India’s image as a swing state in the global arena and a reassuring power at the regional level is a welcome development and it should be utilised for the nation’s emergence as a global role player, noted security analyst Cmde. C. Uday Bhaskar has said.
Delivering a lecture at a programme jointly organised by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) and Visakhapatnam Public Library, here on Wednesday, Mr. Uday Bhaskar observed that the biggest challenge for the country now was ‘domestic’ and immediate steps should be initiated to infuse confidence into the minorities and disadvantaged sections for course correction. Tracing the genesis of India’s foreign policy, Mr. Uday Bhaskar, who is also the president of the Delhi-based Society for Policy Studies, said democracy, demography and diversity are the strengths of Indian polity on which edifice of national and foreign policies are built.
“India’s role as a leader of non-aligned movement and support for the humanitarian activities of the United Nations has earned a global stature. First Former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao’s economic reforms and shrewd balancing role in world affairs and then Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s role in the Kargil war and in the 1998 nuclear explosion were the turning points in the post cold war history of world affairs,” he pointed out. The dramatic transformation in the Indo-US relations from estrangement to cautious engagement is largely due to the contributions made by Vajpayee and US President Bill Clinton, he said.
Making a projection for the future, Mr. Uday Bhaskar said ten years from now, China, the US and India, in that order, would be the dominant powers at the global level while Russia, the EU and Japan would play their role at the secondary level. He lauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s initiatives as steps in the right direction, especially in dealing with Russia and China.
Domestic policy
Mr. Uday Bhaskar stressed the importance of sound domestic policy, making the necessary correctives, for accelerating India’s economic and social progress and for enhancing its image as a democracy that upholds its constitutional values, in consonance with its rich tradition of tolerance and accommodation as ‘an equitable nation’. Dr. S. Vijayakumar, A. Prasanna Kumar of CPS and Dr. Perala Balamuralikrishna were present.