It has been a natural tendency of humans to dominate the earth since we started evolving. Manifested in a different form of this tendency was the imperialism. At that time, imperialism was considered to be brave, heroic and even superior. But as we know, time can change the the values that we hold today as true. An action done in the past might not be seen as correct now because of changed values and norms.
Imperialism was used by countries to subjugate nations into colonies and extract and suck blood and sweat out of it. The trend was to be an imperialist and to dominate. Charles Darwin's principle of survival of the fittest was used as a plausible explanation for this. But today we faithfully condemn imperialistic attitudes to be less ethical and of low moral standards to just simply assume superiority based on prejudice.
But there is far to it that we must know that there is always a tendency that history can repeat itself and Neo - imperialism is a residue of the old imperialism modified to the changes of time.
When a country gives loan/aid/economic assistance/infrastructure to another country, it is almost always expected to be reciprocal. All the debts accumulated will create an obvious obligation of the country receiving aid to pay back in some form or the other in time either now or later to the country giving aid. This type of constant obligation of one country towards other country might be called as Neo - imperialism. Slowly, if the countries are not able to pay back the debt, then there accumulates a moral obligation of a country to cede to the request/order of the helping country ultimately effecting the sovereignty.
It is in this light that we have to understand the recent push of the government towards Aatma Nirbhar Bharath. The vision tries to highlight the importance of self dependency on crucial factors of the economy so that we will not lose sovereignty to third parties. Losing sovereignty to a third party is the worst nightmare of any country. When a country cannot take decisions independently without external interference, then its as good as not having independence for which our freedom fighters struggled. Neo - imperialism can be thwarted and we can maintain sovereignty by having self dependency at least in essential items. As a case in example we can take the PL-480 which was a food assistance scheme of the United States which was used as an arm twisting tool to affect our diplomacy and foreign policies. Moving forward, self dependency creates a sense of belief and leadership among the citizens and gives a psychological boost to handle any crisis.
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