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What Is Wrong with India: The Absence of Strategic Patience
States do not rise to greatness by the accumulation of weaponry alone, nor by the exuberance of national rhetoric. They ascend through a combination of patience, vision, and depth — qualities that define a nation’s ability to shape history rather than be swept along by it.
China offers a telling example. For over a century, it endured the colonial detachment of Hong Kong and Macau. Rather than wage war, it waited — patiently, calculatingly — until circumstances made peaceful reunification possible. No threats, no aerial spectacles, no demonstrations of military vanity. Patience was its strategy; wisdom, its instrument.
The United States, in the aftermath of the Second World War, confronted a defeated Germany whose crimes were unparalleled in modern memory. Yet Washington resisted the temptation to brand an entire people as irredeemable. Instead, under Operation Paperclip, over a thousand German scientists — among them Wernher von Braun — were brought to America, not as enemies, but as contributors to a new strategic horizon. From the creator of the V-2 rocket came the Apollo program, and, ultimately, humanity’s first steps on the Moon. Nations with grand ambitions must have hearts large enough to turn foes into partners, visions high enough to transcend vengeance, and patience deep enough to outlast temporary passions.
India, regrettably, has not embraced this truth. Since 1947, its strategic behavior has too often been reactive, driven by immediate impulses rather than enduring objectives. From the withholding of assets due to Pakistan at Partition, to the military annexation of Hyderabad, Junagarh, and Kashmir; from the intervention in East Pakistan in 1971 to persistent interference in Balochistan and beyond — a pattern emerges. It is the pattern of a state eager to display power, but impatient to cultivate it.
Even in moments when restraint might have built its stature, India has chosen confrontation. In May 2025, when an opportunity existed for joint investigation and cooperation against terrorism, it opted instead for escalation. The result was a humiliating defeat — six aircraft lost, including Rafales once advertised as untouchable. Trump intervened abd saved India from more humiliation. The outcome was noticed in Washington, where India was openly bracketed with Pakistan by US President Donald Trump rather than with China in strategic considerations.
Contrast this with Pakistan’s own moments of restraint: refraining from attacking India during its 1962 conflict with China, avoiding exploitation of internal Indian crises in the 1980s, and declining military adventure in Sri Lanka despite opportunity and request. These choices, often costly in the short term, preserved relationships and credibility.
India’s current trajectory is marked by an inflated sense of regional entitlement, interference in smaller neighbors’ affairs, and the silencing of its own critical voices — scholars such as Praveen Sawhney, Ravish Kumar, and Arundhati Roy, whose analyses are respected even in adversary states. A nation that cannot listen to its own truth-tellers risks being guided only by its illusions.
The world’s great powers — America, China, even Russia in its more measured periods — have learned that greatness is less about coercion than about creating conditions under which others align willingly. The United States lives with a defiant Cuba at its doorstep without daily saber-rattling; China, for all its claims, has not invaded Taiwan.
India must learn that leadership in the 21st century will not be awarded to the loudest claimant, but to the state most capable of strategic patience, intellectual depth, and magnanimity toward both friend and foe. Without these, it risks not merely losing contests, but forfeiting the role it so eagerly seeks on the world stage.
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