The Munich Security Conference confirmed that India’s participation was acknowledged by the world as being of crucial importance and that it helped to evolve shared perspectives for leveraging the collaborative effort of India and the US to address common challenges and harness mutual benefits.

In today’s unsafe world environment and an uneven trajectory of the global economy, India is registering rapid growth, moving towards self-reliance in various spheres including defence and security and pushing up a sense of nationalism among Indians based on India’s civilisational strength that unites rather than divides the people.

India and the US, the two largest tested democracies of the world, recognise the importance of working together to save the ‘rules-based order’ at a time when forces of Marxist dictatorship and ‘fundamentalist’ dispensations were joining hands to destabilise the world.

The strategic alliance between China and Pakistan now developed to the point where these two adversaries are collaborating in conducting covert operations against India, particularly in the border states of J&K and Punjab, which is a prime security threat for India and validates India’s policy of strengthening Indo-US relations generally and stepping up its association with the Quad.

Terrorism resulting from the spread of radicalisation in the Islamic world is another common concern that binds India and the US together in leading the democratic world against this new global threat. An important task before India is to get policymakers of the US to see Pakistan without tinted glasses and overcome the legacy of the Pentagon’s commitment to the Pak generals. It would do them good to recall that Pakistan was a reluctant partner of the US in the ‘war on terror’ and that it managed to keep an equation with Al Qaeda, Taliban and ISIS.

Pakistan helped the installation of the Taliban Emirate at Kabul in 1996 and ensured the subsequent return of Taliban rule to Afghanistan in 2021 on the conclusion of Doha peace talks that were held to facilitate the withdrawal of American troops from the messy Afghan territory. Pakistan had pretended to be a mediator in these talks but was in fact advancing its duplicitous policy of remaining on the right side of the US without giving up on its faith-based commitment to sustaining Islamic radical outfits.