Remember the popular Hindi folksong-ish number “एक रहिन ईर, एक रहिन बीर, एक रहिन फत्ते और एक रहे हम” ? Hugely popularized by Amitabh Bacchan (an almost-God of an actor and lead singer of the song), this Bally Sagoo composition is about four fun-loving friends doing things together. At the core of the song was unsullied friendship, mischiefs notwithstanding.
Take the Operation Sindoor, India’s offensive against Islamist-terrorists camps in Pakistan in May-2025. Some fellow citizens, displaying their naiveite, wanted the government to name the countries that supported India during the Operation. The reason underlying the question was not a genuine concern. Given the deep acrimony that characterizes our domestic politics today, the idea was to cock a snook at the government. Why ? Pakistan was clandestinely supported by China, Türkiye and the USA. India chose not to name any. Having said that, I am not sure if anyone can emphatically discount the grapevine that Russia and Israel did lend India a helping hand. Equally clandestinely. India-baiters aside, did any country oppose India’s position or the form or the scale of the Operation ? Let’s look back. India has fought five full-scale wars with China and Pakistan combined. Did any country support India but for Russia (USSR) and Israel ? On the contrary, in the war with Pakistan (1971, Bangladesh liberation war) the USA, Britain and China actually opposed India militarily. Today, India has changed. It seeks its rightful place in the world order. Do the critics of this pursuit want the countries aligned to India to be more corporeal ? Kind of friends-of-India coming together and supplementing India’s wars every time. How very juvenile !
Earlier India fought for its survival. Today India fights for acknowledgement and respect. Precisely for this reason, it is creating ripples in the silent waters of the global power-pools. Let’s visit the reality. In the world full of political-mercenaries today, the idea of friendship stands redefined. Friendship, in the context of international geo-politics, trade and resource-sharing, is majorly transactional. For two countries to be friends they need to be upfront in terms of their usefulness to each other. Alternatively, between the two, one needs to be a client-state (read, a poodle). Even within an established friendship, the age-old construct that a friend’s enemy is my enemy too is considered amateurish. Countries today are pre-occupied, protecting and furthering their own interests. Therefore, expending bandwidths and resources on the causes that are not theirs is not a priority. Unless, of course, there is a big axe to grind. The USA today is fighting a lone war with Iran for months after having Trump-ed almost all friendly countries. Ukraine (despite friends in the USA, Europe and UK) is being pummeled by Russia for years. Saudi Arab has been repeatedly smacked by the Houthis despite all the shoutings from the rooftop by the Muslim ummah in support and hyped promises (by Türkiye and Pakistan) under the so-called Mecca Agreement. Hamas is getting hammered for years by Israel in a bloody conflict despite support of many friendly countries, organizations and advocacy-groups. Taiwan lives under the ominous shadows of war-like uncertainties originating from China despite support of the USA. The President of Venezuela and his wife are kidnapped by the USA yet its closest allies Cuba, Nicaragua etc. keep mum. Notwithstanding a long history of friendship, the USA wants to take over a sovereign Canada as its 51st state. The list is long. But the lessons aren’t.
There are no friends today, only issue-based collaborators requiring interests to be co-terminus. Sans theatrics, India needs to shed the old, relationship-based idea of friendship if it wants to walk tall. In this context, three pain-points emerge out of India’s geography and chequered history.
Beware of the barking dogs. Heedful of the silent ones.
That India could be friends with its neighbors is a delusional idea. Well, largely. A failed nation called Pakistan in our backyard, harboring quixotic ambitions to lead the Muslim ummah one day, leverage its nuclear-power credentials and earn some relevance. An ungrateful nation, Bangladesh, for whose cause many brave Indian soldiers laid down their lives. A bellicose China which, besides indulging India in one war and multiple skirmishes at the borders, doesn’t spare any opportunity to hurt India’s interests at various fora. Nepal should have been a brother-country but for its chameleonic ways which are prompted by China and the USA. There is a welcome country in Sri Lanka which has reconciled to the idea of a new India whilst parallelly addressing the bumps in the relationship. If one can afford ignoring insurgency and trafficking via the North-East, Myanmar has not been very inimical to the interests of India. Much cannot be said about Afghanistan as our shared boundary (Wakhan Corridor / Gilgit-Baltistan) is illegally occupied by Pakistan. Bhutan is the only neighbor which is at peace with India in all ways, physical and spiritual. Geo-politically speaking, being India is not a matter of envy. Given the scenario, would someone really want to know as to how many in our neighborhood can be counted as friends ? The idiots among us would want to dilute the reality of the situation by creating a pre-Modi and post-Modi dichotomy to suit their respective agendas. Let’s wish them speedy recovery.
