Is India a soft State?

Politicians are doing a wonderful job to play politics within the country and to loot the Tax-Payers money in forms of Spectrum and CAG scams... They'll take enough money and then say they quit...

A political revolution should happen to clean up the country!! No such revolution happened within the country since Independence.. Group of people who lost their faith in the GOI are taking this steps and converted into Naxals and other revolutionary groups in Eastern part of India - They change their way of approach after getting very little interest from the government...

The GOI is not meant for people of India..

Before voting, i need to know whats the opposite for "soft nation"... Rogue nation?? Bully nation?? aggressive nation? responsive nation? Hard nation?

I think this question is irrelevent here but I guess if we are soft nation then its opposition will be something which is ready to go to any extent to protect its national intrests. Israel is very much in proactive mode while we are in reactive mode that too selectively.

Yes, India is a soft state. As it has been pointed out by many posters with examples.

Strange that 7 people so far voted "no". What are they smoking ???

Yes, India is a soft state, GoI should take care of Indians not only in India but anywhere on this planet, by any means and protect their interests.

Its so boring when everybody agrees to something .. so let me voice something different for the sake of debating.

Alright.... i believe we are a hard nation. Our hard stance started on 1948 with Kashmir, 65, liberation of Goa from Portuguese, intervention in 71, organising the NAM ,etc etc We made tougher stands that even Nixon was annoyed with the PM during a time.

Failure or outcomes which are not of the desired scale were always due to unpreparedness or non professionalism shown by the people responsible. Example: 62.

After those war we had a long nation building phase where we were faced a hard time with economy and food security and there was no scope to be a hard nation or soft nation . Like in the period of late 70's to 90's

Once we climbed the ladder of economic progress our aggression moved into another phase called "diplomacy".. I cant recall much nations who has extensive lobbying and aggressive campaigning along with open declarations of discomfort over military deals to major nations.

All the 5 majors nation's premiers came to us like a salesman , selling goods.

In the year 2010 alone , we know how many times we tried to influence certain decisions on other nations . We are never shy to announce our intentions of controlling the Indian ocean and has regular military exercises with majors.Our military spending is that of an aggressive mode and we are purchasing weapons on a large scale.
It is due to our hard stance that not even US or anybody dares to talk about Kashmir.

Yes we have been soft on issues like with BD incident as suggested in the thread opening post and with pakistan over various attacks. But will a war with a minnow nation like BD do any good for us especially when we are trying to create an image internationally through diplomacy?
Will a war against a nation who openly says that they will use nukes against us do any good.??We were successful in kicking back their aggression during Kargil and made sure no others intervened.

We cant just go on do anything on the basis of what US does when its been targeted Eg: iraq, Afghanistan , Koreas, vietnam etc..

US never get cozy with any of the nations which are near like in cuba or venezuela , They are happy to send a ship load of soldiers only to far east. We cant afford to do that coz our threat is immidieate and in the neighbourhood and we have much to loose than to gain.

So diplomacy is our weapon .

And yes, we are not a soft nation.

If that was the case we should have captured remaining part of kashmir as well . also in 1972 when more than half of pakistan was capture why didnt we bargained it for kashmir. some western powers threatened us and we vacated everything. I know you will will come back saying we liberated Bangladesh but that was not direct involvement of Indian armed forces that liberated them It was mukti wahini at the front.

What hard stance? if we had hard stance, we would have taken PoK back when we had opurtunities

I agree with these ones, but these are very rare and now is 2011. ie. 40 years, now we are definitely a soft nation.

example of weak power

Means nothing, infact it means we are soft that we cant extract from those countries what we want in exchange of business. example: China

What does this mean? we cant even control Nepal, S Lanka. LoL

How about controlling S Lanka first.

Again irrelevant

What does this mean? What are weapons for ?

But Pak talks. US dont share border with us. Even i can give an example like this : not even Angola talk about Kashmir

We have to protect our national interests. It doesn't mean going to war with pakistan etc. how about doing some justice to start with eg. eliminate enemies i.e. targeted assassinations, hanging Kasab etc. within few months they are caught, Taxing Chinese goods if they dont stop supporting Pakistan militarily. Kiking out F-16/F-18 out of MMRCA when America announced military aid to Pakistan etc. etc. etc.

Diplomacy equals soft power.

And yes, we are a soft nation.

Agree with you completly, but its impossible now in this age. Otherwise China would have taken Taiwan much earlier.







Huh ....You mean we need to do another war to reverse the trend.



Not example of weak power.. example of weak system or governance.



Only exception is China , even with a hard stance we wont be able to do it due to past history and level of trust.



We dont need to and we are not supposed to. We are not colonists.



Same answer. We are not in British era anymore..



Defense preparedness. It does nt mean every weapon we buy must be used.. like buying fire crackers in diwali.



Yes they talks , because they are part of the problem. i was talking about other nations. What is the relavance of Angola.. In a global scenario , we usually look at the opinions of major powers only. ( Do we have a face palm smiley here..Lol)





We are not good at target assacinations,
Agree with hanging kasab ASAP,
Taxing chinese goods is also a good idea even banning is also good, but we cant dictate them to stop aiding Pakistan militarily, even US cant do that.. does that mean US is also soft power?

yes pick up the gun and lets follow what Iraq did in Kuwait..and act tough..







Note: first of all sorry for the late reply And secondly i have said in my previous post that i am posting something different for debate purposes and doesn't necessarily is my own opinion.

Is India a soft state? No, we are a tolerant state. The day the limit is crossed, the world will witness a resurgent India.

Bring back indira gandhi and impose emergency but many people didn't like that either.

Do we fool ourselves by saying that.Self restraint and no war mongering attitude is a good thing but increasingly i think we are adopting a defeatist attitude

India is not a soft state but we have given our impression to the world as a soft state by blindly sticking with peace and non-violence. Due our weak policy and politicians we have faced four wars and will be facing more in future. Even we haven't learned any lesson from 1962, now for what we are waiting? another 26/11 or 13/12?

Absolutely, we are a soft state.

There is perhaps no other country in the history of the world that has tolerated so much in such a hostile neighborhood. If Russia or U.S. was in our place, do you think Pakistan would still be around? We had numerous opportunities to deal decisively with Pakistan, most notably during the Soviet War in Afghanistan, but we missed that opportunity, among others.

This attitude amongst us has clocked 9% growth, whereas our neighbor is among the Top 10 failed states. War is never a solution. Only scavengers win their lunch during wars.