The official Twitter account of the Defense Ministry of Ukraine caused an uproar in India this weekend by posting an illustration appearing to show the Hindu goddess of destruction Kali dressed as Marilyn Monroe.
The account, @DefenceU, regularly posts memes and other provocative content to promote Ukraine, particularly regarding the ongoing Russian invasion of the country. In the past, the account has encouraged civilians to make Molotov cocktails for use against invading Russians and compared Ukraine’s fight against its neighbor to the film Die Hard.
The offending post appeared on the Defense Ministry’s profile and was deleted shortly thereafter, but not before attracting the outrage of Indian users on the platform, who urged Twitter to censor the image in question and urged Indian politicians to take it into consideration in their ties with Kyiv. The Ministry published an image by Ukrainian artist Maksym Palenko that repurposed an image of an explosion in Sevastopol, occupied Crimea, as the skirt of Marilyn Monroe’s iconic white dress. A female figure appearing to be the goddess Kali — depicted with her tongue out, a necklace of heads, and blue skin, though sporting Monroe’s hair style — wore the dress.
“Work of art,” the original Defense Ministry post read.
The Sevastopol blast, according to Ukrainian state media, was the result of an attack by Ukrainian drones on a Russian oil depot. Russia illegally colonized Crimea in 2014 and has been using it to supply the ongoing assault on the rest of the country.
Kali is one of the most important deities in the Hindu canon, recognized as a goddess of time, destruction, and death. Hindu users on Twitter reacted to the image of the goddess in a revealing dress with outrage, calling it offensive and ignorant.
“Recently Ukraine Deputy Foreign Minister was in Delhi soliciting support from India. Behind that fakery lurks the real face of the Ukraine government,” Kanchan Gupta, an adviser to the Indian Ministry of Broadcast and Information, wrote online in response. “Indian goddess Ma Kali has been caricatured on a propaganda poster. This is an assault on Hindu sentiments around the world.”
“This is why you guys are not getting any support from India. And getting your ass kicked,” another user reportedly wrote.
India and Ukraine have long maintained distant, but cordial, diplomatic ties. India has a storied diplomatic history with Russia and relies on Moscow for much of its military arsenal. In the current conflict, India has offered Ukraine humanitarian aid but refused to support sanctions on Russia, instead greatly increasing its purchases of cheap Russian oil.
Indian officials have repeatedly expressed frustration with Western countries attempting to pressure it into prioritizing the Ukraine war as a foreign policy matter.
“I can give you many instances of countries violating the sovereignty of another country,” Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar said in January, responding to impassioned pleas to defend Ukrainian sovereignty. “If I were to ask where Europe stood on a lot of those, I am afraid, I’ll get a long silence.”
In November, Indian Oil Minister Hardeep Singh Puri condemned Europe for relying heavily on Russian natural gas while attempting to discourage India from buying Russian oil.
“We ended the financial year 2022, the purchases of Russian oil were not two percent, it was 0.2 percent,” he said at the time. “Moreover, we still buy a quarter of what Europe buys in one afternoon. So let’s be very clear about what the perspective is.”
India is hosting the G20 Summit this year; in March, the top negotiator for India at the summit, Amitabh Kant, encouraged the world to “move on” from Ukraine.
“Nutrition has been impacted, health outcomes have been impacted, learning outcomes have been impacted, people have become stunted and wasted and we are just concerned with one Russia and Ukraine war. The world needs to move on and Europe needs to find a solution to its challenges,” he said.
The Defense Ministry rapidly deleted the image of Kali on its profile and has not commented on it at press time, leaving unclear if the person posting it was aware of what the image represented. Palenko has also not publicly commented, though he appears to have removed the image from Instagram. His original post with the image on Facebook remains, but he did not post any explanation for the image or why a Hindu goddess appeared in it.
Palenko appears to have used Kali as an inspiration in one other recent work of art – an image apparently expressing gratitude to musician Lady Gaga for supporting Ukraine in remarks at this year’s SAG Awards. Unlike the Sevastopol image, Kali does not appear overtly sexualized in the image, instead wearing a necklace featuring the heads of prominent Russian leader, including Vladimir Putin, and a dead two-headed eagle, a symbol of the Russian Federation. That image also no longer appeared on Palenko’s Instagram profile.
Observers in India are suggesting New Delhi significantly reconsider its relationship to Kyiv given the lack of respect the image indicates.
“Not only was the morphed image obscene and explicitly Hinduphobic, but also the fact that it was posted by an arm of the Ukrainian government should raise serious questions over Ukraine’s attitude towards India,” Sreemoy Talukdar wrote in India’s FirstPost on Monday, accusing Ukraine of taking “dramatic, performative moral positions” against India prior to the offense.
“From that moral perch, for Kyiv to not know what causes hurt to the sentiments of billions of Indians who call themselves Hindu, and in effect, mock one of their most revered goddesses with a burlesque caricature that runs a Leopard tank over their faith is shocking, hypocritical and tragic,” Talukdar concluded.