Episoder
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A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/opinion-what-makes-trump-a-better-candidate-for-india-and-world-13831800.html
An AI-generated (courtesy notebookLM.google.com) podcast based on this essay is here:
In all humility, I accept that my endorsement of Donald Trump for the office of POTUS doesn’t make a difference, but I think it’s important for me to articulate why I think Trump is the better choice for all concerned.
On the one hand, there are the purely objective factors: economic policies, foreign policy, immigration, and so on. On the other hand, there are the subjective factors: who I personally think is good for the US and for India, the only two countries, lets’ face it, that I care about.
The subjective factors are the ones that matter, I suspect, and my views are shaped by my own personal history. I grew up in an India that looked up to America; many houses had framed photos on their walls that showed a young John Kennedy walking with Nehru in the Rose Garden of the White House; as a food-deficit country we awaited the PL-480 shipments of foodgrains, so much so that cornflour in Malayalam is called ‘American maavu’ or flour.
I remember as a child when Marilyn Monroe died, and John Kennedy, and I listened to the Voice of America coming in on shortwave radio from, I think, Mauritius; I went to the nearby US Information Center to see an exhibit of moon rocks; my father’s PhD thesis was on John Steinbeck; I read SPAN magazine that showed a sanitized picture of life in the US that was aspirational.
In college, I devoured information about America, reading Time and Newsweek magazines. I went to the US consulate in Chennai to use the library; and my beloved professor Anthony Reddy, seeing our collective obsession with the US, referred to it as “God’s own country” (this was before Amitabh Kant as tourism secretary propagated that moniker for Kerala, and in any case I believed that my two homes – Kerala and California – were indeed God’s own countries, at least before systematic rot set in).
America permeated our consciousness. Those were the days before TV, and so American soap operas were not yet available in India, but American films were, and I still remember watching many of them. It was our Saturday ritual in the open-air theater. Do I remember many of them? No, but a few, like “Guns of Navarone”, “Death Wish”, still stand out. No, not exactly highbrow, but they left an impression. So did reading William Faulkner, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, Tennessee Williams, and even “The Exorcist”.
Nixon and Kissinger and their decision to send the 7th Fleet into the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India in 1971, and the shenanigans of Watergate, plus their coverup of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, gave me the impression that Republicans were not to be trusted and that they were the bad guys, as compared to the Democrats: I remembered the two Kennedy assassinations.
Taking the GRE and GMAT, and then going to grad school on scholarship was an achievement, especially because in those days relatively few from India were able to go to the US. Then working at Bell Labs, where I was active in the anti-apartheid movement there that asked AT&T to withdraw from any company doing business in South Africa. It was a just and proper position.
My friends in that effort were all, I suspect, Democrats, and when I was moving to California, they advised me to go Berkeley rather than Stanford, as I had been admitted to both. I didn’t, which was probably a good thing, as I found later that the People’s Republic of Berkeley, as it is derisively called in the Bay Area, was not that much to my taste anyway.
I was, however, left- and Democrat-leaning for years, and I used to even subscribe to the New York Times and Nation magazine. When I left for California, though, one of my friends at Bell Labs correctly predicted that I’d eventually prefer the Wall Street Journal. I became a member of Greenpeace, and I even joined the Green Party of California. In other words, I was pretty much like most of the other Indian-origin people in Silicon Valley. We thought immigrant rights were much more likely to be supported by Democrats; and also the rights of non-whites.
As for presidents, I sort of endured Reagan, whom I didn’t like because of what I thought was his over-rehearsed lines. I was sympathetic to Carter. I don’t remember much about Bush senior and junior, despite the post-9/11 exertions. Then I quite liked Clinton’s affable, avuncular charm, until, that is, I learned more about him. Obama, however, caused my political antennae to perk up: I thought he was sinister.
Somehow, along the way, I stopped being attracted to what I later realized was woke-dom. I began to see that the Republicans, despite their (what I had earlier dismissed as) somewhat primitive, troglodyte sentiments, were actually better for the US and in fact for the world. Clinton-era fossils like Madeleine Albright and Robin Raphel made me cringe.
Robin Raphel’s infamous rejection of the Instrument of Accession of Jammu-Kashmir in 1993, and her memorable characterization of Pakistan as a “modern, model, moderate Islamic nation” were landmarks in tone-deaf behavior by a US official. She was later investigated by the FBI in a counterintelligence operation on suspicion of having mishandled classified information and if I remember right, even of having passed some of this to other countries that need not be named.
Let us note that the US Council on International Religious Freedom, set up during the Clinton era, has been singularly focused on bashing and punishing India for imaginary offenses against religious freedom. It also never has a practicing Hindu as a Commissioner, only HINOs.
The USCIRF is a front organization for pushing a US agenda, in this case, evangelism. In that, it reminds me of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, signed under Johnson (Democrat), entered into force under Nixon (Republican), and intended almost entirely to prevent India from becoming a nuclear weapons power.
In the meantime, I had returned to India, and therefore the Indian perspective began to matter a lot more to me. Later, Clinton’s hyphenated 2000 visit to India and Pakistan (where he arrived in an unmarked plane immediately after Musharaff’s coup), and his lectures to India soured me even further on the intentions and objectives of Democrats.
It was during the George W Bush era, in 2005, that Modi became the only person ever to be denied a visa on the grounds of conducting “particularly severe violations of religious freedom” under section 212(a)(2)(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Yes, literally the only person ever. Dubya was so embattled and so much in over his head that it is not clear if it was a policy decision or a bureaucratic decision.
It is quite curious that this clause is not applied today to Mohammed Yunus who is not a head of state, but only ‘Chief Advisor to the Interim Government’ of Bangladesh. What it suggests, as many have noted, is that the Bangladesh regime-change operation was blessed by Biden and Harris and Deep State, and Yunus may be an “asset” they have long cultivated. Apparently a pogrom against Hindus does not constitute a “severe violation of religious freedom”.
Obama was notable in his dislike of India. Interestingly, at a young age when many American college students travel to India, Obama had instead gone to… Pakistan. He did make two visits to India as President, including as a Republic Day guest, but I could not shake the impression that this was done more as a marketing event than something with substance.
It was quite evident that Hillary Clinton was a particularly unappealing candidate, and that was why I thought that Trump would win in 2016, despite having, well, several character flaws. With Biden in 2020, I thought Trump was again the better candidate, both for the US and for India. In the latter’s case it was the Biden Amendment that delayed India’s cryogenic engine by 20 years.
Arvind Kumar suggests that Biden has been implicated in supporting many questionable rulers such as Pol Pot and Idi Amin, and with his Democrat friends has created havoc all over the place. His and Harris’ policies have not been positive for India: for example the downgrading of the Quad, or the rhetoric to bully India into toeing the US line on Ukraine and sanctions on Russia.
The completely unnecessary Ukraine war, based on an Atlanticist Cold War-era fantasy pushed by the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski, has merely succeeded in pushing Russia into China’s arms. And Biden has handled other wars badly too: the headlong withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the schizophrenic reaction to the Gaza war. There is every chance that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan will be mishandled too.
Biden’s proxy war on India, waged through Canada’s Justin Trudeau, using dangerous secessionist Khalistanis as a weapon, suggests that the Democrats do not believe in allies, only in vassals. The regime change in Bangladesh, the games played with Pakistan, and the evisceration of the Quad, only emphasize that the Deep State is capricious and unpredictable.
In the meantime, the California that I knew and loved is no more. It is no longer possible to stroll through downtown San Francisco, or park your car in the city, because crime and drug usage have become universal and ubiquitous, mostly thanks to woke Democratic governance. One of the greatest and most beautiful cities in the world is now becoming unlivable.
If this is what a Kamala Harris presidency would perpetuate, I believe it is bad for all concerned. Walter Russel Mead has invoked a crisis in leadership in America, and we have seen this aplenty during the Biden presidency, especially as the man himself exhibits signs of severe cognitive decline.
In the background, there is what appears to be the serious infiltration of Chinese agents into the echelons of US power (remember the advisor to the governor of New York?) and even of Iranian agents in high positions accused of passing Israeli plans to Iran.
Furthermore, the open and extremely generous support for Harris by Alex Soros, son of George Soros, is a red flag. Soros the elder had promised to spend billions of dollars to tackle “the spread of nationalism” (translation: regime change operations against the likes of India’s duly elected government); Alex is now engaged to Huma Abedin, a Pakistani-born woman who was earlier Hillary Clinton’s conscience-keeper and probably her handler.
Then there are the issues of the mishandled Covid crisis, with Anthony Fauci essentially toeing the Big Pharma line; the hard-to-believe invasion of the US by millions of immigrants, many of whom are criminals. Mark Zuckerberg recounted how Big Tech was weaponized to interfere in elections and to generally push a particular point of view to gaslight and manufacture consent.
And finally, Kamala Harris herself. I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area when she began her ascent, which was not necessarily because of merit, but because of friends in high places. I also do not remember her ever emphasizing her Indian roots: she always projected herself as a black person. This deliberate deracination may be clever electorally but it certainly does not endear her to me, nor does it sound particularly ethical on her part. (Note: Conversely, 2020 Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren claims to have Native American ancestry).
I was also pained by the fact that Kamala Harris did not attend the White House Diwali 2024 celebration, which I consider a slap on the faces of all the Hindu-Americans who have been supporting her because of her Hindu ancestry. Harris adds insult to injury by attempting, as leftists do in India, to detach Diwali from its Hindu roots, as Utpal Kumar notes.
On the other hand, Trump said something very statesmanlike, and the contrast is telling. Not only is he standing up for the rights of minority Hindus, he’s also saying that he will handle Bangladesh very differently, and that what Indians perceive as all-around anti-India actions by the Deep State will be curtailed. Trump is acknowledging that Modi’s signal of patching up with Xi at BRICS has been heard. This is a statement of some significance, geopolitics-wise.
I am also afraid that Harris has not covered herself in glory as a woman of intellect or one who has a vision of any kind. To be honest, she has come across as the Dan Quayle of our time, in other words “impeachment insurance” for Biden. I remember how her entire 2020 Presidential campaign was destroyed in under two minutes by Tulsi Gabbard on a debate stage. Harris looked like a deer caught in the headlights, quite in the manner of Dan Quayle or Rahul Gandhi.
Worse than Harris’ substance (such as it is) is her style. The incessant “unburdened by the past” slogan began to sound trite after about the fiftieth time. Can she hold a coherent argument without her teleprompter? How is she going to stand up to tough world leaders? Furthermore, her laugh no longer sounds funny. It actually sounds… creepy.
Compared to this litany of everything that has gone wrong with the Biden/Harris regime (which I suspect constitutes a kakistocracy), Trump did a good job in keeping out of wars, knocking heads together to get West Asian powers to a semblance of cooperation with the Abraham Accords, and fending off China’s attempts to dominate the world economically/militarily. The fact that he did not go to war is possibly the biggest reason that the Deep State despises him.
Admittedly, Trump is crude, a loudmouth and a braggart. But beyond the surface, his political instincts and policies were not bad: for instance, demanding that rich European nations must pay their fair share of the expenses for the military protection offered by NATO.
The interesting fact that the strongly Democratic Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have refused to endorse Harris (even though the usual suspects New York Times and The Economist have done so) suggests that despite the tsunami of disinformation and fake news via social media and a pliant Big Tech, the sentiment on the ground is that Trump has gained.
And then I came across a substack from a young man, Rishi Jaitly, a life-long activist Democrat, who is now wondering if the party that he cherished (he is a particular fan of Obama) is now living up to its advertised trajectory. I’d say no, and I suspect he’ll come to the same conclusion. That party has been in terminal decline for some time.
Now to move on to a purely objective perspective, choosing between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris involves evaluating their contrasting policies, leadership styles, and the implications of their potential presidencies. Here are key reasons some voters might prefer Trump over Harris:
Economic Policies
- Tax Cuts and Deregulation: Trump's promises include significant tax cuts, particularly benefiting corporations and wealthy individuals, which supporters argue stimulates economic growth. His approach emphasizes deregulation, which many believe fosters a more favorable business environment, although there is fear of rampant Big Business.
