Republican Party becoming a Trump Franchise ( Sunday Guardian)

 A similar takeover of a ruling party took place in India in 1969.

SARS-CoV-2, the pandemic which was revealed in its horror to the world in Wuhan towards the close of 2019, has the capability of killing not just human beings but the political careers of leaders who thought themselves unmatched by their opponents. President Donald Trump was headed for victory until the virus struck his country and damaged his reputation as a manager, a perception that had overshadowed the reality that the Trump presidency gave a bonanza to exactly the same segment of society in the US that had benefitted hugely from multiple Presidents from Reagan onwards. The US Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has ensured that Big Money remains the dominant influence in electoral contests, and this has ensured success to several candidates who place the interests of the hyper-wealthy few above that of the rest. President Joe Biden has put forward a plan of action that can transform the US for the better, much as Franklin D. Roosevelt did. This is in danger of being stillborn as a consequence of the power of Democrats in Name Only (DINOs) such as Joe Mancin to block the legislation needed to bring Biden’s vision of Opportunity for All to fruition. In his final months as President of the US, Donald Trump understood that it was not just the billionaires that counted but ordinary citizens as well. Had he put forward the same measures as Joe Biden is now placing before the US Senate, the Republicans in that august body would have supported them. Because it is no longer a Trump but a Biden presidency, they oppose the very measures that Trump had veered around to suggesting. After having given trillions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies to the hyper-rich, Trump was prepared to spend as lavishly on the rest of society. After all, it was not his money that was going to be spent, but more of the dollars printed by the Federal Reserve Board. Despite this willingness to play the role of Santa Claus, Trump was defeated because of the Covid-19 pandemic that seemed out of control throughout much of the final year of his term in the White House. The spread of the pandemic ensured the victory of Joe Biden. It is true that vaccines were developed at warp speed because of the huge amounts of money thrown in the direction of Big Pharma by President Trump. Had he directed such funds to universities and research institutes instead, more and better vaccines would have been the result. But few universities or institutes have the lobbying capacity of Big Pharma, which has long profited out of the research of others and the blocking of substitutes that are either imported from countries such as India or produced domestically.

The other country that could have emerged as a vaccine superpower is India, had the regulatory and other bottlenecks to output and innovation been removed sooner than many of them were during March 2021 through the intervention of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The country he has led since 2014 awaits the bringing to justice of those responsible for so many deaths and so much misery that has clouded the first months of 2021 in India. If the cause is a bio-terror attack, it came from a predictable source, and barriers to disaster ought to have been built, such as a sufficient number of oxygen concentrators dispersed across the country as well as substantially more vaccines and medication than had been the situation even after the pandemic had struck. It is difficult, often very difficult, to actually do something beneficial in India, but very easy for interested parties to block such actions from taking place, so dense are the constricting regulations and so immense are the powers of the officials administering them. After every failure caused by a surfeit of regulation that slows or stifles, the standard response is always more regulation. Cronies love such a system, while others despair.

Now that the Republican Party has become the Party of Trump, the definition of Republicans in Name Only (RINOs) has been changed to those who objected to such a transformation. It needs to be remembered that a similar takeover of a ruling political party took place in India as well. In 1969, Indira Gandhi converted the Congress Party into a family-owned enterprise, and the other (once?) consequential national party besides the BJP has been a family enterprise ever since. As Prime Minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao sought to bring his party back to where it had been before its complete takeover by the Nehru family, and was defeated at the polls in 1996 by the formation of the Tiwari Congress. The toxic effect of this on the Prime Minister combined with the incessant personal attack on Rao by what was called the Sonia Duo (Arjun Singh and N.D. Tiwari) that lasted from the time Ottavio Quattrocchi was permitted by Rao to leave India to almost the final days of Rao’s life, when he was not sure whether the next night would be spent at home or in jail as a consequence of criminal charges hanging over his head. Donald Trump has a ruthless streak in him that has helped ensure that most of his party leaders remain faithful to him. Should the Republican Party escape being a Trump franchise, a beneficiary could be Ivanka Trump. She who will be helped by Jared Kushner’s success in fashioning the Abraham Accords, which represent a breakthrough as important as was the 1978 Sadat-Begin Camp David accord. Should the 2022 mid-term elections go badly for the Democrats as a consequence of sabotage of Biden’s plans by DINOs, Trump would dominate the Republican Party. This would weaken the GOP substantially. Despite the Roberts Supreme Court, folks in the US are not ready to move backwards rather than forwards societally. More than her father seems to, Ivanka may understand that any effort at replicating the racial supremacy doctrine that has been woven into too much of the policies of the Trump administration would be futile. Even among white citizens in the US, the majority accept the reality of a multi-racial society. Friendships and marriages are now commonplace. US Presidents such as Lyndon B. Johnson and now Joseph R Biden are enacting measures that take account of such an inevitability. Biden Democrats winning in 2022 will be good for the US even as a loss for them would rescue Republicans from becoming a family-run enterprise. It was among the disappointments of the Clinton-suffused Obama era that the symbolism of the first black President of the US became a substitute for many of the actual steps that were needed to ensure social justice through good economic policy. The wealthy were bailed out by Obama at the expense of the poor and the middle class in the way that first Hank Paulson and later Larry Summers wanted. Should President Biden succeed despite the DINOs, his societal legacy would be far more consequential than that of the first non-white US President. The US needs to fix its socio-economic issues, if it is to successfully confront the existential challenge posed by Cold War 2.0, just as India needs to do. Should the DINOs succeed in blocking the Biden plan, they would cripple their own presidency and the Democratic Party. Should the RINOs succeed after a 2022 Republican setback, they would ensure that the Republican Party gets oriented towards the future rather than remain fixated on the past.

Republican Party becoming a Trump franchise - The Sunday Guardian Live

Xi Jinping banks on US-India systemic issues to ensure PRC success ( Sunday Guardian)

 

The Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity for China to overtake the US in comprehensive global power, given that Xi Jinping has managed the aftermath of the pandemic much better than the leaders of the major countries of North America, Europe and Asia.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken very quickly echoed Henry Kissinger’s recent lament that “tensions between the US and the PRC needed to be reduced before another Cold War took place”. Blinken called on China to return to the “approved path of international cooperation”. Kissinger may be excused in view of his history, but it is a surprise that Secretary Blinken seems unaware of the Battle of Systems that China is engaged in with the US and other major democracies. The CCP leadership believes that theirs is by far the better system, and that in the ongoing contest between the two superpowers, its system will ensure that Beijing prevail over Washington. The US Secretary of State seems to have missed what has been out in the open for at least the past six years: that Xi is engaged in a rivalry that will end only with a meltdown in one or the other of the competing systems of governance. This is a contest whose acceleration has been triggered by the 2008 financial crash caused by Wall Street. Every President of the US since Richard Nixon held the view that the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would permit it to accept permanently the primacy of Washington over Beijing in the international order. It took the street-smart instincts of a New York builder to finally in 2017 enter the thinking of US President Donald J. Trump that CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping had not just accelerated the party’s longstanding drive towards global primacy, but had set a timeline and begun to implement what seemed to the CCP leadership to be a winning strategy. A plan designed to ensure the downfall of US global primacy.

