Shekhar Gupta

Few commentators have lectured India more confidently about unsentimental foreign policy realism than Shekhar Gupta, which makes it all the more remarkable that this piece reads like a man mourning a world that left without saying goodbye. He just wrote the most elaborate self-refutation in recent Indian commentary, and somehow didn’t notice.

His grand conclusion — that India is “punching according to its weight” — is literally the Modi government’s foreign policy argument, just stripped of the triumphalism. He handed them the trophy while pretending to be the umpire.

The Nehru-Indira nostalgia is even more self-defeating. Gupta lists India’s reliance on Soviet support, acceptance of food aid, and silence during the crises in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan — and calls it strategic autonomy. That wasn’t autonomy. That was subservience dressed up in Nehruvian prose, and you can almost feel him wincing as he types it.

Then comes Iran, where he ties himself in the most spectacular knot. He wants to say India should have been warmer to Tehran, but the entire Arab-Muslim world — including Pakistan — had already condemned Iran before he finished the sentence. So he writes “BAH, in all capitals” and hopes nobody notices the BAH was aimed squarely at himself.

The vishwaguru he’s swinging at is a strawman — nobody serious is lecturing the world anymore. India isn’t lecturing the world, it’s cutting deals with it, and Gupta knows that too. That’s precisely what makes the piece so excruciatingly painful to read.

He could have stopped at the headline. The essence was already clear. The rest of the article reads like typical SG-style verbosity, adding little of real substance. Point taken though.