Needed at G-20 Summit in Delhi: A Ukraine ceasefire (The Sunday Guardian)

 The problem is that both the Cold War 1.0 zealots of NATO and Zelenskyy live in the shadowy world of zealotry.

P.T. Barnum was finally displaced as the world’s greatest showman by a former comedian who is now presiding over a human tragedy that Europe has not witnessed since the war against Hitler ended in 1945. With his green fatigues and Just-off-the-Battlefield demeanour, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pushes into the shade NATO leaders as he strides into a meeting with them and demands all of everything as of yesterday. The clouds of war obscure mistakes and waste, hence it is unlikely that there will ever be an accurate accounting of the manner in which the daily tranches of weaponry handed over to the Ukrainian side have been used against the Russian military. What seems clear is that the Russian side has performed much the way the Soviet armies did in Finland just a year before German tanks rolled into Soviet territory in 1941. The shoddy performance of Stalin’s army against the much smaller Finnish foe commanded by Field Marshal Mannerheim helped convince Hitler that his plans for the invasion and occupation of the Soviet Union would be an easy task for a German force that had so rapidly defeated the French armed forces just a year ago. It is therefore unsurprising that the zealots within NATO who have long had visions of the disintegration of the Russian Federation are pushing to escalate military and other support to Kiev so as to further promote the planned collapse of what they term the Russian Empire. Meanwhile, active if not openly from the sidelines, CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping will be anticipating the taking over of vast tracts of Russian territory in the east should Russia disintegrate the same way as the Soviet Union did in 1991. That would, in his reckoning, finally establish him as the equal of Mao Zedong in the history of the CCP where the taking over of additional territory by the PRC is concerned.
For quite a while, the Cold War 1.0 zealots in the US in particular have regarded Belarus and Ukraine as the soft underbelly of the Russian Federation, in much the way that Chechnya, the Central Asian states and western provinces such as Georgia and Ukraine were to the USSR . While Belarus has at least for now remained within Moscow’s orbit, nearly more than 70% of Ukraine is now hostile territory where the Russian Federation is concerned. Were NATO to move towards accepting India’s proposal of an immediate cessation of military hostilities in Ukraine, that alliance would emerge as the effective victor in the proxy conflict that it has been waging against the Russian Federation since the 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russian armed forces.

The problem is that both the Cold War 1.0 zealots (a group that is amply represented within the Biden administration, as it is in most of the chancelleries of Europe) as well as President Zelenskyy live in the shadowy world of zealotry. This is a terrain filled with shades and illusions. Both the zealots as well as the Zelenskyy crew are adamant that the influence of Moscow on the southern and eastern territories of Ukraine should fall to zero. In other words, that Russian-speaking Ukrainians should migrate to Russia and remain there.

Whatever be the defects of the Russian military, it would be an impossible task to evict them from land that they have been in effective control of since 2014, absent a Russian meltdown that seems a remote possibility to any individual other than zealots whose mission in life is the destruction of what her thinkmates regard as the Russian Empire.

Those who are intent on driving out Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin forget that the challenge to him is coming not from the skimpy band of liberals in Moscow but from hardliners such as Yevgeny Prigozhin, who believe that the President of the Russian Federation has been too soft on not just Ukraine, but on adjoining NATO territories as well. The loss by Moscow of that part of Ukraine that has been in effective Russian control since 2014 would represent an existential threat to the stability of the Russian Federation, something that the hardliners believe should be halted through all available means. The refusal by Leonid Brezhnev and his successors as General Secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to militarily cripple Pakistan’s ability to supply the Mujahideen with weapons in the 1980s Soviet-Afghan conflict was the single biggest factor behind the humiliating withdrawal of the Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1988. Hardliners in Moscow argue that Putin’s unwillingness to more aggressively attack and shut down supply depots and transportation links that ensure a steady supply of munitions to Ukraine from NATO member states is what has led to the present stalemate. Just as the odds that the US would wage war on the USSR should the Soviet navy and air force have blocked through force supplies into Afghanistan from Pakistan in the early 1980s, hardliners in Moscow argue that NATO would not have the will or the public support to escalate a determined destruction by Russia of supply routes into Ukraine from nearby NATO territory into a direct conflict with the Russian Federation itself. Judging by the way events are developing, it is the hardliners who seem to be gaining in influence even within the Russian military.

It is in such a context that for the past year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been calling for an end to the fighting in Ukraine, so that the possibility of such a disastrous escalation recedes. Standing against such a view are the Cold War 1.0 zealots in NATO, who together with the Zelenskyy regime, believe it to be feasible to cripple Russia without provoking a matching response from the Kremlin. The G-20 summit meeting in September in Delhi represents an opportunity for reason to override passion, and for measures to be initiated that in months if not weeks would result in an end to the fighting in Ukraine. When zealots shape policy, world wars are the result, and the time has long arrived for the actions and influence of such individuals to be replaced by those who substitute reason for passion, and who avoid the trap of a disastrous escalation of the Ukraine war.

