Star-bungled banner still flies in America: The US plays another Trump card by finessing Sino-Indian geography

The 15th-century Italian explorer Christopher Columbus fondly believed that he had ‘discovered’ India, when, in fact, he had landed up in what would later be called America. It took another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, to set the record straight a few years later by disproving Columbus and leading his own name to a ‘New World’. Both remained blissfully unaware that 500 years before them, a band of Vikings established a settlement on ‘America’.

Following in the tradition of what might be called American geograffiti, President Donald Trump was reportedly unaware that India and China share a border. This revelation features in a recently published book by two Pulitzer prize-winning American journalists, 'A Very Stable Genius', which recounts that during a meeting with PM Narendra Modi, President Trump said, “It’s not that you have China on your border,” much to the former’s consternation.

If he’d ever heard of it, the US president could quite probably think that Aksai Chin described an anatomical feature, like a snub nose. However, when one belongs to what a former US secretary of state described as “the only indispensable nation in the world”, geographical minutiae rarely matter. On his proposed first official visit to India, on landing, President Trump might well assure his host that it’s great to be in Islamabad.