The media in India is going crazy about Modi's first visit to the United States. The global and American media reports are also being analysed and re-reported in Indian media for any trace of enthusiasm about the maiden visit of the newly appointed prime-minister of India. He had a warm welcome by the Indian diaspora and with the extravaganza at the iconic Madison Square in the New York. If reports are to be believed, the such crowds were seen to watch an Indian was in the Eighties when a show of Movie legend Amitabh Bachchan was held there.
Beyond the cultural show, the demographics, the mouse and the Mars, the difference which is most visible in India of late, is the swagger which has suddenly appeared in our foreign policy. Our administration in a long time, visibly reached out to save citizens from strife-stricken areas. Our near memory struggles to find some such effort apart from appeals and sadly pathetic condemnations in the past, quite helpless, quite feeble. We would watch with admiration the distance a global power, say US or UK will to protect its citizens held in dangerous situations in foreign lands, and lament our benignly lame foreign policy. The evacuation of nurses was an act seen not in a long time.
Another wise thing on foreign policy perspective was to get out of the sibling infatuation with Pakistan. After initial attempt to improve on the relations, the hard position with breakdown of talks with Pakistan, is proving to be a right strategy, much to the chagrin of pundits of international policies. This has helped de-hyphenate the oft ill-used Indo-Pak, which is about the way white world, still elitist in approach looks at the 'natives', clubbing them together. India and Pakistan are no longer to be treated with same measure. Pakistan is a failed democracy, which needs army to negotiate the formation and well-being of government, while India is reaching Mars. Pakistan is investment to the US, India is a business proposition. Pakistan keeps looking at the past and two countries looking forward to future cannot engage with a country with unclear future, finding solace only in the past.
India in this sense, has arrived to its near rightful position on the global arena. It is right time to stand straight, with unyielding spine and things will come around. India is the fulcrum on which the tilt of the new world will settle as China and the US move in gladiatorial dance in global economy. The US can keep on putting its weight behind the Pakistan, taking a patronising view of the two as equally errant child, while China keeps on pulling it on the other side with crude economic considerations without moral scruples irrespective of their own freshly encountered trouble with Islamic extremism. As demonstration for democracy continues in the HongKong, it is important for the US to come true to its stated position as guardian of democracy. Whether it will keep putting its weight behind, it's tax-payers money behind the country which runs a sham of democracy under the guardianship of armed forces, which offered shelter to the man pronounced the biggest enemy of United State, and which was marred with selling nuclear weapons technology to banned country and still had the gall of coming on global forum of UNGA2014 and called itself a responsible nuclear nation.
At a moment as this, irrespective of what the US does, it is important for India to resign itself to being a passive player and join the war on ISIS. It is too small and futile to try to contain Indian people from joining ISIS. I would say, it is even counter-productive to keep them from escaping India to join ISIS. By all means, let them go and get killed there, rather than keeping them here, and offering a ground to practice religious fanaticism in India. If they want to go, they are already lost for humanity, demonstrable by their willingness to kill other humans in cold blood. Why would we want to keep such people here in India? This is not a time to dither, and get involved in such futile and ineffective measures and then falsely claim being a participant in the war for peace. It is also not a time for India to wait for the decisive nations to fight the just war and then step in as UN peacekeepers to clean the mess. It is the time for India to come out of the shadows of British commonwealth and state its considered position, without doubt and dither. We can stay in shadow, keep running the middle path, but will surely face the risk of eventually be run over. Or we can reach out to the Sun and take a bite of it. As they say in Sanskrit, 'Vir bhogya Vasundhara' or 'The brave shall inherit the earth.'
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