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Shekhar Gupta is Editor-in-Chief of ThePrint and one of India’s most distinguished journalists. A recipient of the Padma Bhushan and multiple journalism awards, he has reported on key events in India and from around the world since the 1980s. At ThePrint, he does a daily online show, Cut the Clutter, in which he dissects, analyses, and contextualises complex daily news developments and current affairs. He also writes his weekly column National Interest.
Pessimist or optimist are subjective feelings. What matters more is for senior personages responsible for foreign policy and national security to be right a lot more often than wrong. Even before Trump 2.0, the need for course correction was being felt. President Trump has now made it unavoidable.
On what basis are we considering India as a middle income country? At best we are a low income country with a huge domestic market. We are a laggard on every parameter. Whether it be education or health or cleanliness or quality of life or even quality of economy, we are significantly backward. We are, at best, a strong banana republic country which is largely inward looking and divisive. On R&D front we are no better than a jugaad economy. We stifle innovation, we stifle reasoning and/or rationality and want the world to believe that our cultural values give us intellectual superiority. Guess what – Iran too is a civilization country, had a deep rooted history like ours and look where they are. We are a third world country and will continue to be so for decades to come.