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.

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.

Only India can Challenge China's Primacy in Asia (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — More than radical Islam, the threat to the primacy of the West will come from Sinic civilization, centered in the People’s Republic of China. Should China continue to grow at the pace of the last 20 years for the next two decades, by 2015 the backwash created by such progress will pull Japan and South Korea into its gravity field. This will later extend to Siberia and large swathes of Southeast and Central Asia.

As armed conflict would be a lose-lose proposition for all major players, the odds are that such an expansion of geopolitical space will take place peacefully. China’s strategy will be to make cooperation with it attractive while increasing the costs of conflict to Asian countries that may seek to present a challenge, principally India.

Obsessed as Germany is with ensuring the ethnic purity of Europe by blocking immigration even from established, English-speaking democracies outside the West, and France with the preservation of Franco-German primacy in Europe, the European Union is unlikely to adopt the only course that would enable it to retain its edge in the face of rising Sinic power. This is an alliance with India.

Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, with his obsessive focus on Europe and neglect of Asian Russia, has been all but begging France and Germany to admit Moscow into the European Union as an equal of these two states. This course is likely to go the way of Turkey’s application to join the club; in other words, it will end up in the refuse bin. This is likely to push Russia further toward being a partner in the Sinic alliance that will be stitched together by Beijing in a decade.

Racism Trumps Reason at Vienna (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Contrary to the expectations of Congress Party boss Sonia Gandhi and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, last week's special meeting in Vienna of the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group ended in deadlock. The meeting had been requested by the United States to approve George W. Bush's quest for a "clean waiver" for the resumption of nuclear trade with India – commerce that had been frozen since India's 1974 nuclear test.

Tellingly, all but one of the countries opposing India were either European, or of largely European stock. The one exception was Japan, a country that prides itself on its people being the "Westerners of the East."

Expectedly, Austria led the Euro-attack against the proposed exemption, reiterating the bloc’s 34-year demand that India be forced to accept full-scope safeguards on all its nuclear facilities, as well as sign on to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. New Zealand, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Finland, Switzerland and Ireland joined hands with Japan in backing the Austrian stand, even though each had been individually made aware by Indian negotiators that any such conditions would result in India walking away from the deal.

Unfortunately for backers of the deal, reports reaching New Delhi suggest that the Bush point person for the talks, Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation John Rood, proved to be less than enthusiastic about securing a clean waiver for India. In this, Rood is following in the path of his predecessor Robert Joseph, who had also been unenthusiastic about the deal. Both are members of the U.S. nonproliferation mainstream that for decades has focused on India – a state that has never proliferated its technology beyond its own borders – while doing little about U.S. policies that have winked at proliferation by Pakistan, China and North Korea.

The China Factor in India's Nuclear Debate (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — On July 22, should India's ruling alliance win its trust vote in Parliament, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will go ahead and work out an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Suppliers Group. His partners for the past 51 months, the two communist parties, will use their 61 members of Parliament to oppose him – despite Singh having kowtowed continuously to them on economic policy, at the cost of economic reform.

Today, the Indian economy is in far worse shape than it was when he took office in 2004, with government spending out of control, a doubling of the tax burden and a raft of restrictions on private initiative and enterprise.

Why, despite Singh having implemented a "communist lite" program as prime minister, are the two communist parties so anxious to defeat his government and thereby block further progress on the nuclear negotiations begun with the George W. Bush- Manmohan Singh statement on U.S.-India nuclear cooperation on July 18, 2005? After all, the two parties are openly pacifist, having opposed the country's nuclear weapons program since its inception in 1985, and the agreements now being discussed would significantly limit India's freedom of action to build an arsenal capable of responding against a nuclear attack.

Contrary to the reports and commentaries now appearing in the Indian media, the change in stand of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India has little to do with nuclear weapons or energy. It is based on what is perceived – despite ritual denials by the United States and India – to be the principal reason behind the July 18, 2005 accord: the integration of India into the defense architecture of the United States, in the manner of Japan.

Why India Rejected the Nuclear Deal (UPIASIA)

Manipal, India — If we take away the near-automatic, and usually fallacious, identification of a country with its government, and use the views within an elected Parliament as a better guide to opinion, then there is a majority against the George W. Bush-Manmohan Singh nuclear deal that crosses 70 percent.

Regrettably for India's ruling Congress party, Sonia Gandhi gave up her struggles with formal education very early, and since her marriage to a scion of the Nehrus has lived a life as cocooned as any royalty. She chose as prime minister an individual as unschooled in the actual rough-and-tumble of politics as herself. Manmohan Singh was pitchforked into politics by former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao in 1992, and after a disastrous showing in the "safe" and urbanized New Delhi constituency in 1996, has refused to enter an electoral contest.

