PM Modi is fashioning a post-colonial India (The Sunday Guardian)

 

Criminal defamation ought to be removed from the statute books forthwith, and hopefully Prime Minister Narendra Modi will get this done in his drive to cleanse the IPC and the Criminal Code of colonial-era practices.

The British, being colonial masters who were engaged in the suppression of the population, left behind several laws that have no place in the 21st century, nor indeed in any country where the government is elected by the people. In matters relating to industry, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao removed some of the most irksome regressive laws, such as the IDRA regulations providing for the prosecution of officials in a company, were that entity to function efficiently and in the process, produce beyond its government-mandated capacity. A major culling of colonial era laws has taken place only since Narendra Modi took charge as Prime Minister in 2014. So entrenched is the opposition to such removal of colonial laws within the political and bureaucratic structures that the process has encountered roadblock upon roadblock, each needing to be painstakingly removed. There are several Victorian individuals in India, and among them was a group from a Karnataka town. A week ago, they disrupted and stopped a group of ladies from holding a get-together in a hotel in Doddapete, where there would have been dancing accompanied by disco music. Clearly, having a good time was not saintly. It must be admitted that to those not aficionados of disco music, the decibel level is unpleasantly high. Perhaps a regulation needs to be put in place that permits disco music and dancing to take place only in soundproof portals, as otherwise the noise is less than bearable to those not enjoying the fun. However, was the holding of such an event reason enough to try and use the bludgeon of the law to stop it and seek to shame the ladies who were participating in behaviour that the Bajrang Dal regards as inadmissible? With such moral policing spreading in Karnataka, securing investment from outside or inside the country would get difficult. Fortunately, the local Superintendent of Police did not see anything heinous in a get-together organised by the ladies, and refused to book either them or the hotel management. Unfortunately, far too many SPs act differently, and who therefore wield the lash of colonial-era laws and regulations with zest.
Since his party was ousted from power in 2014, Rahul Gandhi has been talking in locations across continents about the effects of colonial era laws in India, but during the UPA period, he did nothing to protect citizens from them. Now he has been found guilty by a court for defamation relating to a surname. His comments were indeed in bad taste, but is the concept of criminal defamation justified in a democracy? Had some individuals having the same surname that Rahul seems intensely to dislike brought forward a suit of civil defamation and asked for Rahul to pay a fixed sum in compensation to persons with that surname, that may have been a better course to adopt than the criminal route. As this columnist has been pointing out for years, criminal defamation ought to be removed from the statute books forthwith, and hopefully Prime Minister Narendra Modi will get this done in his drive to cleanse the criminal code of colonial-era practices. Talking about the police, there are more than a few former members of the Indian Police Service in the BJP, and many of them have had distinguished careers. The point about recruiting an IPS or IAS retired official into a national political party was to ensure that the vision even of its state leaders remains centred around national needs. So far as the BJP is concerned, securing a third term for Prime Minister Modi in 2024 is essential if the mission he began in 2014 is to be accomplished. In every state, those in the BJP placed in charge of state units need to act in accordance with what is needed in terms of not just that state but the entire country. It was therefore a surprise when a former IPS officer, Tamil Nadu BJP chief K. Annamalai, has been saying that he would quit his post were the BJP to not go solo in next year’s Lok Sabha polls. In particular, he was opposed to an alliance with the AIADMK. Once such in-house criticism of an allied party becomes public, it harms relations between that party and the BJP. Given that the DMK under Chief Minister Stalin is steadfast in his support for the Congress Party, the only significant alliance that the BJP has access to in Tamil Nadu is with the AIADMK. Does BJP state president Annamalai believe that the BJP would be able to secure more seats in the Lok Sabha polls solo? If so, his view of the situation in the state is different from that of many others. In 2004, the BJP lost to the Congress party because both its southern allies, the Telugu Desam and the AIADMK were trounced in the Lok Sabha polls. Given the drift of the public mood in Andhra Pradesh, it seems likely that the TDP would this time around get a fair number of seats in 2024 if allied to the BJP. The BJP leadership will need to take a hard look at what is on offer by prospective allies, for in Andhra Pradesh—unlike in Telangana, where going solo may be a better option—an alliance with one of the two principal regional parties in that state is essential. Every Lok Sabha seat will count in the next Lok Sabha, and state leaders in the BJP need to factor in that reality while discussing options, especially in a manner that becomes public. While Annamalai is justifiably proud of being selected as an IPS officer, he needs to remember that the IPS post-Independence is not expected to behave in the same way as they did while serving a foreign power.
TN BJP chief Annamalai needs to win over his team through his behaviour, and not rely on the fact that he was once in uniform. Next, he needs to understand the national ground realities of the 2024 contest, and frame his responses to possible alliances accordingly. Abusing a friendly party in public weakens the bond with that party and affects both the BJP and the other party at the hustings, as numerous elections have shown. PM Narendra Modi is seeking to fashion a post-colonial India. Every institution, every individual, concerned with governance needs to help rather than hinder this super-heavy task.

PM Modi is fashioning a post-colonial India

Modi and Kishida must supercharge India-Japan ties (The Sunday Guardian)

 

Few remember that in 1868, once the reforms consequent to the Meiji Restoration got under way, India was the largest source of raw materials to Japan.

When Fumio Kishida took over as the Prime Minister of Japan in 2021, a widespread perception both in Japan and elsewhere was that he was much less aware of the present-day threats facing Japan than was his predecessor, Shinzo Abe. Since then, Kishida has shown through many of his actions that he too is focused on the manner in which the PRC under CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping is leveraging the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in order to wrest concessions from several countries while threatening others. Abe made good relations with India a high priority, and gave precedence to the Indo-Pacific rather than to the primary theatre of the 20th century, the Atlantic. While mostly going along with his western partners in the way they have sought to use Ukraine in their longstanding quest to weaken Russia, Kishida has continued with the Sakhalin 1 project, in which Japanese and Indian companies are partnering with each other. As a consequence, not only is Japan getting the benefit of oil from the project, but Tokyo refused to join in the initial chorus of loud disapproval that emanated from Washington, London and Berlin in particular (not to mention Kiev) at India’s realistic stance that a cutting off of purchases from a country that comprises half of the land area of the Eurasian continent was an exercise in self-harm. In this, Japan is different from Taiwan and South Korea, both being countries that have joined with Germany and other NATO powers in seeking a complete cutoff of purchases from Russia. It was clear to the Japanese that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was acting in the national self-interest by ramping up rather than shutting down oil imports from the Russian Federation since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war in early 2022. The way in which western nations are dealing with the war is not just harming their economic futures, but their goodwill in the Global South in particular, no matter what the voting figures in the UN General Assembly show.
It is a sign of the times that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia ostentatiously chose Beijing as the capital in which to sign a peace agreement with Iran. Had Riyadh sought to do so in Washington, policymakers in that capital of inflated egos would have made the acceptance by Iran of conditions plainly unacceptable to its government as the price for the privilege of signing the Saudi-Iranian accord in Camp David. A lot has changed since the 1990s, but it appears as though the hangover of that unipolar decade in world history is continuing in the US and in some of its Atlanticist partners. This when fewer and fewer countries regard good relations with the US in particular to be a priority, a situation caused not only by many of the self-goals made by successive Atlanticist capitals but by efforts (many very much in the open) by the Sino-Russian alliance to wean away as many countries as they can from partnering with the US and its allies. In Asia, not a small continent, only South Korea, Taiwan and Japan have adopted the NATO policy of shunning Russia, and among these three, Japan has made pragmatic exceptions such as the refusal to walk away from the Sakhalin 1 project.
India and Japan have long been partners. Few remember that in 1868, once the reforms consequent to the Meiji Restoration got under way, India was the largest source of raw materials to Japan. In 1883, there was an active shipping route from Mumbai to Kobe, while in 1915, the primary export market of Japan was India. Since Prime Minister Narasimha Rao brought in economic reforms in 1992, South Korea has far outpaced Japan in establishing commercial linkages with India, although under Prime Ministers Modi and Abe, the Japanese appeared to be catching up. Were restrictions on the use of human resources from India reduced in Japan, that country would be able to price Chinese ships in particular out of most markets. Another field where India could be helpful would be in the provision of carers for the elderly in Japan, a demographic that is rising substantially. A promising field is that of nuclear power, where both countries could collaborate in safer, cheaper alternatives to present nuclear power systems. Another is cooperation in setting up cyber defences, and in developing Artificial Intelligence in ways that could blunt the use of AI in non-conventional warfare by a power hostile to both the leading democracies of Asia. What is needed by Japan is the spirit and ambition of Shinzo Abe, and Fumio Kishida. The Japanese PM could, together with Narendra Modi, bring back India-Japan commercial relations to the level they attained a century ago, before World War II and later Cold War 1.0 blighted such progress.

