Above all, India’s ambition must be to remain a pluralist country, tolerant of all its confessions, as well as a democratic one - in short the complete opposite of China.
Murderous insanity
In this first-half of the 21st century, Asia’s great powers must be careful not to fall back into the mistakes made by 19th century European great powers. China and India - who easily employ the word "humiliation" to denounce the behavior of Great Britain during the Raj period for India, or to evoke the Sack of the Summer Palace in 1860 by French and British forces for the Chinese - are increasingly behaving like Germany, France, Great Britain, and Russia at the end of the 19th century.
Need we remind them that this policy led Europe to suicide through two world wars? Will the 21st century be the century of Asia or the century of Asian wars?
In this geopolitical context the following question arises: should France supply nuclear-powered submarines to India? Balancing China's growing power in the Indo-Pacific area is one thing. Contributing to the fact that Asia will drag the world into its murderous insanity tomorrow, as Europe once did, is another.
"Do not forget India" is a common sense geopolitical and economic imperative. But the pursuit of this objective requires a reflection going beyond the interests of our arms industries. It is not simply a question of rebalancing our accounts after the loss of the Australian market, but rather that of defining a long-term Asian strategy.
Courtesy of Les Echos, where the article was originally published in French on October 11, 2021.
Copyright: Punit PARANJPE / AFP
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