Needed at G-20 Summit in Delhi: A Ukraine ceasefire

Respect for the citizen (The Sunday Guardian)

 A never before seen opportunity has presented itself to India in the form of countries seeking to reduce their dependence for supplies from the People’s Republic of China. Were such investors to be confident of a welcoming regulatory environment in the country, the quantum of such “decoupled” investment in India would in a few years dwarf the flow going into alternative locations nearby. Whether it be access to a large and fast-growing market, or the availability of skilled brainpower thanks to the abundance of technical and other educational centres that have come up in various parts of the country, or closeness to markets in Europe, West Asia and Southeast Asia, India offers a multitude of suitable locations. Companies would be able to determine which location best meets their needs, so that state governments would compete with each other to ensure ease of business in their state. If there were to be a rough rule of thumb about ease of compliance with regulatory requirements, which plays a significant role in ensuring overall ease of doing business, 60% of the task would be that of the Central government, 30% the state government and 10% local government. It was his performance as Chief Minister and not any patron within the BJP that catapulted Narendra Modi by early 2013 into being the voter’s most favoured politician to lead India. If there had been no Modi phenomenon in 2014, the BJP would have continued to fall significantly short of securing a majority on its own in the Lok Sabha.

During previous governments, even so basic a requirement as the location of a factory was in several instances dictated by those in power rather than decided by the company itself. The consequence was that many of the production sites suffered from shortages of items necessary for the running of the plant, and consequently, costs rose and international and domestic competitiveness fell. Worse, the regulatory rules were so strict and loosely worded that it became an easy task for a corrupt rival to cripple a company by harassing the entity through the misuse of the law and its enforcement. There have been numerous instances of promising startups with innovative and domestically formulated technologies being forced to shut down, and even in a few cases, have the innovators receive not a national award for excellence but a prison sentence. It is in such a context that Prime Minister Modi has created numerous pathways for those who have been victimised by corruptly administered regulations. They can send details of such misuse of authority, often through portals that are immediately visible to not just the public, but to the highest portals of government. Transparency and accountability are central to double digit economic growth, and both are on their way to becoming commonplace. The overwhelming majority of officials belonging to the Central services are persons of integrity, and those who do not follow proper codes of conduct need to be removed from positions of responsibility so that the overall ambience is conducive to investor confidence of a level playing field with neutral umpires. Under Prime Minister Modi, Digital India has expanded manifold, and as a consequence, wrongdoers find it difficult to prevent details of their wrongdoing from getting known to the public. Provided that exposes are based on fact and not malice, each such revelation about the diminishing number of officials who are yet to adhere to the high standards of objectivity and integrity expected of them by the Prime Minister brings closer the day when India will emerge as the world’s third superpower, after the US and China. During the colonial era, the purpose of law was not just to extract as much from the public as possible, but to give a superficial legal cover to any unjust act of the colonial rulers. The other purpose of laws that were so designed as to be easily misused was to instill a climate of fear that inhibited the people of India from developing and putting to use their talents. Since 2014, a citizen’s own signature has been attestation enough for a document, for a democratic government trusts the citizen and generates an ambience that promotes growth. During the next few years, what is needed is to ensure a framework of governance that gives the citizen the freedom to improve his own life and the lives of others.

MDN

Respect for the citizen

Unity essential in holding together diversity (The Sunday Guardian)

 It is the responsibility of educators and historians to ensure that awareness of the common core of belief in the unity of the nation is within every citizen.

Were an extra-terrestrial to land on Earth, he or she may regard the planet as a quarrelling Babel. with little knitting together humankind except a common ancestry in the African continent. On the surface, this may be accurate, but just beneath that are stories of failure and success co-existing with each other. Examine what is happening to two countries that were formerly part of the USSR. What a difference there is between the present condition of Georgia and that of Ukraine.

