Actions by President Trump roil US-India ties

The US under Donald Trump is proving to be an unreliable ally, not just of India but several other partner countries as well.

- M.D. NALAPAT

Given the power of the US Presidency over that country and thereby the world, the inexplicable actions of President Trump have brought in a maelstrom of uncertainty concerning relations with the largest economy in the world.

Among his steps was a clampdown on several of the freedoms US citizens had earlier taken for granted. When Albert Einstein sailed from a Nazifying Germany to Britain, he pointed out that innovation and accretion to knowledge can only take place in a society where ceaseless enquiry and tolerance towards multiple views manifest.

A society controlled from the top and sought to be made monochromatic in thought would witness the perishing of the dynamic essential for long-term progress. And so it proved for Germany, a country known for its scholarship, which was brought to the brink of irreversible ruin by Adolf Hitler and the millions who fell under his spell.

In Britain, Prime Minister Winston Churchill trusted mavericks such as he himself was, and hence ensured that the loner Alan Turing was protected from superiors unable to sense his genius, and put him in charge of breaking the Enigma code.

This was the machine that protected secret German transmissions concerning military operations from being deciphered by the countries opposed to him. In the stasis commonplace among dictatorships where little gets done without sanction from the top, no effort was made throughout World War II to change the code in the Enigma machine.

In 1941, Turing and colleagues working under his direction succeeded in breaking the code, and German war secrets began flowing to the enemy. Rather than the "unbreakable" Enigma code being broken, Hitler blamed many of his generals and those in the general population who were caught murmuring against his dictatorship.

They were blamed for the leakage of secrets and executed in 1944, without once considering the prospect that the Enigma code machine had been compromised by the British.