Some things to Reconsider

The job of a Prime Minister is never an easy one. Some inherit a storm; others inherit calm seas with a steady wind. Jawaharlal Nehru got the raw end of the deal: a traumatised, partitioned land, millions uprooted, and the Cold War beginning to freeze the world in two hostile blocs. Lal Bahadur Shastri died a war time Prime Minister, and Indira Gandhi presided over a war-ravaged economy, staring across hostile borders at Pakistan and China while the superpowers treated India as a pawn. Morarji Desai stumbled into South Block after the Emergency, the West reeling from stagflation and his own coalition too weak to command authority. Rajiv Gandhi, with a brute majority in Parliament, was besieged by multiple insurgencies at home and a belligerent Zia-ul-Haq across the border. P.V. Narasimha Rao had to deal with the mother of all crises—the 1991 balance of payments collapse —just as the Soviet Union, India’s security blanket, disintegrated into history. Even Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who loo...

 https://www.business-standard.com/opinion/columns/india-s-diplomacy-needs-to-move-from-demonstrative-style-to-hard-substance-125080501933_1.html Let’s begin with the obvious. R Jagannathan’s piece titled “India needs to up its diplomatic game” published in Business Standard dated Aug 6,2025 starts with the right note but soon meanders into a muddled defence of the very failures it gestures toward. The title implies urgency, even introspection. But the essay itself does little more than catalogue geopolitical anxieties while clinging to the same photo-op-driven framework that has defined Indian foreign policy for over a decade. To his credit, Jagannathan does briefly acknowledge the hollowness of Narendra Modi’s personal rapport-based diplomacy, stating that “personal rapport with global leaders is not a solid enough basis for conducting the kind of hard-nosed diplomacy that can deliver net gains for the country.” He nods at the performative spectacles of “Howdy Modi,” “Namaste...