Trump treats China, which buys much more oil from Russia than we do, with kid gloves in inverse proportion to the contempt he reserves for us

We have a grand strategic relationship with the United States. It is the grandest of all the strategic relationships we have, the showpiece, the role model, the pièce de résistance. We have other strategic relationships as well. We have a strategic relationship with Mongolia. We have one with Namibia as well. Even Kazakhstan. We have over two dozen strategic relationships at least. Nothing compares, though, to the one we have with the United States, the mother of all strategic relationships.

It is the shiniest example, one that keeps our Amreeki Bhakt Indians particularly chuffed and puffed, though not our farmers and dairy-wallahs and fisherfolk so much. Our foreign policy establishment has painstakingly brought the relationship to this level, stacking up nearly all the eggs here. We began sidling up soon after the Son of Pokhran, ignoring naysayers who argued it would be the kiss of death. It has not been a bottom-up phenomenon but a top-down one, with <Ab Ki Bar Trump Sarkar> as the clarion call. It was billed as a close-up, close-bonding, mint-breathy, intimate strategic relationship—the one that got better the closer you got till you were two hearts beating as one. 

Look closer. Is it really? Nah, it is more of a spit and polish type of relationship. Every day someone or other in the Trump administration, from Trump downwards, whether it is the Secretary of State, the Treasury Secretary, sundry advisers like Peter Navarro, White House major-domos like Stephen Miller, or even that new model Barbie spokesperson, anybody and everybody in fact, spits out a steady stream of undiplomatic epithets at New Delhi. Every day, as the song goes, the paperboy brings more. Then every day our prime-time foreign policy analysts apply the Humpty Dumpty polish, attempting to put it all together again.

Russia very bad, very bad, we are lectured, even as Trump curtsies Putin the same way a 19th-century Russian vassal would treat royalty from the House of Romanov. You can hear the obsequiousness in Trump’s after-event comments, see it in his body language, and smell it in the forward retreat of the quickly recongealing red lines, from cease-fire to portents of a full-blown agreement. All the while Putin polishes to good effect the still-clanging echoes of the nineties German Unification-era American promises against NATO expansion made famous by James Baker—`not an inch eastward’, not an inch.

Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, keen observer of ironical beauty that she is, was moved to exulting on viewing the vast expanse of the Alaskan carpet-scape, “They spent three years telling everyone Russia was isolated, and today they saw the beautiful red carpet laid out for the Russian president in the US.” Putin has Trump on a string while sitting on a rainbow. He’s going to take it nice and easy.

Ah, such beautiful, seductive red carpet that Trump sometimes lays out. We are nowhere in its swirl. What happened that makes American Bwana say if we are strategic partners, we better start acting the part? If we are getting such vituperative lashings daily in public, imagine what the heat must be like in the kitchen. The smell in our noses says the rot is not in Denmark. We are not being told something here.

It seems that the current crème de la crème of our Indian foreign policy blokes look and dress and speak as though they are men of action. But that’s as far as it goes. Other than the behind-the-scenes marshalling for exotic travel medals, 28 in ten years and counting, our foreign policy lot have precious little to show for their efforts. They are more like characters in an absurd play in search of a plot. Well, the sad fact is not all the medals in the world equal one putative Nobel Peace Prize. All of them put together is not going to save us from the quandary we face. 

Working backwards in ipso facto style, it is possible to make a convincing argument that the most charitable explanation is our strategic geniuses comprehensively misread the cue cards and the script of the play they were part of, where they mistook bit roles for lead roles. The lead actors sometimes call up to brief the side characters of the real goings-on, giving local audiences the impression that a grand play is afoot. In the larger play, the script is being rewritten even as New Delhi mutely watches. We have no lines to speak, no cards to play. The others hold the strong cards.

A US trade adviser accuses, “Look, India is ‘cosying up to China.’” Delicious Chinese irony. It is the same China which prime minister Vajpayee, explaining away the Son of Pokhran, said was the basis of our nuclear tests, telling president Clinton, “To add to the distrust, that country has materially helped another neighbour of ours to become a covert nuclear weapons state. At the hands of this bitter neighbour, we have suffered three aggressions in the last 50 years. And for the last ten years we have been the victim of unremitting terrorism sponsored by it in several parts of India, especially Punjab and J&K.” He couldn’t bring himself to name the bitter neighbour in the letter that the Clinton administration duly leaked to the New York Times, which is how we knew about it.

See, again, the same confusion of roles. It’s Groundhog Day all over again. We were told after May by our military brass, with the sanction of the higher-ups, that in the Hall of Mirrors, we were actually fighting China again while all the time we thought we were fighting Pakistan. We chuckled as we told ourselves we won. Yet we find ourselves in the strategic doghouse, all our foreign policy planks crashing like ninepins.

Ipso facto, Trump either didn’t buy our argument or worse. It is the latter we should be concerned about, a night without end. Trump treats China, which buys much more oil from Russia than we do, with kid gloves in inverse proportion to the contempt that he reserves for us, with Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir Ahmad Shah, Pakistan’s 11th Chief of Army Staff, ensconced in throne-lap. Trump is being more than indulgent to Munir, a la King Kong atop the Empire State Building to Jessica Lange, sticking the FTO label on Baloch separatists, dreaming of a Trump Oil Corridor in Islamabad’s Backyard Badlands as Munir nibbles his ear.

Three years is a long time in power. Munir is on song. Where does that leave Delhi? Dependent on outcomes. In Ukraine. In Islamabad. In Washington. Dependent on Beijing’s calculus. Reduced to just so much BRIC-a-brac. A ship out in the raging storm in a series of moonless, starless nights, without anchor, sail, or rudder or oars. In other words, the famous, very famous ‘strategic autonomy’ is in full play. Our stylishly kilted men of action are also singing, with the sirens as choristers. Luck be a lady tonight!