BLINKEN TOO MUCH THE OPTIMIST

Events in Hong Kong have been taken by the CCP as exposing the danger of its earlier “One Country Two Systems” policy. The risk was that a growing public preference for a less restrictive system, should that (as in Hong Kong) deliver a better lifestyle than the mechanism based on the monopoly of authority of the CCP. Which is why Xi has ensured that the system in Hong Kong has been brought closer to that in the PRC. It is now “One Country, One System” so far as residents of that Special Autonomous Region are concerned. Until Xi Jinping demonstrates to the people of China and to the rest of the world the superiority claimed by the CCP governance system, to the people, the risk is that more and more PRC citizens may convert to the same mindset that set much of Hong Kong’s population on an openly confrontational course with Beijing over five years ago. Such manifestations of public discontent against the restrictions that the CCP leadership believes essential are regarded as an existential (and exogenous) threat by the CCP leadership. For Anthony Blinken to believe that Xi would walk back (from a path that is regarded by the CCP leadership as essential to the continuation of its rule) may be somewhat optimistic.

A financial analyst based in Hong Kong discovered in 2015 that the PRC had slowed down almost to a stop its purchase of US debt with the dollars earned from the trade deficit that the US had long had with China. The deficit was partly the consequence of the unprecedented flow of currency pumped into the economy by the US Federal Reserve Board. This boosted consumer demand, which was met mainly by production from China. After all, this was where several manufacturing chains had shifted as a consequence of the “devil take the hindmost” approach of Wall Street-tilted US government policy since the period in office of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. As long as Beijing bought US treasury bills using the money it made through trade with Washington, both countries benefitted. China from increased economic growth, the US through fiscal spending cushioned by sales of debt to the biggest source of manufactures into the US. It did not take rocket science for Xi Jinping’s advisors to realise that the reason that the US dollar value was remaining firm despite ballooning deficit spending was through the accumulation of US debt by China. Should that slow down and finally stop altogether, the US government would no longer have the money to fund even its military, and would consequently enter a period of decline.

The Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity for China to overtake the US in comprehensive global power, given that Xi Jinping has managed the aftermath of the pandemic much better than the leaders of the major countries of North America, Europe and Asia. Deficit spending—necessary to ensure the avoidance of an economic collapse, shot up to record levels during the pandemic under both Trump as well as now Biden. When Secretary of State Blinken talks of Beijing returning to the international rules of the game, what he means is that China should revert to its pre-Xi policy of funding the US deficit by purchasing Treasury bills. This when Xi has switched the surpluses got through trade with the US (and other countries, including India) from buying US debt to investing in Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) projects and in the purchase of gold from central banks in countries, most of whom are NATO members. The BRI is designed to ensure that Beijing emerges as the hub of Eurasian commerce and logistics.

UNPRECEDENTED CHALLENGE TO INDIA AND U.S.

Simultaneously, General Secretary Xi has begun the (inevitable for other large economies as well) transition to a digital currency, the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Xi expects that this rollout will lead to a movement towards the RMB when the US dollar goes in for the painful reset that his tactics are designed to be about. About the change in outlook from Asia-Pacific to the Indo-Pacific, the objection that the CCP leadership has to such a shift is that they would like it to happen after Beijing displaces Washington as the dominant power in these waters, and not before. Apart of course from the importance given to India in the Indo-Pacific construct now being adopted by most of the Atlantic Alliance partners. CCP General Secretary Xi is working to a plan designed to ensure that India never reaches anywhere near its potential. This has been operationalised in an increasingly transparent manner since the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor was launched a year after the “Heir to Mao”, Xi, took charge as CCP General Secretary in 2012. The leaders of India and the US are hopefully aware of the unprecedented magnitude of the challenge facing both of them. Plus the need to cobble up a strategy smart enough to overcome it. Nostrums of the past, which in different types of packaging is what Xi Jinping expects both Delhi and Washington to adhere to, will be even less effective in the new situation than they were in the past, when the US sleepwalked into creating its most potent challenger ever.

CHINA EXPECTS INDIA WILL UNDERPERFORM

In the case of India, the failure of the Union Government to anticipate the March 2021 second wave of the pandemic and prepare for it strengthened the confidence within the CCP that the country remains tethered through an outdated governance system. They believe that this will ensure that India remains true to its longstanding tradition of under-performance. The CCP expects that the pulls and pressures of competing lobbies will reduce the level of US-India security cooperation to levels safe for the PLA to operate in the Indo-Pacific region, on land, air and sea. In particular, that the operationalising of the Russian S-400 system by the Narendra Modi government will ensure that the trajectory of such relations fails to gain anywhere close to the altitude needed for both countries to work (together with other Quad members) on ensuring freedom of navigation to all and ASEAN’s right to seabed exploration in its share of the waters of the Indo-Pacific. Just as the effects of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic ensured the defeat of President Trump, it is expected that the same factor will work to ensure that the BJP loses the public trust needed to win the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. Hope in a better life under Modi and belief in his competence by voters is what ensured the BJP victory in 2014 and 2019. It is calculated that this hope and belief the Prime Minister will deliver on what he had promised, will get reduced with each passing day as a consequence of the handling by the Modi government of the Covid-19 crisis. Thus far, it would appear that not a single individual in the numerous committees set up in early 2020 to battle the pandemic (and which have visibly failed to perform) has been brought to account. Whether the intervention of the Prime Minister to set matters right a month ago will suffice to turn the tide remains a matter of speculation. A forensic audit is needed of why there were delays in approving (a) those who came up with plans for new vaccines (b) production and dispersion of oxygen equipment and (c) neglect of the need to identify and ramp up the production of pharmaceuticals proved to be useful in the treatment of Covid-19.

The loss of political support has been added on to by the feeble response of North Block to the emergency caused by the pandemic, which ought to have led the Finance Ministry and the Reserve Bank of India in early 2020 itself into loosening purse strings much more than what was done. For example, by giving financial assistance to the over 26 million migrant workers stranded by the lockdown in cities all over India, so that there would not be the panic rush to their home states that was seen during the biggest lockdown in world history. As yet, on the ground small and medium units are not getting the benefits that are being touted for schemes designed to keep them in business. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses have been shut down since the start of 2020, as have tens of thousands of medium and more than a few large businesses. What has been ramped up is a flight of entrepreneurs and innovators to locations outside India, a flight that began during the Police Constable (PC) days of the UPA and its coercive measures. Instead of dismantling these, many were added on to during Modi 1.0, and it is only during Modi 2.0 has the necessary reversal of such enterprise-killing policies has started to be carried out. As for the Quad evolving into a security mechanism, policies are yet to be discerned that move away from the standard Lutyens line of ambiguity and ambivalence.

