the Indian people united. And the nation's moral and educational tone is involved. Are we to go forward in trust and friendship - or will we frighten one another into cooperation?

It may prove foolish to think that the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, or the rising inflation that currently troubles almost every nation, will be so preoccupying that the world will ignore the persecution of the government's critics, or silently watch the emergence in India of a state that suppresses minorities and dissenters.

But leaders in government can also choose to offer their cooperation and their trust to the Indian people, including to people who do not belong to the majority community. Trust cannot flow only in one direction.

Human beings, however, have long agreed that exacting revenge on those whom you somehow connect to an earlier wrong done to you is unjustified and unlawful.

Surely it is now time for influential countries like India, Turkey, South Africa, and Brazil (all of them neutral thus far in this horrific conflict) to work actively, and if possible unitedly, for a cease-fire, to be followed by serious peace talks.

Sometimes, going beyond comment or analysis, a columnist must advise, for he or she is a citizen as well, and citizens have the duty to speak to their leaders... It is about the bulldozer becoming the instrument of choice for governing India, and about the patently selective use of that and other instruments. It is about the frequent picking of helpless Muslims as targets for the coercive arm of the state and of vigilante groups.

Brave people will one day pull the train of the Indian nation to a finer place, where strangers "are also my family". Until then we are stuck in a sorry station called "Victimhood" at one end and "Us and Them" at the other.

But using brute force to re-establish the physical control that might have existed in a distant past, and, while doing so, to obliterate the difference between military and civilian targets, and even between the healthy and the hospitalized, and between adults and babies, is not something the world or the people of Russia will forget.

Nationhood does not demand homogeneity or uniformity. Nor does it require authoritarian or imperial rule by a big neighbour. These too are messages that Ukraine's horrific drama is sending.

We must not allow ourselves to be fooled. What is advancing before our eyes is not equality but a project of erasure...