Both have endured slices of their territory effectively coming under the control of the Russian Federation. There are the Nuland school of policymakers in the US and the EU who must have urged the Georgians to launch a hybrid war against Russia in 2008, but luckily for the citizens of that picturesque republic, such calls went unheeded. The Georgians are aware that any future unity would not be the consequence of the kind of kinetic or hybrid warfare now being resorted to by the Ukrainians. It would come only through the carrying forward of a process of enhancing contact with the breakaway territories, rather than creating a mental Berlin Wall between the two sides. Unity could come through the steady accretion of confidence in a breakaway region that the rest of the country was prepared and indeed eager to respect their rights rather than seek to dominate them. In any country, were a section of the population to consider and to behave as though they were superior to the other sections, that would be a pathway towards instability. The reason why the majority of those living in Scotland chose to remain part of the United Kingdom was not coercion from London, but the fact that across Britain, the Scots are as much an equal part of the life of the entire country as the Welsh or the English are. Brexit has of course introduced a new complication in the situation, and this aggravation would substantially increase were the fire-eating Tories clustered around Boris Johnson to succeed in either deposing or emasculating the pragmatic Rishi Sunak. For Boris Johnson, politics is showtime, which is so much more enjoyable than the humdrum business of government, and in this the former UK PM is exactly like Donald Trump. The problem is that showmen have far more appeal in several sections of the electorate than plodding realists who understand that governance is not about pyrotechnics but performance. Fortunately for the Labour Party, the majority of its members seem content with the present leader, unspectacular but hard-working Keir Starmer, than his rival for the job, Jeremy Corbyn. Emotion is always a much more enchanting spectacle than reason, except that the hangover from the aftershocks of governance by such a personage is likely to be long and hard, something that most members of the Labour Party appear to understand, unlike those in the Conservative Party who yearn for the return of the excitement of the Boris period. Brexit would work best for the UK provided there were, in effect, open borders with the EU on both the Northern Irish and Scottish frontier, a fact that hard-core Brexiteers seem to be opposed to accepting, harmful though their stance is to the economic security of Britain.

Of course, it must be admitted that the UK has handled the issue of restive parts of the country far better than Spain has. Madrid is adamant about not going forward with a Scottish-style independence referendum in Catalonia, and several Catalan nationalists have been imprisoned. Even those Spanish citizens seeking an independent Catalonia need to be treated with the respect shown to those of divergent views in a democracy, rather than be placed in prison. Whether it be in Spain, Germany, Italy or France, the absence of a migration policy within the EU that deals with its external borders has resulted in waves of migration illegally landing up on the shores of several European countries. As India has discovered in the case of the millions of illegal migrants it has long hosted from some neighbouring countries, sending back even a few thousand of the millions who have arrived is a monumental task. The UK is discovering that as well, now that the hastily-contrived Rwanda option has been deemed illegal by the courts.

Unfortunately, within the post-2011 migrant communities in Europe, those holding leadership positions are reluctant to facilitate the dissemination of modern education within the younger segments of the population, leading to a disconnect between what they actually study and what they need to study in order to do gainful work in the country they have moved into. Most of the leaders are themselves unconfident of being able to absorb modern learning, hence their resistance to such being made available to the rest. The consequence is the ghettoisation and the other-isation of migrants, repeatedly leading to conflagrations such as what Paris or Marseille have recently been witnessing. While diversity is a plus and should be celebrated, yet there ought simultaneously to be a common core of attitudes that unite the different strands of the population and prevent them from flying off in diverse directions. The common civilisational DNA in the Subcontinent was termed “Indutva” by this columnist in the 1990s. Denial of this fact was the prime mover behind the “Two Nation” theory that was used to justify the vivisection of India in 1947.

It is the responsibility of educators and historians to ensure that awareness of the common core of belief in the unity of the nation is within every citizen, so that those who act as though there are not just “two nations” but multiple nations within a country fail to shake the stability of the country. Which is why the entire and not just the relatively recent history of India needs to be learnt from school onwards, so that the full tapestry of the civilisation of the world’s most populous democracy is admired, understood and experienced. The present tensions and societal dynamics in the EU, an entity that refused to adopt a policy in the 1990s that prioritised talent wherever it came from and instead sought to erect geographic and ethnic barriers to entry irrespective of capability, is becoming a cautionary tale to the rest of the world.

Unity essential in holding together diversity

No visas for terror sympathisers (The Sunday Guardian)

 Names have always been used to camouflage the actual intentions and effect of an action. The Enabling Act that was passed by the German Reichstag in 1933, soon after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg, was the legal cover used subsequently to place a veneer of legality on his dictatorship. Passing the Act was a simple process, as those opposing the measure were simply forced out of the chamber by Storm Troopers before voting commenced, many of whom subsequently were arrested and a few executed. The law was named “the rescue of the German people and state from misery”, surely a classic in the annals of misinformation. Within six years, a war that ought to have begun in 1936 at the latest but for the obsession of the elites of Britain in particular with finishing off not Nazi Germany but the Soviet Union. Indeed, up until the formal declaration in 1939 of a war that could no longer be ignored, much of the British establishment saw Hitler as a useful bulwark against what they regarded as the actual threat, the USSR. Up to the invasion of Poland by Hitler, emissaries were sent by Prime Minister Chamberlain to Berlin to try and convince Hitler to call a halt to further conquests. While the Soviet secret service had reliable information about the intention of Hitler to attack the Soviet Union once he subdued Poland, these were thrown aside by Stalin as “provocations by the British and the Americans that were intended to persuade the USSR to launch a pre-emptive strike on Germany’’. Several of the NKVD analysts in Moscow who warned of Hitler’s coming assault were executed as “agents of the British”, with the result that the flow of information to Stalin concerning German moves dried up. Stalin thought himself to be infallible, a propensity for self-delusion that cost his country over twenty million lives lost on the battlefields and through acts of Nazi bestiality.

