It has recently come to my notice that our great country,
India, is a sovereign nation. I was surprised at this revelation. I always
thought we were an open nation for anyone to come in and chill out and leave if
and when they wished to do so. I didn't know that foreigners couldn't just
stroll into our borders and kill people and claim our territory as their own
and basically try to intimidate this great giant of South-East Asia.
Well these false notions of mine must have been generated
due to what the successive governments of this country have been portraying to
its people and the world for the longest possible time I remember. This country
seems to do nothing at all when its neighbours deliberately try to provoke it.
This country not only refuses to retaliate, but also stubbornly seems reluctant
to even defend itself.
Our Western
neighbour constantly keeps sending terrorists into India to blow up people and
places and lots of other things but we behave like all is well and invite their
politicians to hang out in Delhi. We even agree to start peace-talks over and
over again because they manage to break the cease-fire every now and then.
Just some trigger-happy buffoons, eh?
Then there are our Eastern
neighbours who ‘unintentionally’ just wander into Indian territory and settle
down in our eastern states .These people are also known as aliens because they
have no right whatsoever to settle in another country without permission from
two respective governments first. But since we believe in the phrase, “Atithi
Devo Bhava” (Guests are God), we let them stay in our big beautiful land of
opportunity.
Population problem? No problem!
Our very friendly Southern
neighbours can’t be forgotten. Just because they have an unmitigated prejudice
towards some of our countrymen, they cannot be deemed bad, right? Yeah, they
treat human rights like toilet paper and consider the sea corridor between our
nations to be their own personal waterway but so what? They can be allowed
certain indulgences for being stuck on a small piece of land next to our
humungous country. So we keep quiet about their tantrums and just because they
are too tiny to bother about, we pucker up the courage to condemn them in the
United Nations.
Wow! We did that? Sweet!
Last, but not the least, let us take a look at our Northern frontiers. The
land-where-everything-is-made has apparently run out of space to build more
factories and they need a little territory from us it seems. And well, they’re
not asking for it, they’re just claiming it to be their own. And we just stand
and stare and send our minister for defence to have a little peace talk. Wait!
Where have I heard that before?
Hey, you want some land? Ask the Gujarat chief minister,
he’s giving out land for free anyway.
Now I know that we cannot afford to antagonize all our
neighbours because we certainly aren't ready for war but can we not do a little
more than lodging letters of protest or holding futile ‘peace-talks’? Then
there is the argument that we will be called perpetrators of war in the UN but
I think that the time for making excuses has passed and we need to do something
to protect the interests of this nation.
For how long are we going to stand by and watch while
Pakistan wrecks havoc within our nation?
For how long are we going to tolerate Bangladeshi nationals
residing illegally in our states?
For how long are we going to be pressurized by Sri Lanka, an
island country the size of a peanut?
For how long are we going to keep watching while China
claims that the northern half of our country is their backyard?
… And they say that India is a Superpower.
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