CHINA EXPECTING DINOS TO SABOTAGE BIDEN

In the case of the US, the CCP leadership is looking towards DINOs (Democrats in Name Only). They believe that DINOs will derail the transformative reforms that President Biden and Vice-President Harris are seeking to navigate through the US Congress. The expected loss by the Democrats in the 2022 elections to the US House of Representatives and the Senate (assuming such a sabotage of the Biden-Harris policies) will further convince the CCP leadership that its gamble of accelerating the pace of transformation of the global order will pay off without triggering a kinetic conflict. The PLA is likely to lose such a contest, whether on land or sea, were the Quad to graduate to becoming a genuine security alliance rather than remain a talking shop. In the meantime, CCP efforts will continue to topple the US dollar from its position as (i) the global unit of account and (ii) the world’s reserve currency. Petroleum, for example, is being increasingly bought by the PRC on payment of RMB rather than USD, reportedly even from Saudi Arabia. The calculation in Beijing is that a sudden decline of even 20% in the value of the dollar will lead to selling pressure that would force it down to much lower levels, thereby opening the field to the digital (and gold-backed) alternative being developed by Xi. Given the manner in which the CCP leadership is working to a plan designed to displace the US by first displacing the economy as the biggest in the world, later the US dollar and finally, end the lead of the US in advanced technology, it may be a sign of a disconnect from current reality that Henry A. Kissinger still expects that a reconciliation is possible between Beijing and Washington except on surrender terms. In other words, the “White Flag” terms negotiated by the Trump administration with the Taliban, and which seems to have been accepted by President Biden. Meanwhile, the Central Bank Digital Currency (the digital RMB) will be getting ready in time for the anticipated dollar reset. Clearly, the CCP leadership believes that both the wallet as well as the gun are essential in the pursuit of power.

PLAN FOR SUCCESS

The assumption underpinning such calculations by the CCP leadership is that the Quad will not, owing to contradictory policies of its members, develop the structures needed to ensure a united response to efforts by the PLA to expand the land, air and sea space controlled by the PRC. And that business logic will prevent substantial de-coupling of production units from China to other locations. India was seen by many corporates as a suitable alternative, but that was before the second wave of SARS-CoV-2 struck. Should Prime Minister Modi do the impossible and be able to turn things around in India during the next two weeks, that would pose a significant challenge to the plans of the CCP leadership to ensure that the PRC remains the manufacturing (and increasingly the technological) hub of the world. Should President Biden succeed in getting his plans for rejuvenation of the US economy and society approved by the US Congress, that would be a second blow to the CCP leadership. The months ahead will tell if India and the US can get their act together in time to enable a reversal of the progress made by the PRC. Both the authoritarian as well as the democratic systems are on test, and the outcome depends on who will come out the winner, Xi or Modi and Biden. As matters stand, even sufficient pairing between the two biggest democracies in the world remains a work in progress. The weeks ahead need to be much more productive than past months have been. Cold War 2.0 is very much a Zero Sum game.

Xi Jinping banks on US-India ‘systemic issues’ to ensure PRC success - The Sunday Guardian Live

Second Wave – India at War (Chanakya Forum )

 

Second Wave – India at War

It is odd that the possible perpetrator of an activity being investigated becomes the judge and jury deciding whether the perpetrator (himself) was responsible for the activity or not. From 2014 to 2019, Peter Daszak managed to convince the guru of healthcare in the US, Dr Anthony Fauci, to fund “Gain of Function” studies on bat corona viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Although this laboratory complex has been stamped by the WHO as a BSL4 (or highest grade of safety) lab, the organisation seems to have ignored the fact that the Wuhan Institute has several labs, ranging from BSL2 to BSL4. Or that much of the initial research into the SARS-CoV-2 (or SARS2) virus was done by Dr Zhengli Shi in partnership with Dr Ralph Baric from the US.

It may be noted that it was Baric who in 1999 first began researching the virus that was studied in Wuhan, and which in 2020 brought such disruption and death to the world. The funding for the SARS2 studies was approved by Dr Anthony Fauci on the basis of inputs from Baric and Daszak. This included the money used to develop “Gain of Function” capabilities in the virus. In other words, make it more infectious and more deadly to human populations than it would otherwise be.

Owing to the risk of viruses escaping from labs, “Gain of Function” research had been banned in the US under President Obama in 2014, but reinstated for domestic funding by President Trump in 2017, who disliked any regulation by government, even those necessary for the public good. Peter Daszak saw to it that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was provided with the funding required to carry out “Gain of Function” research in its laboratories from 2014 till 2019.

As the records of the institute are a state secret, it is impossible to know whether such activity was carried out in 2019 in a BSL2 or 4 lab. Even BSL4 labs across the world have been known to have accidental leaks of deadly pathogens, and to assume that Wuhan was the exception to this rule (as the WHO concluded) was based more on faith than science.

Once the “lab leak” theory surfaced, the Funder of the research by the Wuhan Institute into the corona virus, Peter Daszak, ensured that a letter was published in LANCET on February 19 that debunked entirely any suggestion that the virus may have accidentally been released from a lab at the institute. Another US-based researcher, Dr K G Andersen, got written a similar letter in NATURE MEDICINE on 17 March 2020 making the same assertion. It is a reflection on the carelessness of international media that these two letters (which were not scientific papers but a mere expression of personal views) became the basis for the conclusion in media across the world that the highly probable “lab leak” theory was a conspiracy theory invented by Sinophobes, and that the SARS2 pathogen had its origins in the Yunnan bat population. MERS and SARS1 also had their origin in bats, but it was quickly discovered that MERS had travelled from bats to camels and thereafter to humans, while SARS1 had jumped from bats to civet cats and after that, to humans. This far, there is no indication even from Chinese officials of what animal, if any, was the intermediate vector of the virus after it had spread from Yunnan bats.

Wuhan, where the virus first appeared, is nearly 1500 kilometres from that location, another reason why the “lab leak” theory has salience over the “wet market” hypothesis. Despite his connection with the work done by the Wuhan institute and written denunciation of the “lab leak” hypothesis, Peter Daszak was named by WHO as the lead investigator into the origins of the virus. Not surprisingly, the Wuhan lab complex was exonerated in the WHO probe, which was carried out 13 months after the outbreak first, came to attention through PRC social media. The report seems to have been written on the assumption that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the same in February 2021 as it was in November 2019.

Social media posts in China (almost all of which have disappeared) during November 2019 began carrying reports of an outbreak of a flu-like ailment that attacked the lungs. Some posts spoke of micro-containment zones being enforced in the vicinity of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. By the close of the year, the posts increased. The authorities in Wuhan, however, seem to have dismissed the possibility that a new type of SARS had begun infecting human beings, and permitted flight after flight to depart from Wuhan to locations across the world. The WHO certified such flights as safe, even after the warning from Taiwanese specialists in December 2019 that a new disease had begun manifesting itself among the human population in China. Soon afterwards, preceded by North Korea and followed by India, flights from China to Taiwan were banned.

