The guest from the east

When ‘fortress’ Singapore fell to the Japanese on February 15, 1942, Winston Churchill exclaimed: “Australia is threatened, India is threatened.” Dead right! Within months, the enemy was at the gates of India.

- R. PRASANNAN

The one line signalled the strategic value that a port which overlooks the Strait of Malacca has for the security of India, and for much of the south Pacific, together called the Indo-Pacific now. Anyone who controls the strait can control the shipping between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and all the trade between the east and the west.

Empires have gone, politics has changed; geographies haven’t. Landmasses and water bodies lie where they had been, as vulnerable to threats from armies, navies, pirates, tsunamis and hurricanes as they had been a century or more ago.

No wonder we are rolling out the red carpet for Prabowo (Sanskrit