Time To Cut Our Dress According To Our Cloth

China envy got us nowhere. Now it's time to shed our America complex too. Rather than pretending to be a world-beater, India should be mending fences

- MAKARAND R PARANJAPE

Indians simply cannot get enough of Donald Trump. Throughout his immensely fractious and intensely vituperative election campaign back to the White House, many Indians, especially from the so-called right wing, supported him vociferously, even raucously. Even though the other contender, Kamala Harris, was a lady, that too half-Indian.

Now, it would seem, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme. There is scarcely a member of India's ever-expanding commentariat and influencer set who has a kind word to say about the US president. He has become not only the favourite whipping boy, but also the butt of ridicule among the same lot who, until just the other day, were singing hosannas to him.

Today, faced with stiff tariffs and possibly even harsher measures to come, isn't it time we take a re-look—not just at Trump, but our relationship with the US? First things first: we must understand that Trump, far from being a statesman, is not even a conventional politician. A notoriously self-proclaimed outsider to Washington politics, he is the greatest disrupter that certainly the US, and possibly the world, has known in the past half-century.

What this means is that he doesn't really care about what we in India think or say about him. Why, not just us, he doesn't care about what the US mainstream media spews against him either. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, CNBC, Reuters, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, The Atlantic and so on, to name some detractors, carried out a relentless crusade against him during the presidential race, which shows no signs of abating to this day. But Trump has survived, even thrived. For he is not only a disrupter, but also a fighter, as his famous attempted assassination photograph, now immortalised as a painting in the White House, so vividly symbolises.