During the 1965 India-Pakistan war, Indonesia, under President Sukarno, briefly entertained an extraordinary idea: that the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were an extension of Sumatra.
On 22 April 1955, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke at the closed session of the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, where he said there was no no point in blaming the Soviet Union or America and Asian countries must be on the side of peace, not war. ‘If there is aggression anywhere in the world, it is bound to result in world war.’
If the Prime Minister and the Chief Ministers do even one-tenth of the sermonizing to their own colleagues in the ministries as they do to the people, there may be improvement in the tone of public administration.
An oil shock, monsoon fears, rampant unemployment, and the seeming inevitability of inflation are common to both eras. Indira Gandhi’s self-destructive responses are instructive today.
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