Name of the Game is Interdependence: A Response

According to Bharat Wariavwalla, the Manmohan Singh-led government ‘believes that the US rules supreme and that the closer we stay with it the better we serve our interests. America will fight terror, secure us in the South Asian region and make us a world power’. In order to battle such a predilection, his article seeks to show the constraints on US power, mostly vis-à-vis the emerging superpower, China, which he implicitly sees as an emerging threat to India. Since the core of his arguments are economic, and relate to the constraints on the freedom of action of major players in view of their economic interdependence on others, Wariavwalla pays no attention to another security challenge India faces, which is the clutch of terrorist groups guided from within Pakistan and funded principally from elements in the Arab Gulf states. His otherwise well-argued essay also omits that third leg of India's threat matrix, the internal insurgencies taking place across 38 per cent of the country's area, not unreasonable, in view of the global context of the main argument.