THE 'FOREIGN HAND' THAT MADE INDIRA PARANOID

The abduction of Nicolás Maduro follows an old US playbook. Indira Gandhi worried of suffering a fate similar to that of Salvador Allende, who was removed in a CIA-backed coup in 1973

- SUGATA SRINIVASARAJU

TAKING Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores out of their Caracas home in the middle of the night and transporting them across land, air and water to New York City was a wild script that only Trumpian realism could produce. Reason, cultivated by decency and diplomacy, cannot easily delineate why the US government did what it did, and how much more it wishes to unsettle the world.

Many have tried to argue that the US has lost its moral authority from this one act of extravagant crudity and ruthlessness. But one wonders if the US, over the past century, ever aspired to moral authority It has been singularly obsessed with unqualified authority, sans frontier, backed by the dollar and military machines. An Epsteinian metaphorical strand of deceit, which carries the power to consume even conscience-keepers like Noam Chomsky, has perhaps always been part of this worldview.

Perhaps it is only weak countries that aspire to moral authority. Henry Kissinger, the controversial American diplomat who normalised the US foreign policy of regime changes in Latin America and across the globe, had an interesting comment on India's foreign policy under Jawaharlal Nehru. This was after Indira Gandhi had visited the US in November 1971 during Richard Nixon's first presidential term, and had famously not gotten along with him.

Kissinger wrote: "We took at face value Nehru's claim to be a neutral arbiter of world affairs. We hardly noticed that this was precisely the policy by which a weak nation seeks influence out of proportion to its strength." Further extending his reading to Indira Gandhi, he said that "her almost hereditary moral superiority" and "moral pretensions" irritated Nixon. Forwarding moral currency, it could be assumed, has been viewed as a sign of camouflaged poverty by the US. Therefore, it would naturally not be bothered about moral authority.