The US and the UK, obeying advice from the WHO, continued such flights even after India barred them. By then, the
virus had spread everywhere, and with a virulence that suggested that there was indeed a  lab-induced “Gain of Function” in the toxicity of the virus. Doctors in Wuhan began to use social media during the final weeks of 2019 to
draw attention to a danger that the authorities in that city (and in Hubei province more generally) seemed to take lightly. Word of the risk to public health seems to have finally reached Beijing by the end of 2019, when the authorities in Hubei realised that they were unable to keep the genie bottled up.

On January 23,2020, Xi Jinping ordered the indefinite lock down of Wuhan and the quarantining of Hubei province from the rest of the country. The WHO still maintained that flights from there to other parts of the world were safe, and the UN body was believed across the world for some weeks, before it realised the error caused by blind faith rather than discovery through science. The series of errors made by the WHO in the matter of SARS2
did not discourage authorities across the world from having the same faith in the prognostications of the WHO as the organisation did in the official reporting coming from the PRC. The pandemic has hit both lives and livelihoods in a manner as savage as is the case in wartime. 

That SARS2 was studied intensively by both US as well as Chinese experts for several years is undeniable. That the Wuhan laboratory complex was carrying out “Gain of Function” research into creating a more virulent form of the pathogen was not a secret. That the absence of an intermediate vector from bats to humans in the case of SARS-CoV-2 indicates an absence of evidence to buttress the theory of the Wuhan “wet market” for live animals is also on record, as is the fact that the speed of transmission of the virus causing
SARS2 (a simpler way of designating it than other names used) and its toxicity resembles a virus that has been created in a laboratory  rather than having evolved from nature.

Given this, it would have been prudent to assume that the SARS2 global outbreak in 2020 was the consequence of (perhaps an inadvertent) “bio-terror attack”. Or that GHQ Rawalpindi and its all-weather friends in the PLA may have seen the deadly impact of the first wave, and got designed other variants more deadly than the first.

This is not a complicated matter, and it is less a question of scientific capability than of ethics that has prevented more such bio-weapons from being developed. Add the fact that a second wave hit several countries in Europe and other countries that in many was deadlier than the first. Those given the responsibility in 2020 by PM Modi of protecting the lives and livelihoods of the people of India ought to have understood that what they were facing was a war situation.

Had this possibility crossed their minds, they may have been more diligent in utilizing the last ten months to erect barriers to harm done to the people by a new wave of the pandemic, whether engineered or not.The performance of the multiple task forces and empowered groups to prepare against the second wave that began to ravage the country in February 2021 was dismal.

A similar avoidance of acceptance that India is engaged in a war on multiple fronts by the GHQ Rawalpindi-PLA combine may have been the cause of the February withdrawal by the army from the Kailash heights despite
warnings that such a concession would not be met with any from the Chinese side.

Having missed the second wave, India has become the first country to warn of a third wave. This when actionable data on the second wave is still being collated, and (unlike during the second wave) the third wave has yet to appear anywhere in the world.

Meanwhile, the nation continues to struggle with the consequences of not taking worst case scenarios seriously, which unfortunately is Standard Operating Procedure in the Lutyen’s Zone. To assume (as was done in February) that the PLA would reciprocate once India gave up its own advantage on the border, or to believe that a second wave would not hit India when it had so many other countries, indicates the
need for moving to a war footing. This needs to occur before any Third Wave does. India cannot any more afford the luxury of ignoring where its enemies are working to take it, or working harder and better to ensure that they fail.

Second Wave – India at War

What is the US trying to achieve by hoarding Vaccine raw materials to India? Prof M D Nalapat Explains (PGurus)

Is it the Big Pharma of US that is holding up the shipment of raw materials to India, in the fear that its monstrous profits will be eaten by Indian companies? Unlike the I-me-myself attitude of the US as far as vaccines are concerned, India has shipped 67 million vaccines to countries all over the world. Do the right thing President Biden, Prof M D Nalapat says. 

What is US trying to achieve by hoarding Vaccine raw materials to India? Prof M D Nalapat explains - PGurus

Modi's intervention set to control Covid-19 tsunami within weeks ( Sunday Guardian)

 

Of the 162 oxygen plants sanctioned last year under pressure from the PMO, only 35 are in production as yet. Thanks to the Prime Minister’s intervention in April, nearly 90 will begin to operate by the close of May, with many more on the way. In the same way, the supply of drugs will be ramped up.

On 30 November 2017, a paper on the origins of SARS coronavirus appeared in the journal PLOS Pathogens. Almost all 17 of the “equal” co-authors were from China, an exception being Peter Daszak, a British-born resident of the United States. An associate of China’s famed “Bat Woman”, Shi Zhengli, Daszak had been active in ensuring that large amounts of funding from the US flowed into the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He was supported in this by Dr Anthony Fauci, who has emerged as the lead figure in the fightback against the Covid-19 pandemic. Given Daszak’s longstanding links with the Wuhan institute, it may have been prudent for him to recuse himself from the WHO team sent weeks ago to investigate whether the Wuhan Institute was responsible through negligence in releasing SARS-CoV-2 into the human population. Published papers indicate that the Institute was working for years on precisely such a coronavirus, and the funding arranged by Dr Fauci was intended to promote “gain of function” research into the virus, i.e., make it deadlier and perhaps more transmissible (perhaps in order to develop vaccines against such a strain). Although a US State Department team flagged the Wuhan Institute of Virology as having “defective and sloppy procedures”, it does not appear from the records that this and other such reports alarmed Dr Daszak, or if it  did, such apprehensions were shared with Dr Fauci. It is because of the published papers that came out of the work of the numerous coronavirus-related experiments in the Wuhan lab that suspicions grew that the catastrophe originated from an inadvertent leak from the institute lab experimenting with the virus. The WHO study group (in which Peter Daszak was made a member) all but ruled out such a possibility on the basis of a visit to the lab more than a year after the leak of the virus was suspected to have taken place. No surprise, therefore, that no evidence of such a leak was discovered by the team, whose reliance on data supplied by their Chinese hosts was, in keeping with WHO policy under its current leadership, total.

Discussions with experts resident in the US, who are cognizant of the centrality of India in the ongoing battle to retain the initiative in the Indo-Pacific, make it clear that the country is key towards ensuring the rollback of the Covid-19 pandemic across the world. They spoke on the basis of anonymity, out of worry that some of the facts mentioned may create adverse circumstances for them, were the identities of the sources made public. They have therefore not been named.

