Wake-up call for our ‘China-watchers’

The Chinese Communist Party invitation to BJP president Nitin Gadkari to lead a first-ever party delegation to China will create much ‘ideological’ confusion among the noisy, self-appointed Indian nationalist camp in our strategic community who arrogate to themselves the right to be vituperative at a personal level to any rational interlocutor who dares to articulate views on China at variance with their own sermons. At the moment, they are having a field day huddled within their secretive internet groups like school children and exciting themselves and each other over a brilliant speech made by an extraordinary diplomat-scholar on China, Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani (dean of the Lee Kuan Yew school of diplomacy in the Singapore National University who previously served as ambassador to US and UN in a most distinguished diplomatic career) at the Habitat in Delhi last week to the creme de la creme of the Indian strategic community. Briefly put, our self-appointed natiionalist-wallahs in the strategic community are ranting over Mahbubani’s advice that India should not squander away the historic opportunity of Asia’s rise (primarily China and India’s rise) to be used by the West as hedge against China. It is on occasions like this that these so-called “nationalists” are best understood as the American lobby in India. Their agenda is simple: tie India somehow to the apron strings of the US.