> pacifist

That pacifism was very much required though. The whole projection of India as this "mystic peaceful place full of peace-loving meditating sadhus that the Beatles and Steve jobs were so enamored by" was instrumental for the way we got independent with minimal balkanization[1], our ability to stay non-aligned in the cold war (which btw, is the original definition of a third world country!) and maintain strategic autonomy throughout the following decades - which we exercise quite well today. Of course, it was nothing but a political image, and we built nukes behind the scenes (by order of the very same politician nehru), but gandhis pacifist outlook and the heavy marketing of this in western countries (see Nehru's rallies in USA at the time), as well as in soviet Russia, was very necessary. People like to say we shouldn't have been socialist back then, but the Soviet help that arose out of that was really useful. In geopolitics there are no morals, so it is also completely OK that we took a U-turn from all that a while later. The only interest is self-interest.

My point is, a lot of these political positions are simply projections cast in order to achieve a certain goal, meaning to look at it from a moral standpoint is useless.

This is true for any political position held in any country anywhere in the world at any point in history.

[1] If you think the partitions were bad... the rest of india would have had a much worse fate had foreign interests gotten involved. Think: other cold war battlefields of the late 20th century. The number of secessionist states at the time in india...the cia and the kgb would have had a field day.

> In geopolitics there are no morals, so it is also completely OK that we took a U-turn from all that a while later. The only interest is self-interest.

> My point is, a lot of these political positions are simply projections cast in order to achieve a certain goal, meaning to look at it from a moral standpoint is useless.

Claims like this can easily be used justify Nazism (which is alarmingly prescient considering the direction India's been going in recent decades)

I agree that many people use disingenuous moral outrage as a way to drive some political outcome, but many people with moral outrage are coming from a place of sincerity in reaction to the moral bankruptcy demonstrated by the world's leading powers.