- Manufacturing Jobs: Trump has focused on reviving American manufacturing through tariffs on imports and incentives for domestic production. This strategy appeals to working-class voters who feel left behind by globalization. However, it remains to be seen if manufacturing jobs will in fact return, given supply chain constraints and loss of competency, especially in technician-level skills.
Immigration and Law Enforcement
- Strict Immigration Policies: One of the biggest concerns about Harris has been her mishandling, as border czar, of illegal immigration. While law-abiding and gainfully employed Indian immigrants wait for decades for green cards, illegal and even criminal aliens simply walk in and get everything, including the right to vote. Trump advocates for stringent immigration controls, appealing to voters concerned about border security and the perceived impact of immigration on jobs and public safety. His tough stance resonates with those who prioritize law enforcement and national security.
- Support for Law Enforcement: Trump's rhetoric often emphasizes strong support for police and law enforcement agencies, which can attract voters who prioritize safety and crime reduction. All the ‘Defund the Police’ rhetoric has boomeranged on the wokes.
Social Issues
- Conservative Values: Many Trump supporters appreciate his conservative stance on social issues, including opposition to abortion and support for traditional family values. This alignment with conservative ideologies can be a decisive factor for voters who prioritize these issues. However, some of this may veer into dangerous territory as racism.
- Populist Appeal: Trump's persona as an outsider challenging the political establishment resonates with many voters who feel disillusioned by traditional politicians. His direct communication style and willingness to confront political norms attract those seeking change.
Leadership Style
- Decisive Leadership: Supporters often view Trump as a decisive leader who takes bold actions. His approach to governance is seen as straightforward compared to Harris's more cautious style, which some may perceive as indecisive or dilly-dallying.
- Economic Performance: Some voters recall economic indicators during Trump's presidency—such as low unemployment rates before the pandemic—as evidence of effective leadership, contributing to their support despite controversies surrounding his administration.
- The Team: There are people such as J D Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are prominent in the campaign; there seems to be a well-thought-out program and plan that is waiting to be executed.
Foreign Policy
- America First: While there are potential irritants to allies in a MAGA (Make America Great Again) approach that prioritizes US interests, it is a lot more sensible than what Democrats offer: something that was lampooned by Kissinger as: “It is dangerous to be America’s enemy, but fatal to be its friend”. An interest-based (“there are permanent interests, no permanent friends”) foreign policy is not capricious, unlike an ideology-based approach that Biden has apparently followed in relation to Russia.
- Fortress America: There is the danger that Trump may turn his back on the rest of the world (America has done this navel-gazing periodically in the past). Given rapid globalization and the relative decline of the US, this may end up being counterproductive.
- Foreign Wars: Trump has promised to end the Ukraine war; he may be able to bring all parties to the table in Gaza and avoid an Iran-Israel all-out war; and he might put enough pressure on China through other means to avoid a disastrous war over Taiwan.
While both candidates present distinct visions for America's future, Trump's appeal lies in his economic policies, strong stance on immigration, conservative social values, clarity in foreign policy, and a leadership style that many find refreshing amidst political gridlock. Voters inclined toward these aspects may lean towards Trump over Harris in the upcoming election.
Finally, there is that intangible something: the courage Trump showed when he was shot in the ear by a would-be assassin.
Thus from both a subjective and personal perspective, and a more objective hands-off perspective looking at the benefits to the US, India and the world at large, I submit that Donald J Trump would be the right choice for the next President of the United States.
3100 words, 2 Nov 2024
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The potential consequences of a Trump presidency for India span multiple dimensions, including military, economic, trade, cultural, financial, and social aspects. Here’s an overview of these impacts:
Military and Geopolitical Implications
- Defense Ties: Under Trump, India may continue to strengthen its defense partnerships with the U.S., particularly in countering China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
- Transactional Foreign Policy: Trump's approach is likely to be more transactional, focusing on bilateral deals without attaching conditions related to so-called human rights or internal policies.
Economic and Trade Consequences
- Tariffs and Trade Relations: Trump’s protectionist policies could lead to increased tariffs on Indian goods, challenging India's export competitiveness.
- Supply Chain Shifts: Despite potential trade frictions, India could benefit from the ongoing shift of supply chains away from China.
- Economic Growth: India's domestic demand-driven economy might mitigate the long-term impacts of any slowdown in U.S. growth.
Immigration and Social Impact
- H-1B Visa Restrictions: Trump's administration is expected to maintain a hardline stance on immigration, which could complicate visa processes for Indian professionals. This may be a good thing for India, forcing H1B seekers to return to India, especially given worsening conditions in Canada.
- Indian Americans: The tightening of immigration policies may lead to increased backlogs for green card applications among Indian nationals in the U.S.. On the other hand, these are desirable productive, legal, immigrants. The US just sent a planeload of illegals back to India.
Cultural and Financial Dimensions
- Cultural Exchange: Attacks on hinduism may or may not diminish, given the preponderance of religious christians in his republican party
- Financial Markets: Indian markets may experience volatility due to Trump's unpredictable trade policies.
Long-Term Impact on Indians in India
- Economic Resilience: India's robust economic structure may help it weather any adverse effects from U.S. policies.
- Geopolitical Positioning: As the U.S. seeks allies against China, India’s strategic importance is likely to grow, potentially leading to enhanced economic and military cooperation over time.
* Dedollarization. The impact of this on India is unpredictable, but the signals are unmistakable that India seeks to reduce the impact of a total dependence on the dollar and on US reserves so that it may undergird its financial sovereignty.
And here, as always, is an AI-generated podcast ABOUT this podcast. As usual, interesting and engaging, thanks to Google NotebookLM and its robot anchors. And twice as long as my actual podcast above!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe -
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* POTUS election: Trump has momentum, but this election looks increasingly like it’s going to be interfered with by the Democratic machine. Harris is likely to “win”; the DeepState will return with renewed vigor, and its embrace of thugs like Pannun, understandable only if you believe they have every intent to sabotage India, will resume.
* The BRICS+ shindig sends a signal to the US and the collective West that dedollarization may be upon us sooner than expected; but India should not jump into the BRICS currency without due deliberation because it exposes India to the economic and military might of China. However, it is a good signal to threaten the DeepState with.
* India’s neighbors, most recently the Maldives, are treating India as some easily-gaslighted uncle whom they can get free money from, while giving nothing in return. This has to stop. Extract a pound of flesh (like take an island or two, or maybe an airport as collateral for loans) especially from nasty people like the Maldivians who were just the other day shouting “India Out”.
Here’s the Google NotebookLM-generated podcast based on the transcript of the above podcast:
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe -
A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-the-implications-of-a-kamala-harris-presidency-for-india-13828576.html
Here’s an AI-generated podcast based on this essay (courtesy Google’s NotebookLM): always entertaining and appealing.
Full disclosure: Parts of this essay were written by AI, and edited.
The entire sorry spat with the Canadians, the tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats and a virtual breakdown of ties leads to a good question. Are the Americans behind it (and if so why?), because for all practical purposes, Canada takes the lead from its Five Eyes friends and mentors? Several commentators have suggested that this is so.
Trudeau is not a serious politician, as he demonstrated in this photograph in blackface acting allegedly as an “Indian potentate”.
But the Deep State is deadly serious. They have meddled in country after country, leading to the utter misery of their populations. I can, off the top of my head, count several: Salvador Allende’s Chile, Patrice Lumumba’s Congo, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Muammar Ghaddafi’s Libya, Bashar Assad’s Syria, not to mention Sihanouk’s Cambodia.
We have to make a distinction between the US public in general and the Deep State. The nation as a whole still believes in the noble ideals of the American Revolution, and American individuals are among the most engaging in the world; however, the Deep State is self-aggrandizing, and now poses a potent danger to the US itself as well as others. Alas, it is taking its eye off its real foe, China, with what probably will be disastrous consequences.
The Khalistani threat is a significant concern for India because it appears that the Deep State is applying pressure through proxies. Since it likes to stick to simple playbooks, we have some recent and nerve-racking precedents: Ukraine https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/trudeau-is-us-deep-states-zelensky-2-0-why-india-should-fight-canadas-diplomatic-war-with-all-its-might-13827294.html) and Bangladesh https://rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/p/ep-134-the-geo-political-fallout.
So what exactly is in store for India after the new POTUS is chosen, which is just two weeks away? US betting markets are suggesting that Donald Trump will win, but it’s likely that Kamala Harris will emerge as POTUS. I was among the few in India who predicted a Trump win in 2016; admittedly I predicted a Trump win in 2020, and I do believe there were um… irregularities. I think in 2024 Trump would win if it were a fair fight, but it is not.
But I fear the vote will be rigged and lopsided, partly because of the vast numbers of illegal aliens who will be, or already have been, allowed to vote (by mail). Every day, I hear of strange practices in swing states, as in this tweet. There is room for a lot of irregularities.
On the other hand, the Indian-American voter (“desi”), apparently, will continue to vote for the Democratic Party, with some reason: there is racism in the Republican rank and file; but then let us remember that anti-black racism in the US South had Democratic roots: George Wallace and Bull Connor and “Jim Crow”. The Republicans had their “Southern Strategy” too, to inflame racial tensions. The racism Indian-Americans, particularly Hindus, face today is more subtle, but I doubt that the indentured labor and Green Card hell will get any better with Kamala Harris as President. I suspect 100+ year waits for a Green Card will continue.
A Harris presidency could introduce several challenges for India across various domains, including economics, foreign policy, terrorism, and military affairs. It is appropriate to consider historical contexts, especially the stances of previous Democratic administrations and notable figures. In particular, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Robin Raphel come to mind: they were especially offensive to India and India’s interests.
The Biden Amendment, and Bill Clinton/Hillary Clinton’s efforts delayed India’s cryogenic rocket engine and thus its space program by 19 years. https://www.rediff.com/news/column/who-killed-the-isros-cryogenic-engine/20131118.htm
One of the most vivid historical examples is that of Japan’s economy. After a dream run in the 1960s and 1970s, when they seriously threatened American supremacy in trade based on their high-quality and low-priced products, the Japanese were felled by the Plaza Accord of 1985, which forced the yen to appreciate significantly against the dollar.
The net result was that Japanese products lost their competitive pricing edge. Furthermore, it led to an interest rate cut by the Japanese central bank, which created an enormous asset bubble. The bursting of that bubble led to a Lost Decade in the 1990s, and the nation has not yet recovered from that shock. One could say that the reserve currency status of the dollar was used to bludgeon the Japanese economy to death.
Having observed this closely, China took special care to do two things: one, to infiltrate the US establishment, and two, to lull them into a false sense of security. Captains of industry were perfectly happy, with their short-term personal incentives, to move production to China for increased profits. Wall Street was quite willing to finance China, too. Politicians were willing to suspend disbelief, and to pursue the fantasy that a prosperous China would be somehow like America, only with East Asian features. Wrong. China is a threat now.
But the Deep State learned from that mistake: they will not let another competitor thrive.
The possible economic rise of India is something that will be opposed tooth and nail. In the background there is the possible collapse of the US dollar as the reserve currency (i.e. dedollarization), because of ballooning US debt and falling competitiveness, and the emergence of mechanisms other than Bretton Woods and the SWIFT network (e.g. the proposed blockchain-based, decentralized BRICS currency called UNIT).
Besides, the Deep State has a clear goal for India: be a supine supplier of raw materials, including people; and a market for American goods, in particular weapons. Ideally India will be ruled by the Congress party, which, through incompetence or intent, steadily impoverished India: see how nominal per capita income collapsed under that regime until the reforms of 1991 (data from tradingeconomics and macrotrends). The massive devaluations along the way also hurt the GDP statistics, with only modest gains in trade.
Another future that the Deep State has in mind for India could well be balkanization: just like the Soviet Union was unraveled, it may assiduously pursue the unwinding of the Indian State through secession, “sub-national diplomacy” and so forth. The value of India as a hedge against a rampaging China does not seem to occur to Democrats; in this context Trump in his presidency was much more positive towards India.