WHO FOLLOWED CHINA BLINDLY

On 23 January 2020, President Xi Jinping ordered the complete lockdown of Wuhan in an effort to contain the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This was perhaps the first time such a measure had been adopted anywhere in the world, and the WHO soon fell in line, recommending a similar total lockdown in all countries where the coronavirus had spread. This was the consequence of flights operating out of the PRC to cities across the world even ten weeks after the virus had entered the general population of Wuhan in particular. President Xi succeeded in ensuring that the effects of the pandemic on China were much lower—at least on record—than in almost all other countries. Paying heed to advice from the WHO, officials in India advised Prime Minister Narendra Modi to implement the biggest lockdown in the history of mankind. Nearly 1.3 billion people were anchored to the locations they were in for weeks as a consequence of the withdrawal of transport services. At the same time, again as a consequence of the incessant warnings belatedly issued by the WHO, a mood of panic spread amongst the populace concerning the very disease that had been intensively researched at the Wuhan Institute of Virology but which Peter Daszak and others were emphatic did not “originate” in that facility, leaving open the question of where this alternative source was. Dr Anthony Fauci, who has emerged as the principal strategist in the battle against the pandemic, appears to have broadly agreed with Daszak’s view that the Wuhan lab was innocent of blame.

Dr Fauci has in his toolkit the instruments that he first developed in order to fight the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s. Together with others, they spent billions of dollars (much of it from the Gates Foundation) in a search for a vaccine that would be effective against a disease that was a death sentence to all who caught it. Their associate was Seth Berkley, who now heads the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI) after having been, for decades, President of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). Although the vaccine-focused strategy failed in the case of AIDS, media reports are that the same methods used by Dr Fauci and colleagues such as Dr Deborah Birx in the AIDS pandemic may be proving effective in the Covid-19 epidemic. A vaccine is similar to a sniper rifle, creating antibodies that hit directly at the virus. Those developed in the US, India, the UK and Russia seem to be effective in at least preventing serious consequences from SARS-CoV-2 even while not eliminating the possibility of infection altogether. India opted to route most of the vaccines supplied externally through the COVAX facility of GAVI, so that the WHO, other multilaterals and the Gates Foundation, rather than India got most of the credit internationally for the supply. It is unlikely that the generous act by the Health Ministry (of routing much of vaccine distribution through COVAX rather than India directly supplying needy countries) will bring any closer the MEA’s quest for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council.

NEED FOR TAPPING DOMESTIC EXPERTISE

Thus far, much of the policy adopted by the Health Ministry in India are those that originated in the toolkit of the WHO. It may be helpful for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to look outside the WHO, especially into the possibility of developing a set of medicine “cocktails” that could be useful in saving lives during the pandemic and in facilitating swift recovery by a victim. Apart from AIDS, where therapeutic cocktails produced in India account for over 90% of the medications used to preserve the lives of sufferers, another disease that was brought under control not by vaccines but by preventive and curative therapeutics is malaria, a disease that thus far has defied efforts at developing a vaccine protecting against its spread by more than 30%. Whether it be Dexamethasone, Remdesivir, Ivermectin, Favipiravir or other anti-virals, more robust use by PM Modi of the powers available to government under Indian law could prove a game changer in the global battle to roll back the Covid-19 tide, including in India. Those in the establishment who have fallen prey to the blandishments offered by US-EU Big Pharma need to be identified and prevented from further damaging the Indian interest. Unless effective action is taken against the present “tsunami” (in the words of Prime Minister Narendra Modi), expectations of foreign investment into India by 2024 of up to a trillion dollars may dissolve. Already the UK has banned travellers from India from entering the country, while the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta has advised US citizens not to travel to India until advised that it is safe to do so. Given the immensity and complexity of conditions in the country, a centralised policy on essential measures is doomed to failure. Among the causes of the present unprecedented and unexpected spike in SARS-CoV-2 caseload is the fact that Prime Minister Modi had to spend considerable amounts of time on the campaign trail and was therefore left with less time to supervise the officials in charge of managing the pandemic. These officials have usually relied on the WHO and experts favoured by that agency for advice, despite the unsatisfactory performance of the WHO throughout the pandemic, beginning in November 2019, when its field units were in a position to know that a new form of SARS had struck the human population in parts of China. They could have then warned the world rather than claim for months afterwards that there was no epidemic and that in any case, the virus was barely infectious, and therefore international travellers from affected regions of the PRC were safe to admit.

BUREAUCRATIC BOTTLENECKS MUST GO

Judging by the situation prevailing in many parts of India, accurate predictions of the April-May requirement of drugs, vaccines and oxygen do not seem to have been made. It took the intervention of PM Modi to ensure that bureaucratic bottlenecks in the multiplication of plants for the production of these essentials were removed. Of the 162 oxygen plants sanctioned last year under pressure from the PMO, only 35 are in production as yet. Thanks to the Prime Minister’s intervention in April, nearly 90 will begin to operate by the close of May, with many more on the way. In the same way, the supply of drugs will be ramped up such that by July, the pandemic would ebb to levels that are safe for near-normal operation. By this is meant normal operations while at the same time adhering to the Covid-19 protocols such as washing of hands, social distancing and masking. Should such normalcy be restored, by the close of the year, the flow of additional jobs should pick up substantially, especially if the Finance Ministry and the Reserve Bank of India expend 5% of the national income in targeted demand-creating stimulus measures over three years (2020-2023) and follow Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s directive to remove regulatory and administrative roadblocks to output and services across all sectors. Also needed is further reduction and simplification of taxes, if necessary through a mid-term budget. The PM directly and through his able External Affairs Minister, S. Jaishankar, needs to convince President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris that Washington should resume the supply of ingredients essential for ramping up the vaccine and therapeutics programs of companies in India. The US is not safe unless the whole world is safe from SARS-CoV-2, and only India can ensure this through its unique capabilities in the mass production of medicine cocktails and vaccines.

NO MORE DISTRACTIONS

Now that state elections are almost over, the BJP needs to leave Prime Minister Narendra Modi alone to tackle the job for which he has been elected, which is to provide an exceptional administration for the people of the country. The present tsunami was likely the consequence of the distractions caused by the spate of elections, as well as the decision by some regional leaders of the BJP to not intercede with the organisers of the Kumbh Mela to get them to show their devotion by ensuring that Covid-19 protocols be maintained, preferably at home. After Modi publicly intervened, the Kumbh was cut short by the organisers. India needs to be spared such activities for the next few months rather than once again suffer the unbearable economic pain of massive lockdowns. Idle speculation that PM Modi was going to announce another long lockdown at a few hours’ notice on 20 April was an attempt at causing another wave of mass panic. This was quelled by the Prime Minister’s assurance that lockdowns were not contemplated. Just as the crisis of 1990-91 led to the reforms of 1992-95, the crisis of 2020-21 needs to lead to still more major reforms during 2021-24. In this way, the present healthcare crisis can be overcome and the economy expanded so as to create jobs for tens of millions.

Modi’s intervention set to control Covid-19 tsunami within weeks - The Sunday Guardian Live

Catalonia not threat but an opportunity to EU ( Sunday Guardian)

 

Were Spain as well as Catalonia both EU members, Spanish citizens can live, work and settle in Catalonia and vice-versa. Independence would be minimally disruptive.

