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Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in New Delhi. The two leaders are holding talks on strengthening India-Bangladesh relations. (PMO India)
You can also read this article in Hindi- भारत के लिए बंधन तोड़ने का समय आ गया है
Jawaharlal Nehru was an imaginative statesman turning the country’s all-round weakness into moral leverage to carve out a role for India and for the Non-Aligned Movement as the balancer of power between the United States (US) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and gaining from the competing attention of both. He appreciated that, while soft power is good, hard power is what matters.
Nehru seeded the dual-purpose nuclear energy and space programmes and the first jet combat aircraft project in Asia, which at last, he hoped, would lay the foundations for the cutting-edge Indian aviation industry.
Most importantly, he articulated a stunning strategic vision for India as the fulcrum of power in the arc Maghreb-Indonesia, marred only by his blind spot for China. Succeeding prime ministers, lacking his ‘map reading habit of mind’, foreign policy intuition, historical insights, and the confidence to prosecute surefooted diplomacy, initiated the country’s slide.
Ironically, it was post-1971 war and post-nuclear test three years later that the country’s prospects darkened. India’s military policy shrank, its focus on a weak and truncated Pakistan and, in the strategic realm, the benefits of increased global heft from full-scale nuclear weaponisation were lost because the government developed qualms.
India, in the new century and under different party dispensations, forsook ‘strategic autonomy’ for the comforts of American camp followership and, with near total reliance on imported armaments, has become a second-rate military power to match. To recover for India its inherent significance, it is necessary for an expansive national vision to be defined in geostrategic terms of making India the foremost power in the quadrant Caspian-Central Asia-South China Sea-southern Indian Ocean-the East African littoral-Gulf and by the by, ensuring that the Indian Ocean once again becomes an ‘Indian lake’. It is imperative that India embraces disruptive policies to force itself back into international reckoning.
To achieve the above aims, the following foreign and military policy priorities have been highlighted. In the foreign policy sphere, India should:
In the military sphere, India should:
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