Chances are that a Harris presidency will cost India dear, in all sorts of ways:
Foreign Policy Challenges
1. Kashmir, Khalistan and Regional Dynamics: Harris has previously expressed support for Kashmiri separatism and criticized India's actions in the region. This stance could complicate U.S.-India relations, especially if she seeks to engage with groups advocating Kashmiri secession. The persistent support for Khalistan, including its poster boy Gurpatwant Singh Pannun who keeps warning of blowing up Indian planes, shows the Democrats have invested in this policy.
2. Alignment with Anti-India Elements: Her connections with leftist factions within the Democratic Party, which have historically taken a hard stance against India, may result in policies that are less favorable to Indian interests. The influence of figures like Pramila Jayapal could further strain relations.
3. Balancing Act with China: While the U.S. aims to counter Chinese influence in Asia, Harris's approach may involve a nuanced engagement with China that could leave India feeling sidelined in strategic discussions. Barack Obama, if you remember, unilaterally ceded to China the task of overseeing the so-called “South Asia”. Harris may well be content with a condominium arrangement with China: see https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-a-us-china-condominium-dividing-up-the-world-between-themselves-12464262.html
4. Foreign Policy Independence: An India that acts in its own national interests is anathema to many in the US establishment. The clear Indian message that the Ukraine war and perhaps even the Gaza war are unfortunate events, but that they are peripheral to Indian interests, did not sit well with the Biden administration. In a sense, just as Biden pushed Russia into China’s arms, he may well be doing the same with India: the recently announced patrolling agreement between India and China may also be a signal to the Harris camp.
Terrorism and Security Concerns
1. Counterterrorism Cooperation: A shift towards prioritizing “human rights” may affect U.S.-India counterterrorism cooperation, as can already be seen in the case of Khalistanis. If Harris's administration emphasizes civil liberties over security measures, it could limit joint operations aimed at combating terrorism emanating especially from Pakistan..
2. Support for Separatist Movements and Secession: Increased U.S. support for groups that advocate for self-determination in regions like Kashmir might embolden separatist movements within India (see Sonam Wangchuk in Ladakh, and the alleged Christian Zo nation that Sheikh Hasina said the US wanted to carve out of India, Bangladesh and Myanmar), posing a significant internal security challenge.
Military Affairs
1. Defense Collaborations: Although military ties have strengthened under previous administrations, a Harris presidency might introduce hesitancy in defense collaborations due to her potential focus on alleged human rights issues within India's military operations. This is a double-edged sword because it could also induce more self-reliance, as well as defense exports, by India.
2. Historical Precedents: The historical context of U.S. military interventions in South Asia, such as the deployment of the Seventh Fleet during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, raises concerns about how a Harris administration might respond to regional conflicts involving India.
3. Strategic Partnerships: Any perceived shift in U.S. commitment to India as a strategic partner could embolden adversarial nations like China and Pakistan, thereby destabilizing the region further. This, at a time when China is vastly outspending all its neighbors in Asia in its military budget (data from CSIS).
Economic Implications
1. Increased Scrutiny on “Human Rights”: Harris's administration may adopt a more critical stance towards India's human rights record, particularly concerning alleged violations of minority rights and alleged mistreatment of dissent, although there is reason to believe this is mostly a convenient stick to beat India with rather than a real concern: we see how the real human rights violations of Hindus in Bangladesh raise no alarms. This scrutiny could have economic repercussions, such as reduced foreign investment from companies concerned about reputational risks associated with human rights violations, and possible sanctions based on the likes of the USCIRF’s (US Council on International Religious Freedom) report.
2. Shift in Trade Policies: Historical Democratic administrations have often prioritized labor rights and environmental standards in trade agreements. If Harris follows this trend, India might face stricter trade conditions that could hinder its export-driven sectors.
3. Focus on Domestic Issues: Harris's potential prioritization of domestic issues over international relations may lead to a diminished focus on strengthening economic ties with India, which could stall ongoing initiatives aimed at boosting bilateral trade and investment.
Social Issues
1. Anti-Hindu feeling: There has been a demonstrable increase in antipathy shown towards Hindus in the US, with a number of incidents of desecration of Hindu temples, especially by Khalistanis, as well as economic crimes such as robberies of jewelry shops. The temperature online as well as in legacy media has also risen, with offensive memes being bandied about. A notable example was the New York Times’ cartoon when India did its Mars landing. And you don’t get more Democrat-leaning than the New York Times.
In summary, while Kamala Harris's presidency may not drastically alter the trajectory of U.S.-India relations established under previous administrations, given a convergence of major geo-political interests, it could introduce significant challenges stemming from her focus on so-called “human rights” and alignment with anti-India factions within her party. These factors could negatively influence economic ties, foreign policy dynamics, counterterrorism efforts, and military collaborations between the two nations.
Four more years of tension: revival of terrorist attacks in Kashmir, the chances of CAA-like riots regarding the Waqf issue, economic warfare, a slow genocide of Hindus in Bangladesh. It’s enough to make one nostalgic for the Trump era: yes, he talked about tariffs and Harley-Davidson, but he didn’t go to war, and he identified China as enemy number one.
2000 words, 23 October 2024
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The podcast above was made by the Google Gemini AI via notebookLM.
A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-narrative-building-of-west-and-the-threat-of-regime-change-13827231.html
While we can all laugh at the absurdities mouthed by Justin Trudeau in his crusade against India and Hindus, there are meta-questions that really beg for an answer: what the heck is going on? Who is behind all this? Why now? What other precedents do we look at? What do we see as immediate fallout?
I am a student of narrative building. I wrote of information warfare a couple of months ago in https://rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/p/ep-131-information-warfare-narrative and pointed out that this particular method of creation of narratives, while it has long been popular, now functions at warp speed, and the targets of such narratives often get blind-sided, or worse.
I spoke of the sudden U-turns that ended up deposing erstwhile friends like Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega; and I pointed out that something along those lines had happened with Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh in August. There are other examples: for instance, the Maidan Revolution courtesy Victoria Nuland that ended up in the overthrow in Ukraine of Viktor Yanukovych, the installation of Vladimir Zelensky, and… well, you know the rest.
There is a pattern: you unilaterally label somebody a terrorist, and then you proceed to topple him/her. In the old American idiom, “give a dog a bad name, and hang him”. With our supine obeisance to Big Tech and Western media, and thus the gaslighting, we (that is, anybody other than the elites running the West) just believe this, and blame ourselves for not noticing this all along. Total mind-control, in other words.
That makes me quite nervous about what’s going on with the Canadians. It’s true that the Trudeaus, pere et fils, have simply ignored the Khalistani terror problem, both before and after the tragic downing of Air India Kanishka, Flight 182, almost 40 years ago, and the deaths of 329 people. Since those 329 were mostly brown people, it appeared to be not an issue.
There was dissenting opinion: the Major Commission report from 2021 https://www.majorcomm.ca/en/reports/finalreport.html excoriated the Canadian government for incompetence and complacency. Here is an excerpt.
But nobody has ever been brought to book for the bombing. And this has gotten worse over time: Khalistanis like US citizen Gurpatwant Singh Pannun regularly threaten to blow up Air India planes, and warn that this will happen on specific occasions where he suggests people should avoid flying on Air India. These are acts of transnational terror and intimidation, but he gets a pass.
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but after Trudeau’s outburst earlier this week, there have been at least a dozen incidents of bomb threats against Indian-owned aircraft. One circumpolar Air India Delhi-Chicago flight ended up landing in an obscure Canadian airport in Iqualuit in the Great White North because of an online bomb threat. It’s possible that Khalistanis are involved.
Furthermore, there is some kind of a summons issued against Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval in a lawsuit filed by Pannun (who is a lawyer himself) in the comical case of an alleged plot to bump him off, wherein an alleged Indian operative allegedly tried to pay an alleged hitman money to do the deed.
The latest round of the hoo-haa has Canadians targeting Home Minister Amit Shah. Dutifully, the Washington Post with its old US State Department links has made a whole series of serious allegations, which would be funny if they weren’t noir.
The fact that the Ministry of External Affairs reacted sharply to this circus, alas, does not mean there is some new-found spine, but simply that the bureaucrats were peeved that one of them, the senior IFS officer who was Ambassador to Canada, was humiliated. Normally, most bureaucrats have children in the US, or are eyeing lucrative Western sinecures. They tend not to do anything that might damage their personal interests.
But this time it IS different. Things are coming to a head. The sum and substance is that, after the long-running attack on social media on Hindus as ‘pajeets’ and ‘street defecators’, now the stage is set to declare “the Modi regime” a “rogue government”, as though fascist, brutal, anti-minority, and other epithets they habitually use were not enough.
The next step would be regime change, of course. Is India prepared to defend itself?
All this is strictly from the Deep State playbook, so a priori I would blame either Foggy Bottom or Langley, but right now, in the middle of a grueling Presidential election? Don’t they have bigger fish to fry? So I started to wonder if it was some other entity that had prodded Trudeau.
It was interesting to see the closed ranks among the Five Eyes, which is to say English-speaking white countries or Anglosphere. Keir Starmer of the UK, again dutifully, supported Trudeau with alacrity, so much so that I began to wonder if this assault on India is actually a British plot, considering two things.
Brits must have been really annoyed that an Indian-origin PM, Rishi Sunak, ruled them for a while, and they think India is insufficiently respectful of the British King, who, oddly enough, is Canada’s Head of State, and probably Australian and New Zealand’s as well. Maybe they blame India for Chagossians finally getting out of brutal colonial control (which by the way means the end of the grandly named “British Indian Ocean Territories”) which has an impact on the US naval base at Diego Garcia, for which Chagos islanders had been displaced.
The Five Eyes have exalted opinions of themselves. For instance, one of the Biden administration’s many unfathomable decisions was to downgrade the sensible Quad (the brainchild of Abe Shinzo) and instead plump for AUKUS (which is all, well, white) with the remarkable story of wanting British technology transfer to Australia re submarines. Let me repeat that: British. Technology. Transfer.
And here I was, thinking the objective was to contain a rampaging China!
Then there are other little episodes that need to be remembered. Sheikh Hasina stated that the US wanted an island near Chittagong for a naval base, and more alarmingly, that there was a plan for a Christian Zo state that would include territories in India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. This is again a Deep State modus operandi, see East Timor and South Sudan.
Furthemore, the US Ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti, has been hyperactive in “sub-national diplomacy” along with other US officials, meeting a Tamil supremacist M K Stalin one day, doling out funds paying special attention to the restive Northeast the next day.
Not content with that, here’s more from the energetic Garcetti:
Assuming these tweets are authentic, things do look a little bleak for India and the “Modi regime” at the moment. Balkanizing India has long been a goal of the Deep State, reflecting the wishes of its proxies in Rawalpindi and Islamabad.
I hate to be a Cassandra, but a rising and strong India is not on the agenda of anybody but Indians, and that too only some Indians. Others, and you know who they are, are quite happy to revert to the status quo of the pre-1991 era, when India, the alleged socialist paradise, steadily lost ground and became poorer and poorer relative to other countries.
These are dangerous times. I have been nervous about Deep State intent since the days of Madeleine Albright and Robin Raphel, and I am concerned about the coming Kamala Harris Presidency (yes, she will be POTUS). I am worried about a faction of the US establishment that is congenitally anti-India.
Given the looming threat of China, I would much prefer a good working relationship between the US and India, my two favorite countries, and I’d like to take the protestations of common interests (including a very large purchase of Predator drones by India) at face value, but as Ronald Reagan said memorably, “Trust, but verify”.
1325 words, 17 Oct 2024
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I wrote a note in January regarding BKS (which I will not post because of some sensitive information), and here I share a summary, created by Google Gemini NotebookLM.
Summary
Rajeev Srinivasan argues that India can use technology to advance its traditional knowledge systems (BKS). He proposes developing a "BharatLLM" – a large language model trained on Indian texts – to preserve Bharatiya concepts and create a "Splinternet" of domain-specific text repositories. This would allow for machine translation into Sanskrit, protect intellectual property, and foster research in BKS. Srinivasan acknowledges challenges like access to computational resources and copyright issues, but believes that building these systems could benefit India's cultural heritage and technological advancements.
