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Advani cites Padma awardee Zakaria to criticise Nehru

Advani has quoted extensively from journalist Fareed Zakaria’s book Post-American World to shore up his argument against Nehru.

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After accusing Manmohan Singh of kowtowing to the American line, BJP leader LK Advani has taken on former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru for his foreign policy “blunders”.

Advani has quoted extensively from journalist Fareed Zakaria’s book Post-American World to shore up his argument against Nehru.

Advani is not saying anything new, but it leads one to ask how Zakaria managed to get a Padma Bhushan even after being critical of Nehru.

While Manmohan Singh has been accused by the BJP of projecting India as a soft state in his eagerness to start talks with Pakistan, Nehru has been accused of naivete in his dealings with the world. To the extent that “his [Nehru’s] mishandling of Pakistan has left terrorism and Kashmir as two festering sores for our body politic to this day,” says Advani in his blog.

The RSS and the BJP have always held Nehruvian naivete responsible for India’s early blunders with China and Pakistan, and Advani seems to have found support in journalist Fareed Zakaria.

 “In his book, Zakaria says that the “central paradox of India today is that its society is open, eager, confident and ready to take on the world”, but its state — its ruling class  —  is “hesitant, cautious and suspicious of the changing realities around it”. Advani quotes this in his blog.

Further quoting Zakaria, the blog says, “Nowhere is this tension more obvious than in the realm of foreign policy, the increasingly large and important task of determining how India should fit into the new world.”

Nehru’s undermining of the army and refusal to take a permanent seat in the UN Security Council in favour of China, are also mentioned.

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