ABSTRACT
This chapter considers India's engagement with the humanitarian crisis in Syria. The Syrian crisis was obviously connected to the wider Arab Spring unrest. Small protests took place in January and February 2011 but in early March, in Daraa, 15 young boys who had been spray-painting anti-government graffiti were arrested, tortured and summarily executed by police. Because the crisis in Syria built relatively slowly through 2011 there was no burst of commentary by Indian policy-shapers like that which erupted vis-a-vis Libya earlier in 2011. Ganguly was not alone in calling for India to pressure Syria's regime, although she was substantially alone in being motivated by robust liberal-democratic logic. There was also relatively little evidence of contributions to the debates about Syria grounded in stridently anti-Western logic in 2011. The parliament largely ignored the Syrian crisis – both during 2011 and on into 2012 too – presumably because no intervention in Syria took place.