Modi and Kishida must supercharge India-Japan ties

Rahul, please do not trash the India Story (The Sunday Guardian)

 

On his annual sojourns to other countries in the 21st century Anglosphere, Rahul ought not to come across as having a visible and visceral dislike not just for Prime Minister Narendra Modi but for the Republic of India itself.

This columnist confesses to a bias in favour of the two children of one of the nicest individuals he has ever encountered, Rajiv Ratan Birjees Gandhi. Before his mindspace being taken over by both the Congress Party as well as the official bureaucracy that began during 1983 and was complete by 1985, Rajiv sought to free India from a rut that dated back not just to the British period but even sooner. Among the achievements of this interlude of relative freedom from control by the politico-official machine, Rajiv sought to adopt Mani Shankar Aiyar’s plan to broadbase governance in India by strengthening the panchayat system, a move that the Mahatma would have approved of. Satyen Pitroda helped ensure that our country’s first steps towards a communications revolution took place, and there were a few other transformative moves as well. In a way, Rajiv’s backing away through the Muslim Women’s Bill from Arif Mohammad Khan’s desire that the Supreme Court verdict giving justice to Shah Bano be affirmed marked the moment when things started going sour for him. No longer was Rajiv seen as a harbinger of change, instead he was seen as having been co-opted into the pit of the status quo. The tragically shortened political and administrative career of Rajiv Gandhi, which began with another tragedy, the death of his brother Sanjay in an air crash in 1980, ought to have been the foundation of the political education of Rahul Gandhi, who is clearly the choice of Congress supremo Sonia Gandhi for the role of Prime Minister of India, to form for the family a quartet together with his great-grandfather, grandmother and father.
The advice given to Rahul seems not to include the imbibing the lessons from the trajectory of the three Nehru family Prime Ministers of India mentioned earlier. On his annual sojourns to other countries in the 21st century Anglosphere such as the UK and the US, Rahul ought not to come across as having a visible and visceral dislike not just for Prime Minister Narendra Modi but for the Republic of India itself. It is for him not just Modi who needs to change, but the whole of India. It’s always the refrain of India being in a deep moral, even existential, crisis because voters in 2014 chose the BJP led by Narendra Modi rather than the Congress led by Sonia Gandhi to rule. Even in a matter as consequential for a country that our leaders in 1947 allowed to be partitioned on the grounds of faith, Rahul appears to many to question the very meaning of the Union of India by giving the impression of believing that the model he favours for the country is that of the European Union, where independent countries have formed a loose confederation. To Rahul, present-day India appears as a dystopian hell, ruled by an all-powerful autocrat who was presumably therefore responsible even for ordering that the BJP lose 17 state elections and counting since 2014. A Prime Minister who in Rahul’s words has choked to suffocation democracy in India, such that the country has become what Italy or Spain was in the first half of the previous century, a fascist state. Certainly the BJP has overreacted in some matters, such as in its blocking of a tawdry cut and paste BBC hit job on not just Modi but the whole of India, or in the way in which punitive laws capable of being applied in myriad ways to deprive a citizen of his or her liberty continue being used by officials in the manner they have been for the past 75 years. However, India is very far from being what Rahul daily describes it to be during sojourns in countries where the well-heeled send their children to study and themselves to settle down in.
Rahul needs to get a tutorial from the maestro in the use of colonial-era penal laws, Palaniappan Chidambaram, the Home Minister who sent Anna Hazare to jail in 2011 and whose tenure, among other things, saw the wrecking of a thriving domestic exchange that had gone global, to the relief of another exchange familiar to Chidambaram that was feeling the heat of competition from the felled rival. Not to mention the energetic use during successive governments including the UPA of the very agencies that Rahul claims are being used solely to harass individuals that include Abhishek Banerjee, Lalu Yadav and others, most of whom remain unknown. Does Rahul believe that none of the HNI targets of the CBI or the ED have made a rupee more than what they get as salaries. Of course, he would be aware that some of his relatives in Italy saw massive changes in their lifestyle beginning with the 1980s although of course, this must have been a phenomenon entirely unrelated to a hugely influential relative of theirs long resident in India. Unlike Modi, who as PM has eliminated more than half of colonial era restrictive laws, the ten years of the UPA saw the frequent use of such laws without any discernible request emanating from Rahul that such laws and practices be abandoned. There definitely remain more than a few dystopian features to the post-colonial structure of governance in India, but almost all of them were around during 2004-14, the period when Rahul Gandhi had a somewhat greater influence over the workings of government than he does these days.
In 2014, and then in 2019, his family would have been delighted to see Rahul ascend to the Prime Ministership, a view of his capabilities that he does not appear to strongly disagree with. Which is probably why he is working so hard to challenge Mamata Banerjee, Arvind Kejriwal, KCR and Tejashwi Yadav in being the politician who is the most vocally dismissive of Modi’s achievements. Unlike Rahul, however, the others have not so far thrown out the baby that is their country from the bathwater that is their differences with Prime Minister Modi. In an era where India bids fair to drain away a lot of the investment flowing away from China, the verbal interventions of Rahul Gandhi seem aimed, perhaps inadvertently, to prevent tens of billions of dollars of investment needed for jobs and higher incomes from relocating from China into India, rather than going only to Vietnam, Indonesia or Thailand. Fortunately, while his audiences enjoy the repartee and the barbs so frequently flung by Rahul at not just Modi but in effect the country of which both the Prime Minister and the MP from Kalpetta are citizens, much fewer take his opinions as gospel. Many know India better, and despite (or perhaps because of) the clearly Hinduphobic hysteria spewed by the BBC, CNN, NYT or the Manchester Guardian about India, people across the globe sense that this is India’s time. Please don’t try and stop that bus, Rahul, but hop onto it. The India Story is real.

Rahul, please do not trash the India Story

75 years on, time for an accelerated transformation (The Sunday Guardian)

 

2023 should become a year of accelerated transformation towards a system where anomalies and injustices get uncovered and rectified seamlessly.