In the roster of misleading names, a prizewinner is “Sikhs for Justice” (SfJ) run by individuals working closely with the diplomatic staff of two countries not friendly to India. What was done to a community that is among the most valorous in the world during 1946-48 in that part of Punjab that was handed over to Pakistan cries out for justice. In not the tens but in the hundreds of thousands, Sikh men, women and children were put to death, stripped of their assets, physically assaulted and made to flee. The loss was Pakistan’s, for the Sikhs are a community that enriches any part of the world they settle down in. SfJ is not just not interested in seeking justice for the victims of that period, the organisation has become the handmaidens of the grandchildren and children of some of the very individuals who were guilty of acts of horror against the Sikhs in what is now Pakistani Punjab during those years of travail. Instead of concentrating on the perpetrators of genocide, the organisation and others auxiliary to it are targeting the very country in which many in the Sikh community found refuge during 1946-48, the Republic of India. It is a fact that the events following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on 31 October 1984 were inexcusable in any manner or form, and that much more needs to be done to ensure accountability on those guilty of acts of hatred and worse. But joining in the plan to divert attention from 1946-48 by focusing on 1984 is to become accomplices of those who seek to remove from the record the Sikh genocide of that period. Worse, to serve their interests by indulging in acts of violence against India and its people, including the Sikh community. Whether it be the UK, the US, Australia or Canada, the causal linkages between acts of violence planned or executed and the organisations and individuals responsible are available in the records. Yet there is a paralysis of the will in capitals that incessantly preach about “fighting terror and the enemies of democracy”. The people of India expect better from countries that are partners in the fight against extremism. On India’s part, the least that ought to be done is to take away any visa given to those individuals whose identities have become known as accomplices of the efforts of two hostile powers to needle the world’s most populous democracy. Neither they nor their facilitators and accomplices should be allowed to visit India, for the obvious reason that the purpose of such trips would be to cause violence within the country.
Prof Nalapat

No visas for terror sympathisers

In India, ‘secularism’ stands for the opposite of the concept (The Sunday Guardian)

 Just as in Turkey, Egypt, the US or the UK, there needs to be a Uniform Civil Code if secularism, equal treatment of those belonging to all faiths, is to be maintained.

Post-Independence India is where those who believe not just in the Two-Nation but in a Multi-Nation Theory consider themselves secular. For such individuals, there is almost nothing in common between citizens belonging to different faiths than their Indian passports. In every other way, each is looked upon as different from those of other faiths, a premise that is most prevalent where Hindus and Muslims are concerned. Even Barack Obama, hardly an IQ lightweight, believes that Muslims and Hindus in India belong to different ethnicities. He has imbibed the trope that has been fed into the minds of Pakistan’s youth by textbooks that claim their ancestry to be not subcontinental but a mix of Arab and Turk. Reading the history textbooks chosen in India by post-Independence governments for study by the young, millions of Indians believe that there was no effort at conversion of Hindus by the Mughal emperors, not even by Aurangzeb, whose intolerance finally initiated the collapse of the Mughal Empire. They further believe that it is a crime against “secularism” for Hindus to want the return of the three sacred sites of their faith, Kashi, Mathura and Ayodhya. Such “secularists” become apoplectic with anger at such a wish, forgetting that Kashi, Mathura and Ayodhya are as sacred to Hindus as Mecca, Medina and Al Aqsa are to Muslims or as the Vatican is for Catholics. In a country partitioned on the grounds of faith, those who initially ruled India since August 15,1947 ignored such a historical injustice, leaving the three sacred sites the way they were during Aurangzeb’s rule.
Another red rag to “secularists” as the term gets defined in India, concerns a Uniform Civil Code. A UCC is needed so as to make equal the treatment meted out in civil matters to citizens across all faiths. In the past and to a much lesser extent in the present, there are still a few Hindus who have more than one wife. Just as in Turkey, Egypt, the US or the UK, there needs to be a UCC if secularism—equal treatment of those belonging to all faiths—is to be maintained. Yet even some citizens in these countries believe that there should not be UCC in India even while it is law in theirs. Fortunately, those in the US in particular who have such an anti-secular view of secularism are on the wane, as witness their failure to either prevent or dim the significance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s just concluded state visit to the US. There are more than a few self-proclaimed Sanatanis who favour different regulations rather than a Uniform Civil Code. These pass off as champions of Hinduism, even while they are the polar opposite of what a believer in Sanatan Dharma favours, which is equal treatment to all faiths. It is those who believe that Hindus and Muslims have different DNA that anti-India, anti-Hindu groups across the world use to present a false case that India is a hotbed of Hindu fanaticism.

