China may lend a helping hand to crisis-hit Pakistan

For some years, various Indian media platforms got it wrong when they predicted that Pakistan is on the verge of collapse as a sovereign state. The cooked up debates on TV lacked common sense, with participants oblivious to principles of statecraft, writes Gopal Misra With Chinese President, Xi Jinping, in Moscow, it is a wake-up call for India. Russia and China were never so close to each other. Pakistan too finally has reaffirmed its alliance with the Dragon this March. China has outwitted the USA in the Middle-East by establishing the Saudi-Iran détente, and at the same time luring Pakistan into its fold. Beijing banks are already rolling over $1.3 billion financial assistance to Pakistan to rescue it from an embarrassing financial default amidst the reports that the IMF may now cough up a huge sum of $ 6.5 billion as a bailout for the client state. These breath-taking events are taking place, thus influencing the global play of forces. India knows that she has already ceded diplomatic initiative, if any left, when the world watched in awe, Russian President, Vladimir Putin, driving a car in the newly acquired Russian-speaking districts of Ukraine. It is not surprising that the Indian diplomacy appeared to be confused and without any direction to cope up with the new developments, and the Indian media, both electronic and print, is being seen behaving like an ostrich burying its long neck in the sand during a desert storm.  In recent years, the various platforms in the Indian media have been abuzz with predictions that Pakistan is on the verge of collapse as a sovereign state. Many social media sites even claimed that Pakistan may witness a repeat of 1971, when Bangladesh came into being. Little did they realise that Bangladesh had scripted the epitaph on the grave of the two-nation theory, but the people in Pakistan today continue to subscribe to the sectarian vision of Islam.  Therefore, the propagandas in India, including cooked up debates, lacked both common sense as well as the principles of statecraft, yet narratives are being woven like the medieval bards praising the valour of the ruler of the day. The ruling BJP’s social media cell could be traced for this faux pas, which might have had a purpose in projecting PM Narendra Modi in his macho avatar adorned in ultra nationalist façade. It might have served in increasing the party’s tally in the previous Lok Sabha elections, but the country is now under the spell of rhetoric sans reason. Unfortunately, during the past nine years, these cock and bull stories which were for the purpose of winning polls, have become a norm of the media proxies of the ruling party, thus the country’s mainline media too is subscribing to it.