Who will blink first? Xi or Modi?

Shekhar Gupta

As Mao did to Jawaharlal Nehru in 1959-1962, Xi Jinping has thrown at Prime Minister Narendra Modi the biggest challenge in his public life.

Over the next few days, weeks, months, and years, he will take decisions that determine the strategic fate of his nation. And his own political legacy.

Reading his mind is an act of daring.

Over these six years he has built a formidable reputation of delivering the most stunning surprises, without anybody having an inkling.

Even on crucial strategic and foreign policy issues.

Remember his sudden stopover in Pakistan on his way back from Kabul.

Gaming his responses over the Chinese provocations in Ladakh is complex, but there are pointers.

So, for once, we can read the main question on his mind as he weighs strategy and politics.

Simply put, demand that he must respond, but not in a way that looks like Nehru.

The politics and strategic, philosophical and ideological thought he and his ideological and political parents, the RSS and BJP, have constructed is founded on not being like Nehru.

The most important thing then is to ‘not repeat his waffling blunders'.

Mr Xi has thrown the gauntlet at him at the moment of his choosing, just as Mao had done in 1962.

The pressure on him is to respond immediately, in anger, and exasperation just to be seen to be doing something, as Nehru did.

Translated: How to show fellow Indians and the world that you are not Nehru of 1962, without doing precisely what

Nehru took a decision (‘I have told my army to throw out the Chinese') that might have looked brave, but was divorced from reality.

History has judged him harshly.

Not as a brave, tough leader who ‘died' fighting, as politically and physically he never recovered from that decision.

He will forever be seen as a weakling who went to war against his conviction.