The European Union contains in its functioning a few imperfections, among them being the dominance of large countries in the determination of much of policy. This in a group that prides itself on its members being equal. A single country and a single leader, Angela Merkel in Germany, steamrolled the approval by the EU of an investment treaty with China. More than any other major power, that country has been adept in tweaking rules so as to comply in form while going against them in substance. Despite its being the world’s second largest economy, the PRC continues to hold on to the concessions that are made available by wealthier nations to the under-developed world. Nothing in the WTO has prevented Beijing from effectively blocking pharma and much of information technology imports from India, even while it ensured through its agents that the world’s biggest democracy became dependent on the world’s only authoritarian superpower for the feedstock needed to turn out low-cost pharmaceuticals for the world. Any ruling by an international tribunal that does not go the PRC way is simply ignored, as was the 2016 decision by the International Court of Arbitration in favour of Manila in the case of Scarborough Shoals, which Beijing took over from the Philippines with scarcely a sigh from President Obama. In the field of data, while Indian software companies are yet to be given a foothold in sales to the state sector, meta data gets funnelled out of India to feed into the Artificial Intelligence systems that are operational in the PRC. As for that country’s state-owned enterprises, rather than buy directly from Indian software companies the way many foreign companies operating in China do, they source their requirements from European companies that recycle what they bought from India and sell at a markup to the Chinese. Both Australia and Japan will have cause to regret their joining the RCEP, just as the US has understood its own economic losses as a consequence of the welcome into the WTO extended by President Clinton to the PRC. President Joe Biden continues longstanding US policy in pharma, preventing Indian vaccine manufacturers from accessing essential feedstock from the US. Epidemics start anywhere and spread everywhere, and Biden denying poorer countries low cost Covid-19 vaccines from India may cause yet another wave of an epidemic that has damaged the globe more than several wars have in the past, including through loss of life.

The primary benefit of the structure of the EU is that it permits the expression of regional diversity through its policy that the citizen of any EU country is welcome to live and work anywhere in that group. In the UK, a sensible policy after Brexit would be to allow Northern Ireland and Scotland to have open borders with the EU. These two windows into and out of the EU would serve as a safety valve, preventing the clogging up of logistical arteries from the EU to the UK even while retaining for Britain the extra rights that Brexit has brought. In Spain, much of the population of Catalonia would like to free their territory from the control of Madrid. Rather than oppose membership of the EU, the leaders of the Catalan freedom movement should embrace such membership, for the reason that it would then be illogical for Madrid to oppose independence for Barcelona. Were Spain as well as Catalonia both EU members, Spanish citizens can live, work and settle in Catalonia and vice-versa. Independence would be minimally disruptive. In other European countries as well, some provinces seem restless within nominally federal but significantly unitary countries. An example is Bavaria in Germany, which has long been out of step with some of the provinces to its northwest. In Spain, seeking to snuff out a powerful movement for cultural and linguistic autonomy in Catalonia through the use of police methods should not be attempted, especially in Europe. This is a continent that has suffered much as a consequence of internecine conflict during the previous century. Denial of the freedom of Catalans to determine their own future makes a mockery of the very foundation of the EU, which is equal rights (including presumably of self-determination) for all. Election results in Catalonia, despite a substantial portion of the voters being from other parts of Spain, indicate that a majority of the Catalan people favour independence from Spain in view of their distinctive traditions, customs, language and culture. Keeping the lid on such desires through the enforcement of federal law may create the conditions for an Ulster-style uprising that would be against the interest of Spain.

The EU can set an example to the world in its tolerance for the freedom of its peoples to decide on the limits of self-determination whichever the country they belong to. Should an independent Catalonia remain within the EU together with Spain, the two together may progress both economically and societally much more than is the case at present, with Barcelona resenting the control of Madrid over so much of its destiny.

Catalonia not threat but an opportunity to EU - The Sunday Guardian Live

Post US Withdrawal Afghanistan ( Chanakya Forum)

 

The most sophisticated of surgical instruments remain ineffective when used by those unsuited to handling them. Whether it be in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria, US forces have failed to subdue largely irregular forces substantially inferior to them in equipment and often in number. This is partly the consequence of the primary Battlefield Objective of the US armed forces being self-preservation, and partly because of the adoption of tactics unsuited to the neutralisation on the field of such an enemy.

Afghanistan is neither Germany nor the US, the UK or France, and yet it is these countries that have expended considerable effort in training and guiding the Afghan National Army (ANA) in order to make that force commit to battle in the manner that their trainers do. A manner that has led to the revival of the very irregulars that President George W Bush swore to eliminate in 2003. A war is not won by declaring the present foe to be a future friend, for such a transformation comes about only after the comprehensive defeat of that foe in battle, something that has eluded the well-equipped and amply-manned military of NATO in the many wars that they have fought during the 21st century.

In contrast, India (despite having a far lower level of resources to expend on its troops) has succeeded in recovering the initiative against irregular forces armed, funded and trained by GHQ Rawalpindi with assistance from the PLA. Which is why the withdrawal of US troops in Afghanistan by President Biden in less than five months is less a setback than an opportunity, but only provided the ANA is given

(a) the weapons, intelligence and logistics help needed and

(b) the correct training to take on the Taliban and other elements that are circling around preparatory to converting President Ashraf Ghani into the next Najibullah.

The Afghans do not need Indian troops to take on and defeat the Afghans in the Taliban and their Pakistani minders. They do require some of the expertise of the Indian soldier in the world’s biggest democracy’s battle against extremists nurtured in the crucible of the global terror machine, the Pakistan army, and this needs to be in place by September 11, 2021, the date that Biden has set for completion of the withdrawal of US troops from a country that has been ravaged as much by the errors made by NATO as by extremism.

There is little benefit in a resource unless it be used in the proper manner. India is a coal superpower, yet spends considerable amounts of foreign exchange every year importing the feed stock. Even items as crucial to the very survival of the people as the ingredients that go into the manufacture of pharmaceuticals have been outsourced to China at the cost of facilities in India. Similar is the situation with rare earths and a host of other essential items. Much of the intellectual property that has gone into the design and manufacture of telecom equipment comes from Indian minds, and yet almost all such equipment is sourced from abroad, principally the PRC. Hundreds of tons of sand containing rare earths have been exported each year to the PRC from India, helping to make that country almost the monopoly producer of an item that Canada, Australia and India could make with ease, had it not been commercially a smidgen cheaper to manufacture the same in China. Now that President Xi Jinping is threatening to block rare earth and other exports to countries that refuse to ratify the extravagant claims on land and water made by Beijing, the folly of being dependent on the PRC for so many items that could have been manufactured locally or within the democracies is becoming evident. The more Wahabbi a country, the closer its links to China, which finds in such extremism a factor that can divert the attention of the US, the EU and other countries from itself. In such a context, the shift in emphasis by the Biden administration from Wahabbi Extremism to Authoritarian Expansionism as the principal foe of US interests is justified. The first can be overcome, especially if it were to lose the often not even clandestine support of the other.

