How Sri Lanka slipped into China's orbit (gatewayhouse.in)

BY M.D. Nalapat

That old habits die hard is clear from the way in which the functionaries of the European Union seek to influence the developing economies on the best way to manage their nations. And woe betide those leaders from the former colonies who explain that their knowledge of local conditions may be a tad better than the EU officials jetting in from Paris, London, Berlin and other exquisite capitals to advise the locals. If Chechnya or Kashmir did not follow the Kosovo and East Timorese path of breaking away from their parent countries, then it was the good luck of Russia and India, both countries with leaders receptive to advice from afar. Indeed, India has the distinction of asking the British Viceroy to tarry a while longer in 1947 after its independence and partition of Pakistan, so terrified were the new rulers of the country to exercise their responsibilities sans the guidance of the colonial hand.

If India has had about a century and a half of unbridled European colonisation, Sri Lanka has had nearly five centuries. Small wonder that its leadership, of whichever political hue, obeyed the dictums of even junior officials from Europe and the US.

That ended when Mahinda Rajapaksa was elected President of Sri Lanka in 2005. Within a year, he had shed the cocoon of subservience that had been the characteristic of his predecessors, going so far as to challenge even India, the country that " Sri Lankans love to hate, and hate to love"

Rajapaksa's most egregious crime of lese majeste has been his refusal to heed the many and ever-shriller EU, US and Indian demands for an immediate ceasefire in early 2009. Then, the Sri Lankan army was on the cusp of overrunning the last sliver of territory controlled by the LTTE, an organisation whose backers have significant influence not merely in Chennai, but even more so in Brussels.

India and a 21st Century Anglosphere (JINSA)

M.D. Nalapat

When President Barack Obama travels to India in early November, he will be visiting a country much more conscious of skin color than his own. Because of his mixed Euro-African ancestry, Barack Obama's election as President of the United States is seen in India as a transformational event. The fact that millions of American voters of European extraction preferred him to John McCain affirmed a truth widely believed in India about the United States, that America is culturally "quadricontinental" and not "unicontinental." The American melting pot has given the world not just a vibrant people (of multiple hues) but also a composite culture that is a fusion of strands from Africa, Europe, Asia and South America. Unfortunately, change even in the Obama administration seems to be only skin-deep. The contemporary Washington "establishment" obsessively considers itself and America to be, in effect, an extension of Europe, in much the same way as the ruling structures in Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

All three of these latter countries may be termed as belonging to the classical  "Anglosphere," the geopolitical construct ascribed to Winston Churchill in which ethnicity trumped almost all other qualities. It was Churchill, the wartime prime minister of Great Britain, who insisted over President Roosevelt's objections that the freedoms promised in the Atlantic Charter were to apply only to the peoples of Europe and not to those in Asia or Africa who were denied their liberty for years after the Allied victory in the "war for democracy." A war in which, let it be noted, more than two million Indian soldiers served (and a further six million auxiliaries worked in defense industries and logistics). This is a figure far in excess than the numbers mustered by France yet Winston Churchill rewarded France with a seat at the post-war High Table in preference to India. Had Churchill continued to get his way, even China would not have gained admission to the Big Five in the United Nations Security Council, as the country was not European or neo-European. While Churchill deserves the admiration of the world for the manner in which he confronted Germany's Nazi dictatorship, his attitude in matters of ethnicity marked him as belonging firmly to the 19th century.

With Barack Obama's 2009 entry into the Oval Office, it was expected that the United States would lead the way to what may be termed a "21st Century Anglosphere," the grouping of countries with common linguistic, cultural and, let it be admitted, colonial ties to the former British Empire. While this concept has been around for some time, especially since Churchill emphasized the unity of the "English-speaking countries" in the period since German aggression launched World War II, what may be termed the "Classical (or Churchillian) Anglosphere" had ethnicity in addition to the English language as its foundation. Churchill rejected Roosevelt's view that those of the English-speaking world but not of European ancestry had the same claim to cultural and other traditions of that world.

An Entrenched Establishment Retards India's Political and Economic Development

Along with the United States and, of course, the United Kingdom, India would be the major player in a 21st century partnership of the English-speaking countries. Given that India is still a "work in progress," a closer association with the Anglosphere should help to nudge the country's ruling elites towards the legal and institutional reforms needed for a deepening of its democracy. An obvious candidate for change would be the prevailing political party structure in India, each of which is dominated by either a single family or an equally self-perpetuating clique of individuals.

Hidden hand poisoning ties between India and the West? (UPI Asia)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — Quiet surveys conducted through multiple sources indicate that the root of the spasms of "curry bashing" – violent attacks on Indian students – seen in Australia over the past year is the belief of migrants from some European states that only whites ought to be allowed to emigrate to Australia.Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, Germany ensured that a huge chunk of Western Europe's resources would go into subsidies for the eastern part of the continent, believing that ethnicity would trump economics.

Had Western Europe adopted a strategy of relying on global skills for its expansion, rather than relying on a single source, Eastern Europe, with a half-century history of dysfunctional educational and occupational networks, that most productive part of the world would have witnessed rates of growth closer to those of India and China than to Japan’s.

As matters stand, the hugely expensive Western gamble on Eastern Europe is likely to see the eclipse of Western European companies within the next 15 years, faced as they will be by competition from China, India and Brazil. Had even one-third of the investment that flowed into Eastern Europe gone to India, for example, the returns from that would have been enough to wipe out the losses now being made in Eastern Europe.
Eastern Europe surely includes many highly artistic, liberal and talented individuals. Yet it also includes those whose notions of ethnic privilege belong to a bygone era, but have now been made the foundation for EU immigration policies.