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The podcast above is also created by the same LM and its Deep dive audio output, which is amazing, and the male and female hosts are uncannily human.
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First, in 2003, exhorting India to be a hard state. i wrote this 20 years ago about why India needs to be #hardstate. coercion, carrots, covert action and containment: the principles remain relevant even though the dramatis personae are different. https://www.rediff.com/news/2003/feb/21rajeev.htm
Second, in 2008, the fear that India would be a failed state. I wrote this just after the invasion of Mumbai on 26/11/2008. https://rediff.com/news/2008/dec/08mumterror-are-we-heading-to-being-a-failed-state.htm…
2008 was antonia maino rule. no wonder India looked like a failing state then.
in 2022, I wrote of India, a serf state, as per the neo-feudal #deepstate:
https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/nupur-sharma-neo-feudalism-and-the-geopolitical-squeeze-on-india-10808101.html
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Dr Puri is a Telegram enthusiast (and a tech maven in general, despite his day job as a radiation oncologist), so he is particularly concerned about the full-court press against the app recently: its founder was arrested in France, its antecedents were questioned, its business model (which includes its own cryptocurrency, and also a million paying subscribers) was mocked, and there was a suggestion that it was nurturing crooks, criminals, child pornographers, human traffickers, etc.
There are some fundamental questions about Freedom of Speech, as well as about the US First Amendment as well as their Section 230 of the Communications Code that provides immunity to common carriers. In the context of problems faced by X in Brazil and Mark Zuckerberg confessing that he had been forced to censor things during Covid, the issue of the control over social media does come to the fore. What is “all the news fit to print”? Who determines that?
This may also be very different from laws in other nations: India’s First Amendment actually imposes restrictions on free speech, for instance.
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PS. The video is a little small, I think there was some conflict between Abhishek’s phone and my PC. The audio content should be fine.
PPS. As per Hari Mahadevan’s request, here are the slides that Abhishek put together that may not be so visible in the video.
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The Dr B S Harishankar Memorial Lecture, Bharatiya Vichara Kendram, Trivandrum, 27th August 2024.
A Malayalam version of this has been published by Janmabhumi newspaper at https://janmabhumi.in/2024/09/01/3258051/varadyam/geo-political-implications-for-bangladesh/
A brand-new genAI-generated podcast with two different anchors (it’s really quite good, give it a listen!) courtesy Google NotebookLM added. Let me tell you, I liked it. Your comments on this, below?
It was startling to hear from retired Ambassador G Sankar Iyer on Asianet’s program with Ambassador TP Sreenivasan that the celebrated Malayalam author Vaikom Mohammed Basheer (once nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature) said in 1973: “In Bangladesh, we have created yet another enemy.” With his novelist’s insight, Basheer understood that the Two-Nation Theory held sway among certain sections of Bengalis.
In the current crisis situation in 2024, the ongoing pogrom against Hindus (amounting to a virtual genocide) and the forced resignation of teachers, police officers and other officials based only on the fact that they are Hindus (there are videos that show them being beaten and humiliated even after resigning) suggests that anti-Hindu feeling is running rampant in Bangladesh. It is another kristallnacht.
This is coupled with anti-India feeling. For instance, the current floods in Bangladesh are being blamed on India opening a dam in Tripura after torrential rains, although the Indian government has said that it provided all the hydrological data that it always has.
The fact of the matter is that the departure of Sheikh Hasina is a blow to India’s geo-political ambitions. It now appears as though India erred in “putting all its eggs into one basket” by cultivating only her Awami League, and not the Bangladesh National Party of her arch-rival Khaleda Zia.
The indubitable fact that Indian influence in Bangladesh has now been supplanted by forces inimical to India raises the question of who might be behind the regime change operation. Beyond that, there is the question of whether it was indeed a popular uprising based on the suppressed ambitions of the people that led to the ouster of Sheikh Hasina.
The third question is what this means for Bangladesh, India and the region going forward, especially as climate change may alter the very geography of the area. It is predicted that as much as 11% of the land area of Bangladesh could be underwater by 2050. This could displace 18 million people, which would lead to unprecedented migration of their population into India.
Regime Change operation: Who benefits from it?
Cui bono? Who benefits? That Latin phrase is used to consider who might be motivated to commit a crime (the other part is who has the means to commit it). In this case of regime change in Bangladesh, there are several entities who might benefit.
Obviously Pakistan. That country has never lived down its balkanization in 1971, and it had a number of its sympathizers already in place at that time. There were many who collaborated with the Pakistani Army in identifying Hindus and facilitating their killing or rape or ethnic cleansing, and also Muslims who were their political opponents. These are the people Sheikh Hasina referred to as “razakars”, and they are essentially in control now.
China is a clear winner whenever something happens that hurts India’s interests. There is the perennial issue of the Chicken’s Neck, that narrow strip of land that connects the Seven Sister states of India’s Northeast to the Gangetic Plain. It is a permanent threat to India that somebody (most probably China) will cut this off and truncate India, with the Northeast then becoming part of a Greater Bangladesh, with associated genocide of Hindus and Buddhists.
Former Ambassador Veena Sikri spoke to Ambassador TP Sreenivasan about something very odd indeed: Sheikh Hasina made a state visit to China in mid July, and she was thoroughly humiliated there. Xi Jingping refused to meet her; and she cut her visit short by one day and returned to Dhaka. This is an unheard-of protocol violation for a State Visit; what it suggests is that China had decided that Sheikh Hasina was on the way out. This is in sharp contrast to a Xi visit in 2016 when he made grand promises about Belt and Road Initiative investments.
The United States also has interests. Sheikh Hasina had alleged two things:
* An unnamed Western power wants St Martin’s Island (aka Coconut Island) off Cox’s Bazaar as a military base to keep an eye on both China and India,
* An unnamed Western power intends to form a new Christian Zo nation (for Mizo, Kuki, Chin) just like Christian homelands were carved out in East Timor and South Sudan.
The implication was that the unspecified Western power was the US.
It is not entirely clear that the US benefits greatly from a military base in the Bay of Bengal but there has been a long-running Great Game initiated by the British to keep India down as a supplier of raw materials and a market for their products. The US may have inherited this mantle.
Intriguingly, the US Deep State and its proxies in the Western media had built a narrative around Sheikh Hasina as a model leader for developing Asia, a woman who also succeeded in improving the economic status of her country. That Bangladesh’s per capita GDP had overtaken India’s, and that its garment industry was doing well were used to mock India’s own economic achievements. The switch to Hasina being a ‘dictator’ was a sudden change in narrative.
There is, therefore, enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that there was a foreign hand in the happenings in Bangladesh, although we will have to wait for conclusive evidence.
Was this indeed a regime-change coup or a true popular uprising?
It is true that Bangladesh under Sheikh Hasina’s fifteen-year rule was not a perfect democracy. But there are mitigating factors, including a violent streak that led to the assassination of her father and independence hero Sheikh Mujibur Rahman just four years after the bloody birth of the new State after the Pakistan Army’s assault on its Bengali citizens. The toppling and desecration of his statue shows that his national hero status may not be accepted by the entire population: in fact it looks like friends of Pakistan wish to erase his entire legacy.
The history of democracy in independent Bangladesh is checkered and marred by violence. Before he was deposed and killed in 1975, Mujibur Rehman himself had banned all opposition parties. After Mujib, there was outright military rule till 1986, when the erstwhile Chief Martial Law Administrator Hussain Mohammed Ershad became the elected President.
When Ershad was deposed after (student-led) agitations in 1991, Khaleda Zia (BNP or Bangladesh National Party) became the PM and after that she and her arch-rival Sheikh Hasina (Awami League) alternated in power. The BNP boycotted the 2018 elections partly because Khaleda Zia was jailed on allegations of corruption.
In all of these twists and turns, ‘students’ were involved. In 1971, when Yahya Khan launched Operation Searchlight, the Pakistani army went straight for students and professors in Dhaka University, especially if they were Hindus. Later too, ‘student’ protests were instrumental in the overthrow of Ershad.
The proximate cause of the troubles in 2024 was also a ‘student’ uprising. There had been a 30% quota in government jobs for the children of freedom fighters; along with other such set-asides e.g. for minorities and women, a total of 56% of government jobs were ‘reserved’ by 2018. This reservation system was largely abolished by Sheikh Hasina’s government in 2018 after yet another student agitation.
In June 2024, a High Court in Bangladesh overturned the 2018 judgment as unconstitutional. Even though the Supreme Court reversed it, and restored the status quo ante (of drastically reduced reservations to 7% in total), the peaceful ‘student’ agitation suddenly morphed into a violent confrontation led by members of the Jamaat e Islami (an Islamist party) and the BNP. There was police firing. The Daily Star, a respected daily, found out that 204 people were killed in the first few days, out of which only 53 were students.
It appears the supposed ‘student revolution’ was taken over by professional agitators and agents provocateurs, and it rapidly led to the overthrow of Sheikh Hasina, with escalating violence, especially against Hindus, and the Army getting involved. Even though the Army is in charge now, there is a smokescreen of an ‘interim government’ that allows entities like the UN an excuse to not impose sanctions on Bangladesh.
It is hard to take it on face value that this was a popular uprising; circumstantial evidence suggests that there was a clear agenda for regime change, and since it suits both China and the US to keep India constrained, either of them could have been behind it. The diplomatic snub to Hasina in July suggests the Chinese were well aware of the coming coup.
On the other hand, the sudden U-turn in the narrative about Hasina in the Western media suggests that the US might have decided to dump her. The process by which the regime change happened is also similar to what happened in other countries that experienced ‘color revolutions’. The actions of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and of some diplomats in supporting the BNP, have been offered as possible evidence of US bad faith.
What is obvious is the role of the fundamentalist group, the Jamaat e Islami, which has strong connections with Pakistan. It seems likely that they were the enforcers, and had invested assets within the armed forces. They have called for the secular Bangladesh constitution to be replaced by Islamic Sharia law, and for non-Muslims to be treated as second-class citizens. The Yunus government has just unbanned the Jamaat e Islami.
The attacks on Hindus, including large numbers of lynchings, rapes, and abductions of women, suggests that there is a religious angle and the Jamaat e Islami’s prejudices are coming to the fore. Notably, the entire Western media, Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the USCIRF, human rights specialists all, had nothing at all to say about the horrific oppression of Hindus.
The New York Times even had a headline about “revenge killings” of Hindus, as though somehow the 8% minority Hindus had been responsible for whatever Sheikh Hasina was accused of. Upon being called out, the NYT changed the headline to just “killings” of Hindus with no explanation or apology.
The role of Professor Mohammed Yunus is also intriguing: he had been invited to head an interim government in 2007 but abandoned the attempt and in fact left politics. He had been close to Sheikh Hasina at one point, for instance he got the licenses for his Grameen Phone during her rule, but they later fell out. Yunus’ Nobel Peace Prize and his earlier stint in the US have raised questions about whether he is in fact managed by US interests.
Given all this, it is much more likely that it was a coup than a popular agitation. It remains to be seen who was behind the coup.
What next for India and the region?
There are several long-term challenges for India. None of this is positive for India, which is already facing problems on its periphery (eg. Maldives and Nepal). The coup in Bangladesh also makes the BIMSTEC alliance as unviable as SAARC.
1. Deteriorating India-Bangladesh Relations
The overthrow of Sheikh Hasina, seen as a close ally of India, has led to a rise in anti-Indian sentiment in Bangladesh. The new government may not be as friendly towards India, especially on sensitive issues like trade and security. This could jeopardize the gains in bilateral ties over the past decade. The presence of hardliners among the ‘advisers’ to the interim government suggests that India will have little leverage going forward.
2. Increased Border Security Risks
India shares a long, porous border with Bangladesh. The political instability and potential increase in extremist groups could lead to more infiltration, smuggling, and illegal migration into India's northeastern states, posing internal security risks. Monitoring the border region will be critical. As it is, there are millions of illegal Bangladeshis and Rohingya residing in India, which actually poses a threat to internal Indian security.