Unfortunately, there are some self-proclaimed champions of Hinduism whose unwisdom gets showcased as the norm, when in fact it is the exception. Some weeks ago, those across the world who seek to portray India as a paradise for hatemongers were ecstatic. A former minister in Karnataka belonging to the BJP was quoted as threatening that “every mosque will become a temple”. Whether this was what he said, or his words were deliberately garbled and quoted out of context is not clear, as the former minister seems afterwards to have entered into a state of maun vrat and taken a vow of silence. Did the former minister mean that every mosque is a house of prayer, and hence should be regarded by Hindus and those of every other faith with the respect befitting a house of prayer ? If so, he ought to have made that clear. If he were serious about seeking what was reported, that every mosque would be made into a temple, the fact that such an individual had been a minister in the BJP government in Karnataka provides a clue as to why the party gave a walkover to the Congress Party in this year’s Assembly elections. The fact is that only three sacred locations matter to the Hindu community, Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura. Should the three be restored to the glory they had before being demolished by the destroyer of the Mughal Empire, Aurangzeb, the pain caused within the pysche of Hindu community at such a historical injustice would be healed. The birthplaces of Lord Ram, Sri Krishna cannot be altered, and the Kashi Vishwanath complex has a tradition that was mentioned even during Vedic times. Many Muslims who oppose such a reversion to tradition of the three sites do so because they worry that such a return of the three would be the start of a movement by Hindus involving many other mosques as well. The former Karnataka minister has added to the list of opponents of the return of the three sacred sites to the pre-destruction (by Aurangzeb) period. He has done this by irresponsible utterances that damage the course of action favoured by the Prime Minister, which is “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishwas, Sabka Prayas”. The former minister does not seem to have heard of Prime Minister Modi’s wise words, and has as a consequence been among those whose words and deeds have played into the hands of foes of a strong and united country. He joins such company as those who sully the name of India and the Hindu faith by killing people whom they (usually incorrectly) think of transporting beef.

In the 20th century, Hindus and Muslims were sought to be divided through the Two-Nation theory. What is taking place in Pakistan today ought to be a cautionary tale to those who believe that any country can be stable, peaceful and prosperous were there to be discrimination between those of different faiths. We are all Indians, and it is our common history and our common DNA that should unite all citizens so that our march towards the status of the world’s third superpower gets accelerated rather than delayed.

In India, ‘secularism’ stands for the opposite of the concept

Asian allies worry that Blinken blinked in Beijing (The Sunday Guardian)

 Blinken’s China visit will do nothing to quiet fears in Taiwan that Washington will look the other way were there to be a total blockade imposed on Taiwan.

TAIPEI: Two of the defining images of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Beijing last week were the underwhelming welcome accorded to him in the Chinese capital and the manner in which the CCP General Secretary read out the riot act to him at their meeting. There were no important Chinese office-holders to receive the man who is third in the line of succession to the Presidency, nor even a red carpet. Instead, Blinken walked along a red line painted on to the tarmac, a less than subtle indication of what his hosts expected Washington not to cross, not just at the Beijing airport but everywhere else in the world. And judging by the images released of the Xi-Blinken meeting so eagerly sought by the US side, the Secretary of State listened to the translated version of Xi’s homily in silence. Officials in the Department of State have been floating stories about the “robust” exchange of views that the two sides had, with Blinken leading the charge behind the privacy of closed doors. Yet it is difficult to disguise the fact that the Chinese side appears to have ceded no ground whatsoever from its maximalist position that whatever the CCP carries out through its agencies has to be accepted by the rest of the world, no country excepted. There were even reports on social media that the Secretary of State emulated the example of US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, who told the then dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein on 26 July 1990 that US Secretary of State James Baker had instructed her to tell him that the George H.W. Bush administration “had no opinion on Iraq’s dealings with the Arab world, including in Kuwait”. This was reportedly taken by Saddam as an indication that the US was not concerned about the future of Kuwait, and hence that his forces could move in and occupy that US ally without any blowback from Washington. Blinken was quoted in these reports as having in effect given a green light to CCP General Secretary Xi to invade and occupy Taiwan, something that is not just improbable but impossible, given the importance of Taiwan, including to the security of that key US ally in the northeast of Asia, Japan. The joker in the diplomatic pack is whether the Chinese side misconstrued Blinken’s mild and courteous manner, refined over years spent as a staffer to Senator Biden, as an indication that there was any inadvertent smudging of Washington’s red line that would be crossed were Beijing to attempt a kinetic change in the status quo over the Taiwan Straits.

