A Resolute, Resilient People and Their Partners

Adversity and poverty are harsh schools, and those who come out of such tests, including several hundred million people in India, are ready to face up to the challenges coming their way.

- M.D. NALAPAT

An amazing coincidence. Just when Apple and other top US brands announce that they are downsizing operations in China and ramping up production in India, comes the Pahalgam terror attack. GHQ Rawalpindi has become nothing more than a pliant instrument of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of China, so it obligingly launches the Pahalgam terror attack.

The intent was to cause communal unrest not just in Kashmir but throughout the country, so that India would not be perceived as a safe destination. It is so because successive governments in India resisted pressure from the US in particular, which, especially during the stint in the White House of Bill Clinton, worked hard at forcing India to denuclearize. The country did not, and the consequence is that it has built up a nuclear deterrent that is sufficient to ensure Mutual Assured Destruction should any hostile country launch a nuclear war against India.

Where conventional forces are concerned, the people of India are as ready to face the exigencies of combat as the PLA was during the time of Mao Zedong. The PLA today is a very different force. It may have a large number of weapons, but where the soldier, sailor or airperson is concerned, they lack combat experience.

Given the reality that Cold War 2.0 principally between the US and China has become, it would be logical to expect Washington, especially during the Trump administration, of providing a seamless logistics supply chain of munitions both to be stockpiled as well as for use when kinetic operations are on in whichever front is active, that against terror to the west and against authoritarian expansionists to the north. Both are the common foes of both New Delhi and Washington. Why this does not seem to have happened is the unique chemistry of President Trump.