Small wonder that both misread the chemistry of the country and went ahead with a nuclear deal that does India the "favor" of being accepted as low caste rather than an outcaste, as the country has been treated under the leadership of the United States, China and the European Union since its first nuclear test in 1974. "Low caste" in the context of the nuclear sector can be held to refer to countries that have been given the privilege of supervised and limited access to nuclear technology, a category that includes most countries in the world.

Move the UN to Ethiopia (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 (UPI) -- Those responsible for the creation of the United Nations conglomerate were idealists, intent on seeking to avoid another international conflict.

They succeeded in the conventional sense. The prospect of another conventional world war is remote, though regional and intercontinental conflicts continue and groups like al-Qaida -- not specifically nation-states though tied to one or more of them -- have emerged to fight a global war against the values and the systems of pluralist democracies.

The Peoples Republic of China is seeking to create a self-perpetuating super state independent of the people as a means of securing its interests. The PRC is supporting a slew of similarly authoritarian structures across the world with missile and nuclear technology.

Several democracies are having to battle against insurgencies and terrorism while AIDS has replaced tuberculosis as the primary killer of the world's poor.

What are the conflicts that the UN has succeeded in preventing?

The threshold of effectiveness appears low. In a few instances the UN system as such -- as distinct from the actions of a few of its member states -- was able to prevent a conflict or stop it once begun. The organization's principal value has been as a talking shop, a pulpit for the preaching of verities. Much of the "work" of the several thousand functionaries is comprised of going from one meeting to the other, organizing yet another "talk-a-thon" after getting through several.

Stripped of verbiage, the UN has value only as a clearinghouse of concepts and policies. It has value in a world in which several countries are below the radar of the attention of the powerful. If there were no United Nations, it would need to be invented -- but not along the lines of how the current organization as taken shape.

The Battlefield is the Mind (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India, Oct. 13 (UPI) -- After World War I, the consequences of the Versailles "peace" were the rise of the National Socialists and World War II. That conflict was followed by the Marshall Plan, the democratization of Germany, Italy and Japan and their bonding with the United States and the United Kingdom into both a security alliance as well as an economic partnership. Both British values and American culture permeated the three former Axis powers, vacuuming away the hostility in the minds of their populations to the victors.

Today, some Germans (as indeed many Britons and more than a few French) may be against what George Bush did to Saddamite Iraq. Almost none are anti-American except in a narrow political sense -- in other words, except in the same way as many Britons are "anti"-Blair and several U.S. citizens "hostile" to Bush.

Why did the Peace imposed after World War II create a benign backlash while that which followed World War I create the Hitler-Tojo-Mussolini monster? The reason was that conquest was achieved in the 1914-1919 conflict only on the ground, over physical territory. In the second, it won over the mind of the "enemy" population pool as well. It can be argued that the extremely liberal treatment given to the Germans after they had backed the most loathsome dictatorship in history, a policy of forgiveness that took within its fold more than 95 percent of those who had been active in the NSDAP, helped avoid a second Hitler.

It is now clear that the formal respect paid to the Emperor of Japan and to the non-militaristic aspects of the culture of that civilization, together with an efficient MacArthurite democratization and integration into the modern economy of Japan, transformed a power that had been first suspicious of and then hostile to the West (at least for the previous two centuries) into a reliable ally, despite the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima

Operation Enduring Freedom ought to have been conducted by giving the same billing to a "Free Iraq" leadership as was given to its U.S.-U..K participants. A Free Iraqi general conducting press briefings jointly with the non-telegenic Tommy Franks, four stars glistening on his lapel, would have had an effect similar to that created by projecting Charles De Gaulle as the heroic leader of a multitude of "Free French," when the reality in German-occupied France was that the level of resistance was far lower than that found in the eastern theatres, while active collaboration was high. The "Free French" were, however, wonderful in cinema newsreels and on the BBC and VOA, which was enough to preserve French pride in the postwar period, avoiding the kind of backlash that made Paris the prime mover behind the Versailles Treaty.

Constrain, not contain, China (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India, June 6 (UPI) -- Second of two parts

The Clinton administration tried to recruit Communist China as a strategic ally that would help Washington defend U.S. interests, but that strategy failed because China's long-term interests are significantly different from those of the United States.

China seeks the strategic withdrawal of the United States from Asia, and sees itself as the replacement.

It would like to ensure that an Asian Common Market get formed that would give member-countries -- principally itself -- preference over countries outside the bloc.

An Asian Common Market that included the Middle East, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and South Asia would isolate Japan, suck in South Korea, and in the view of the planners in Beijing, ensure Chinese prosperity at a time of increased tensions with Washington.

Today, throughout Asia with the exception of Japan and, until recently India, China has been conducting a quiet but persistent diplomacy designed to wean the countries of the region away from their "dependence" on the United States.

This has been only partially successful in the ASEAN region of Southeast Asia, as most of the countries belonging to this group are wary of the giant nearby, seeing it afar as a safer option, at least in private.