Should China attempt a change through force of the status quo, the frontline would be populated by Taiwanese youth. Which is why it is no accident that they as voters have been migrating from the ruling DPP to the Taiwan People’s Party launched by former Taipei Mayor Ko wen-jie. The TPP says that there is no need to buy more weapons from the US or from anywhere else should they come to power, as the TPP would see to it that a cross-strait war is avoided. Such a policy is reminiscent of the stance taken by Prime Minister Nehru until the 1962 war with China, which was that India had no need of an expanded military as skillful “non-aligned” diplomacy would keep the peace between India and its neighbour China. Unilaterally reducing the kinetic defensive capabilities of Taiwan would meet one of the conditions required for the PLA to launch an attack on the island, while the other condition would be a tepid response to such an invasion by the US and its Quad partners Japan, India, Australia and South Korea. In this context, the response by the Biden administration to the furious and kinetic PRC reaction to Nancy Pelosi’s 2 August 2022 visit to Taiwan was not reassuring. Instead of a US carrier in the vicinity sailing towards the air and sea defence zone that the PLA was invading, the naval vessel and its accompanying fleet sailed away from the region even while close to a total blockade was imposed on Taiwan by the PRC for nearly five days. There was a reduction rather than an intensification of US air activity around Taiwan, almost as though a PRC blockade of the island (which would be the first stage of any invasion) would not matter. Such seeming pusillanimity was in contrast to the (admittedly much smaller) 1996 kinetic threats made by China to Taiwan, when two US carriers steamed towards the region and forced the Chinese side to abandon their show of force. Blinken’s visit will do nothing to quiet fears in Taiwan that Washington will look the other way were there to be a total blockade imposed on Taiwan. There is also the discouraging reality that NATO, despite its assurances of support to Kiev, has not sought to impose a No Fly zone over Ukraine and has restrained Kiev from attacking bases in Russia that are regularly causing havoc on the front line. How can Taiwan repel a PLA assault without attacking targets in the PRC? A reduction in the credibility of the US as the guarantor of Security has been why the neo-Nehruvian, former Mayor Ko wen-jie, has emerged as the favourite in the 13 January 2024 Presidential elections in Taiwan.

While spinmeisters in the Biden administration claim its response to the 24 February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine as a morale booster for the Taiwanese, in reality the images daily coming on television screens of battered cities across the country are feeding into a growing scepticism across the island nation that the US has the will to go into battle with the PRC over Taiwan. The way in which Ukraine is being pummeled into ruins is apparent, despite efforts by western media to portray the battle as going Ukraine’s way. Rather than a confidence booster, across Asia the war in Ukraine has become a cautionary tale for countries that were formerly confident of the ability of the US to defend them against PRC expansionism, something that western media appears not to have noticed.

Asian allies worry that Blinken blinked in Beijing

Modi and Biden script history in Washington (The Sunday Guardian)

 Although the United States and India have been the two largest democracies in the world from the period when India became independent 75 years ago, the India-US relationship has gone through several twists and turns, high points and dips, periods of storm and sunshine. Had Franklin Roosevelt survived throughout his last 4-year term rather than passing on almost at the start of it, and had B.R. Ambedkar or Sardar Patel been nominated the Prime Minister of India rather than Jawaharlal Nehru, the two countries would, from the start of their official relationship, have become the closest of friends. Nehru had the Old Harrovian’s prejudice of the New World, looking on the US as a bumptious newcomer to the galaxy of big powers. In contrast, the military in Pakistan began its odyssey of leeching on to one great power after the other. Prior to Independence, M.A. Jinnah had teamed up with Winston Churchill in a joint effort to ensure that the “beastly Hindoos” (in Churchill’s eloquent prose) got left with as little of British India as possible. Myanmar, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Nepal and of course (then undivided) Pakistan were snatched from the control of New Delhi once the Congress Party took over the reins of power. Heavily under British influence, London worked hard at separating the Gulf countries from the close relationship that they had had with India during their time. The Indian rupee had been in general use within the Gulf region for a long time, but was replaced with other currencies as India was regarded by London with suspicion by many and distaste by more than a few policymakers in that capital because of the perception that Nehru was in the Soviet camp, a presumption that was untrue. Throughout the decades of the India-USSR relationship during Cold War 1.0 between Washington and Moscow, not once did India conduct military exercises with the Soviet Union nor permit a single Soviet soldier to be stationed in India. The obsession of Whitehall, soon adopted by the White House, to wrest Kashmir away from India and hand it over to its creation, Pakistan, led to a situation when there was very little option but to rely more and more on Moscow as protection against the British obsession to appease Pakistan through the gift of yet more Indian territory than was already handed over to it