3. Economic Fallout
Bangladesh is India's largest trading partner in the region, with $13 billion in commerce under the Hasina government. A deterioration in relations could hurt Indian exports and investments. The economic interdependence means India also has a stake in Bangladesh's stability and prosperity. Brahma Chellaney pointed out that Bangladesh is in dire straits, and has requested $3 billion from the IMF, $1.5 billion from the World Bank, and $1 billion each from the Asian Development Bank and the Japan International Cooperation Agency to tide over problems.
4. Climate Change Challenges
Both countries are vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, floods, droughts and extreme weather events. Bangladesh is especially at risk due to its low-lying geography. Millions of climate refugees could seek shelter in India, straining resources and social cohesion.
5. Geopolitical Implications
The regime change has opened up space for China to expand its influence in Bangladesh. India will need to balance its ties with the new government while countering Chinese inroads in the region. The U.S. is also closely watching developments in Bangladesh. Instability in the region plays into the hands of Pakistan, whose medium-term ambition would be to detach India’s Northeast as revenge for the creation of Bangladesh and for increasing normalization in J&K.
6. Quota Implications
Indians, especially those agitating for ‘proportional representation’ should note that the Bangladesh quota system was abolished in its entirety by Sheikh Hasina’s administration in 2018 in response to student demands. India has a constitutional limit of 50% for reservations, but some are agitating for even more, which is a sure recipe for resentment and possibly violence. It is not inconceivable that it could be the spur for regime change in India as well.
7. Human rights for Hindus and Buddhists; Citizenship Amendment Act and the Right to Return
The Hindu population in Bangladesh has fallen dramatically from about 28% in 1971 to about 8% now, and there is every indication that this is a demographic under extreme duress. Buddhist Chakmas in the Chittagong Hill Tracts are also under stress. India should enhance the CAA or create a formal Right to Return for Hindu and Buddhist Bangladeshis. Writing in Open magazine, Rahul Shivshankar pointed out that Hindus had faced attacks and threats in 278 locations across 48 districts.
In summary, the fall of the Hasina government and the long-term threat of climate change compel India to rethink its Bangladesh policy. Fostering stable, democratic and economically prosperous neighbors is in India's own interest. Rebuilding trust and deepening cooperation on shared challenges will be key to navigating the new realities in the region.
2350 words, Aug 26, 2024
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A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/climate-tragedy-of-wayanad-and-the-vulnerability-of-western-ghats-13808331.html
Here’s a new AI-generated podcast courtesy of Google NotebookLM that summarizes this essay.
After days of intense coverage of the landslides in Wayanad, the news cycle has moved on to other calamities. But the problems remain, and things cannot be left to benign neglect as is usually the case. For example there was a strange thundering noise from deep underground that alarmed people in the area. This is ominous, as it may presage a tectonic movement, although there have been no big quakes here for centuries.
A dramatic before-and-after report from Reuters, using satellite images from Planet Labs, Google, Maxar Technologies and Airbus, shows how the landslide left a giant scar on the surface of the earth, washing away hundreds of houses, leading to widespread fatalities and destruction.
Prime Minister Modi visited the afflicted area. Better governance, both by Center and State, is sorely needed to tackle the problem, because it is not simple: there are proximate, preponderant and root causes. A lot of it is anthropogenic based on local factors, but climate change is also a major factor, as the local climate and rainfall patterns have shifted dramatically in the recent past. There was a drought in 2015, followed by the Ockhi cyclone in 2017, and then landslides and floods in 2018 and 2019.
As a resident of Kerala, who has visited Wayanad only twice (once in 2018 and the second time in April this year), both the problems and the possible solutions are of immediate importance to me, because the very same issues are likely to crop up all over the State, and unless remedial measures are taken now, we can expect further tragedies and endless suffering.
Proximate Cause: Excess Rain
The proximate cause is La Nina-enhanced rainfall, which has been higher this year along the west coast. In Wayanad itself, it rained 572mm in 48 hours before the landslide: about 1.8 feet, an enormous amount.
Before the Wayanad landslide, there had been another in Shirur on the Karnataka coast near Ankola, where a number of people were swept away. The story of Arjun, a Kerala trucker whose truck full of lumber disappeared, was all over the news, and after a weeks-long search, there was no sign of him or the truck.
The total rainfall since June 1 was of the order of 3000mm in Wayanad, which is unusually high, creating vulnerability to landslides. In a recent interview, environmental expert Madhav Gadgil mentioned that quarrying may have added to the intensity of the rainfall, because the fine dust from the mining and explosions forms aerosols, on which water molecules condense, leading to excessive precipitation.
The intense rainfall saturated the soil, and in the absence of sufficient old-growth vegetation that might have held it together, the hillside simply collapsed.
Preponderant Cause: Population Pressure, Over-Tourism, Ecocide
The preponderant causes of the problems in Wayanad are obvious: population pressure, over-tourism and environmental destruction. The forest has basically ceased to exist due to human exploitation. According to India Today, 62% of the green cover in the district disappeared between 1950 and 2018 while plantation cover rose by around 1,800%. Fully 85% of the total area of Wayanad was under forest cover until the 1950s.
Overpopulation, settlement and habitat loss
My first visit to Wayanad was in 2018, when we drove to Kerala from Karnataka: from the Nagarhole/Bandipur Wildlife Sanctuaries to the contiguous Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary, all forming a Project Tiger ecosphere along with neighboring Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary in Tamil Nadu. Together they form the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve.
Bandipur/Nagarhole actually looks like a forest. But I was astonished when we drove into Wayanad, because it does not look like a forest any more: it is full of human habitation. It looks like any of the other districts in Kerala: thickly populated, with settlements all over the place. It appeared to be only notionally a wildlife sanctuary.
Habitat loss, especially that of forest cover, is true of all of Kerala, as highlighted in a study by IISc scientists. It is startling to see how much of this has happened in just a few decades. But it is the culmination of a process that started at least a century ago.
Wayanad, according to myth and legend, was once a lovely, lush forest inhabited by a small number of tribals. There were fierce Kurichya archers (it is possible they were warriors banished to the forest after losing a war) who, with Pazhassi Raja, carried on a guerilla war against the British colonials in the 19th century until the Raja was captured and executed. I visited the Pazhassi Museum in Mananthavady this May, on my second visit to Wayanad. There were artifacts there from the tribal settlements.
Then, in the 20th century, there was a large migration of lowland people, mostly Christians from Central Travancore, to the Wayanad highlands (and the Western Ghats uplands in general). They encroached on public/forest lands, cleared the forests, and created plantations and agricultural settlements. Their struggles against malaria, wild animals and the land itself was the subject of Jnanpith winner S K Pottekkat’s renowned novel Vishakanyaka (Poison Maiden).
The public land thus captured eventually made some people rich, but the whole process also in effect enslaved the tribals, who became an exploited underclass: the very same story as of Native Americans, who are still struggling for social justice after centuries of being untermenschen.
Since most of the settlers were Christians, the Church became a powerful spokesman for them. Successive governments gave a lot of the settlers title to the land they had illegally captured. So there is a class of rich planters, and on the other hand, miserable plantation workers, often migrants especially from Tamil Nadu.
The green deserts need to be turned back into forests
Kerala’s highlands, over time, became ‘green deserts’, rather than ‘tropical rainforests’. The monoculture of tea, rubber, coffee, and especially invasive species such as acacia and eucalyptus is destructive. They crowd out native species, ravage the water table, do not put down deep roots, and offer almost no sustenance to wild animals. It may look deceptively green, but it is no forest.
An expert committee, the Madhav Gadgil Commission, recommended in 2011 that the entire Western Ghats was ecologically sensitive (ESA or Ecologically Sensitive Area) and 75% of it must be preserved intact with minimal human presence. The report was scathing about quarrying, including blasting with dynamite, which upset the already fragile ecosystem, ravaged as it was by the removal of old growth forest and the root system that held the soil together.
At the time, Gadgil did say that the calamity would not take a 100 years, but it would happen in ten to twenty years. He was right, but he was ignored as though he were Cassandra.
The Church opposed the Gadgil report tooth and nail, and the Government of Kerala pushed back on it. So the Central government created the Kasturirangan Commission (2013), which reduced the proposed ESA to 37%. It classified 60% of the Western Ghats as a ‘cultural landscape’ with human settlements, plantations and agriculture.
But that too was not acceptable. In fact, Jayanthi Natarajan claimed that she was forced to resign as Environment Minister because she actually notified the order on protection of the Western Ghats the day before she was removed. Her successor duly put the order on hold.
Sitting Congress MP in nearby Idukki, P T Thomas, says he was dropped in the 2014 elections because he supported the Gadgil report against “encroachments… illegal constructions, quarrying, timber smuggling, sand mining from the rivers and ganja cultivation…My stand upset the Idukki dioceses of the Syro Malabar Catholic Church. The Idukki Bishop had openly opposed my candidature.”
The GoK convened a third committee, the Oommen Commission (2014), which was specific to Kerala, and it recommended keeping all inhabited areas and plantations out of the ESA altogether. Mission accomplished. No more restrictions on land use.
Over-tourism and carrying capacity of the land
This is one reason for the proliferation of resorts and homestays in Wayanad. Every second house caters to tourists, as can be seen from a Google Map (of the area around Kalpetta). The environmental pressure from this (what about solid waste disposal? Do they dump liquid wastes into rivers?) is horrific and increasing. Trash lines the area near the Thamarassery Pass.
As a tourist myself, I did not choose a plantation resort, but instead a homestay which has a working farm. Perhaps I made a wrong choice, because a plantation has a lot of space to absorb the tourist impact. The homestay had many youngsters from Bangalore over the weekend, and it was perfectly nice, but I wonder how much I contributed to the human toll on the environment.
I had gone to Wayanad to visit the Thirunelli temple and the Edakkal caves, which have petroglyphs and drawings reliably dated back to 8000 Before the Present, making them second only to the Bhimbetka caves in Madhya Pradesh, whose rock art dates back to 10,000 BP and earlier. So this area, despite the geological fault lines, has indeed been inhabited for a very long time. The carrying capacity of the land was sufficient in those prehistoric times and even up until recently; now the land can no longer sustain the population.
It is also host to another recent influx. Muslims from nearby lowland Kozhikode and Malappuram districts have come up the Thamarassery Pass and settled in Wayanad in numbers. They have added to the population pressure in Wayanad. Incidentally this is one reason Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency (which includes areas from nearby Kozhikode and Malappuram districts that are heavily Muslim) is so dependably a Congress citadel.
When I made my trip in April, just before elections, I asked several people who would win there: the candidates were Rahul Gandhi (Congress), Annie Raja (CPI), K Surendran (BJP). All of them said “Rahul Gandhi”. One man told me “Rahul Gandhi is going to become the PM”. Another laughed and said, “Are you joking? We all know the answer”. It was, pun intended, a landslide win for the Congress candidate.
Root Cause: Geology and Errant Rainfall
The root cause of the problems in Kerala is the increasingly unstable landscape. It is remarkable that Kerala has such a high number of landslides and vulnerable spots. India Today reports that Kerala has recorded the largest number of landslides in the country, 2,239 out of 3,782 that occurred between 2015 and 2022. The “Landslide Atlas of India 2023” from ISRO lists 13 out of 14 Kerala districts among the top 50 landslide-prone areas of the country.
This is surprising, because the more obvious fault lines must be in the North, where the Indian Plate continues to grind up against the Eurasian Plate, and the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau continue to gain a few centimeters in elevation every year. Indeed Arunachal, Himachal, J&K and Uttarakhand are landslide-prone. But why Kerala, at the other end of the land-mass?
It must be the case that there have been severe tectonic movements in Kerala in the past: the Parasurama legend of the land coming up from the sea is based on a real event, presumably caused by an earthquake in a prehistoric time frame. More recently, the thriving Kerala port of Kodungalloor (aka Muziris), the principal West Coast port in historical times along with Bharuccha in Gujarat, was suddenly rendered bereft in 1341 CE after a severe flood in the River Periyar, and port activities shifted to nearby Kochi.