Such individuals would like to see the United States, Canada and Australia copy the European Union in shutting the door to those of non-European ethnicity. They have linked up with anti-nonwhite immigrant lobbies in all these countries to seek to enforce an effective ban on even highly skilled migrants from nonwhite countries.

COP15 shuns the poor (UPI ASIA)

M. D. Nalapat


Manipal, India — Those intent on ensuring that the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen is free of the worst sufferers of climate change -- the poorly-heeled participants from the developing world with the exception of a few vetted and sanitized samples -- did well to fix the venue at one of the most expensive cities in the world.Holding COP15 in Copenhagen during the Christmas season was designed to ensure that airfares were high enough to scare away almost all participants from the developing world and that the developed world got a large share -- over 80 percent -- in conference participation, which is their share in global emissions.

Naturally, almost all the designated voices at COP15 are from the developed world including the chairperson, as indeed are the overwhelming majority of those representing non-official groups.

Now that pavements in Copenhagen have been declared off-limits by the local police, and low-cost student and youth accommodation has almost entirely been taken up by visitors from developed countries, those unable to get a European Union visa or afford a two-week stay in an expensive hotel in Copenhagen are sitting at home while decisions that could cost them their lives are being taken up by opaque bodies.

The few from the poorer corners of the world who managed to arrive in the Danish capital have found to their dismay, several of their accreditations cancelled without being assigned any reason. Others have been excluded from access to the high level Plenary Room because such access is arbitrarily cut off once the capacity at the Bella Centre crosses 15,000 observers, or less than even half of the 36,000 accredited participants. Such a cutoff favors those who had the finances to come early to Copenhagen, usually groups that include an army of lobbyists for business purposes intent on harnessing the conference to their advantage.

Interestingly, organizers have told delegates that the prized "Third Level Badges” will be issued to the entire business community to access high-level segments of the conference. Such measures ensure that the rich and the business world hear the major voices of the Conference.

Losing Minds and Hearts in Iraq (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — India has been at the business end of jihadi-funded insurgency since 1981, the year in which Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) began to organize a "Khalistan" movement that would in a couple of years launch a terror campaign in India's Punjab State. Although local members of the Sikh community declined to come on board, enough funds were raised from ethnic Sikhs in the United States and Canada to provide the funding for a vicious struggle that lasted till the mid-1990s.

The Khalistan movement blended seamlessly with the other jihadist operation in Kashmir, an insurgency set off by those who returned to the Indian-held part of the state after receiving training in Pakistan from 1982 to 1988. It is still smoldering, and has thus far cost 73,000 lives, mostly in the killings of Muslims by Wahabbis.

In 1989 the USSR was defeated in Afghanistan and the ISI transferred its attention to Kashmir. Unfortunately for them, New Delhi proved a tougher proposition than Moscow, the reason being the manner in which the security forces conducted anti-jihadist operations. Given their low level of financial resources, these had perforce to depend on the "software" of psychological warfare against the jihadis, placing emphasis on changing of mindsets and preventing of unity between those disaffected with Indian rule.

In contrast, the United States has thrown into battle in Iraq a (usually wasted) flood of material resources, with far less success than the Indian armed forces have shown in Kashmir, where the jihadis have been beaten to the ground and are now desperately clutching at diplomacy to rescue themselves from the pit they have been pushed into.

Why not an Asian NATO? (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat 


MANIPUR, India, April 26 (UPI) -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other war planners in the Pentagon may bridle at the comparison, but the reality is that the U.S. military establishment follows the example set by the State Department in at least one crucially wrong assumption: the belief that European traditions and analytical models can suffice to analyze Asia.

After all, since Asia was carved up among different European countries until a few decades back, clearly that meant the Europeans knew their way around.

However, times have changed, and today's Asia is a fusion of local with Western mindstreams that paradoxically make the peoples of the world's biggest continent more difficult to understand by Western scholarship.

An example is Iraq. Several Asian scholars -- including the writer, in these columns -- had warned that the absence of involvement of local anti-Saddam Hussein militias and the prominence given to the British -- the former colonizers of Iraq and therefore a people the locals are understandably sensitive about -- by U.S. war planners was likely to lead to a bulge in support for the Saddam regime, fighting what is perceived as a new Western war of conquest.

Mind Wars and Iraq (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India, Nov. 11 (UPI) -- After World War I, the great powers imposed a peace on Germany that led to a fresh conflagration just two decades later, one far more virulent in its scope and effects. The coming military campaign against Iraq promises to be a duck shoot, given that country's eviscerated war machine. However, unless equal attention is paid to the "chemistry" of the campaign -- its "mind" factor -- as well as its "mechanics" -- the straightforward military aspects -- the very victory over Iraq may create the conditions for an intensification of the terror war against secular democracies.

This would affect the strategic interests of the democracies worldwide. To paraphrase a phrase from the 1992 Clinton campaign," It's the Mind, Stupid!" Defeating the Iraqi armed forces and toppling Saddam Hussein needs to be complemented by the creation of an atmosphere within the Muslim world that accepts such a success to be in their interests as well.

In other words, the strategy against Saddam needs to be a fusion of mechanics and chemistry .While the first deals with field mechanics and hardware, the second concentrates on the atmospherics and the psychological effects of such actions.

Islamic radicals have attempted to overcome their deficiencies in the "mechanical" with emphasis on the "chemical" in their war against modern civilization. This strategy has thus far been neglected by Western military planners.

In Afghanistan, it was not the air-dropping of peanut butter but the entry of fellow-Afghans into the battle against the Taliban that dried up support for that regime. In a similar way, there needs to be very visible -- and voluble -- Iraqi faces in the campaign against Saddam alongside President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.