Security Wise

The external affairs minister, S Jaishankar, for some reason, dislikes “polemics”. Derived from the Greek word for war, polemos, and defined by Oxford Dictionary as “a strong verbal or written attack” and as the “practice of engaging in fierce discussion”, he has time and again attacked those he claims indulge in it. Because over the last 25 years, no other policy analyst or commentator has so consistently, relentlessly, substantively, and harshly criticized the country’s extant foreign and national security policies, and questioned the quality and credibility of India’s nuclear arsenal and related deterrence strategy — a particular bugaboo with Jaishankar — and fleshed out hardline alternatives to existing policies in some six-odd books and innumerable writings, I presume, his diatribes are directed at me! Whence this response.

Curiously, Jaishankar’s father, the late K. Subrahmanyham (KS), whose views he often indirectly invokes, and alludes to, if only to validate his own “realist” take on the world, appreciated — even if he did not wholly accept — my approach, that Jaishankar derides. KS and I agreed on almost nothing but our exchanges in the first National Security Advisory Board, in the drafting of the nuclear doctrine, in various conferences at home and abroad, and in one-on-ones in his offices in IDSA, and elsewhere, involved unresolved argumentation without ever lapsing into opinion-mongering which, alas, passes for strategic thinking within the portals of government, the military, and in the press and media — something Subrahmanyam readily agreed was the case.

It may be interesting to juxtapose Jaishankar’s abhorrence of hawkish policy polemics against his father’s more catholic (with small c!) attitude to it. Consider the ‘blurb review’ Subrahmanyam wrote for my 724 page 2002 tome — Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy (with a second edition in 2005) published on the book jacket. This is what he said in toto: “This is a monumental effort at interpreting the evolution of Indian national security perspective since Independence. Bharat Karnad has painstakingly researched into American and British secret documents recently declassified and released to the public. His comprehensive study encompasses the numerous shortcomings and failures in the decisionmaking structure and processes of political leadership, bureaucracy, and armed forces leadership over the last half a century. He has been able to unearth many hitherto publicly unknown facts in respect of the country’s nuclear policy and weapon acquisition process. He advocates a ‘hawkish’ policy. His advocacy based on vast research and logically coherent within his preferred framework of values and perceptions. There is a lot to learn from this book and a lot to contest. It is a very valuable, timely, and provocative contribution to the national security debate of a kind and quality not hitherto attempted.” He was gone by the time my later books were published, but I venture to say they would have met with, albeit, his grudging approval.

On Dec 15, 2024, Jaishankar, released a magazine — India’s World, apparently a “platform” for his alter ego in the Press and media, C. Raja Mohan — langotia yaar from their time together at the Jawaharlal Nehru University — an institution best known for producing ideological and other chameleons with a certain kind of talent but absolutely no convictions!

Jaishankar lauded the new periodical as “an additional forum for debate and argumentation in our country” and expressly as a vehicle to “change”, as he put it, the “Track 1-Track 2, government-think tank, official-academic” “dynamic” to promote “realism” through “our public space discourse” that should neither be “theological [nor] polemical.” Then, in his very next breath, as it were, he undercut the need for any such forum, with a startling declaration that “Track 1” — meaning the MEA habited by foreign service careerists like himself, “has been consistently ahead of Track 2 when it comes to diplomacy, foreign policy, and keeping up with the world. In fact, if you look at many of the big ideas, much of the advocacy of change, I would say really it’s interesting that Track 1 has outpaced Track 2” in the “last 25 years”! ( For his remarks, refer https://www.mea.gov.in/Speeches-Statements.htm?dtl/38804/Remarks+by+External+Affairs+Minister+Dr+S+Jaishankar+at+the+Launch+of+Indias+World+Magazine )

This must come as news to many, even as his paens to Track 1 display not only lack of humility but an exaggerated view of careerist infallibility — something the intellectually more gifted Subrahmanyam never betrayed.