More recently, old-timers talk about the Great Flood of ‘99, i.e. 1099 Malabar Era, or 1924 CE. Exactly 100 years ago there were torrential rains in July, and records suggest it was 3368mm or 1326 inches over three weeks, that is 11 feet of rain. Floodwaters rose up to 6 feet, rivers changed course, and at least 1,000 people died along with large numbers of livestock, and there was massive destruction of agricultural land and foodgrains. The Flood of ‘99 became etched in the collective memory of the area, but it mostly affected the lowland areas of Travancore and Cochin, leaving the highlands largely untouched.
That has changed with deforestation, quarrying, construction, and denudation of hillsides.
There were the floods of 2018, which affected the hills, especially in Munnar. A full mountainside fell 300 meters into a river there. Entire settlements were washed away. A total of 2,346mm of rain or 923 inches was recorded in July and August, almost 50% higher than the norm. 483 people were killed, with many more missing and unaccounted for. Infrastructure was wiped out, including roads and clean water supply. Dams had to be opened, wreaking havoc on those downstream.
There is also the perennial threat of Mullaperiyar Dam overflowing or being breached, which is, among other things, a source of friction between Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
Other root causes include the following:
* Climate Change: A study by the World Weather Attribution group indicated that climate change has intensified rainfall in the region by about 10%, contributing significantly to the severity of the disaster. The ongoing increase in global temperatures has led to more extreme weather patterns, including heavier monsoon rains.
* Soil Characteristics: Wayanad's soils are loose and erodible, particularly in areas with steep gradients exceeding 20 degrees. When saturated, these soils lose their structural integrity, making them susceptible to landslides. The presence of large boulders and mud further complicates the stability of the slopes during heavy rains.
* Soil piping: Previous landslides in the region, such as the 2019 Puthumala event, created conditions for soil piping, where voids form in the subsurface soil, increasing the risk of subsequent landslides during heavy rainfall.
* Lack of Effective Land Management Policies: There is a notable absence of comprehensive land use and disaster management policies in Kerala, particularly in ecologically fragile areas. Despite previous disasters, there has been insufficient progress in implementing hazard mapping and community awareness programs to mitigate risks associated with landslides.
Thus Kerala is vulnerable to a host of issues, especially climate change (which is also eating away at the coastline). Behind the tropical paradise facade of “God’s Own Country”, there lie tremendous dangers related to excessive human exploitation, amounting to ecocide. What is the solution?
Maybe Madhav Gadgil was right, after all, and strict controls should be imposed on human activity, especially denudation of forest, and quarrying. His report had included Vythiri, Mananthavady and Sulthanbathery taluks in Wayanad as Ecologically Sensitive Zone ESZ-1, which means no change whatsoever in land use is permissible there. Chooralmala, Mundakkai, and Meppadi, where the worst of the disasters happened, are all in Vythiri taluk.
No effective disaster prevention or mitigation efforts have been put in place. The only solution is reforesting and restoring green cover, and stopping construction, quarrying, and tourism and the most contentious issue, relocating people away from the ESZ. Unfortunately the tropical rainforest may not restore itself if simply left alone (as temperate-zone forests do), and perhaps efforts such as Miyawaki foresting with native species may need to be pursued.
It is to be hoped that we have not passed the point of no return. Kerala’s population is shrinking (Total Fertility Rate is 1.80, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman), but there is no limit to human greed.
What needs to be done
There are no magic solutions, but comprehensive climate action and improved disaster management strategies can mitigate things to an extent. Experts emphasize the importance of:
* Enhanced Communication and Coordination: There is a critical need for better intergovernmental communication regarding disaster preparedness. This includes timely warnings and efficient evacuation plans to mitigate the impact of natural disasters.
* Land Use Policies: Implementing stringent land use regulations is essential to prevent construction in ecologically sensitive areas. The degradation of green cover due to unregulated development has significantly increased the risk of landslides.
* Early Warning Systems: Developing robust early warning systems for landslides and floods can provide crucial alerts to communities at risk. These systems should be supported by regular community education and drills to ensure residents are prepared for emergencies.
* Afforestation and Environmental Conservation: Massive afforestation and reforestation drives (especially with native species) are necessary to stabilize hillsides and reduce landslide risks. Protecting and restoring natural habitats can help mitigate the effects of climate change and enhance biodiversity. Collaborating with local communities for reforestation projects can also provide economic incentives and foster a sense of stewardship.
* Community Engagement: Empowering local communities to participate in disaster preparedness and environmental conservation efforts is vital. Education on risks and proactive measures can significantly reduce the impact of disasters.
* Tourism Management: Over-tourism can exacerbate environmental degradation. Developing a sustainable tourism strategy that limits visitor numbers, promotes eco-friendly practices, and educates tourists about environmental conservation is essential. Establishing eco-tourism zones and supporting community-based tourism initiatives can provide economic benefits while preserving the natural environment.
* Regulation of Quarrying and Construction: Strict regulation and monitoring of quarrying and construction activities are necessary to prevent ecological damage. Implementing sustainable practices in these industries, such as controlled quarrying methods and responsible waste management, can mitigate their impact on the environment. Regular audits and penalties for non-compliance can enforce these regulations.
* Surveillance and meteorological data collection: With modern technology like drones, continuous monitoring of the landscape is possible at a relatively low cost; and this can also be used for collecting large amounts of meteorological data to support early-warning systems. Satellite images from India’s own as well as foreign sources can be used to warn of dangerous construction, quarrying, and loss of forest cover.
Some of these are purely technical solutions, offering computerized forecasts and disaster warnings. The social and governance aspects are even more important: discipline, co-operation and awareness on the part of the residents, and the strict enforcement of land use rules and regulations.
Dealing with powerful settlers, encroachers, and vested interests requires a delicate balance of enforcement and negotiation, carrot and stick. Government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and local communities must collaborate to develop and implement policies that address these challenges. Advocacy for stronger environmental laws and community involvement in decision-making processes can help align interests and foster co-operation.
With all these in place, it may be possible to repair the damaged hills of the Western Ghats, one of the global hotspots of biodiversity.
2200 words, Aug 17, 2024 updated 3000 words, Aug 19
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A version of this essay was published by news18.com at https://www.news18.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-beyond-lenient-laws-what-will-it-take-to-protect-indias-women-9023844.html
After this fortnight, it is not hard to see why some are demanding speedy punishment, including automatic death sentences for severe crimes against women. To put it bluntly, the Indian State is letting rapists and murderers get away with their crimes against both grown women, and especially tragically, against little girls. This is a blot on humanity. There needs to be recourse. There has to be a severe deterrent, and men should quake in fear at the prospect of instant, fearsome retribution.
The cry of anguish began with the extraordinarily brutal rape (suspected gang-rape) and murder of a 31-year-old doctor (revealed by her mother as Moumita Debnath) in the R G Kar Medical College Hospital in Kolkata on August 9th. As information trickled out, it became clear that she had also been severely tortured before being smothered to death. It is rumored that she had stood up to some important people and this may have been “punishment”.
The immediate parallel was with the gruesome rape-murder of Girja Tikkoo in 1990 in Jammu and Kashmir, where she was gang-raped and then sliced alive in two, screaming in mortal pain, on a mechanical saw.
There was also, in a hospital setting, the extraordinary case of Aruna Shanbaug, a 25-year-old nurse who was choked with a dog chain and raped by a janitor in a Mumbai hospital in 1973. She was brain-damaged and in a coma for 42 years, cared for by the nurses in the hospital until she died in 2015. Assaults on women staff in hospitals is especially ironic considering a recent finding that patients treated by female doctors have better outcomes possibly because of empathy.
Then there was the 2011 case of Sowmya, a 23-year-old shop assistant traveling in an empty women-only coach in a train in Kerala. She was chased around the coach by a one-armed vagrant named Charlie Thomas alias Govindachami, who repeatedly bashed her head against the walls. He then pushed her off the train, raped her and beat her head in with a stone. The lower courts sentenced Charlie to death, but the Supreme Court commuted it to life imprisonment.
Not about sexual crime, but about power over women
This is not about a sexual crime, it is about something more vile and reptilian. It is about sadistically inflicting pain and humiliation, dominating women, exerting power over them. It is extreme misogyny, and is motivated by pure hatred, possibly intent on sending a message. It is also about “putting women in their place”, so that uppity females are “taught a lesson”.
The rape-murder of “Nirbhaya”, later revealed by her mother as 22-year old paramedical student Jyoti Singh, in 2012 in Delhi, was similarly traumatic. Four of her assailants were executed after seven years, and one killed himself in jail, but the worst offender, who instigated the ramming of an iron rod into her genitals, was let go in 2015 on the flimsy reason that he was allegedly a juvenile. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal presented a sewing machine to the offender upon his release.
There was also the 2016 case of Jisha, a 30-year-old law student in Kerala who was subjected to extreme violence, including disembowelment in her rape-murder. A migrant laborer was charged with the crime, and sentenced to death, which was upheld in May 2024 by the Kerala High Court. However, it is rumored that Jisha was the illegitimate daughter of a local bigwig, and that she was “punished” for demanding a share in his property.
In Kerala again, there were the Walayar sisters, a 13 year old and a 9 year old, who were found hanging, two months apart, in 2017. The initial conclusion was ‘suicide’, but after an uproar when postmortems confirmed sexual assault, the case was reopened. Several politically connected people were involved, whom the POCSO court acquitted. But the Kerala High Court ordered a retrial of the five accused, including a juvenile, and the case is with the CBI as of now.
Every sinner has a future, maybe, but he denied his dead victim her future
There was the startling “every sinner has a future” Supreme Court verdict of 2022 that commuted the death sentence of a rapist-murderer of a four-year-old child into imprisonment for 20 years. The court also held that this was not a “rarest of the rare” case.
Using this “every sinner has a future” precedent, the Orissa High Court in May 2024 also commuted the sentence of a rapist-murderer of a six-year-old child. He had been on death row, but they commuted it to “life imprisonment”. In India, “life imprisonment” usually means the convict will walk after 14 years, so that is the total sentence the murderer will serve in practice.
On August 20th came another shocker. After 32 years, a POCSO court has convicted six men in Ajmer of raping/molesting, photographing and blackmailing over a hundred minor girls. It took 32 years for what should have been an open-and-shut case. The assailants are said to have political connections with a particular party.
Also on August 20th, the Justice Hema Commission published its report on the plight of women in the Malayalam film industry. It alleges that sexual exploitation including the ‘casting couch’ is rife, discrimination such as the lack of even basic amenities like toilets on sets is common, and that a ‘criminal gang’ of senior actors, producers, and directors perpetuates a cycle of abuse.
Soft on crimes against women and girls
All this signals that the Indian State, especially the Judiciary, is soft on horrific crimes against women and girls. This cannot continue in a civilized nation. One possible outcome is that the Executive and the Judiciary will take cognizance of these lapses, and provide severe deterrence, which can only come with fast-tracking of these cases, and enforcing capital punishment, instead of vague homilies quoting Oscar Wilde.
Another possibility is vigilante justice. There was the 1974 film Death Wish about an unassuming architect in New York who takes the law into his own hands after his wife is murdered and his daughter raped by violent criminals. He stalks muggers and criminals. Ordinary citizens may be tempted to do the same in India.
The third thing is to drum it into males from a young age, especially in school, that they have to respect women as human beings, not see them as sexual prey. Repeated insistence on that message will get through to them.
Furthermore, there is every reason to try juveniles committing heinous crimes (such as rape and murder) as adults. The existing Juvenile Justice Act is sufficient for this; it may well be that prosecutors are not using the law to its full extent. Prosecutorial incompetence was alleged in the Sowmya case as well, along with the involvement of shadowy benefactors for the murderer.
Copycat crimes, in particular against babies and toddlers, are becoming more frequent. In November 2023, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl was raped by a 17-year-old boy in Buldhana, Maharashtra. In August 2024, a Class 9 student was detained for allegedly raping a three-year-old girl in Mumbai.
