Thanks UPA for your 10 years.....

Jacques Yves once said, " The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its nets of wonder forever." Let me put a different perspective of it," The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its nets forever." The difference between these two lines is just the sentiment, the former is positive and the later could serve the purpose of both, negative and positive. A wise person will say, it will be often negative. Prabhakaran Paleri, the former Director General of Coast Guards said, one who masters the ocean, masters everything. He also suggests different methods of safeguarding its sea. The best he suggests is the inclusion of neighbours or friendly neighbours. It does not matter how strong one is, and how weak its neighbour are, but a friendly term between neighbours should be utmost priority and it should always be preferred to a very strong but very distant relative. Mutual relationship becomes too much wider when this relationship involves two regions or two countries. The greatest of the greatest empires like Mughal Empire, Mauryan Empire etc. had been built by getting into establishing marital relationship with the un-tamable neighbour, who despite were weak but strategically too important too fight with. Their cooperation was desired rather than a hardly 1-2 months of fight. The ruler who understood this, became "The Great".

The UPA Saga

Unfortunately, the above events were not in the analysis of the UPA 1 or 2. The leadership had the time to visit US 8 times in 10 years but not once to visit "small" neighbours particularly those who were at the sea. Every time some pre-occupation, economical or political, stopped them doing so. They remained looking at sea, thinking and staring at it. Even those which had been visited earlier remained neglected due to the pre-occupation. Name the countries and we find only denials in terms of our commitments towards them :
Nepal was not visited once; Bangladesh remained at backfoot (he visited it only once); No Sri Lanka; poor handling of sensitivity in Maldives; Afghan President moves closer to those who were never on Afghani agenda and our country did nothing; Myanmar set ups it camps on our soil; What to say about Thailand, Vietnam etc. Of all the countries which Mr. Manmohan Singh visited, most of the time he visited to attend some summit, its hard to say that he had any specific bilateral agenda on his mind when dealing with these countries.
To add to our misery, China was working very craftily and hawkishly, while we were busy in persuading the West which was declining; we utterly neglected Asia which was rising. And what did we do with our pro-West policy is that we witnessed the lowest ebb ever with America in the end because of a lady who was not so decent (the Khobragode incident). After all this preferential treatment, an ebb!!! So, in other words, we did hardly anything with regard to foreign policy. The worst was this, that in all this we also loosed to some extent the Russians who found us too close with the West and with the rising China, Russians started looking at them. We failed to secure our seas while we were getting roped in by "String of Pearls". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_of_Pearls_(Indian_Ocean))

Our "Iron Fist Policy", which was supposed to be a counter of the Chinese string, was pushed even to further backfoot when Iran detained our oil ship.Though its true that many social initiatives like Adhar Card etc. were taken by the government but the fact of the matter is that Central Govt. is not all about distributing rations, states can handle that if directed properly, the very purpose of making a country strong from "National Security" point of view lies solely with the Central Govt. Since we badly loosed our Sea during that period, I have not an inch of doubt while saying this that we failed in it. The complaints registered by our neighbours could not be neglected and their closening ties with China cannot be declared as selfish. If we cannot ensure them that we do stand with them, how the hell they will not start removing their dependencies from us. Every countries foreign policy enshrines only one aspect : Its security with respect to its economy and defence (in particular). Every time we cannot get away through by sending the notes of "Panchsheel". If we have to achieve something then we have to transform our dialogues into action. Those actions include making our relationship with the neighbours strong in terms of both aspects. When they will see us wandering and submitting to the powers they do not want to do so, how would they submit our confidence on us??