Since taking over as the Prime Minister of India in 2014, Narendra Damodardas Modi managed to consign to the dustbin more than 30,000 laws and regulations that had not simply been preserved but added on to since 1947. Equal justice under the law is at the core of the democratic process, else the essence of “one man, one vote” would approach the status of a nullity. Over the course of decades in journalism, encounters multiply, such as with a family where the spouse of a smallholder attracted the lascivious attention of the son of a big landholder, who was moreover the village moneylender. Being an only son with four sisters, every wish of the brat was akin to a royal command where his parents were concerned. When monetary inducements failed to tempt the smallholder or his wife to barter away the virtue of the latter, it was child’s play (or in this case, the desire to play of a youth) to ensure that an obsequious policeman from a nearby police station locked up the husband of the woman who was being sought for the pleasure of the youngster, on the basis of an oral complaint made by a nearby landlord who had never actually ever been in contact with the accused, and who had been given a complaint scrawled by the policeman to sign. Subsequently, the wife was told that the only way her husband would be released from the lockup (where he was being daily subjected to kicks and blows by the policeman and his colleagues) would be to succumb to the demands of the big landholder’s son. All that needs to be said is that once the couple were together again, they left behind their patch of land and shifted to a city, where a job in a store was secured on account of the smallholder being more than merely literate. Given the relatively very low bar required for taking away in practice the liberty of an individual in India, such accounts of the misuse of colonial era laws in order to intimidate and harass others are often too numerous to recount even in a village, leave alone a panchayat. Fortunately, the High Courts and the Supreme Court often step in to rectify the abuses of the legal process that come to their attention, but these must only be a small fraction of the many acts of misuse of the law that take place. Even in cases where an obvious miscarriage of justice has been discovered further up the judicial ladder, the penalty for those guilty is not always more than a possible verbal slap on the wrist. As a consequence of the lingering miasma of colonialism that continues to exude its reek of injustice, in too many instances, even those guilty of serially being responsible for deliberate falsification of charges and wrongful arrest seldom get subjected to anything other than a notional penalty. There has been an uproar among some at the way in which the homes of mafiosi are being bulldozed in parts of the country. If such critics were made to encounter the victims, male and female, of the predators that mafiosi are, they would understand why political parties that shelter and defend such criminal elements are losing ground electorally to those that call for stringent punishment for the guilty.
The Indian Police Act (IPA) was promulgated in 1860 and is still in force. There has been much talk of police reform, and certainly this is needed, to prevent a force intended for public good to morph into an instrument rewarding private greed. More than a few who have had distinguished careers in the police service have pointed to changes in the IPA designed to give freedom to the police from political interference. The problem comes when what gets sought is not just avoiding interference but political oversight. With all its faults, the electoral system ensures a check on politicians, and every election and byelection shows how the voter in India has become more aware of the power inherent in exercising the right to vote. Freeing any wing of the wings of government from oversight would create conditions for misuse of those powers rather than ending such an evil. What is needed is to ensure that transparency multiplies, and in the fulfillment of such an objective, technology has become a factor delivering substantial assistance. While such capabilities could be and sometimes are misused, the fact that a smartphone can serve as a video or audio recording would assist in documenting misdeeds, including by the use of the threat of one or the other provision of some colonial era law or regulation to intimidate an individual into submission. The Supreme Court has acted in a welcome manner by permitting the live streaming of proceedings, and a similar facility needs to be introduced in every court in the country. During the days when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi once spoke to a visitor, an academic who dabbles in journalism, that his effort was to ensure that there would be online public tracking of every file, so that delays would immediately become evident. Another task would be to reduce the number of stages that a file has to go through before a final decision gets recorded. Since Modi took over the Prime Ministership in 2014, there has indeed been substantial progress in such a direction, and the expectation is that such an ameliorative process will continue. In an era when opacity was the norm, files would inexplicably get piled up at the desk of a particular official or minister, and rapidly diminish were the right visitors to pay him or her a call. Online tracking of the progress of files is becoming the practice in a rising number of operations, and that is indeed a welcome trend. Even in matters as routine, but in so many instances as important, as the delivery of a letter, the sender of a letter by courier or speed post is able to track its progress. The Indian postal service has been doing a lot more than the credit it gets, and the introduction of online tracking is among its practices that need to be generalised across the field of administration.
Consigning to the wastebasket regulations intended only for generating visits from those armed with a packet stuffed with currency notes, or ensuring the online tracking of files on matters of importance to the citizen, are some of the ways in which India can overtake its peers to be an economic and political model for the rest of the world. Others are the courts, which need to ensure that the delivery of justice does not get clogged not just for months or years, but often for decades. In the 75th year of India’s freedom from colonial control, the task of those in charge of the various wings of governance is to ensure that 2023 becomes a year of accelerated transformation towards a system where anomalies and injustices get uncovered and rectified seamlessly.

75 years on, time for an accelerated transformation

Senator Menendez, help defend the Indo-Pacific (The Sunday Guardian)

 

It is substantially in the hands of Bob Menendez whether or not the resolution recognizing Arunachal Pradesh as part of India passes the US Senate.

The Achilles Heel of the Biden Administration is that the President of the United States has stuffed the higher echelons of his administration with wannabe Europeans. Among policymakers, Europeanists act as though Europe and the US were a single entity separated only by the waters of the North Atlantic. Paraphrasing EAM Jaishankar, while the rest of the world’s problems (barring of course the US itself) are usually not considered America’s problems, Europe’s problems immediately are seen as America’s problem. Donald J. Trump may not be the most popular person in Senator Bob Menendez’s party (or, less openly, in its main rival in the political arena), but he was the first US President in a long while to call out the Europeans for putting in a mere penny to assist Washington in its geopolitical forays, but always expecting a dollar from the US where their own issues were concerned. Whether it be in matters of defence or getting the US to act as the spearhead of European efforts to retain primacy in those parts of the world that had in the past been colonies of states in that continent, Washington has run an extra ten to each of Europe’s mile. The visit of every US President to Europe has been an exercise in unsubtle flattery from the hosts accompanied by a list of demands. Ukraine is different, for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy skips the flattery while constantly upping his demands from the Atlantic Alliance. In days past, V.K. Krishna Menon used to say that if you wanted anything from the Americans, “don’t beg them, kick them”. Zelenskyy has shown that Menon was right, given how President Biden is showing the generosity of a trillionaire Santa Claus by shovelling ever more equipment and help to Ukraine free of cost. This is in contrast to the much more meagre help given to other democracies endangered by an authoritarian state. Neither India or Taiwan has been given even a single artillery round gratis by Joe Biden. Instead of enough of the much-needed advanced—repeat, advanced—defensive and offensive (for the first is useless without the capabilities of the other) missile and aircraft systems, the US sent Taiwan House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and will soon send Speaker Kevin McCarthy. A wonderful pair, to be sure, but of limited value in case a kinetic conflict were to ensue across both sides of the Taiwan straits.
Senator Bob Menendez needs to avoid showing that he is one with President Biden in subliminally considering himself to be a European who has swum across the pond, and not an American, or part of a people who are not European, Asian, South American or African but a blend of all four of these continents and its peoples. It was the wannabe European in the White House that would have motivated Senator Menendez to demand that the alliance with India be torn to shreds by President Biden through imposing CAATSA sanctions after S-400 systems were purchased by India from the Russian Federation. Senator Menendez should instead have asked Donald Trump why the US THAAD defence system was not offered to India on concessional terms (given that they would be useful to US security as well) while the S-400 deal was being negotiated by Delhi with Moscow. Is it that “Panda Huggers” in both the Trump as well the Biden administration would fret that their friends in Beijing may pull a long face at any such offer of the THAAD system to India ? After all, if Bob Menendez is so unhappy about Russia’s land grab in Ukraine as to have signed up to Victoria Nuland’s “Let’s Punish India” policy, why is the same anger missing at China’s land grabs in Asia? This is, after all, Cold War 2.0, not Cold War 1.0. In such a context, having India as an ally in the Indo-Pacific against the PRC is essential for the security of the US. Fortunately, there are others in the Biden administration who understand where the principal threat to the US is coming from, President Biden had their wiser counsel, and refused to do what would have delighted both Beijing and Moscow, which would have been to place CAATSA sanctions on India.
It is substantially in the hands of Bob Menendez whether or not the US Senate resolution recognizing Arunachal Pradesh as part of India passes the Senate, before being sent to the House of Representatives and finally to the White House for assent. Should the Arunachal bill get signed into law, it would be an affirmation that the US is with India in resisting the expansionism of the authoritarian superpower rampaging in the Indo-Pacific. Both the Sino-Wahhabi and the Sino-Russian lobbies in Washington will seek to stifle that partnership against tyranny, including by following Nuland’s advice to make its passage conditional on India joining hands with those European powers who are committing hara-kiri on themselves by cutting off from the natural resources of Russia, which comprises half the land area of Europe and of Asia combined. Given the times they lived in, a Zbigniew Brzezinski or a Bill Casey could be forgiven their pro-China tilt. During Cold War 1.0, the PRC was invaluable in assisting the US to stymie the USSR. In the era of Cold War 2.0, a partnership with India is even more of an essentiality for the US than that with China in the past, a memo the Nulands in the Biden administration appear to have ignored. The Arunachal bill, should it become law, promises to be a game changer in India-US relations. Both in the Senate and House, and even in the White House if not yet in Foggy Bottom, this needs to be understood and actioned. Over to you, Senator.

