Zoo Station

As has been pointed out on this blog before, the standards of Indian news media has been plummeting from bad to abysmal. The one exception has been Indian Express Delhi, which I still enjoy reading. The reason for IE's standards has to be the stewardship of Shekhar Gupta, who I consider to be the finest journalist/editor in India. A terrific example of Shekhar's work is this analysis of the Bush visit and the nuclear deal, which appeared in the Indian Express a couple of days back. He starts by calling a spade a spade.

The direct gains from the India-US nuclear agreement, legitimisation of India’s nuclear weapons, the end of the high-tech apartheid and rapid growth of nuclear power capacity are considerable. But the real significance lies much beyond the N-word. And please, please, do not get confused by that utter nonsense on how the US will help India become a super power.

Provides some historical context.

This is not merely an India-US agreement and the fallout of this is not merely nuclear. If India plays it right, it could be the beginning of a process of breakout from the ‘lower middle class’ status in the community of nations to which it had been consigned for half a century, some of it a conspiracy of circumstances, and some of it self-inflicted. In the name of non-alignment we tilted too far the other way, as our voting record on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan shows. Our politicians tried to exploit this sloganeering foreign policy through domestic politics, embracing Castro one day, and naming a major avenue in New Delhi after Tito, on another. Incidentally, do a google search for how many cities in the world, even in former Yugoslavia, still have a street named after that dictator our school history textbooks taught us to admire!
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We shifted a bit as the ground shifted under our feet after the end of the cold war, but we never abandoned the notion of the non-aligned movement, or our having a permanent abode in that comity of the “lower middle classes” in the international power game, led by some of the world’s most dictatorial regimes and despots.
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We are a long way from being a big power yet. But our place in the world is a lot better than it ever was in the so-called, Soviet-included non-aligned movement. And how terrific was that non-aligned “solidarity”? Please check out the way most members of that “movement” voted at international forums on issues of India’s vital security interest, not just Kashmir but also on both series of Pokharan tests. On each occasion, ’74 and ’98, they were firmly “aligned” with the big powers, against us. India, who so stupidly arrogated to itself the leadership of that motley group, continued naming its streets after international thugs and despots.

Offers some possible future scenarios.

We must not delude ourselves into believing we are in the same league now as China and Russia (listed in that order deliberately). But if we continue to act with sense and maturity, we can form the third point of a new triangle of stability in a vast Asian region, stretching from Korea to Israel, Kazakhstan to Sri Lanka. Or, if you don’t like triangles, you can look at it as an opportunity for India to join — along with China, Russia and Japan — a new arc of strategic calm. That is the new slot that the world wants India to occupy in its new batting order. The beauty of it all is, you can do it while being perfectly non-aligned, and running a foreign policy enormously more independent than it ever was when we were exposed as a totally client state so stunningly once every decade: the invasion of Hungary in the ’50s, Czechoslovakia in the ’60, Cambodia in the ’70s and Afghanistan in the ’80s. Read the whole thing.

Shekhar is absolutely right in his analysis, but it takes some historical context to understand full well the sheer stupidity of the chimera that was non-alignment. To paraphrase a foreign policy dictum, if you want to play with the big dogs, you've got to stop pissing with the puppies. I think most Indians will agree we're done pissing with the puppies.