India is irrelevant internationally.

The US whistle-blower, ex NSA contractor, Edward Snowden asked for asylum in India and was promptly turned down. Our most revered External Affairs Minister said that India is not an " open house " for asylum seekers because the country has a " very careful and restrictive policy " on the issue. Livemint, 2 July. Why? When we allow Bangladeshis to flood into the country in their millions and provide them with ration cards so that they can have subsidised food at Indian taxpayer expense and allow Pakistani actors to earn millions from Bollywood movies why can we not give asylum to Snowden on purely humanitarian grounds when we know how Bradley Manning, another whistle-blower, was tortured in prison by the vindictive Obama administration? This is despite the fact that Snowden's revelations show that India was fifth on the list of countries that the US was spying on. In fact, the Minister was quick to defend the US saying," Some of the information they got out of their scrutiny, they were able to use it to prevent serious terrorist attacks in several countries." HT, 2 July. Really? Pray spell out how many terrorist attacks on India were prevented by the US spying. Give us specific instances, and not placebos, and let us judge for ourselves. Why do we kowtow to the US when we do not receive any aid from them, when they keep selling arms to Pakistan to kill Indian soldiers and when they have given asylum to Rabinder Singh, a CIA mole in the Research and Analysis Wing of India in the 1980s? Singh is said to be living happily in new Jersey. Tiny Iceland is contemplating giving citizenship to Snowden to protect him. The Supreme Court in Iceland has ordered credit card companies to process payments to Wikileaks which were stopped by US pressure following exposure of deliberate killings of innocent people, including 2 Reuters journalists, in Baghdad by a US helicopter crew. " This is not scrutiny and access to actual messages. It is only computer analysis of patterns of calls and emails that are being sent...it is not actually snooping on the content of anyone's messages or conversations," said the Minister. Why is he protecting the US when he should be outraged by this assault on Indian citizens? Because the Congress is doing much worse. The Central Monitoring System is designed to read our emails, listen and record our telephone conversations and see our internet postings without any restrictions or supervision by citizen representatives. When our politicians are persecuting Indian citizens they cannot be humanitarian to foreigners, can they? That is why other countries kick us around.