The Achilles Heel of the Biden Administration is that the President of the United States has stuffed the higher echelons of his administration with wannabe Europeans. Among policymakers, Europeanists act as though Europe and the US were a single entity separated only by the waters of the North Atlantic. Paraphrasing EAM Jaishankar, while the rest of the world’s problems (barring of course the US itself) are usually not considered America’s problems, Europe’s problems immediately are seen as America’s problem. Donald J. Trump may not be the most popular person in Senator Bob Menendez’s party (or, less openly, in its main rival in the political arena), but he was the first US President in a long while to call out the Europeans for putting in a mere penny to assist Washington in its geopolitical forays, but always expecting a dollar from the US where their own issues were concerned. Whether it be in matters of defence or getting the US to act as the spearhead of European efforts to retain primacy in those parts of the world that had in the past been colonies of states in that continent, Washington has run an extra ten to each of Europe’s mile. The visit of every US President to Europe has been an exercise in unsubtle flattery from the hosts accompanied by a list of demands. Ukraine is different, for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy skips the flattery while constantly upping his demands from the Atlantic Alliance. In days past, V.K. Krishna Menon used to say that if you wanted anything from the Americans, “don’t beg them, kick them”. Zelenskyy has shown that Menon was right, given how President Biden is showing the generosity of a trillionaire Santa Claus by shovelling ever more equipment and help to Ukraine free of cost. This is in contrast to the much more meagre help given to other democracies endangered by an authoritarian state. Neither India or Taiwan has been given even a single artillery round gratis by Joe Biden. Instead of enough of the much-needed advanced—repeat, advanced—defensive and offensive (for the first is useless without the capabilities of the other) missile and aircraft systems, the US sent Taiwan House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and will soon send Speaker Kevin McCarthy. A wonderful pair, to be sure, but of limited value in case a kinetic conflict were to ensue across both sides of the Taiwan straits. Senator Bob Menendez needs to avoid showing that he is one with President Biden in subliminally considering himself to be a European who has swum across the pond, and not an American, or part of a people who are not European, Asian, South American or African but a blend of all four of these continents and its peoples. It was the wannabe European in the White House that would have motivated Senator Menendez to demand that the alliance with India be torn to shreds by President Biden through imposing CAATSA sanctions after S-400 systems were purchased by India from the Russian Federation. Senator Menendez should instead have asked Donald Trump why the US THAAD defence system was not offered to India on concessional terms (given that they would be useful to US security as well) while the S-400 deal was being negotiated by Delhi with Moscow. Is it that “Panda Huggers” in both the Trump as well the Biden administration would fret that their friends in Beijing may pull a long face at any such offer of the THAAD system to India ? After all, if Bob Menendez is so unhappy about Russia’s land grab in Ukraine as to have signed up to Victoria Nuland’s “Let’s Punish India” policy, why is the same anger missing at China’s land grabs in Asia? This is, after all, Cold War 2.0, not Cold War 1.0. In such a context, having India as an ally in the Indo-Pacific against the PRC is essential for the security of the US. Fortunately, there are others in the Biden administration who understand where the principal threat to the US is coming from, President Biden had their wiser counsel, and refused to do what would have delighted both Beijing and Moscow, which would have been to place CAATSA sanctions on India. It is substantially in the hands of Bob Menendez whether or not the US Senate resolution recognizing Arunachal Pradesh as part of India passes the Senate, before being sent to the House of Representatives and finally to the White House for assent. Should the Arunachal bill get signed into law, it would be an affirmation that the US is with India in resisting the expansionism of the authoritarian superpower rampaging in the Indo-Pacific. Both the Sino-Wahhabi and the Sino-Russian lobbies in Washington will seek to stifle that partnership against tyranny, including by following Nuland’s advice to make its passage conditional on India joining hands with those European powers who are committing hara-kiri on themselves by cutting off from the natural resources of Russia, which comprises half the land area of Europe and of Asia combined. Given the times they lived in, a Zbigniew Brzezinski or a Bill Casey could be forgiven their pro-China tilt. During Cold War 1.0, the PRC was invaluable in assisting the US to stymie the USSR. In the era of Cold War 2.0, a partnership with India is even more of an essentiality for the US than that with China in the past, a memo the Nulands in the Biden administration appear to have ignored. The Arunachal bill, should it become law, promises to be a game changer in India-US relations. Both in the Senate and House, and even in the White House if not yet in Foggy Bottom, this needs to be understood and actioned. Over to you, Senator.

Nikki Haley is a formidable challenger to Democrats (The Sunday Guardian)

 

Ron DeSantis, the favourite of the media, has handed over the First Mover advantage to Haley.