This does not mean that extremism should be ignored. It is in the interests of the PRC if the pot of extremist violence is kept on the boil, hence the battle against such a menace is part of the struggle against Authoritarian Expansionism. Because of the 1948 folly of not taking back control of the entirety of the princely state of Jammu & Kashmir, neither Indian nor pro-India forces have a usable land border with eastern Afghanistan.

 However, because of assistance provided in crossing by GHQ Rawalpindi, anti-Indian groups have such a border. To assume that such a facility will not get used by the GHQ Rawalpindi-PLA alliance to cause trouble for India would be to join those who since the 1920s have acted on the assumption that making concessions to hostile elements would change their behaviour towards India.

It is in the common interest of India and the US that the elected government in Kabul recover territory lost to the Taliban, hence the need for the former to provide training and the latter equipment to the Afghan National Army. Ensuring that the supply of both is plentiful would boost the morale of the Afghan people and stiffen their resistance to the retrogression represented by the Taliban in all their avatars.

Britain and later the USSR needed materiel from the US in order to retrieve the air and land situation from disaster during the 1939-45 war caused by Adolf Hitler. Now that US forces are leaving, ensuring that morale and confidence remain high within both the Afghan military as well as the general population is crucial in rolling back the Taliban tide. This can come only should President Biden commit to the supply of weapons and other materiel to the Afghan forces battling the Taliban. That militia has declared victory over the US. It must be shown across the world that such a claim is the opposite of fact, else the global fightback of the moderate majority of Muslims against Wahabbism will be severely impacted.

Rather than remain aloof, India needs to put in motion a program designed to provide training for the ANA, with countries in Europe and East Asia that are allied to the US meeting the costs of such training. Equipment from the US, training by India and financial assistance from the EU and Japan in particular are essential for the achievement of stability in Afghanistan. Such a package needs be put together, and Indian diplomacy must play the keystone role in such an effort.

The Sino-Pak alliance is standing by to occupy the space left vacant by the US troop withdrawal. That space needs to be filled by the trio mentioned earlier, and which includes the US in the capacity of a provider of logistical and information support to the ANA, which must not be allowed to go the way forces under President Najibullah did in 1992 when they disintegrated in the face of the forces opposing them. It will cost much less time and effort to prevent a repeat of the tragedy of Afghanistan in yet another form by the provision of assistance to the government in Kabul than it would once the furies of the past return as conquerors of a people who no longer want them.

Afghanistan may be regarded as a distant place by sections of the international community, much the same way as Czechoslovakia was in 1938 when Chamberlain and Daladier gave much of it away to Hitler, who very soon grabbed the rest. Both Pakistan as well as its all-weather ally China would benefit from Afghanistan sliding into the hands of the Taliban.

This time around, the civil war will be a lot less unequal than was the previous fightback against the groups that coalesced into the Taliban during the 1990s. The people of Afghanistan remember the period of Taliban rule and barring a few who are longing for a return to the customs of the past, the population of Afghanistan looks towards a future that embraces the modern and the moderate. This is especially true of women, who have long been denied anywhere close to an equal opportunity to develop their skills and secure the lifestyle of their choice, except when they migrate to faraway shores, an opportunity available only to a few. The country must not be abandoned to its fate, although the nature of the involvement needs to change.

The decision by President Biden to withdraw troops within a brief period of time needs to be followed by coordinated action by the democracies to nurture that legacies of freedom and justice in a country that had been stripped of it. The US, the EU, Japan and India must work together and yet separately in Afghanistan, if that country is to be prevented from re-entering a period when it was the nursery of terror that was so virulent that it menaced the most powerful country in the world. And will do so again, unless there is a plan for the day after withdrawal in a way that was absent during the days after the rout of Saddam Hussein and his army in Iraq in 2003. That history must not be repeated by the White House, but for success and not disaster to follow this particular Biden move, India, the EU and Japan must step forward to assist the government in Kabul to overcome the forces seeking to yet again convert Afghanistan into a source of extremist terror.

Post US Withdrawal Afghanistan - Chanakya Forum Chanakya Forum

 

Flying the skies with the Maharaja ( Sunday Guardian)

 

During the decade when the UPA was in office, the airline crashed to the ground so far as its financials were concerned.

Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata was that overused word, a visionary. JN Tata had founded Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel in 1903 when he was denied entry into a hotel in that city “because he was Indian”. It was acceptable to the Colonel Blimps to have Indians serve at tables or make the beds, but allowing someone from that ethnicity to enjoy the privilege of staying in a room of whatever hostelry it was that excluded the founder of the House of Tata was “not cricket” to the racist mindset that has fortunately diminished considerably in size in the UK but has yet to disappear. The manner in which life was made impossible for Meghan and Harry, the eagerness with which the Prince was stripped even of his His Royal Highness title, may have been due to curmudgeonly elements within the palace staff or to the usual jealousy between sisters-in-law. If the second, it adds strength to those who argue that Queen Elizabeth and her children and grandchildren do not have a racist bone in their bodies. However, the spectre of being a bit too Churchillian in the wrong way will hover above Buckingham Palace until Meghan and Harry are reinstated in rank to what they were before they left not just their family home but the country itself. 2021 is not 1937, the year in which Edward VIII had to abdicate the throne because he insisted on marrying Wallis Warfield Simpson. Marrying a divorced spouse was not a cardinal sin then, nor should it be now, although this may not be the view of traditionalists linked to the Windsors who believe that any divergence from Standard Operating Procedure in the 1930s would inflict disaster on the British royals. Fortunately for the Crown, Queen Elizabeth has moved with the times, and many expect that she will ensure the return into the fold of HRH Prince Harry and the bride of his choice, Her Highness Meghan. Such a move would strengthen the bonds of sentiment that individuals across the world have for the British monarch, even if some do not share a similar view of the institution of the monarchy. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi effected a cultural revolution in India when she stripped royals of their privy purses and titles (saving Rs 60 crores for the exchequer) in 1969. No Prime Minister in Britain thus far has followed her example of erasing with the stroke of a pen the solemn promise made by Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel to the princes in exchange for the states they ruled, some for centuries. Less than a decade later, after having first imposed the Emergency in 1975 and then made restitution for that by holding free elections in 1977, Indira Gandhi was voted out of office despite having torn up the Covenant entered into between the princes and the Union of India. All in the name of the people of India.