Tethered as they were to the policies favoured by the ruling scions of the Nehru family, neither Prime Minister Narasimha Rao nor Manmohan Singh was able to craft a relationship with the US in the fashion that they favoured. Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee alternated between bouts of Nehruvian dream think and Sardar Patel practicality. President George W. Bush made an error that finally led to the reconquest of Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2022. This was to spurn Vajpayee’s offer of a partnership with the US to rout extremists in Afghanistan in favour of once again (as in the 1980s) outsourcing that problem to its creator, the Pakistan army, in 2001. In 2009, Bush and Manmohan Singh went ahead with the India-US nuclear deal, but it was only in 2014, with the coming to power of Narendra Modi, that the India-US relationship moved onto the fast track. During the 21-23 June State Visit by the Prime Minister to the US, what could be the defining relationship of the 21st century has come of age. India and the US are entering an era of technology partnership, as well as the beginning of joint production of cutting edge defence systems that will begin to reveal its full potential by 2029. It goes to the credit of President Biden that despite a well-funded campaign by the Sino-Wahhabi lobby to jettison the State Visit, he remained firm and understood its potential. In the era of Cold War 2.0, the US and India are indispensable partners. Together, both countries have the ability to ensure that the Indo-Pacific be rescued from the onset of hegemony and remain free, open and inclusive. PM Modi’s State Visit to the US is scripting history by placing the relationship between the two largest democracies on a trajectory that ought to have begun in 1947, but has been delayed for over seven decades.
MDN

Modi and Biden script history in Washington

Biden and Modi need to be ambitious (The Sunday Guardian)

 Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s impending visit to Washington to confer with US President Joe Biden and address a joint session of both Houses of Congress has the potential to finally elevate India-US relations to the level that the challenges of the 21st century have made inevitable. It must be said that the Biden White House has shown wisdom and fortitude in resisting pressure from junior levels in the State Department in particular that are prone towards accepting the policy recommendations made by those expert backseat drivers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, both of which have become severely diminished versions of their former selves. Their clinging on to the fantasy that the world is still in the midst of Cold War 1.0 between the USSR and the US has resulted in editorial policies that are reminiscent of those UK and US newspapers in the 1930s that saw Stalin’s USSR as the foe needing to be vanquished, of course with help from that somewhat loquacious Hitler and the country he ruled over, Germany. In an era when the pivot of history has shifted from the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific and from Europe to Asia, the New York Times and Washington Post editorial content resemble a Ford Model T in the 1990s. Useful in their time, but a traffic hazard now. Both have unwittingly signed on to the Sino-Wahhabi and Sino-Russian campaign seeking to distance the United States from India. A well-funded, expertly crafted campaign that is both mendacious and vicious in tone has been launched against the Modi visit, but the White House and the Congressional leadership has held firm on its plans to welcome the elected Head of Government of the world’s most populous country that also happens to be a democracy. Both the Republican as well as the Democratic Party leadership understand the importance of strengthening rather than jettisoning the US-India partnership, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other outlets opposed to close ties between Biden and Modi notwithstanding.

Much of the malaise that has afflicted US policy comes from lower-level staffers who swear by the New York Times and the Washington Post, and who attend the many enchanting soirees that are held by “useful idiots” of the Sino-Wahhabi lobby. It was this group that generated a flurry of abuse against Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the consequences of which have been predictable. With events such as the 2021 surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban taking place, doubts about US reliability have been replaced with the certainty in Riyadh that Washington is unhelpful in a crisis. As a consequence, the Kingdom has moved away from the US to become closer to the other superpower, China. The CCP has no qualms about assisting both sides in a conflict, so that whether it is Heads or Tails, it is the PRC that wins at the expense of those trusting their future to it. Slowly, however, despite the immense cloud of disinformation about its enemies and misinformation about its intentions, more and more policymakers in Delhi and in Washington are becoming aware of where the actual menace comes from. Spin has the capacity to create temporary perceptions that are distant from reality, but finally hard facts will prevail in the creation of the narrative. Despite the immense hype made by CNN, BBC and other Cold War 1.0 relics, the fact that Ukraine is being drained of its vitals and that the so-called Spring Offensive is but a fiction has become clear.

Unfortunately for President Biden, he has filled the top drawer of his administration with those who remained chained to the past, yet it is cause for optimism that he has adopted a futuristic course of action in extending a warm welcome to Prime Minister Modi. What is needed is for the US and India to agree on a partnership for peace and prosperity that is designed to deter aggression and promote growth in both countries. The 1971 Indo-Soviet treaty ensured that the US and China kept away from kinetically assisting those in the Pakistan military that were engaged in genocide in Bangladesh. A similar document establishing a 21st century partnership for prosperity and security between India and the US will have the effect of giving a boost to an all-round partnership between businesses, citizens and academe as well as deterring expansionist and aggressive powers from encroaching on the rights of smaller countries, such as what happened in the case of the Spratly islands that belong to the Philippines but which is presently occupied by the PRC. Both the US President as well as the Prime Minister of India need to ensure that their meeting this time places the relationship between the two countries in an orbit high enough to meet the challenges that have appeared for both in recent times.

MDN

Biden and Modi need to be ambitious

Neutral rules essential for multilateralism (The Sunday Guardian)

 The intention of Beijing is to get BRICS to accept RMB as the common currency, replacing the US dollar.