Every member of the Republican or Democratic Party who is aware of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis knows that he wants to be the GoP nominee in next year’s Presidential elections. As yet, however, DeSantis has yet not accumulated the courage to announce the obvious. The ambitious Republican hopeful is waiting for what many believe to be a sure bet, which is that Donald Trump can be expected to blow up his chances with some indiscretion. The former President has in his usual manner careened over the past months, flouting both common sense as well as common decency, such as by sitting down to supper with a White Supremacist together with a Black Holocaust Denier. Given his ignorance or uncaring attitude about what is politically incorrect and even toxic (as are Racial Supremacy and Holocaust Denial), the reaction even from within his adopted party to his cosy dinner with two fringe elements must have surprised him. But Donald Trump has spent a lifetime doing such things, and he is not going to change. What is different is the extent of the fall in the backing that he has within the Republican Party in his craving for a second term in the White House. Given that she is the first Governor of South Carolina (and a Republican at that) to have removed the Confederate flag from the precincts of the state capitol, Nikki Haley is also among the overwhelming majority of US citizens who are unafraid to acknowledge the evil that was perpetrated by the Nazis during the 1941-45 mass murder of millions entirely on account of their Jewish faith. At the same time, while having resigned as Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley has been careful to not cross swords with former President Trump. Indeed, there may exist a chance that she chooses Donald Trump Jr, Trump’s son, as her running mate, something that may convince Donald Trump to let go of his effort as securing the Republican nomination (and losing to a Democratic candidate, provided that individual is not Joe Biden). The younger Trump has shown himself to be a feisty kickboxer in the political arena, and has a way of energizing the Trump base in a way no other surrogate can. Despite his age and other handicaps, the former President of the US appeals to the cowboy and gunslinger instincts of enough members of the Republican Party to make the Democrats dream come true by securing his party’s nomination. The most likely antidote to that could be the candidacy for the Vice-Presidency of his son, who is young enough to still be considered youthful even were he to wait out even four presidential terms without seeking to step into the job his father won in 2016.
In the way that has happened to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain, nativists within the Republican party may balk at choosing an individual who not only makes no secret of her Indian roots, and who is a woman as well. It must be remembered that the clueless Liz Truss was chosen over Sunak by the Conservative Party faithful, almost certainly because it was too much for most of them to have a non-white family live in 10 Downing Street. Not the Conservative Party base (which still hankers after Boris Johnson) but party MPs chose Sunak over Truss, to their credit. Despite efforts by his ebullient predecessor to fan unrest and criticism of the UK Prime Minister within the Conservative Party, Sunak has soldiered on. Of course, it has helped neither Britain nor him that the Labour Party has mobilised its cadres to make the UK a country where strikes by essential workers have become a commonplace occurrence. The Labour leaders want a situation that is chaotic to a level that would lead to an economic catastrophe by next year. Should that take place, the UK’s present success in maintaining its lead over the rest of Europe in its financial industry may be lost, and with that, the country’s best hope for an early recovery from woes that have been majorly caused by the hypersonic manner in which Boris Johnson (then Prime Minister) joined hands with President Biden to craft a strategy that was designed by them to kneecap Russia. Instead, the backfire from the Biden-Johnson led moves against Putin’s Russia has damaged oedinary lives not just in Europe but across the world. In creating what the Biden-Johnson duo believed would be a one-way street for Russia, they have succeeded in preventing any visible escape from the auto-da-fé that Ukraine has to its cost become. There is no mercy shown by the Zelensky regime to any Ukrainian citizen who dares to point out that the only way to stop the war with Russia is to concede the territories lost to the Russian side since 2014. That year marked the overthrow of the previous regime in Kiev by a band of Russophobes groomed for the task by the US, Britain and Germany, something that Angela Merkel with refreshing honesty had no qualms about admitting last year. Whatever his private views about the Biden-Johnson escalatory tactics being followed by NATO in Ukraine, Prime Minister Sunak has been forced to join other Atlanticist leaders and worship at the shrine of the Kiev regime. By the time the US Presidential elections take place, it is certain that the Ukraine war will be an albatross on the neck of President Biden, and will define his legacy more than the transformational social welfare programs that he is working to implement. Biden is going the way President Johnson did in Vietnam, of making himself unelectable through the prosecution of an increasingly unpopular war on Russia at a time when China is by far the principal adversary of the US.
With her attacks on the adventurism of Xi Jinping and on the terror machine fashioned by Wahhabi extremists, Nikki Haley has long been a target of the Sino-Wahhabi lobby. She will have to overcome the invectives hurled against her by this lobby, besides the worst instincts of the nativist wing of her party. Despite such handicaps, Haley is articulate and attractive as a candidate. Ron DeSantis, the favourite of the media, has handed over the First Mover advantage to Haley, and that may not be the only thing that he loses out on, now that the former Ambassador to the UN has come forward and declared her candidacy for the Republican Presidential nomination in a country where skin colour and ethnicity matter far less than was the case in the 1950s.

Nikki Haley is a formidable challenger to Democrats

Biden facing a 1962 in slow motion with PRC (The Sunday Guardian)

 

Washington is stumbling into another version of India’s own 1962 war with China.

The Sunday Guardian (TSG) was among the first media outlets in the world to be barred not just physically but online by the PRC in 2020. It does not therefore come as a surprise that academics known to be cosy with the CCP spew venom on the paper as well as on some of its contributors. A recent gem of vituperation against TSG was by an individual who claimed to be a professor in Australia. According to her, to talk of a Sino-Wahhabi alliance was a flight of fantasy. What she makes of the military exercises taking place that involve Turkey, Pakistan and China are not known. Perhaps she believes that President Erdogan is a true follower of Kemal Ataturk, the leader who secularized Turkey, and that Pakistan run by its army is an exemplar of what a tolerant, liberal democracy ought to be. Small wonder that non-Muslims in that enlightened country have dropped from around 37% of the population to less than 2% over the 75 years that Pakistan was carved out of India. Whether it be Somalia or Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the PRC has cordial relations with each of the countries that openly practise discrimination against significant elements of the population. Not just the lady professor but a few other Australian academics as well have responded especially sharply in public to reports in TSG that the CCP was steadily expanding its control over several of the South Pacific Islands, now that it has created and claimed ownership rights over several islands it has built in what ought to be called the ASEAN Sea but is termed the South China Sea for some reason. Just days ago, Daniel Suidani, one of the few South Pacific leaders who were brave enough to call out the CCP, was voted out of his job as Prime Minister of Malaita, a part of the Solomon Islands. Supporters of his warned of the well-funded, remotely directed operation to topple him through a no-confidence motion in the legislature of that state. Their warnings went unheeded by policymakers in Australia and New Zealand, who have taken on themselves the task of assisting the South Pacific Island countries to resist the tentacles of the ruthless, expansionary moves of a nearby superpower. Suidani had protested against the action by Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare of the Solomon Islands of shifting diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. From that time onwards, for more than two years he was the target of the China-leaning lobby in the Solomon Islands, and they finally succeeded in persuading (through methods that are not difficult to guess) enough legislators to get passed the no-confidence motion.
Australia and New Zealand are far closer to India or to Indonesia than they are to Ukraine or Germany, and yet both appear to have lost any enthusiasm that they may have had in preventing the spread of authoritarian tentacles in nearby waters. Instead, both Auckland and Canberra seem to be obsessed with the conflict that has been taking place between Russia and Ukraine. In Asia, with the exception of South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, no other country has thus far shared the substantially greater priority given by New Zealand and Australia to Europe rather than to the world’s biggest continent. Even in the case of South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, there has been from the Biden administration none of the gifts of advanced weaponry that has been sent by Washington to Ukraine. This when any one of this trio is much more vital to the national security of the US than Ukraine is. CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping is into an unprecedented third term in his job. Having achieved that, simply for reasons of survival, he needs a fourth term. Unless he is able to fulfill his promise of recovering the “lost lands” (i.e. those territories that belong to the PRC only in the imagination of the CCP leadership), even the usually docile CCP Central Committee may balk at giving him yet another term once he completes his present term within five years. Which is why this period is one of extreme danger to Taiwan in particular, the country that the CCP proclaims is a “renegade province”. It must be said that even though the members of NATO have not directly entered the Russo-Ukraine war, a seamless flow of weaponry has gone to Kiev, not to mention sanctions on Russia that only its abundance of resources has shielded that country from economic collapse. In particular, China is by far the biggest purchaser of Russian natural resources, a factor that has enabled Moscow to shrug off the impact of western sanctions. The fall of Taiwan would critically weaken the defences of two US treaty allies, South Korea and Japan, and would have almost as severe an effect on the Philippines. The ripples would then spread to Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam. Given that, why President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken still cling to the doctrine of “strategic ambiguity” when it comes to defending Taiwan in the event of an attack by China makes no sense. Rather than prevent a conflict by humouring the exaggerated sensibilities of Beijing, the doctrine of strategic ambiguity only pushes forward the prospect of a kinetic attack on Taiwan by China. Together with strategic clarity on what is an essential reaction in the context of overall US interests, the Biden administration needs to put in place a mechanism to begin delivery of advanced weaponry to Taiwan in the way this has been done for Ukraine.
The visible eagerness of the Biden administration to downplay the significance of the strategic slap that the PLA administered to it in the form of a mammoth spy balloon has cast doubt in several corners of the Indo-Pacific about the extent of resolve of the White House to resist authoritarian expansionism in the region. Seeking a diplomatic America-Chini Bhai Bhai is as much a chimera as India’s efforts to get a military-controlled Pakistan to sheathe its terrorist talons and choose the path of cooperation rather than conflict with India. Given the steady salami slice upon salami slice of the advance of PRC expansionism within the Indo-Pacific, Washington is already stumbling into another version of India’s own 1962 war with China, except that this time around, it is in slow motion. When or even whether this oncoming reality will become evident to the Biden White House is unclear.

