Mr Prime Minister, we shrank the dragon: THE INSPIRATION

Powerful semantics and widely dispersed optics evoke a sense of suspicion in me. Folks, It isn’t because of current Covid19 gloom and doom. It probably is my going through the School of Hard Knocks after I finished all schooling that stopped at handing me degrees and things. As a consequence, with me alarm bells ring when somebody’s hype after numerous other hypes keeps hitting me with sickening regularity.

China’s political system is one such entity. It has fooled the world into abject surrender through its low-cost manufacturing might, based on prison labour and below-sustenance level wages to its people. West didn’t care as long as it was getting stuff 20 to 50 percent cheaper than what they could have produced. Immediate gains, folks, immediate gains has been the mantra. China is flouting proprietary right by blatantly copying their designs. Well, let’s ignore it. They help me make much greater profit margin by making my smartphone cheap; I will live with their chicanery. China is dehumanizing millions in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Well, we will put aside our moralizing. “Look, how low my cost of production now is,” exulted Samsonite.

Through my life’s experiences, I have come to believe that compromising with your principles inevitably hits you big. It is not that India did not fall into this trap. It did. And it ruined many of its own small and medium scale industries. In India, the decades-long refrain has been that China is militarily all too powerful. So we decided to mollycoddle them by buying electronic parts, firecrackers and cheap stuff like doormats and plastic toys.

Well, you allow someone to go on pulling wool over your eyes, he will. If it is China, it is a pastmaster at that.

Many Indians sitting in Delhi and in position of power chose to think afresh. I thought along those lines too. I mean, what on Earth are we dithering about! Vietnam could eventually scare the Americans to retreat and also make China run for cover; did they not? Haven’t we ourselves foiled them in 1967 and recently in Doklam?

That realization struck me like a ton of bricks. Then as a problem solving exercise—bless my corporate management experience—I figured why can’t I find a solution that takes care of some perineal problem area such as Pakistan’s intransigence. Liberation of Balochistan suggested itself. Pakistan is truncated one more time and China’s much-touted CPEC goes for a toss.

*****

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Pradeep Goorha

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