WHY IS IT IMPORTANT FOR INDIA TO HAVE GOOD RELATIONS WITH SMALL NATIONS?

According to Kautilaya – If you don’t have good relations with the neighbors, your kingdom cannot sustain longer and in the long term your people will suffer heavily.

In the modern era, if you have good relations with neighbors, especially in international politics, you have a better and secure future. When I am talking about neighbors it means, I am talking about bigger and smaller nations. I live in India, and we have many neighbors, some are loyal to us, some are our rivals, some are our competitors and some are “two-faced”. We need to have good relations with each and every neighbor country. Today I will discuss how the present foreign strategy of India will strengthen our relations with our neighbors, who were ignored in the last decade. 

In the last two decades, the one thing India lacked was the “sweet relationships” with smaller nations around us. Relationship with nations like Bhutan, Seychelles, Mauritius, Nepal and Sri Lanka were not on the right track. We had affection for the USA, and we gave too much priority for USA but we had not much contact with these small nations. We gave importance for “super-powers” of the world and we unnoticed these nations. It compensated us heavily in defense and security sector, as their Government was not helping us and intruders as well as spies were entering our nation. Now, who are these spies? From which nation they belong? We had not much idea. A nation like China was making influence in these nations and was developing them as per their requirement. Always remember, China and India have a bitter history, and in Asia both nations are struggling to be a super power in this region. The race is for the spot no. 1, a supreme force in this province. India believes in competition, but China believes in monopoly. India believes that small nations (that I mentioned above) should rise above in every sector, but China wants its development more than any others. And that is why China was making good bonds with small nations in the Asian continent, so that it can manipulate them whenever it want and India was scarce this department. Every nation was becoming Pro-China & Anti-India, and believe me we were facing a typical situation as the USA was playing a twofold game with us. On one hand, they were helping our rivals, especially Pakistan and on the other hand they were showing themselves as our “friend”. We paid really heavily in terms of investment, security, foreign policy and else. The neighbor did not believe and invested in us and did not provide us the support which we were expecting from them. You can say we were in the tight path!

However, now we have a new leader named as Narendra Modi and a foreign minister Sushma Swaraj, who are working day and night on making “fruitful” relationship with our neighbors. Prime Minister Modi visited Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Mauritius & Seychelles, and each and every nation got something from us, it might be financial help or technology. Now believe me our neighbors either its big shot like Japan or Russia or small nations like Bangladesh, Bhutan etc. are with us and helping us in many platforms. This is what we want, we want to have good relations even with China, we do not need war, and we want peace and prosperity in Asia and all over the world. This is what was missing from our nation and present Government is successful in achieving that. I want more and more success in foreign policy and better relations with our neighbor and other foreign nations. As foreign policy is the factor of raising investment & trust in one nation. That is why relations are important with small nations as well, so that we can avoid a war and increase our trade. We should weigh both developed & developing nations equally. Every nation should be our friend & accomplice.