I can understand and even empathise with the self-congratulatory tone but only if it is deserved! The Minister’s claims of Track 1 being “ahead” of the curve is maintainable only if by “Track 2” Jaishankar means the host of academics who act like echo chambers for the government and a welter of thinktanks, including those funded by the three armed services that are into event management (‘Raisina Dialogue’, anyone?) and who consider their brief as bounden duty to prop up the line the MEA, defence ministry, the military services, or whoever is paying their bills, is putting out, and whose research activity amounts to imitating the government-funded IDSA in embroidering the policy of the day of the regime, ministry, or patron armed service.

IDSA, it may be recalled was led for a long while by Subrahmanyam. Whatever he may have intended for it, this thinktank has evolved into something ineffably sad led mostly by a string of retired diplomats with little intellectual leanings. The quality of IDSA’s body of “research” is so unoriginal it disrespects the man whose name the institution now bears — Manohar Parrikar. Parrikar, the only defence minister to-date of the Indian republic who, as an IIT-trained engineer had a problem solving mindset, and in the face of political pulls and bureaucratic pushes within the defence ministry, settled unflinchingly on the right track. He tended to military hardware choices based on cost-benefit calculations (like more Su-30 MKIs, not new aircraft — Rafale), and preferred basic changes in the defence procurement policy framework that would have given the lead role to the more efficient, productive, and effective private sector defence industry in defence production. Unfortunately, Parrikar was found unsuitable and shunted back to Panjim, and far from following up on his innovative policy tracks, these were ditched, and the defence ministry babus recovered their generalist “know nothing, take the easy way out” decisionmaking turf. They succeeded in miring the atmanirbharta (arms self-sufficiency) programme, for instance, in the ‘Make in India’-‘Made in India’ confusion at the centre of it. Sure, if Track 2 is what this lot of thinktanks and academics is about, then Jaishankar is right — where’s the need for them?

Jaishankar’s claims about “Track 1” is preposterous nonsense, however, once, the Centre for Policy hoves into view. Unlike the sarkari/semi-sarkari “thinktanks”, CPR is the only one of its kind that took its role seriously as a source of alternative policy ideas and tacked to an independent policy wind, and was recognised worldwide for producing first rate policy research, offering alternative policy templates and advice to ministries and departments of government over the years. How many people know, for instance, that at the December 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, a CPR faculty member, now a young international law Don at Oxford University, was hired by the Danish government for its summit secretariat and channeled inside dope to the Indian delegation to help hone its tactics and shape its positions? Or, that CPR did the original work on river waters and the Farrakka Barrage? And that its faculty pretty much shaped the country’s environment laws? MEA has been particularly reluctant to give credit to CPR’s work in the foreign policy field, even though the 2012 ‘Nonalignment 2.0’ Report (https://cprindia.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/NonAlignment-2.pdf ) saw Manmohan Singh’s 2nd NSA, MK Narayanan, sing its praises at its release. Written under the then Centre’s President, Bhanu Pratap Mehta’s guidance it, in fact, forms the unacknowledged general policy framework of the Modi government, and is the basis for Jaishankar’s crowing about Track 1 being miles ahead of Track 2.

If CPR’s ‘Nonalignment 2.0’ was geared for the MEA mainstream, alternate thinking on national security-dominated foreign and military policies and calculus, was found in my many books. (This aspect is elaborated by third parties in several chapters, including by Manmohan Singh’s NSA, Shivshankar Menon in Kanti Bajpai, ed., How Realist is India’s National Security Policy? published by Routledge in 2023) The ideas and concepts in the books and my writings were transmitted and entered the government, ministerial, and military thought circles and policy streams through various routes — interactions with political leaders (in my case, direct contacts and communications with the late Jaswant Singh and KC Pant), seminars and conferences here at home and abroad, and interactions with senior officers of the armed services and paramilitaries via lectures at higher training institutions, formation “study weeks”, and conferences called by theatre commanders, and the Strategic Nuclear Orientation Course (SNOC) I was tasked to conceive and conducted for Brigadier rank officers and equivalent and above for many years. SNOC, incidentally, reflected the then chairman Chiefs of Staff Committee and CNS Admiral Arun Prakash’s singular conviction that the armed services needed, what he called “ginger groups”, within them that “thought outside the box” and challenged the mainstream views especially on strategic issues. The present state of strategic understanding of nuclear security and deterrence in the military generally can be gauged from the fact that the Centre for Joint Warfare Studies, run by the army, that was supposed to carry on with the course dropped it some years back resulting in the armed services having no worthwhile knowledge of nuclear warfare and deterrence. The Strategic Forces Command does not count because it is manned by officers on rotational postings.