Biden facing a 1962 in slow motion with PRC

The life and times of a 21st century Indian (The Sunday Guardian)

 

Renee Ranchan’s book gives a series of peeks into what such an individual, such a mind thinks and reacts to places, people and circumstances.

India has seen a transformation of mindsets that has become impossible to ignore. From 1993-95 onwards, waves of reforms in the economy ensured that the earlier policy of discriminating against private industry ended. Once Narendra Modi took over as Prime Minister of India in 2014, that process has accelerated sharply. Sectors where in the past domestic (although not international) private industry was excluded have been thrown open. Across the country, private schools and colleges have multiplied, as have innovations in education designed to replace rote learning with the exercise of intellect and discretion. It does not not come as a surprise that citizens of India have become welcome additions to countries across the world, from Australia to the United States. It helps that for 75 years, the people of India have lived in a democracy and have adapted to its ways and requirements, thereby outfitting them to live and work in other democracies. Renee Ranchan reflects the new, globally attuned, confident persona of the 21st century Indian. Her book gives a series of peeks into what such an individual, such a mind, thinks and reacts to places, people and circumstances. As is clear from the title, the range of subjects that is covered is wide, very wide. There are vignettes of the interaction of a mother and her son interspersed with contacts and communications with strangers or friends.
Ranchan weaves into her narratives the inevitable essentialities of modern life, especially in matters electronic. She speaks with a smile about her son’s attachment to a portable DVD, or to spending hours on an I-pad. The question is whether the steady march of online contact is reaching a point where the person to person interaction is essential to human society. She sketches the way in which fun mingles with knowledge, through outings under a star studded sky that teach of the wonders of space. The vignettes are ever written in a tone of amused wonderment followed by understanding.
Humour is pervasive, as in her description of different diet regimes , such as the papaya or the cabbage diet. Of course, a friend holding a book on such esoteric matters was willing to surrender that gem of a book for a block of the darkest of chocolates, perhaps a fair trade, given how diets seldom last beyond a few days. Or in her description of government offices with their long lunch breaks.
At the same time, she draws attention to dangers such as online stalking. The mobile phone, the laptop, are ubiquitous, they are everywhere, including in a country that not long ago was derided for being “Third World”. Not any more. Ranchan points to the influence of India even in Britain, which has become a fusion of cultures and ethnicities, even choosing a Prime Minister whose parents came from India. Over abd over, she sketches the impact of technology on everyday life. About how these days, there is no need to carry a staggering load of books when all that and much more can get fitted into a palmtop.
The author moves on from locale to locale, personal glimpse to personal glimpse, personality to personality, with ease that makes reading the book a pleasure rather than a chore.Ranchan has a sharp eye for detail, not only where India is concerned, but where the US or Britain are. She points to the reverence with which the Royal Family is regarded in Blighty, and draws a contrast to the attitude in the US, where Presidents move on and family dynasties falter, as the experience of the Clinton and Bush families have shown. Given her undoubted talents, Hillary Clinton would probably have been more succesful had she been a candidate whose husband had not been President of the US. There is so much to read about, from Sanju Dutt to Madhuri Dixit to Angelina Jolie. There are so many slices of reality revealed through her expressive prose, that it would take a page to enumerate even in precis form. Better, dear reader, to get the book and savour its delights directly.
WIDESCREEN ( pages 312)
by Renee Ranchan
Konark Publishers (P) Ltd

The life and times of a 21st century Indian

Don Quixote would have approved of Secretary Blinken (The Sunday Guardian)

 

Blinken needs to read ‘Don Quixote’ to understand the nature of his temporarily halted mission to get Xi to go against CCP’s interests and push Putin to the negotiating table.

