On Tuesday (July 4, 2017) External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in her keynote address at the Delhi Dialogue stated that India’s deep civilizational engagement with Southeast Asian countries happened without any ‘conquest or colonization’. Earlier, on Monday, at a Conference organised by Zakir Husain Delhi College and the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), BJP’s General Secretary, Ram Madhav, called on India and Vietnam to make sure that they are not subjected to colonialism again. In a forthright manner, he added that the “geo-politics in the Indian Ocean region makes the possibility of the return of neo-Colonialism a reality with countries trying to dominate others through money, markets and military”. Through these iterations on ‘colonialism’, it appears that the Indian leaders are obliquely pointing to China’s external engagement in its immediate and extended neighbourhood
