New Delhi: In the theatre of Indian politics, few tactics are as self-defeating as dragging a foreign head of government into domestic score-settling. The recent exchange at a Congress event—where a joking reference to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was used to mock Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “hug diplomacy”—is a case in point. Sandeep Dikshit’s quip (“Meloni samajh ke toh nahi pakda tha?”) and the accompanying laughter may have drawn applause from a partisan crowd. Yet it exemplifies a deeper flaw: using a sitting European leader as a prop to…
Read MoreDiplomacy as a Punchline: The Self-Defeating Politics of Dragging Foreign Leaders into Domestic Debates