Indeed, the 2008 Indian-US nuclear deal that Jaishankar believes is the crowning glory at least of his career and is being projected as the peak achievement of the recently deceased Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, and as opening the doors for the Modi regime’s bettering of relations with the US, was also CPR’s “finest hour”. Providing realtime, technically proficient, analysis and warnings in op-eds and other media interfaces about the pitfalls for the country in this deal and its various provisions, a few stellar nuclear stalwarts — former chairman of the atomic energy commission PK Iyengar, ex-director of BARC, Trombay, AN Prasad, President of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, A Gopalakrishnan, alongwith this analyst, almost derailed Jaishankar’s handiwork — the N-deal. (For these prophetic essays that are still relevant, see Iyengar, Prasad,Gopalakrishnan, Karnad, Strategic Sellout: Indian-US Nuclear Deal, Pentagon Press, 2009).

While the late Manmohan Singh was perfectly correct in seeking a rapprochement with the United States as a pathway to India’s economic prosperity, he did not dictate the contents of the deal nor how it was to be negotiated. That was left to the tender mercies of the “professional” — Jaishankar, as Joint Secretary (Americas) in MEA, the lead Indian negotiator. Rather than stick immovably to core principles protective of national security and the national interest — as, say, the Chinese negotiators invariably did in key negotiations with the US government, starting with the Nixon Administration in the 1970s, that obtained for China massive investment flows and manufacturing wherewithal to set it up as the premier trading nation it is today, and advanced military and aviation production tech from the US that has turned the PLA into a modern entity, Jaishankar compromised and compromised some more at the negotiating table and ended up stripping India of its sovereign security imperative to conduct thermonuclear tests.

When some 20 years from now the official documents of these talks will be declassified on the 30-year schedule of the US National Archives, it will be become plain just how much Jaishankar’s lack of appreciation of the nuclear military angle and his willingness to surrender the country’s strategic security — something the American negotiators sensed, and ruthlessly capitalised on, resulted in advancing America’s longstanding nonproliferation goal of gutting the Indian nuclear weapons programme. By then many of us will have been long gone, and Jaishankar’s heinous role in thus strategically hobbling India will have faded into history.

Had Jaishankar played hardball, the US would have relented because there were many powerful ‘long view’ elements in the Pentagon and the White House even then, for instance, who were pleading to have India in America’s corner in the coming clash against China in Asia. But then the country had Jaishankar, who is partial to a policy tilt US-wards as the steward at MEA, as was Subrahmanyam. And when is a father’s son in the same business not influenced by the paterfamilias?

Worse, from India’s point of view, another former generalist diplomat, Natwar Singh, as the Minister of State in MEA, far from reining in Jaishankar’s negotiating bias and tendencies, pushed Manmohan Singh to accept the final document that the US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s team had managed to get out of Jaishankar. The last time I met the late Natwar Singh, some time before he passed away, he regreted his “haste” in seeking the nuclear deal, which I took as a confession that he had erred in bolstering the negotiating process and its end product. Conclusion: Jaishankar did his job reprehensibly, seemingly unmindful of the ramifications of signing away the nuclear testing option and was thus complicit in India’s nuclear and strategic reduction.

To clarify the record some more, Manmohan S was not convinced by Natwar’s case for Jaishankar’s draft agreement, and sought clearance from the then chairman, atomic energy commission, the lily livered Anil Kakodkar, whom Natwar coerced into acquiescing in the deal. By then the political situation, thanks to CPR’s public campaign against it, had heated up in Delhi with uneasy coalition partners making noises against it. It led to the Congress Party chief Sonia Gandhi asking Manmohan Singh to hold off on signing it. It is at this juncture that Manmohan Singh took ownership, saying essentially that he had negotiated in good faith and now that an accord was ready he could not back down from it, and offered his resignation. It was a power play Sonia G could not resist and the N-deal went through.