Another Tata who was a visionary was Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata. It would be unfair to blame him for the complexity of his full name, for JRD was not at fault but his illustrious ancestors. Among the assets he created was Air India, which began as Tata Airlines in 1932. In 1953, Jawaharlal Nehru ensured that the government he headed was the majority stakeholder, although JRD Tata continued as the Chairman of the Board. The inventive mind of Bobby Kooka ensured that Air India (the Flying Maharajah) became well known across the world. During the decade when the UPA was in office, the airline crashed to the ground so far as its financials were concerned. Even the Frequent Flyer program was handed over to some company of indeterminate ownership. This columnist has had a soft corner for the airline ever since the days when it was the only option available. All that Air India needs is a complete overhaul of its aircraft seats and entertainment systems to once again make it among the finest airlines in the world. A lot of prize slots in several countries were handed out as confetti during the UPA period, but a few good ones somehow escaped this process. As has from the beginning of freedom been commonplace in India, there does not seem to have been any accountability concerning the individuals who crash landed the airline financially. Until he is able to introduce much greater transparency and accountability in the policy and implementation process, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan for India to emerge as an economic superpower may get delayed beyond three terms. Thanks to whichever entity is in control of the Maharajah’s frequent flyer program, this columnist was a few weeks ago abruptly downgraded from the highest to the lowest class in the program. The crime was that he hardly flew at all during the course of the pandemic. Were Air India to have offered reimbursement of the costs of treatment of Covid-19 for customers, the swift downgrade would have made more sense than it did in a situation where flying at all became impossible and is still difficult. Fortunately for his faith in the Maharajah, their earlier class was swiftly restored to all members in recognition of the need for citizens to observe the protocol needed to avoid Covidiot status.

This columnist was among those who flew in the first direct India-US Air India flight (from Mumbai to New York, if memory serves right). Designer on board wear and the usual warm and uniquely Indian onboard Air India service ensured a superb flight. After dinner and a normal night’s sleep given the length of the flight, the aircraft closed in on its destination. There is talk of Air India getting new management. Whoever that is should recreate the excellence that J.R.D. Tata ensured in the years that he was in command of the controls.

Flying the skies with the Maharajah - The Sunday Guardian Live

India should learn from Rodrigo Duterte's Unrequited Love ( Sunday Guardian)

 

Around 200 PRC ‘fishing boats’ have entered Philippines waters and despite love calls from Duterte to his counterpart in Beijing, refuse to leave.

President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte may have his faults, but a lack of confidence is not among them. So convinced was he of the persuasive impact of his charm that he was certain that the leadership of the PRC would reciprocate in a generous manner to his obvious preference for China over the US as the primary ally of his country. After giving marching orders to US forces stationed in the Philippines, Duterte waited for the bonanza from China that he expected would flow from that decision. He is still waiting. In the meantime, the territorial waters of the former US ally are being overrun by the PRC. Most recently, around two hundred PRC “fishing boats”, many of considerable size, have entered waters decreed by a UN-designated agency as Manila’s, and despite love calls from Duterte to his counterpart in Beijing, refuse to leave. Every citizen of the PRC has been told by the leadership of their country that the entirety of the South China Sea belongs to them, and hence that they have a right—indeed, a duty—to roam those waters unmolested by any other country. Even PRC diplomats have caught the mood of Chinese exceptionalism, and have returned to the earthy traditions established by Mao Zedong until such habits got stopped by Deng Xiaoping. Schoolbooks that speak of vast tracts of territory belonging to countries such as India rightfully belonging to the PRC have bred a mindset within the public that make more difficult if not impossible the compromises and adjustments in territorial negotiations with other countries. Compromises that are essential to the escalation of tensions that could even lead to war. The frequent public assertions of the PRC leadership that the South China Sea is as Chinese as the Yangtze river have been accompanied by demonstrations of military power by the PLA. Under Xi, an overwhelming number of citizens of the PRC, especially within the military,are convinced of both the legitimacy of China’s numerous claims as well as the PLA’s ability to secure them by force. The marked change in mindset in the aftermath of the coming to power of Xi in 2012 led to incidents such as the deadly confrontation that occurred at Galwan on 15 June 2020. This was when an Indian patrol came up to what the other side had agreed was within the territory allocated to them. The patrol was nevertheless attacked, and its Commanding Officer pushed to his death. This infuriated his men and led to a violent altercation in which a substantial (but hitherto mostly unacknowledged) number of PLA soldiers were killed along with 20 soldiers of the Indian Army. They lost their lives because of the unexpected pugnacity of a PLA unit that ought never to have been where they were on that day.

Despite every meeting of the Special Representatives across thedecades ending without result in terms of settlement of the border issue, this ritual continues. Every telephone conversation between functionaries in Delhi and Beijing is regarded by sections of the media as a “breakthrough”. A recent consequence of the multiple interactions that have taken place has been the withdrawal by India from vital positions that came under the control of the Army in the Pangong Tso sector. This was on the understanding that the PLA would reciprocate in the other sectors that were discussed during talks between the two sides, both military and civilian. Rather than opening talks on “dis-engagement” in a sector where conditions on the field conferred an advantage to India, such talks should preferably have focussed on sectors where the other side had seized an advantage. The withdrawal from other sectors by the PLA has yet to take place, which ought not to be much of a surprise, given the change in tone and tactics by that military in the era of General Secretary Xi Jinping. Successive governments in India have expended a considerable amount of time in seeking better relations with both Pakistan and China. Given the unimpressive yield from such efforts, perhaps a more productive use of time would have been to work harder in other ways. This would be geared towards ensuring that in the event of a single or two-front kinetic conflict, India would not face its attackers alone as in past wars but would reap the benefit of a previously agreed logistics chain bringing the material needed to ensure that on both fronts, the armed forces of India prevail. Also needed is to work towards a situation where any such attacker would face the consequences of escalation dominance from newfound allies of the world’s most populous democracy. Planning with present and prospective partners needs to be meticulous for these requisites to be met, and those who have supported Narendra Modi from the time he was CM of Gujarat remain confident that such a process must be taking place under his (now national) watch. The next conflict will show this. Given the overall situation where China under Xi is concerned, those wagering on “peace in our time” are likely to be proved wrong, that too before the next Lok Sabha polls in 2024. The impression of a melange of confusing and sometimes conflicting policy moves on the crafting of a “worst case” security matrix needs to be replaced with public awareness that the Modi government has been planning in a manner designed for India to prevail in a future contest. More than anything else, such an outcome would give citizens the energy and confidence needed to ensure rapid progress across a variety of fronts. Among the reasons why Narendra Modi is much more popular than Rahul Gandhi is that in interactions with the public, the former implants hope within the people, the latter despair. Success would promote hope, failure despair.

While he was in the opposition, the current President of Seychelles was opposed to a naval base that would be built by India. He needs to reflect on the swarm of Chinese “fishing boats” plying the waters of the Philippines, and on the intrusions and occupation by the PLA of waters that in UN-sanctioned law belong to the other members of ASEAN. The naval base proposed by India would protect the Seychelles and nearby island countries from a Philippine-style invasion of their space. Such a violation would of course be in violation of UN conventions that Wang Yi once again recently swore to abide by. Keeping the Indo-Pacific free and open would benefit each of the littoral countries of those waters, and this explains the warm response from them to PM Modi and EAM Jaishankar’s vigorous diplomacy throughout the Indo-Pacific Rim.

India should learn from Rodrigo Duterte’s unrequited love - The Sunday Guardian Live