It took a hot air balloon to stop US Secretary of State Antony Blinken from embarking on a pilgrimage to Beijing that not just countries in Greater Asia but the Democratic Party’s own voters would have disowned. US Senators belonging to the Republican Party have signed on to a letter warning Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the lack of sufficient and substantive action by the Biden White House on a matter of the highest concern to countries in the Indo-Pacific. This is the kid glove treatment given to the PRC led by CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping. This is despite his masterminding of aggressive actions by units of the PLA directed against India and Taiwan. In the case of India, there has thus far been silence from the Biden administration not just about how much but whether there will be additional US supply of weapons to India during the next kinetic attack by the PLA on Indian territory. While US President Donald Trump gave a strong official response to the aggression by the PLA at Galwan in 2020, in the Yangtze fracas that took place barely months ago, all that Biden came up with was the same formulation that Xi Jinping has favoured. This is that the PRC aggression against India “should be settled bilaterally”. In other words, that India is on its own where even kinetic aggression by the PRC is concerned. President Biden has taken credit for the way in which the cooperation in matters of defence between India and the US has been progressing since Ashton Carter was the Defence Secretary during 2015-17, in the previous administration. Since that period, even the Quadrilateral Security Alliance has been downplayed by Biden in favour of localised alliances between the US, Japan and Australia with countries not in Asia but in Europe. Not that this comes as a surprise. From the time he was in the US Senate, Joe Biden has been a committed Europeanist. The US President shares this trait with his longtime advisor on foreign policy, Antony Blinken. Those knowing this admittedly pleasant Biden favourite say that to the Secretary, US interests must revolve in the same orbit as the interests of its European partners. Asia, South America and Africa are a much more distant priority in the White House since 2021, as is noticeable from the hypercharged way in which Ukraine is being flooded with weaponry and resources gratis at the cost of substantial chunks of voters in the US who had been promised by Biden in his 2020 Presidential campaign that they would be his primary priority. Are any of the countries in Asia that have endured loss of sovereignty of territory to China been given the same consideration? None at all, not even countries that have faced PLA efforts at land and air encroachment this year itself, India and Taiwan.
It is not easy to keep secrets in Washington, and those in that city who track diplomatic goings on say that the primary purpose of Blinken’s humbling, hopefully not entirely visit to Xi in his court in Beijing was to persuade the CCP General Secretary to put his thumb on the scales and help get Vladimir Putin to pull out of the Russian-speaking parts of that country that have been taken over by Moscow since the 2014 change of regime from a Russophile to a Russophobe Head of State in Kiev. Common sense would indicate that Xi has no interest in any except token and cosmetic gestures in so fundamentally altering a situation that serves the interests of the PRC and in particular the PLA so completely. Only a desperate man or someone who has no comprehension of the mind of the top tier of the CCP would have undertaken such a mission, but given his Europeanist blinkers, this is what Blinken hoped would be achieved by his visit. Just as he did not factor in the damage to trust among democracies in Asia at least to his chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, President Biden seems oblivious to the effect that such an obvious kowtow by one of his closest associates to Xi Jinping would have had on US credibility as a reliable partner against the expansionist plans and activities of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping.
Several countries in the periphery of China have suffered the effects of such a policy by the CCP leadership, including a country that had for the longest time been organically connected to the US, the Philippines. Small wonder that behind the politeness by President Marcos to Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, there was a polite scepticism about US reliability. It was while Biden was a heartbeat from the White House during the Obama administration that Scarborough Shoals was forcibly taken away from Manila by Beijing, an action that showed that none of President Obama’s tough talk was backed by action where military aggression by China was concerned. At a time when the future of the Indo-Pacific as a location where hegemony by a single power is concerned hangs in the balance, all that a legislator close to Biden, Pramila Jayapal, seems to bother about is buttering up GHQ Rawalpindi by dragging out the so-called Kashmir issue. Or in other words, get Biden to pressure India to hand over chunks of Kashmir to Pakistan and China. For it has become obvious that GHQ Rawalpindi is as much an auxiliary of the PLA as the LeT or the JeM are auxiliaries of the Pakistan military.
With the consent, sometimes direct and otherwise implicit, of his interlocutors in Beijing, Secretary Blinken would have mouthed the usual homilies about China, which would then have fired back, again in a predictable fashion. As he dusted off this time-worn routine indulged in by US Presidents who cloak their empowerment of the CCP by rhetoric, Blinken’s thoughts would ever have been Ukraine, defined by Europeanist policymakers in Washington as the determinant of the future of Europe. It is time for those political leaders such as Senator Marco Rubio that are serious about deterring the PRC to ask why thus far, there has not been any trace of Ukraine-style generosity in giving advanced weaponry to either India or Taiwan, the two countries most at risk of a large-scale PLA attack. Or why there has not been any talk by the White House of what (or even whether) sanctions of the kind imposed on Russia would be imposed on China in the event of further PLA aggression into the sea, air and land spaces of Asian countries whose territory Xi publicly covets. Antony Blinken needs to read “Don Quixote” by Miguel Cervantes, to understand the nature of his temporarily halted mission to get Xi Jinping to go against the CCP’s interests and push Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table to in effect sign a surrender document. On such dreams is present-day US foreign policy based.

Don Quixote would have approved of Secretary Blinken

Churchill’s prejudices reflected in BBC docuseries (The Sunday Guardian)

 

There are indeed ‘men of straw’ in high positions, but not in the country where Churchill and his intellectual progenitors claimed they were.

According to Winston Churchill, “Hindoos were a beastly people”. As for those who were expected to take over the reins of a free India, they were “men of straw” of whom in a brief period, “no trace will remain”. Churchill opposed efforts in the 1930s to make India a Dominion rather than a colony of Britain, arguing that only those who had European ethnicity had the qualities needed to qualify as a Dominion rather than remain a colonised people. The 1947 Partition of India was the consequence of both the convincing of Whitehall by M A Jinnah during World War II that a newly created Pakistan would be a much more reliable post-colonial ally of Britain and the west in general than “Hindoo India”. Equally fraught was the decision taken in 1946 by the leadership of the Congress Party to ignore the wishes of Mahatma Gandhi and go accept rather than oppose the Labour PM Clement Attlee’s plan to partition India, Until 15 August 1947, it had been the policy of the Congress Party to emphasise (correctly) that dividing the people of India on the basis of whether they were Hindu or Muslim was absurd. Both the Hindu Mahasabha as well as the Muslim League was, in pre-Independence days, opposed by the Congress leadership. After Independence, in perhaps a reflex designed to smother any impetus towards a second partition on the same lines as the first, the new leadership of the country divided the population into the “majority community” (ie the Hindus) and the “minority community” (i.e., non-Hindus). Since then, the concept that the people of India are composed of two parts, minority and majority, has been allowed to take deep root, including in s administrative and legislative edicts forms.
Was Partition a good enough reason for creating such a distinction, a presumed difference that is difficult to explain, given the numerous common strands that bind together the people of India, no matter what their faith? Strands such as a common history spanning several thousands of years as well as cultural and societal fusion rather than the fission that the “Majority-Minority” binary explicitly assumes to be the case. It is in the context of the reality of the people of India having a common societal DNA irrespective of faith that the two-part BBC documentary titled “The Modi Question” needs to be viewed. There is nothing different in the documentary that a diligent search of YouTube would not be able to uncover, except the Straw Report. The BBC has given the names those who produced the two parts of its portrayal of India, a vision that is completely congruent with Churchill’s assertion that a people such as the citizens of India would never be able to cohere into a stable, progressive population, but would disintegrate into bits and pieces. The BBC worked tirelessly to defend British rule during the period when India was subjugated, has shown through this and other broadcasts that the channel believes that those who the people of India have been elected to power remain what Churchill vitriolically described them as being, “men of straw”. With unintended irony, the individual the channel turned to for validation (besides a surfeit of material of the kind available on YouTube) was a forgotten politician, Jack Straw.
The words “Nazi” and “Fascist” get blithely strewn across the landscape of political discourse in India and the world. After Part One was aired, Jack Straw was interviewed by a prominent television presenter, the entire interaction being subsequently aired on an equally prominent news website located in India. There are several media outlets that are critical of the present government, especially its top tier, as indeed they have a right to be in a democracy. That such news channels would not have survived a week in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy does not seem to have troubled those in the BBC and elsewhere across the world that parrot the allegation of the Sino-Wahabis that India today is both Fascist as well as Nazi. And that the country is on the “brink of genocide”, something that has been repeatedly asserted by several Argumentative Indians since 2014 in varied locations, never mind that such a “brink” seems no closer to being crossed in 2023 than it was in 2014. Or that there are as many as 230 million non-Hindus in a country they claim is dominated by “Intolerant Hindus” who they claim routinely go about committing atrocities on non-Hindus. The steady growth of the population of minorities in India goes along with a comparative drop in the number of communal incidents in India since Modi took over as Prime Minister as compared to the period before that. It is not known who in the Government of India took the decision to block the BBC series on PM Modi from being digitally accessed in this country, but this is as unimplementable a proposition as the recent suggestion by the RBI that crypto assets should be banned. Morarji Desai was awarded the highest honour in Pakistan by General Zia. He ought to have been given similar recognition in Dubai as well, for it was his Gold Control Order that began the transformation of what was an insignificant trading post into a global dynamo. The prosperity of Dubai was founded on the smuggling of gold into India, a process that bloomed once Finance Minister Desai sought to turn back through a firman the waves of India’s attraction for gold. Blocking the series was a boon to the BBC, in that such a move has generated worldwide interest in a mediocre documentary that is an undiluted exercise in vilification directed at India, specifically at Hindus and still more directly at Prime Minister Modi.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi could not have been in the decision loop when the blocking of the BBC series was ordered, most likely much lower down. This BBC docuseries is only the latest in 999,999,999 earlier efforts at maligning him through regurgitating shaky arguments that have been used against Narendra Modi throughout his political career. None of such abuse has had any impact on his trajectory, which is why PM Modi must be unconcerned, indeed amused, by the BBC series.
Jack Straw’s Dodgy Dossier was taken to be gospel truth by the BBC in 2023, the way the channel accepted his equally mendacious litany of lies in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had huge stockpiles of WMD, including nuclear materials. Had that been true, there would never have been any US-UK invasion of Iraq. Ask Kim Jong Un, who is going forward with impunity in adding to his WMD stockpile, with a wink and a nod from Beijing and Moscow. The Straw Dossier that was the principal basis of the 2-part BBC documentary was an effort by the then British Foreign Secretary to serve his political interests. Foreign Office mandarins exhibited their fealty to Churchillian prejudices about India by obeying Jack Straw’s self-serving command to write a report whose conclusions had been pre-cooked, exactly as the Iraq WMD dossier was concocted a year later. The Straw dossier was based entirely on motivated gossip retailed within India and outside by those who for varied reasons opposed Narendra Modi. A hubbub is being sought to be created worldwide about what resembles a cut and paste job from YouTube, mixed with an interview with a politician previously discredited for his strident characterisation as fact the falsehoods that were used to justify the 2003 Bush-Blair war on Iraq. There are indeed men of straw in high positions, but not in the country where Churchill and his intellectual progenitors claimed they were, but in the land of Jack Straw and what must be a favourite channel of such individuals, the BBC.