Kakodkar could offer no worthwhile defence when his senior colleagues such as Iyengar accused him of perfidious behaviour in accepting the deal. Slack-jawed, he, in turn, passed the buck to the still more disreputable R Chidambaram, whom he succeeded as the bossman in Trombay. Going against every evidence including the data produced by Director, Field Testing at Pokhran, Dr. K Santhanam, Chidambram farcically declared the fizzled 1998 S-1 thermonuclear test a great success and, further, that India never needed to test again! This last was apparently the scientific premise and the green signal for Jaishankar’s compromises that resulted in a ban on India’s resuming nuclear tests written into the N-deal text that has kept this country’s weapons technology frozen and capped at the basic low yield fission weapons level Washington wanted it at that a puny Pakistan is at— the better for the US to play off the two squabbling South Asian states. FYI, Chidambaram is Jaishankar’s uncle! Wheels within wheels! It shoved the Indian weapons programme into the well of despond it is presently wallowing in, even as Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is marching ahead with an intercontinental ballistic missile and cruise missile tech the Chinese have helpfully provided Islamabad via the North Korean route.

By the way, all my books and writings in such severely realist vein, is what has got under Jaishankar’s skin, getting him to issue a warning against me for rubbishing the Indian nuclear weapons inventory and the country’s manifestly flawed deterrent posture. This I readily I admit, I do, because unlike him, I do not care for the country and its people, its government and military, to remain deluded about India being up to scratch on the thermonuclear front vis a vis China just so Jaishankar escapes his responsibility for crafting an accord massively damaging of vital national security interests.

Over the last 35-odd years, I have made the case for vigorously proactive foreign and military policies, expansive geopolitics (based on a collective security architecture in Asia to ringfence China, having Israel and Japan at the two ends, the Southeast Asian countries as the vulnerable underbelly poviding a fighting frontage on the South China Sea, and India as the pivot able to switch forces and resources east and to the west articulated in my 1994 book — Future Imperilled: India’s Security in the 1990s and Beyond), which the MEA has accepted as its plan form. And I have advocated in these books an LAC-deployed nuclear posture involving not only the resumption of open-ended thermonuclear testing which a properly primed Washington would happily accommodate because of the strategic necessity to shore up its Asian partnerships, but also the jettisoning of the No First Use principle exclusively against China to counter PLA’s manifest comprehensive conventional military superiority. It may not prevent the territorial creep by the PLA but it will deter China from escalating the hostilities that may occur. My stress has been on a singleminded focus on China as the primary threat, the realisation of a strictly reciprocal “eye for an eye”-China strategy inclusive of equipping China’s neighbours with nuclear missiles as a belated response to Beijing’s nuclear missile arming Pakistan — a recommendation that a gutless Indian government has, some 25 years after I first made it in NSAB, watered down to transferring conventional Brahmos cruise missiles to Philippines, Vietnam, et al.

These books also argued just why relying on the US is foolish and foolhardy — a point amply proved by the Trump Presidency the first time around that will be hammered in again come January 20, 2025 when he reoccupies the White House, cementing America’s record as an inconstant friend and partner, not one to be trusted in any manner, for any reason, certainly not with India’s strategic security or even for military high-tech. It is something other Asian states are beginning to acknowledge but the Modi-Jaishankar foreign policy blithely ignores. Consider just this: If the China behemoth is what America fears, why does it stop India from testing to get high yield Hydrogen Bombs to match China’s and thus somewhat neutralise Chinese strategic power? Wouldn’t that help the US cause as well? Do such actions inspire confidence in the US as friend and quasi-ally?

