Fallacy, fantasy, Global South

For India to think of leadership of the Global South, it needs a reality check. The odds of it becoming a Chinese Bloc in the emerging new bipolar world are high

However fashionable it might be to repudiate and disown Jawaharlal Nehru these days, at least one element of foreign policy he bequeathed to us remains intact, even in the Narendra Modi dispensation.

We could set up this argument by simply counting the number of times Mr Modi has used the expression “Global South” in his public speeches lately. This stretches across global summits, the address to the US Congress, Brics summit at Johannesburg to domestic platforms, including his Independence Day address from the Red Fort, and earlier this year in January, at the Voices of Global South Summit.

Let’s first