Churchill’s prejudices reflected in BBC docuseries

Mr Guterres, end the Ukraine war (The Sunday Guardian)

 

Neither Russia nor Ukraine nor the EU is gaining from this war, neither is the rest of the world, especially the poorer countries.

Wars are a catalogue of misery brought about by miscalculation. When he gave the command to launch the “Special Military Operation” against Ukraine that began on 24 February 2022, President Vladimir Putin would not have been aware of what much later was revealed by Angela Merkel and others. That the Minsk process, on which Moscow had pinned its expectations of a peace settlement, was only a ruse designed to give the regime in Kiev sufficient time. This was to prepare for a Ukrainian offensive designed to retake the territories lost after the success of the 2014 regime change operation in Ukraine, with indirect but very substantial involvement by NATO. Given that Russian intelligence agencies have honeycombed the Kiev establishment, that there would shortly be such a military offensive would have become known to the Kremlin. Rather than wait for the blow to fall in the manner Saddam Hussein did in 2003, Putin decided on a pre-emptive strike before the Ukrainian military had completed preparations for the recapture of Lugansk and Donetsk, if not Crimea. The “Special Military Operation” presented an opportunity for war planners within NATO to entangle that Russian military in a quagmire such as what the alliance had faced in Afghanistan as a consequence of the Pakistan military sabotaging efforts at eliminating the Taliban. In other words, Ukraine in the 2020s was to be what Afghanistan had been to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, a bleeding wound that would drain away the resolve and resources of the Russian military. Surprisingly, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had been elected on a promise to pursue peace rather and confrontation with Russia metamorphosed into as determined a champion of such a kinetic challenge to the Kremlin as Russophobes such as Petro Poroshenko, who had been installed in 2014 to head the government in Kiev that was to win back territories that had been lost during that year. Since then, the government in Kiev had sought to pummel the territories lost by constant harassment caused by shelling that resulted in a consistent drip drip drip of civilian lives lost in Donetsk and Lugansk. Concurrently, an influence building operation was launched that has become among the most successful in its genre. This was to portray Ukraine as a country denuded of Russian-speaking citizens, and which historically had only the most tenuous of links with Russia, neither of which is true. Next was to portray the post-2014 governments in Kiev as exemplars of integrity and having the finest of cultural traditions to be found in Europe. The final touch was to link Ukraine to the defence not just of western civilisation but western security, such that any increase in Russian influence in that country would go counter to both western civilisation and security. After Russia launched its war on Ukraine last year, such a process was speeded up by barring any media outlet that portrayed a Russian perspective on the conflict. Few of the many across both sides of the Atlantic who seek to educate the rest of the world on the desirability of freedom of speech appear to disagree with the view of chancelleries in the western world that the only way to protect free speech was to bar any that was at variance with the approved version of events in Ukraine. Similar is their view that jailing Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning was essential to the preservation of democracy in the West.
As mentioned by External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, it is extraordinary that Europe believes its own problems to be the world’s problems, but does not consider the rest of the world’s problems to be its problems. Whether it be Asia, Africa or South America, very few countries back the stance taken by the NATO powers on the Ukraine war, that the defeat of Russia is an existential battle for democracy itself. Their prowess in Perception Management resulted in several media outlets and commentators in the three continents mentioning breathlessly forecasting from the close of March 2022 itself that the Ukrainian military was on the cusp of pushing Russian forces back towards the vicinity of Moscow. Similar to a carrot being waved in front of a donkey to get the animal to trot along carrying the cart with him, this “cusp of victory” seems to be getting not less but more distant by the month. The problem is that Europe’s problem has become the world’s problem. More than the war, the sanctions imposed against Russia by the US, EU and others have caused shortages of essential commodities and inflation across the world. They have also underscored the imperative of moving away from the US dollar as the global reserve currency, given the collateral damage that a rising dollar is causing to the debt burdens of poor countries and to global inflation. A rising dollar may not be as helpful as is supposed in taming inflation in the US, but it certainly pushes inflation and consequent misery in countries that have a low per capita income. As for the inflation now being witnessed in the US, the UK and the EU, a substantial portion of that has been self-inflicted, through the backfire of sanctions. Not that this gets mentioned in a media that has cosily embedded itself within the pre-approved information stream of NATO.

Before the war, the perception within the Atlanticist world was that Vladimir Putin, if replaced, would give way to another Gorbachev or Yeltsin and be as mindful of western needs as the two were. Now, the course of the proxy war between Russia and NATO that is being conducted in Ukraine is steadily ensuring that were Putin to fall, the next in line would be even more hardline than the present President of the Russian Federation. Not only are the bridges between Russia and the EU, US and UK being burnt, the ashes are being scattered with little hope of retrieval. Neither Russia nor Ukraine nor the EU is gaining from this war, neither is the rest of the world, especially the poorer countries. In the name of bringing back territory lost to Russia in 2014, Ukraine is being destroyed. The only gainer from the present conflict is the CCP, which got a reprieve from attention towards its ultimate geopolitical objectives getting diverted in the way that was the case when 9/11 took place in 2001. Short of a meltdown of Russia, there is no chance of Ukraine getting back its lost territories. In its eagerness to ensure such a meltdown, NATO goaded by the US, the UK, the Baltic states and Poland are ignoring one red line after the other, bringing closer the point when it will find itself in a direct and cataclysmic direct conflict with the Russian Federation. The time has long past for the conflict to end. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres needs to call for an immediate ceasefire as well as the rollback of Ukraine-related sanctions on Russia. The world must not be forced into enduring the pain of a conflict that both sides to it have blundered into.

Mr Guterres, end the Ukraine war