And yet, here we have Jaishankar trumpeting his supposed foreign policy successes in terms of depending on the very same US for India’s security, technology advancement, and access to its market for Indian talent, exports and economic wellbeing. This when the new avatar of Trump promises even greater stringency in tariffing all trade out of business, erecting walls to keep out foreigners, including the likely outcome of the MAGA clash with Vivek Ramaswsami-Elon Musk over an open green card regime that Indians have monopolised, and which will likely end, terminating the H1B visa joyride the Indian government has been witlessly promoting at the expense of improving the job prospects for the youth at home so they don’t have to seek a future abroad. Recall too that Trump shut down the US collaboration to develop the Indian Kaveri jet engine. But he will be overjoyed to sell anything the Indian military wants, but not the “know how and know why” to make India a competing seller of military goods. Oh, no! But Modi, Jaishankar and MEA, like the Bourbons in France remember nothing and learned nothing, and are positioning India to run into the new Trump Administration’s buzzsaw. With what results will become clear soon enough.

Jaishankar does not think any advocacy over the years for a “hawkish”, more nationalist, less compromising, stance should be the template for India’s foreign and military policy, plans and posture. Rather he is animated by the potential and possibilities promised by diplomacy and diplomatic methods, reflected in his flexible attitude to bartering away vital national interests.

Let us, in this context of clashing polemics, peruse Jaishankar’s other points made at the magazine function. He has propounded India as “Vishwabandhu” — a concept he settled on after Modi had strained everyone’s credulity with the vaporous notion of India as “Vishwaguru”. Except, vishwabandhu is a mirror image of the Nehruvian nonalignment — the same old, same old, especially because that’s how the Western policy audience it is targeted at, perceives it. Like in the 1950s, India has feet in both camps — US-West and Russia-China, and expects to gain from it. But Jaishankar insists it “signifies” something new — a “realism, which is contemporary [and] ambitious”. Is the nation’s terminal ambition then to remain content with managing this “feet in both camps” posture? Seemingly so, because he went on to describe this posture management policy as somehow ending in India becoming “a leading power”! Even this low level ambition may be beyond India’s reach but he, perhaps, believes in magic because reality is more unforgiving. “Positioning” India in this a manner, according to him, will result in the country having “the most friends, the least problems, the best relationships, the minimal baggage”. This “optimal” positioning, he suggests, is best in a “global landscape” that’s “become very volatile,…very turbulent, …very uncertain.”

Meaning, in troubled times he wants India to jump on to the American bandwagon as NATO countries and many Asian states have long done and chosen to continue to do, but are now questioning their wisdom in doing so, with many of them trying to take corrective measures. Such as an all-European armed force and nuclear deterrent. Jaishankar doesn’t reckon that by climbing on to Washington’s lap Modi will have to do what leaders in Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Singapore, Manila, Jakarta routinely do — kiss the US President’s….. That is where this kind of thinking will get India. All the fancy diplomatic traipsing around Jaishankar has done with the incoming Trump’s NSA, Mike Walz, will avail of little if the Modi regime refuses to dance to Trump’s tune.

The fact is the Vishwabandhu stuff is sustainable only for so long as the three major players — the US, Russia and China play along, and massage New Delhi’s conceit about India being above the fray and too important to alienate. What happens if the US sanctions India more frontally for its energy trade with Russia, or for buying more Russian hardware at the expense of counterpart American offers, and if China and the US reach a modus vivendi — the G2 conceived during Barrack Obama’s tenure to run the world, leaving India economically high and dry, and military-wise up a creek because one of the main tenets of keeping Washington humoured is, as Modi and Jaishankar have discovered, buying more of their high-value military hardware and weapons and surveillance platforms? Will THIS lead to “Viksit Bharat” that Jaishankar explained “means India’s rise”?