This sort of thing simply cannot continue. It is not the case that India is particularly prone to sexual crimes against women: the number of reported rapes is not high compared to other countries, but for a nation that calls itself the Motherland and worships many female deities, the cavalier treatment of crimes against women is a disgrace, and must be stopped.
1100 words, 20th August 2024, updated 21st August
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com on April 8th at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-generative-ai-creates-challenges-in-intellectual-property-and-epistemology-13757273.html
It is fairly obvious that the dominant, i.e. Western mechanism for generating new knowledge is rather different from the traditional Indian mechanism, and this shows up in all sorts of ways. One is that Indian epistemology seems to be empirical and practical, based on observation; whereas the Western tradition seems to prefer grand theories that must then be proved by observation.
Another difference is the Western idea that Intellectual Property is a private right that the State confers on an inventor or a creator. The Western gaze is fixed on the potential monetary gains from a monopoly over the use of the IP Right (for a fixed period of time, after which it is in the public domain): the argument is that it eventually helps everybody, while incentivizing the clever.
The Indian concept is vastly different. It was assumed that a creator created, or an inventor invented, as a result of their innate nature, their god-given gifts. In a way they could not avoid being creative or inventive, which would be a negation of the blessing they had received from the Supreme Brahman. Therefore no further incentive was needed: benevolent patrons like kings or temples would take care of their basic needs, allowing them to give free rein to creativity and innovation.
This seems to us today to be a radical idea, because we have been conditioned by the contemporary epistemological idea that incentives are a necessary condition for knowledge creation. Although this seems common-sensical, there is no real evidence that this is true. Petra Moser, then at MIT, discovered via comparing 19th century European countries that the presence of an IPR culture with incentives made little difference in the quantum of innovation, although it seemed to change the domains that were the most innovative..
In fact, there is at least one counter-example: that of Open Source in computing. It boggles the imagination that veritable armies of software developers would work for free, nights and weekends, in addition to their full-time jobs, and develop computing systems like Linux that are better than the corporate versions out there: the whole “Cathedral and Bazaar” story as articulated by Eric Raymond. Briefly, he argues that the chaotic ‘bazaar’ of open source is inherently superior to the regimented but soul-less ‘cathedral’ of the big tech firms.
It is entirely possible that the old Indian epistemological model is efficient, but the prevailing model of WIPO, national Patent Offices, and all that paraphernalia massively benefits the Western model. As an example, the open-source model was predicted to make a big difference in biology, but that effort seems to have petered out after a promising start. Therefore we are stuck for the foreseeable future with the IP model, which means Indians need to excel at it.
In passing, let us note that the brilliant Jagdish Chandra Bose was a pioneer in the wireless transmission of information, including the fundamental inventions that make cellular telephony possible. However, as a matter of principle, he refused to patent his inventions; Guglielmo Marconi did, and became rich and famous.
India has traditionally been quite poor in the number of patents, trademarks, copyrights, geographical indications, semiconductor design layouts etc. that it produces annually. Meanwhile the number of Chinese patents has skyrocketed. Over the last few years, the number of Indian patents has grown as the result of focused efforts by the authorities, as well as the realization by inventors that IP rights can help startup firms dominate niche markets.
India also produces a lot of creative works, including books, films, music and so on. The enforcement of copyright laws has been relatively poor, and writers and artistes often do not get fair compensation for their work. This is deplorable.
Unfortunately, things will get a lot worse with generative AI. Most of us have heard of, and probably also tried out, the chatbots that have been the object of much attention and hype in the past year, such as chatGPT from OpenAI/Microsoft and Bard from Google. Whether these are truly useful is a good question, because they seduce us into thinking they are conscious, despite the fact that they are merely ‘stochastic parrots’. But I digress.
The point is that the digital revolution has thrown the edifice of copyright law into disarray. At the forefront of this upheaval stands generative AI, a technology with the uncanny ability to mimic and extend human creative output. Consider two stark examples: the contentious case of J.K. Rowling and her copyright battle with a Harry Potter-inspired fanfic, and the recent Japanese law that grants broad exemptions for training large language models (LLMs).
J.K. Rowling's spat with Anna M. Bricken, the author of a Harry Potter fanfic titled "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Wine," ignited a global debate about fair use and transformative creativity. Bricken's work reimagined the Potterverse with an adult lens, but Rowling, citing trademark infringement, sought to have it taken down.
While the case eventually settled, it exposed a fundamental dilemma: can AI-generated works, even if derivative, be considered distinct enough from their source material to warrant copyright protection? The answer, shrouded in legal ambiguity, leaves creators navigating a tightrope walk between inspiration and infringement.
On the other side of the globe, Japan enacted a law in 2022 that further muddies the waters. This controversial regulation grants LLMs and other AI systems an almost carte blanche to ingest and remix copyrighted material for training purposes without seeking permission or paying royalties. While proponents laud it as a catalyst for AI innovation, critics warn of widespread copyright infringement and a potential future where authorship becomes a nebulous concept. The Japanese law, echoing anxieties around J.K. Rowling's case, raises unsettling questions: who owns the creative spark when AI fuels the fire?
For India, a nation at the precipice of the AI revolution, these developments raise crucial questions. With a burgeoning AI industry and a large creative sector, India must tread carefully. Adapting existing copyright laws to encompass the nuances of AI-generated works is paramount. Robust fair use guidelines that incentivize transformative creativity while safeguarding original authorship are urgently needed. Furthermore, fostering ethical AI development practices that respect intellectual property rights is crucial.
The debate surrounding AI and copyright is not merely a legal tussle; it's a battle for the very definition of creativity. In this fight, India has the opportunity to carve a path that balances innovation with artistic integrity. By acknowledging the complexities of AI while upholding the cornerstone principles of copyright, India can become a global leader in navigating the uncharted territory of digital authorship. The future of creativity, fueled by both human imagination and AI's boundless potential, hangs in the balance, and India has the chance to shape its trajectory.
Disclaimer: The last few paragraphs above were written by Google Bard, and lightly edited. A chatbot can produce coherent text, but it may be, and often is, completely wrong (‘hallucinations’). Now who owns the copyright to this text? Traditionally, it would be owned by me and Firstpost, but what is the right answer now? Would we be responsible for any errors introduced by the AI?
On the other hand, the ‘mining’ of text, audio/video and images to train generative AI is an increasingly contentious issue. As an example, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing that they weren’t being paid anywhere near the fair market value of their text that the tech companies mined.
This sounds familiar to Indians, because Westerners have been ‘digesting’ Indian ideas for a long time. Some of the most egregious examples were patents on basmati, turmeric and neem, which are absurd considering that these have been in use in India for millennia. The fact that these were documented in texts (‘prior art’) enabled successful challenges against them.
An even more alarming fact is the capture and ‘digestion’ (a highly evocative term from Rajiv Malhotra, who has warned of the dangers of AI for years) of Indian personal and medical data. Unlike China, which carefully firewalls away its data from Western Big Tech, and indeed, does not even allow them to function in their country, Indian personal data is being freely mined by US Big Tech. India’s Data Privacy laws, being debated now, need to be considered defensive weapons.
Paradoxically, there is also the concern that Indic knowledge will, for all intents and purposes, disappear from the domain of discourse. Since the chatbots are trained on the uncurated Internet, they are infected by the Anglosphere prejudices and bigotry therein, not to mention deliberate misinformation and ‘toolkits’ that are propagated.
Since most Indic concepts are either not very visible, or denigrated, on the Internet (eg Wikipedia), chatbots are not even aware of them. For instance, a doctor friend and I published an essay in Open magazine comparing allopathy to generative AI, because both are stochastic (ie. based on statistics). We mentioned Ayurveda positively several times, because it has a theory of disease that makes it more likely to work with causation rather than correlation.
However, when the article summarized by chatGPT, there was no mention whatsoever of the word ‘Ayurveda’. It is as though such a concept does not exist, which may in fact be true in the sense that it is deprecated in the training data that the chatbot was trained on.
One solution is to create Indian foundational models that can then become competent in specific domains of interest: for example an Arthashastra chatbot. These can also be trained, if sufficient data sets are created, on Indian languages as well, which could incidentally support real-time machine translation as well. Thus there can be an offensive as well as a defensive strategy to enable Indic knowledge systems to thrive.
India is at a point of crisis, but also of opportunity. If India were to harness some of the leading-edge technologies of today, it might once again become a global leader in knowledge generation, as it was a millennium ago with its great universities.
1680 words, Jan 10, 2024 updated Apr 7, 2024
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe -
A version of this essay was published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rajeev-srinivasan-hamas-war-is-an-immediate-setback-to-india/20231017.htm
It can be argued on several grounds that the 2023 Israel-Hamas war is a point of inflection indicating the general eclipse of the West, and in fact I have done so in an essay. What is unclear is how the end of this era will play out in the medium term and the long term.
The best analogy I can think of is the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian nationalist in 1914 or so, and how that set in motion a chain of events that, among other things, ended the European and Ottoman empires over the next forty or fifty years, and more immediately caused the so-called Great War, now re-framed as World War I.
Chaos theory at work: as the saying goes, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil setting off a tornado in Texas.
There is the obvious concern that the Israel-Hamas war could set off World War III, especially given that there are many nuclear weapons in the possession of the belligerents and their friends. Iran has recovered from the debacle of the Stuxnet computer worm that caused their Uranium-enrichment centrifuges to blow up (in what was then lauded as an unacknowledged triumph of American and Israeli cloak-and-dagger and technical know-how).
Then there is Pakistan and its rapidly growing arsenal, no doubt helped along by screwdriver assembly of Chinese components, and perhaps knocked-down kits. Pakistan is one of the most vocal supporters of Palestine as an Ummah cause, which is ironic considering that Pakistani soldiers (and maybe irregulars) seconded to Jordan in 1970 during the Black September uprising may have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Palestinians.
The specter of an encompassing World War III is sobering, and just as the crumbling League of Nations was unable to fend off earlier editions of world wars, the toothless United Nations is now unlikely to be able to prevent a new one. It hasn't been able to prevent all the smaller conflicts, such as the Ukraine war, and it is obvious that major powers simply don't care about the UN's exertions and bloviations. Therefore, one of the biggest fears is that the Hamas attack might seed a larger conflagration.
Of immediate concern, though, is that a nascent process of normalization in West Asia may now grind to a halt. This can have global consequences. It is likely that the earlier edition of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, led directly to the Arab oil embargo followed by the shock of their quadruplication of oil prices. This caused inflation in the US, but more seriously, it precipitated a massive transfer of wealth from developing countries, which set them back by decades, compounding human misery.
There are thus unforeseen consequences to what happens in West Asia, which, barring some miracle, will continue to dominate energy supplies for the next couple of decades, even if the most optimistic Green initiatives come to fruition. Things are obviously different from 1973, with West Asians (especially Saudi Arabia) much more self-confident, immensely richer, and also cognizant of the fact that their oil/gas bonanzas will run out sooner or later. They need to diversify their economies, and possibly make some new friends, other than those who are dazzled by their petro-dollars.
It is this realization that led to the landmark Abraham Accords, whereby several Arab nations normalized their relations with Israel. The general expectation has been that Saudi Arabia would follow suit, and Mohammed bin Salman has been signaling that he is willing to do this (but also, in his own national interest, willing to embrace China and the proposed BRICS+ currency, both of which would be setbacks for the US and the collective West). The biggest geopolitical casualty of the Hamas war is that this normalization will be put on hold.
Saudi Arabia simply cannot appear to be mindless of the plight of the largely Muslim Palestinians, even if they are nervous about the decidedly fundamentalist Hamas, who, in an interesting twist, may well be aligning themselves with Shia Iran, the principal regional foe of the Sunni Saudis. However, what is also worth noting is that the Saudis, as well as Egyptians and other Arabs, are all reluctant to resettle Palestinians in their largely empty, and rich, countries.
There might be two reasons for this: one, perhaps it is still the ambition of the Arab States to eliminate Israel and wipe it off the map altogether (which is what they, and Iran, proclaimed loudly in the past, although it is not clear this is actually feasible any more). If so, maintaining Palestinians as an aggrieved quasi-nation, which would supply an endless stream of militants to the Hamases and Hezbollahs of the region, is a viable, if brutal, strategy.
