Wooed more than wooing! NaMo is back from the US. He must be happy. Everything seems to have gone well. The country is palpably impressed with the impression he has made and the the rapport he seems to have established. There was a lot of anticipation riding on this visit. The only other Indian Prime Minister whos trip to the US is worth recalling, even if only in terms of atmospherics, was when Indira Gandhi was hosted by Ronald Reagan. She went to the US in the early eighties, after staging a triumphant electoral comeback, just after having hosted, in quick succession, the spectacular Asian Games, the NAM Summit and the Commonwealth Heads, with an upgraded DD in tow, beaming live images back home on the newly ushered-in colour TVs. Indira Gandhi herself had undergone a phenomenal makeover for the trip. Gone was the starched cotton pallu covering her head and the long sleeves. Gorgeously coiffured, in her resplendent silk sarees and sleeveless blouses, with her chiseled-in-white-marble like arms and lips in gloss, displayed in public the first (and perhaps the only) time, she was elegance and charm personified. The images of her reception at the White House, beaming, flanked by the Reagans and with hundreds of flashbulbs popping are still fresh in our memory. But all that was doomed to be sterile in terms of furthering Indias strategic or economic interests. It was the height of the Cold War, when the US was cooking the Evil Empire over its military foray into Afghanistan. India, being a de facto Soviet ally then, had chosen to turn a blind eye to all that. That took care of whatever point of convergence there was between the two largest democracies. To stretch the paradox further, God blessed America with a military dictator in our neighbourhood, Zia ul Haq. In no time, the champions of freedom and Human Rights were in bed with someone who had defiled democracy in Pakistan by staging a coup and then judicially murdered the elected Prime Minister he had deposed earlier. The kohl-eyed, crooked-browed and greasy-haired imposter oozed more desirability with the CIA. That trip was Mrs. Gandhis tribute to herself. Nothing more and nothing less. Modis journey to America happened in a substantially changed world. Though a unipolar power, the United States need for allies is perhaps as much as it ever was, if not more. The challenges of the 20th century, in hindsight, seem far more straightforward as it involved States, their understandable interests, their pressure points and their limits. The 21st century is about far more complex players, some amorphous, some deliberately ambiguous about their allies and rivals and most others perpetually hedging and with strange bedfellows. Fault lines are criss-crossing and ever changing. The UPAs policy, to not have a policy, passed off a state of drift to look like great strategy. Modis first four months are a picture in contrast. Just like the Mangalayan, on the eve of his US visit, he too seems to have made a solitary attempt to put himself in the right trajectory for the times to come.
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 09:41:50 +0000
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