As with US, so with India: Deportation images and political silence

The fact is, deportation, which should have been like a cracker thrown in the midst of routine, slightly tired politics, has not compelled people to take to the streets

Relations between the United States and India have been a subject of fevered domestic politics in the past. American criticism of India’s non-alignment as “immoral and shortsighted” (1956) united Parliament behind Jawaharlal Nehru. Indira Gandhi’s signing of the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1971, definitively tilting India to the USSR even as the US was tilting towards Pakistan, was in part, a strategic riposte to the leadership challenge the lady faced in the Congress after the split of 1969. She fanned and developed the theme of animus to the US