Wednesday, October 28, 2009

DNA: India's lonely furrow

oct 27th, 2009

india is friendless. well, with the insufferable and preachy finger-wagging and moralizing approach india has adopted, why is that a surprise? nobody likes a scold, and we have not offered practical support to anyone. we have screwed our potential friends and fawned over our enemies. we wasted all our efforts on those jerks in the non-aligned movement, banana republics every last one of them, all of them panting after china these days.

pretty much what brahma was saying too: we have put all our eggs in the wrong baskets -- first into russia when it was declining, now into america when *it* is declining. 

tremendous sense of timing, indeed, ministry of external affairs! are you guys blithering idiots or what? half of the MEA act like agents of other countries, not to mention half the ministers -- they generally appear to be worrying about others' interests, not india's.

this is what comes of a command bureaucracy, soviet style: the Great Man always knows best. at least if the Great Man is a nationalist, as in the case of the chinese, it would make some sense. but no, the Great Man is always an internationalist, more worried about cuba or palestine than about india.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: sri v


India's lonely furrow

http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/column_india-s-lonely-furrow_1301478

R Jagannathan

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 22:45 IST

We have never been in this situation before. Just a couple of years
back, in the last years of the Bush regime, it seemed as if an Indo-US
geopolitical alliance was all we needed to move up to the big league.
But enter Obama and all bets are off.

The US embrace is no longer as warm as we imagined it to be.
Meanwhile, the India-China relationship is fraying at the edges;
Pakistan is getting into a Talibanesque mess; Nepal is ambivalent, and
the Maoists positively hostile to us; Sri Lanka is cocky after
subduing its Tamil Tigers; and Bangladesh is unlikely to do anything
to keep its people from spilling over into India or turn overtly
jihadi.

In short we have no real friends anywhere -- neither in the
neighbourhood nor in the wider world of power blocs. How then are we
going to protect our national interests?

One thing is for sure. Lazy diplomacy is not going to help. Nor will
ambivalence about defence preparedness.

We have, in the past, put too much faith in moral posturing,
influenced by the likes of Nehru and Gandhi. But the emerging scenario
needs a Chanakya, not woolly thinking, as every country's foreign
policy is driven by realpolitik. China is bashing up Tibetans and
Uighurs, but has the friendliest of relationships with Pakistan, the
epicentre of jihadi terrorism.

... deleted

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Rajeev,
No country has any "friends". Everyone is alone and looks out for their interests. It is time we did the same. Besides, if we keep growing our economy we will have a lot of new "friends" eager to trade with us, the India-ASEAN free trade for example.

Shankara said...

India's foreign policy is a product of its internal vote bank policy and a policy of ''fitting in'' and not to be seen as a pariah nation. Our foreign policy is planned to be stooges or side kicks to USSR and now the US and tomorrow who knows even China. The plan and vision was never to break away and stand and be counted on your own like China has done.

Nehru and Congress in order to get technology and foreign aid sucked up to USSR and Europe and now to the US.

India foreign policy is non existent. Below are a few links where this is explored in different light.

http://sowingseedsofthought.blogspot.com/2009/01/bush-to-obama-to-chaos.html

http://sowingseedsofthought.blogspot.com/2009/01/hindus-are-treated-as-second-class.html

http://sowingseedsofthought.blogspot.com/2009/01/indias-only-true-friend-yet.html