Still more problematic is his contention that amidst “uncertainty”, “predictability …and stability” are needed “more than anything else.” Actually, for a riser like India what is requried is for it to be disruptive like hell, to “move fast, break things” as Elon Musk is advising Trump to do. Instead, Jaishankar hopes to get the country over this hump with the same antique remedy, a “mixture of offense, of defense, of hedging, of prudence, of joining in rebalancing, of participating in globalization, or to be more accurate, re-globalization, hopefully on different terms, of taking advantage of interdependence, …accelerating multipolarity and of utilizing for our benefit fully the impact of technology.” In short, to carry on doing what New Delhi has been doing — fiddling on the margins as the statist Modi has done in not overhauling the economic system at home and proving himself the last true prop for the Nehruvian socialist state as I argued in my 2018 book Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition — a thesis now backed by his one time economic adviser Surjit Bhalla! (See Bhalla’s Dec 8 Indian Express op-ed — “When dreams of Viksit Bharat stumble over Nehruvian impulses”, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/when-dreams-of-viksit-bharat-stumble-over-nehruvian-impulses-9709073/) So laggardly have been Modi’s economic, land, and labour reforms, Vietnam has raced ahead in replacing China in the global supply chain as the preferred source of quality manufactured goods, including mobile telephones, for the US and the West, even as India is scratching around, too late as always to do anything much or to benefit hugely from it.

But here’s Jaishankar articulating his geopolitics as a “world in concentric circles. So you have a neighborhood, first, you can say, a SAGAR in the oceans, the Act East and Indo-Pacific to the East, the Gulf and the whole Link West and the IMEC to the West, leading all the way up to Eurasia and to Europe.” Except, very little of any of this has actually taken off. Because, for one, the “neighbourhood first” is a disaster with MEA and Indian intel having no inkling, leave alone initiating prompt actions to preempt the ouster of Sheikh Hasina from Dhaka, or to prevent the turn of events in Kathmandu. With Pakistan army returning to Bangladesh and Nepal closing in with Beijing, our South Asia policy is in tatters — the rethink by Colombo and Male proving small consolation. Because the Indo-Pacific is contested primarily by the US and China, India is out in the cold as New Delhi has neither made bold to take forceful steps to undermine Chinese buildup east and west of the Malacca Strait nor is prepared to tie in more fully militarily with at least some of the Quad countries. And because, IMEC, I2U2, etc are still a gleam in the eye compared to Chinese BRI’s expanded footprint.

The second larger circle is “the world stage” where, with not much evidence by way of support, he Jaishankar claims India is “a player of consequence, a player to whom others turn to” before proceeding to mislabel India’s trademark risk averse policy as “bashful”, and to talk of “a multi-vector foreign policy” without anywhere mentioning that the single most powerful vector in a big country’s foreign policy quiver — distantly deployable hard military power, is missing in India. Because the Indian armed services, mirroring the government’s prejudces and reticence, never prioritised acquiring such capability. Without it, the country is minus an expeditionary forces muscle and is unable to make a splash as argued at length in my 2015 book — Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet).

But then Jaishankar shrinks our ambitions and horizons and sets us all straight by saying, without much ceremony, that India under Modi’s watch and during his time at the steering wheel, seeks nothing more than to become a “middle and upper middle power”. Almost as if India is a bright lower class Indian seeking a H1B visa hoping eventually to make good under the American sun! With this small goal in mind, he states, that “We need to focus and play regional contradictions to our benefit,…create sets of balances whose aggregate actually favors India’s rise” before rounding in on “a grand strategy” that he promises, will make the country a “leading power one day”. That “one day”, however, is seemingly so far away, he feels it necessary to amplify that his “plan [is not] for today or tomorrow, but for the next generation, maybe even beyond that” and that the BJP regime “is actually planning …., trying to expand its footprint [but] lightly”. He thereafter proceeds to console such countrymen as are by now thoroughly discombobulated by his verbal diarrhea as they have long taken Modi’s rhetoric of far grander results faster a bit more seriously than they should have done, by saying what his regime is attempting is only “a beginning, and beginnings, at the end of the day, are the start of processes.” So, there is is a process to contend with as well once the beginnings are done with. Oh, Boy!

Next, Jaishankar pitches in with some diplomatic backpedalling, referencing what he calls “a multi-generational foreign policy… a mix”, by his account, “of the old and new, the issues that we have historically confronted, many of them [that] have not gone away.” so, yea, insecure borders, terrorism, yadda, yadda, so what is new?

