Economist and blogger, Atanu Dey, has a bitter and controversial post on the reality behind “India Shining” hype. I don’t agree with a good bit of it, but I can’t say it’s not a credible point of view and provokes some thought:

“India is powerless. The Washington Post reports “two missteps” by the US in relation to India. Misstep is a nice – what’s the word that I am looking for – circumlocution. Or maybe euphemism. Whatever. Misstep is when without intending to, you hurt someone’s toe; a couple of tight slaps on the face is not a misstep. Anyone with half a brain can tell it is calculated and deliberate. India has to silently endure the indignity that the US routinely subjects it to……

..Sometimes, just by the luck of the draw, some states, large or small, get good leaders. The US had great luck when it became independent in 1776. Intellectual giants – Franklin, Jefferson – guided the nation. Singapore, a tiny nation of absolutely no special promise, got Lee Kuan Yew and became a powerful country. Enlightened leadership makes a difference.

India too got an authoritarian dictator at its independence. What was missing was enlightened leadership.

As an Indian, I feel envious of the power that China has and uses ruthlessly. Even when it was just another extremely poor country, it gave India a drubbing in 1962. China had been provoked by the hubris of Indian leaders. Now that it has trillions of dollars in the bank and has the US kowtowing to it, China can severely damage India. Arunachal Pradesh is as good as gone. China is encircling India. Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan.

What’s depressing is that India could as well have been referred to as one of “the two leading world powers.”

As the American poet John Whittier wrote, “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”

India’s leaders are ensuring that it continues to be an irrelevant third-world country by keeping it poor. India suffers indignities, and more can be expected when China overtakes the US as the largest economy in the world in a few years. Poverty is like that – not just injury, it also brings insults in its wake. Those who made India poor did not just condemn hundreds of millions of Indians to lives of extreme deprivation and premature deaths, but they also weakened India externally and internally.

India is so weak externally that even a failed two-bit tinpot Islamic dictatorship can cause immense harm to India. Another failed Islamic state – one which India saved from being butchered further by its Islamic brother and helped it gain independence – routinely sponsors terrorism in India and is engineering a demographic change in India’s eastern states. India responds with weak protests.

India is so weak internally that its citizens die by the hundreds each year from Islamic terrorism and all it can do is to run to the US and complain that Pakistan is being bad to India. India whines and asks the US to declare Pakistan a state that supports terrorism. The US, in response, declares Pakistan to be a frontline ally of the US’s “war on terror.” That’s not a slap on the face of India. That’s a steel-toed military boot shoved deep in the head.

All this need not have been. It could have been different. We all know it but we cannot do anything about it. India has been ruled by the Congress for nearly all of its existence since independence. India has been reduced to a rather pathetic state that its prime minister feels grateful for the little attention that the US administration magnanimously throws his way. He, of all people, should know because the family he serves so loyally is the one that has reduced India to this.

The evil they did lives on. The good is vanishingly small and hence really irrelevant.”