I believe we don't pay as much attention to this issue as we should.

India was much poorer before independence, but you read people like Tagore, Sarojni Naidu, Azad, Gandhi or Nehru, and you have a sense of ultimate confidence of India's place in the world. https://twitter.com/ChandhokHursh/status/1357734846039220228

Even the paintings of somebody like Amrita Shergill, trained in Paris, but developing her own style while traveling across India, or at her family's estate in Gorakhpur, express a confidence that is at odds with the insecurity that many middle class Indians today harbour.

You could suggest that they were an elite, but look at the horrible "don't interfere in India's internal affairs" idiocy that our elite just offered us.

These people from Tendulkar to Lata Mangeshkar, have nothing to prove to the world, but they speak of us as deeply vulnerable.

No, this is a deep insecurity, a deep sense of unworthiness, our earlier leadership never had, even if we were far poorer, far weaker than we are now.

It's inexplicable.

By its very size, India is one of the least vulnerable countries on earth.

So why this fear?

I honestly don't have an answer to this, and I cannot understand it. Never, as an Indian, have I ever been threatened by anything, so I can't comprehend this type of thinking and don't know how to engage with it.

Bloody hell, it was the UN's acceptance of the Indian armistice suggestion that helped end the Korean War, with General Thimayya playing a major role in the aftermath.

Can you imagine the confidence, the global respect, to pull that off, in the 50s, when we were paupers?

We weren't scared then, looking for international conspiracies, we shaped the global order, took on the most powerful countries in the world in our pursuit of anti-colonialism and non-alignment.

When did we become so scared? When some of us got rich while the rest started poor?