We have a grand strategic relationship with the United States. It is the grandest of all the strategic relationships we have, the showpiece, the role model, the piece de resistance. We have other strategic relationships as well. We have a strategic relationship with Mongolia. We have one with Namibia as well. Even Kazakhstan.

We have over two dozen strategic relationships at least. Nothing compares though to the one we have with the United States, the mother of all strategic relationships. It is the shiniest example, one that keeps our Amreeki Bhakt Indians particularly chuffed and puffed, though not our farmers and dairy-wallahs and fisherfolk so much.

Our foreign policy establishment has painstakingly brought the relationship to this level, stacking up nearly all the eggs here. We began sidling up soon after the Son of Pokhran, ignoring naysayers who argued it would be the kiss of death. It has not been a bottom up phenomenon but a top down one, with as the clarion call. It was billed as a close up, close bonding, mint breathy, intimate strategic relationship, the one that got better the closer you got till you were two hearts beating as one.

From ‘Mint Breath Bonding’ to Daily Verbal Lashings

Look closer. Is it really? Nah, it is more of a spit and polish type of relationship. Everyday someone or the other in the Trump administration, from Trump downwards, whether it is the Secretary of State, the Treasury Secretary, sundry advisers like Peter Navarro, White House major-domos like Stephen Miller, or even that new model Barbie spokesperson, anybody and everybody in fact, spits out a steady stream of undiplomatic epithets at New Delhi.

Every day, as the song goes, the paper boy brings more. Then every day our prime time foreign........

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