Further, he talks of the foreign policy laying “much greater stress on economic diplomacy” than in the past 10 years. And he regurgitates what the PM has been bellowing from the rooftops for a while now about making India central to the global supply chain by “rerouting”. Except, as already pointed out, such rerouting is limited by the Modi government’s seeming incapacity to create a business-friendly ecosystem more than in words, which the existing system of regulatory controls won’t permit because the babudom is in no hurry to speed the country’s progress if it cuts into their power, and because Modi is unwilling radically to transform it. So India is destined to trudge along, while Asian states like Vietnam and Malaysia with more nimble regimes steal a march.

He then muddles into an area that’s obviously beyond his ken by suggesting that the country leapfrog the grimy smokestack industrial stage, and step smartly into the “the digital era” — a bill of goods last sold by the former University of Chicago economist, Raghuram Rajan, who was imported as economic adviser to the PM and preached ridiculously that India need only specialise in software and financial services while relying on Chinese and other manufacturers for its material needs! Jaishankar finally alights on the “global workplace” to enlarge which, he says, has been the one point agenda of the Modi government over the last decade, with every passing leader from the West being pigeonholed for more H1B visas and equivalents for trained Indian manpower to use as an unemployment pressure valve. Really enthusiastic now, he next reels out statistics pertaining to the export of skilled talent “growing in leaps and bounds [and] of some 33-34 million Indian nationals and persons of Indian origin working abroad” before assuring everyone in the audience that “these numbers are going to go up dramatically in the coming years [and] going to see an explosion in mobility because there will be a demand for talent coupled with very sharp demographic deficits in different parts of the world.” And that’s a change this government is eagerly awaiting.

For most self-respecting countries, it’d be a matter of the greatest national shame for its prime minister and foreign minister to proclaim to the world that its economy and systems are so weak and rotten, the country simply cannot afford to have the local engineering, scientific and managerial talent stay at home and make good. For Modi and Jaishankar, however, it is an accomplishment to boast about!

And all the promised goodies, moreover, that are supposed to deliver prosperity to India are external and likely realised in the country’s “tomorrows” — India-Middle East Economic Corridor, the International North-South Transport Corridor, the trilateral highway ending up, in the minister’s words, “somewhere in the Gulf of Tonkin”. “When you put all these connectivity initiatives in place” Jaishankar purred, they [will] take years…, maybe a decade to realize” all of which is something to look forward to because “a lot of this connectivity is going to run through India”. This to say don’t expect any results anytime soon.

And he paints the international scene without “fixed point collaborations” as allowing India to be a member of QUAD one day, member of BRICS the next, and participate in SCO on the third day and simultaneously “lead the Global South” and “be present at G7 meetings.” It calls, he says, “for a different kind of flexibility and nimbleness” that will require India to be a first responder in the extended neighbourhood [and] part of an international response whenever such a thing is warranted.”

By way of summation, he talks of “open architecture, more multiple choices, but much deeper involvement, many more complex decisions” and no guarantee of success (it will be “very hard to predict how it’s going to go”) but India, Jaishankar says, will avoid getting into “the kind of defensive crouch into which we had, for a variety of reasons, got into”. Pray, how is the country to escape its “defensive crouch” if the Indian military, by its own devising and the government’s assistance, is reduced to a near nullity? Ah, yes, import arms– this Jaishankar does not recommend. But then he has found no role for the Indian military in regional and international relations for him to expatiate on in this or earlier speeches! Such is the pixilated reality Jaishankar is selling to Indians.

Having made it his business to think small, and to make India a dependency palpably shrinking, in the process, India’s ambitions to a middle power, and otherwise conceiving of every possible way and some to make the country a peonish secondary power surviving on the lifeline the West, the Gulf countries, or whoever else throws it as India sinks under the weight of its unemployed millions by offering a few lucky Indians jobs in their countries, Jaishankar, our minister for external affairs, asks us all “to think big, to think long, but to think smart.”

OK, then!!!

I am frustrated and all tired out, as many others may be, by the small-time ambitions and plans and matching strategy and policies for this country that Jaishankar constantly, mind-numbingly, and endlessly verbalises. If any of it makes any sense to anybody, I am happy to be tutored in the intricacies of the current foreign policy because I, for one, can’t make head or tail of it, other than to point out that what the country may be getting into is a real national security pickle.