Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was a liberal leader of world stature at par with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan. While M.A. Jinnah was a hardcore realist, Pandit Nehru was an idealist. He harboured a grand idea about the independent India being the leader of the South East Asia. He knew that the Sub-continent lying on the mouth of vital regions of Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa enjoyed enormous economic and strategic importance, and the Ocean surrounding it had vitally served trade and commerce between the East and the West giving predominance to the British Empire as the major world power. The matter of the fact is that the emergence of Pakistan had frustrated Nehru’s ambition to see India substituting the British Empire as the greater power. The successors of Nehru continued to entertain this delusional ambition. Back in the mid 1940s, Nehru wrote in his “Discovery of India” that the “Pacific is likely to take the place of the Atlantic in the future as the nerve centre of the world. Though not directly a Pacific state, India will inevitably exercise an important influence there. India will also develop as the centre of economic and political activity in the Indian Ocean area, in South East Asia and right up to the Middle East. Her strategic position gives her an economic and strategic importance in a part of the world which is going to develop rapidly in the future. If there is a grouping of the countries bordering on the Indian Ocean on either side of India including Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), India, Burma (Myanmar), Malaya (Malaysia), Siam, Java (Indonesia),the present day minority problems will disappear, or at any rate, will have to be considered in an entirely different context”. The reflections of Pandit Nehru amply demonstrated that he wanted to replace the British Empire in this region with India as the political and economic leader of the groupings of small states. “The small national state is doomed. It may survive as a culturally autonomous area but not as an independent political unit”, he further wrote. In one of his interviews with the Washington Post as quoted by the Daily Dawn in its issue of 21 December 1963, he gave vent to his thoughts about the Sub-continent saying that “Confederation remains our ultimate goal, though if we say it openly, they are alarmed that we want to swallow them up”. China has moved to strike a long term partnership with Iran excluding India from all the main projects including Chabahar and the building of roads and railways to connect with Afghanistan. India has also lost Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh to China This is how Nehru thought of India as the leading power or the hegemon of the region before the departure of the British Imperialists and even after the Partition. The political and strategic policies towards the small states of the region India adopted under the leadership of Nehru and his successors were driven by this long cherished ambition of becoming the hegemon power. While cloaking its designs by the mantle of Non Aligned Movement, democracy, freedom of people and sweet talk of good neighborliness, it continued to pursue deceitfully Kautylia’s statecraft and military strategy intimidating and subduing small states, destabilizing neighbours and patronizing subversion and terrorism in the region. Its footprints are found in the bogey of Pakhtunistan, civil strife in Sri Lanka, secession of Bangladesh, insurgencies in Balochistan, patronage of separatist groups in Sindh, bloodshed in Karachi, border dispute with China. The continued political and economic stability and close strategic alliance with the USA after the collapse of the erstwhile Soviet Union, India has been relentlessly pursuing its hegemonic designs. To realize its long cherished dream of being the major power in greater Asia, India went into the tight embrace of the USA and started behaving as a counterpoise to China miscalculating its own military power, the USA reliability and the Chinese military and strategic threshold and suffered humiliation to the chagrin of the sane Indians. As put it by an analyst, ‘one minor Chinese military move took the wind out of the Hindutva nationalist regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi which miserably failed to give a reasonable political, diplomatic, economic or military response to the Chinese move along the LAC’. The membership of the Quad and the new ally – the USA – did not help avert the blow to its prestige. India suddenly realized it had no other option than falling back on the old ally – Russia. The Indian Defence Minister lost no time in rushing to Kremlin to buy military hardware (Mig-29, SU-30, S-400 Missile defence system, K-class submarines, T-90 Tanks etc worth more than $16 billion) and also to seek Russian help to ease tension with China. The Chinese message to India and its strategic allies was loud and clear that it does not know to compromise on its territorial integrity and strategic interests including BRIor CPEC in the region. The Chinese move dealt a heavy blow to the grandeur and the awe and fear of India in the region. China has moved to strike a long term partnership withIran excluding India from all the main projects including Chabahar and the building of roads and railways to connect with Afghanistan. India has also lost Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh to China. India’s defence budget in the recent years leapfrogged to $71billion in 2019. With increasing tension at LAC, it will have to spend even more on defence related purchases. The US is India’s fourth largest supplier of arms after Israel and France. The defence trade between the two countries jumped from $200million in 2000 to $20billion in 2020. The US designated India as the major defence partner in 2016 and signed three defence cooperation agreements with it between 2016 and 2019. This emboldened it to revoke article 370and 35 A of its Constitution abolishing the special status of the Kashmiris, shutting and locking down the valley for almost a year, indulging in blatant Islamophobia, atrocities against Muslim minority and audacious genocidal moves in Jammu and Kashmir. The Modi regime has internationalized the Kashmir dispute bringing in China as the third stakeholder. (To be concluded) The writer was a member of the Foreign Service of Pakistan and he has authored two books