Mumbai: Congress member Shashi Tharoor said that if Prime Minister Narendra Modi succeeds in persuading the current Chinese government to move seriously on a permanent border settlement, then he would take his hat off to him. He was in the city to discuss his recently published book, India Shastra: Reflections on the Nation in Our Time.
On the Delphic relation between China and India, Mr Tharoor said that his personal reading has been that China enjoys having the border dispute available to keep India off balance when it suits it to.
He went on to add that Mr Modi’s true triumph would only be when the Chinese government decides to take Modi’s India seriously. “Only if they (China) want to get this future irritant off the table… can they sign on the dotted line.” Until they do that, Mr Tharoor said, he will still see the Chinese keeping their options open.
He claimed that the changes in the foreign policies that the Modi government has recently garnered a lot of traction for are principally more stylistic. “Certainly India had never had a Prime Ministerial inauguration, the way Mr Modi conducted his own. It was a wonderful and clever gesture to call the neighbours.”
According to him, it was UPA who had articulated the policy of emphasising the centrality of the neighbourhood before and Mr Modi had fallen in line with the same policies. “It was we who had done this with Nepal, Bhutan; we had tried to get the Bangladesh land boundary signed, sealed and delivered but the BJP had blocked it, and Manmohan Singh was the biggest advocate of peace with Pakistan.”
