Losing it over Washington

To protect ourselves from irrationality, we must first introspect the bipolarity within our establishment discourse. You could start with Modi's rise in the summer of 2014

- SHEKHAR GUPTA

Psychoanalysing Donald Trump is a booming global business. We in India are doing our bit. The only objective, however, is to find a way of surviving him for about two more years. It can't be to cure him. Nobody has a pill or therapy for him. India has to look at ways to protect itself from his industrial-scale irrationality.

To protect ourselves from Trumpian diplomacy on social media, we must first introspect the bipolarity within our establishment discourse. Establishment here means not just the Modi government but also much of its support base in public debate, from social media to TV panelists and Op-edists, in that order of significance.

You could start with Mr Modi's rise in the summer of 2014. That's when this establishment was celebrating the end of the 30-year wait for a strong leader to consummate India's strategic, economic, political and moral weight. In short, its comprehensive national power. The first warning shot came from Xi Jinping as his troops came for a stroll in southern Ladakh's Chumar region exactly when he was being feted by Mr Modi in Ahmedabad. Their actions worsened over time. On China, however, India has had a long view.

Overall, the mood was upbeat. India had arrived, an indispensable power in the new world to which it was teaching multipolarity and multi-alignment. If a Western strategic scholar described India as a powerful swing state, the reaction was: Grow up, you aren't talking of Turkey or Brazil; we are already a great power. Or almost there.

The peak year was 2023, the G20 year. By now, India was the toast of the world. Soon to be the fourth-largest economy, the pivot of the Quad, even more significant because we weren't a treaty ally. We were the only one of the four staring down China and keeping nearly a hundred thousand of its troops occupied along our 3,488-km border.