Take-away: Our neighborhood-management plans should be totally matter-of-factly. Remorselessly ignoring philanthropy, humanitarianism or mushy ideals unless we have very strong interests to protect or to further. We need to walk alone to walk tall.
If it doesn’t have my monkey, it’s not my circus.
Over 34,000 Indian soldiers lost their lives in the World War One (1914-18). Similarly, around 87,000 Indian soldiers never returned home from the World War Two (1939-45). Whose wars were these ? What was India’s stake ? Except that we were compelled to align our fate with that of our British rulers or the assurances for an independent India, does the hindsight offer any other hypothesis to explain the death of over 120,000 brave Indians in these two wars? In the liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971, India sacrificed around 3,800 of its military personnel. What was the prompt for India ? Over three million Bangladeshi civilians were massacred and thirty million rendered homeless. Around half a million women were raped and their private parts were mutilated by Pakistani military and Razakars. The acts which were nauseatingly explained away as maal-e-ghanimat (“लूट का माल” / “booty of war”) by Yahya Khan, the then president of Pakistan. How should India respond when the same Bangladesh pairs with the perpetrator (Pakistan) of heinous crimes against its own citizenry to find ways to sodomize India. Similarly, India got embroiled in the Sri Lanka Civil War (1987-90). Continuous influx of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees into India triggered our involvement in Sri Lanka as Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF). The mandate to IPKF was to disarm the militant groups (LTTE majorly) and facilitate formation of an administrative set-up. Nearly 1,165 personnel of the Indian military lost their lives in Sri Lanka. What were the wages of the good work and kick-backs of the sacrifices ? IPKF personnel were later accused of rapes and human rights violation.
Take-away: Don’t poke your nose in the affairs of others unless you have your own, very strong interests to protect or to further. No point baking the brownies that one cannot eat.
It’s a theatre of the absurd.
Today, friends you depend upon twist arms. They blackmail too, if dependencies on them enter the realm of the critical. If you are at the receiving end of the friendship, more often you are expected to settle for sub-optimal outcomes. Let’s examine the India scenario. Our massive trade surplus emboldens the USA to threaten us repeatedly in ways more than one. On the other hand, despite a large trade deficit, China spares no opportunity to press our raw nerves often and care two hoots. India’s near-total dependence on others for energy faces serious disruptions in the supply-chains due to wars involving the supplier-nations far away. To add to that, the joker in the USA threatens us, hilariously though, with incremental tariffs for sourcing energy from our traditional suppliers. Nearly 55% of our population is engaged in agriculture & allied activities and yet we import agricultural products. A situation caused by our own stupidity to look at agricultural reforms through the prism of electoral politics. More often than not even the agricultural supplies get constricted by the happenings in the political ecosystem of supplier-friends. Acknowledged worldwide for the IT-services, India has nothing to write home about when it comes to the IT-products, a situation which cedes room to the USA (which accounts for over 54% of our IT-services exports) to blackmail us. It may be a farcical possibility today, the absence of home-grown, public-facing technology platforms (operating systems, search-engines, email, GPS, social-media etc.) carries the potential of a doomsday scenario for India. Despite being the world’s largest importer of defense equipment, we have been able to take only a few baby-steps, that too recently, obligating the suppliers to substantive indigenization. Why ? Because some friendly-countries see a threat of competition in India.
Take-away: A comprehensively empowered team needs to be tasked with de-risking India in the areas of energy-security, agricultural imports, IT products, public-facing technology and indigenization of defense-imports.