A visitor to China will find much that has been designed and built to impress, whether it be the massive skyscrapers or the multi-lane highways crisscrossing a city and the country. High-speed trains convey passengers at speed smoothly to numerous destinations, evoking awe in the minds of visitors. Older and even not so old buildings are razed to the ground and replaced with modern structures, and overall there is an impression of bustle that could rival cities such as Tokyo or Mumbai in the business quotient. Taiwan is very different. Although the per capita income of the small but significant island is over $33,000 as compared to $12,000 in China, the capital of Taiwan is unpretentious. The roads are smaller, as are the houses, not to mention that older buildings are allowed to remain rather than get torn down. Comparing the two sides, it would be difficult to guess that it is Taiwan that is in per capita terms more of a powerhouse than its much larger neighbour on the other side of the straits. The buildup of infrastructure in Taipei has been sedate as compared to that witnessed in Beijing. What is unmistakable is the difference in the ambience. Folks in the Chinese capital are more careful about what they speak and to whom. There is an invisible CCP-directed script that they adhere to so consistently that doing so has become second nature to them, so much so that they almost believe what they are saying to others, especially to foreigners. In contrast, people in Taiwan are relaxed about airing their views. Political parties and television channels each have their own script, all of which causes the ambient noise that is the cadence of discourse in democracies. While almost all the people across both sides of the Taiwan Straits come from the same ancestral roots, they have evolved into entirely different societies. Whatever was left of the mood for unification with China has been dissipated by the experience of once different Hong Kong, which has been pummelled into subservience to the CCP the way the rest of the PRC has. Whether it be within the PRC or in the littoral of China, locations such as ASEAN or even Taiwan, high-ranking visiting officials of the CCP walk with a swagger, steeped as they are in the belief that Might is Right.

In the CCP-directed script, it is always China that is the peace loving country, that is never the aggressor. That any contrary impression is because of untruths peddled by US media. What had been concealed from getting expressed in the past is now openly said, which is that the US is the enemy. There are more than a few in the Biden administration who remain trapped in the fog of memories relating to Cold War 1.0, during which Beijing was an ally in the battle against Moscow. Joe Biden has been a Cold Warrior throughout his political life, and it is no accident that he was the prime mover behind the effort launched by NATO since 2022 to terminally weaken the Russian Federation, so that it dissolves into fragments. This is an eventuality that would be welcomed in Beijing, which would waste little time in seizing as much land in eastern Russian as it could. Not for the first time, by its actions Washington has speeded up the pace of the effort by the CCP to overtake the US not merely in GDP but in terms of global power and influence. To take a single example, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen signed on to the numerous sanctions on Russia that have so affected global growth, and continues to believe that any large scale shift of US investment from China to elsewhere would be a disaster for the US a stand that has earned her the title of “useful idiot” of the PRC from Senator Tom Cotton. Not that Janet Yellen appears to have noticed, but even in recent times, the PRC has occupied huge chunks of land, air and sea space that does not belong to it. Each such acquisition is justified on the ground that it is Chinese territory. In the PRC telling of a wrong narrative, there has been no aggression against India, to take the example of the world’s largest democracy. All that the PLA soldiers were doing was to take a stroll in their own land when they were interrupted by Indian troops. In the CCP book, any territory occupied by China or which is a target of that country’s expansionism is by definition Chinese and has always been. Such are the rules of the game that Beijing would like the world to play by. The western world has often been accused by others of having set up a rules-based international order that they themselves ignore in practice whenever it is convenient to do so. Or to set rules that have the effect of perpetuating western dominance. In the longstanding tradition of copying the example of the US, the CCP is seeking to replace Washington and its western allies as the prime movers in global affairs while creating a set of international rules that are skewed to favour the PRC. The BRI is an example, where almost all the money spent flows back to China in some form or the other. A multilateral world calls for rules that are neutral between countries, not those that tilt in one direction or the other. Those countries that preach multilateralism while promoting a unilateral world order need to have their biases called out.

There was a lot of discussion within BRICS about using each other’s currency for purposes of trade. Had the idea been implemented, each of the members of BRICS would have been the gainers. However, it is clear that the intention of Beijing is to get the group to accept RMB as the common currency, replacing the US dollar. Which is why efforts to revert to the rupee-rouble trade that took place during the Soviet era failed. Behind the scenes, Xi persuaded Putin to ensure that the Russian Federation asked for payment for its oil not in rupee terms but in RMB. There is clearly no interest in Beijing for the rupee to begin to be used more widely as a key currency in international trade, as would have been the case were there to be a revival of the rupee-rouble agreement. Nor is there any desire in Beijing to promote the South African rand or the Brazilian real. Only the RMB matters or ought to matter. A fitting response would be for IBSA (India Brazil South Africa) to begin using each other’s currencies in trade amongst themselves, an initiative that could be taken by ASEAN as well. Genuine multilateralism calls for such moves, and not merely the exchange of a single dominant power or currency with another.

Neutral rules essential for multilateralism