Two, Arab States may not actually want Palestinians as refugees because they might cause all sorts of domestic problems. This always puzzled me, because on average the Palestinians of 1948 were much better educated than most other Arabs, and could have contributed to other Arab nations. My conjecture is that, given the examples of Pakistani migrants in Britain, the Black September Palestinians in Jordan, and more recent Syrian etc refugees in Europe – easily radicalized and prone to blood-curdling rhetoric and possibly action against their host nations – Arab States want to keep them out.
This could be the real reason Egypt refuses to open the border for the fleeing residents of Gaza..
It is a bit like the Rohingya of Myanmar. They have a reputation for being troublesome radical Islamists, and so nobody wants to take them in: not Bangladesh where they originally hail from, not any Arab States, not Pakistan (although some Westerners suggested that India and China should take them. China laughed in their faces, but India dutifully did so).
Given all this, and the growing clout of Israel under the American security umbrella, chances are that the Palestinian cause would have become increasingly less relevant to Saudis and other Arabs. And that is precisely what might have motivated Hamas and friends: with the emergent normalization of ties with Israel in the region, and initiatives like i2u2 (Israel, India, US, UAE) and IMEC (India Middle East Europe Corridor), there would be commercial and trade ties that would bind.
After all, a major part of these trade corridors would be the infrastructure links (railway lines through Saudi Arabia, the Israeli port of Haifa) that would offer alternative trade routes to Europe from India and Southeast Asia. This would offend China too, because its grand Belt and Road Initiative and trans-European railway links would see less business. Thus, in passing, China also is a winner in this Great Game as West Asia goes on the boil, along with usual suspects Iran, Qatar and Turkey.
Thus, from several points of view, this Hamas war is an immediate setback to India: it is one of the few countries in the region that enjoys good relations with both Israel and Saudi Arabia, and IMEC would allow it to recreate the old Spice Route to Europe, which was highly lucrative over millennia. All this is in jeopardy now. The strategic and under-construction Vizhinjam container transhipment port in Thiruvananthapuram is a key part of this ambitious trade route.
India also has interests in Iran: the Chabahar port could enable India to create an alternative route to Central Asia and Russia called the INSTC (International North South Transport Corridor) bypassing trouble-prone Pakistan and Afghanistan (although that long-pending logistics link is years behind schedule). India cannot allow its relations with Iran to be affected by the war in Gaza.
More broadly, if world trade collapses and/or a war begins now it would be unfortunate timing for India. This is the very moment India is ready to finally leave behind the bitter legacy of colonialism, which looted enormous wealth from India (I have argued it was $10 trillion, but economist Utsa Patnaik puts the figure at $45 trillion). A collapse in the procedures of the ‘liberal, rules-based international order’, however biased it is in favor of the West, is unfortunate for India in the medium term, although it would probably be fine in the longer term.
There are two other aspects of the response to Gaza that are notable. The first is the rise of ugly anti-Jewish sentiments in many parts of the West. This is of concern to Indians, specifically Hindus, because Hindu-hatred is anti-semitism 2.0 and Hindus cannot wish it away.
On the other hand, the Left was startled by the dramatic reaction from American Jews to standard Left positioning of moral equivalence between Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces. For instance, several Harvard student groups released statements about their support for Palestine and/or Hamas, which probably was seeded by Pakistani and, alas, woke Indian-origin students in their ranks.
Retribution was swift: Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager, in effect asked fellow CEOs to blacklist these students. There was furious backpedaling as many students, worried about their job prospects, protested that the statements were made without consulting them.
This is positive. The Woke Left in the US is splintering. That may mean the Democratic Party tactic of uber-wokeism may now backfire on them, especially notable as elections are looming in the US. The less the wokeism around, the better for India (see Justin Trudeau’s Khalistan antics).
The weakening of Western power and resolve vis a vis China is another problem for India. The West simply cannot supply munitions for multiple wars (Ukraine, Gaza, and possibly Taiwan), partly because the US has been deindustrialized. What we might see in the medium term is the deprecation of US power in the Indo-Pacific, and indeed a fallback to isolationism and Fortress America. This would encourage a China that is just waiting to rampage.
The current Israel-Hamas war is a net negative for India; the issue of Western Hindu-hatred is a topic for another day.
1650 words, 16 October 2023
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-does-the-war-in-israel-mark-the-end-of-pax-occidentalis-13235762.html
The attack by Hamas on Israel may well be remembered in future as marking the very moment the decline of the West became an indubitable fact. Thus October 7th, 2023 may be a point of inflection in geo-politics and geo-economics, although it is true that the economic center of gravity of the world has been moving eastwards (and southwards in future) for some time.
The question really goes to the heart of the so-called ‘liberal rules-based international order’, which is a nice euphemism for ‘America and friends lay out the rules’. To give credit where it is due, this was a pretty good paradigm for the post-World-War-II period, and it helped much of Europe and East Asia advance economically, although it didn’t help India, Africa or Latin America much (and that was partly due to poorly thought-out self-imposed policies as well).
But like all empires and quasi-empires, this one has also deteriorated over time, partly as it was based on the presupposition of overwhelming American dominance. The US was supposed to be the global policeman who could arbitrate if necessary, and offer a bracing dose of punishment if someone erred. But that is no longer the case, as the US is bogged down in arguably futile wars.
The rot goes much deeper, and affects every institution that has been built up by the ‘liberal, rules-based international order’. All of us thought the UN and in particular the Security Council would be champions at preserving world order, unlike the hapless League of Nations. But it has proven singularly ineffective, and the media didn’t even quote the Secretary General or the Security Council making a pro forma plea for peace in Israel on October 7th.
The World Health Organization was another entity that lost much of its credibility in the wake of its hapless performance during the coronavirus pandemic. UNESCO has long since become a woke fortress, shorn of its earlier importance. The World Bank and IMF are so often handmaidens of Western agendas and dogmas (see “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”) that nobody mourns their eclipse as new lending institutions arise.
The Nobel Prizes, we were brought up to believe, were the ultimate in impartial recognition of excellence. Perhaps in the sciences they still have some value, but the moment the Peace Prize was given to Henry Kissinger (and Le Duc Tho who had the grace to reject it), it became evident that it was political. Of course, never giving the Literature Prize to Leo Tolstoy had damaged it way back (Sully Prudhomme got it instead. Sully, a household name!).
The less said about the Economics Prize the better. Just look at the Indian-origin winners or the New York Times columnist. I think I can rest my case.
In passing, there is this reputation that the Scandinavians have for fair play, partly because of the Nobels, and partly, I imagine, because they are blond, blue-eyed Vikings. But increasingly I have noticed that their antics on the environment (“How dare you!”), on politics (“we can judge the quality of your democracy via V-dem index”), on psychology (“happiness index”) and various others things suggest that some gaslighting is going on. But that’s just by the way.
The other institutions that we have always depended on are the media. It was practically a given for most of us that the BBC was objective and trustworthy, the VoA a little less so, and Pravda was full of propaganda. The NYT was the gold standard, the Economist and the FT were, if not paragons, worthy of respectful attention, despite charges of ‘manufacturing consent’.
And the Lancet was impeccable, the very fountainhead of medical wisdom. During covid, it was stunning to find them endorsing research by an entity called Surgisphere, which, I wrote at the time in “Pious Frauds” (Open Magazine, June 2020), was a naked scam with the intention of deprecating a cheap off-patent medicine called hydroxychloroquine or HCQ. Let us compare prices: Rs. 6.25 for HCQ, Rs. 30,000 for Remdesivir. That must mean something.
Over the last year or so, revelation after revelation has exposed the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex’ as a handmaiden of governments; particularly shocking has been the suggestion that the Biden administration has been hand-in-hand with Big Tech in defenestrating anybody whom the Thought Police did not like, eg those who opposed vaccine mandates.
To be blunt, you cannot take Facebook/Meta, Google, YouTube, Apple, Amazon, Wikipedia, or any other Big Tech outlet at face value; parenthetically, and for different reasons, you cannot take anything spewed by chatbots like chatGPT or Google Bard seriously either. Twitter/X, after Elon Musk’s takeover, seems to be the least compromised news outlet available.
But the real kicker comes with Mossad and Five Eyes, and Israel’s total unpreparedness for the Hamas offensive. Mossad is legendary for its almost superhuman acts to protect Israeli lives and property, and is the world’s most admired intelligence agency. On top of this, there is the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing mechanism among the Anglosphere. In the recent past, we have heard a lot about this in the context of Justin Trudeau and Khalistanis.
The impression that I, for one, had was that these people were masters at intelligence gathering, with sophisticated technical means including satellite reconnaissance that could spot any substantial logistics on the ground. It would have taken a lot of organization to gather 5,000 rockets and dozens of pickup trucks and hundreds of fighters, but none of this registered on their signals intelligence or human intelligence?
That is hard to believe. Except for the likelihood that Mossad and the Israeli armed forces have been distracted by the internal squabbles between Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli Supreme Court. The usually apolitical security services took sides in what is partly a divide between white Ashkenazi and brown/black Mizrahi, with religious orthodoxy thrown in. (It is a stark reminder to Indians, especially the INDI alliance, that a house divided will fall.)
Yes, it is hard to believe the combined might of the Anglosphere did not anticipate the Hamas invasion catastrophe. Maybe they did not want to prevent it? That would be criminal, considering the sufferings of Israeli civilians, as well as what’s to come for Palestinian civilians when Israel, as it always does, hits back hard in Gaza.
A Jewish writer in Tablet Magazine, Liel Leibowitz, accused the Israeli ruling class of “cosplaying some game of Demokratia, complete with donning handmaid outfits and ululating about fascism”, and of entertaining “the fantasy that the United States was and always would be their protector—when in fact the ruling party in America has decided that Israel is a liability”. The same magazine, in March, accused the US Deep State of instigating Israel’s internal squabbles.
That is harsh, but in a nutshell it suggests that America in particular, and the West in general, is no longer able to, or willing to, run the ‘rules-based liberal international order’. Thus, the end of Pax Americana or Pax Occidentalis may be here. This does not make the world a nicer or easier place: Pax Sinica, for instance, could be brutal (ask the Tibetans). But it suggests that a Pax Indica in the Indian Ocean Rim is a worthwhile goal for India.
1200 words, 10 Oct 2023
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-g20-and-its-fallout-india-the-swing-state-imec-and-trudeaus-tantrums-13162212.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
A fortnight after the end of the G20 Summit in New Delhi, it’s worth revisiting what really materialized, and what India can expect out of all the hard work that went into it.
First, the positives. The flawless execution of the Summit is something the Indian leadership and officials deserve to be congratulated on. There were all sorts of things that could have gone wrong – including security worries – but the whole thing was done with clockwork precision. In a way, this is unsurprising: Indians revel in complexity, and surely running this event, despite the VVIP foreigners, was easier than pulling off the Kumbha Mela.
Many pundits had written off the Summit, citing the absence of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, and predicting that it would be next to impossible for there to be a consensus based on which a common declaration could be accepted by all. In the event, the 83-paragraph Leaders’ Declaration, wide-ranging and comprehensive, was seen as a diplomatic triumph, with everybody giving in a little on their positions in the interest of the G20 community.
The fact that NATO members had to swallow a watered-down condemnation of the Ukraine war, without actually naming Russia, has been framed as a ‘climbdown by the West for the sake of G20 unity’ by the Financial Times. That’s pretty good spin, but it was remarkable that they didn’t seem to be bothered by such ‘G20 unity’ at the Bali Summit, 2022.
There are more plausible reasons for this ‘climbdown’. One is that the Ukraine war is not going according to plan, which anticipated Russia being beaten by now, both militarily and financially. On the contrary, the EU continues to be Russia’s biggest customer, by far. So the sanctions have failed, and the EU is probably fed up with energy shortages. Plus, the Ukrainians don’t seem to be making much progress with the much-hyped ‘counteroffensive’. NATO could well be on the point of throwing Zelenskyy under the bus any day now.
The West appears to be backpedaling furiously, and they have made such miscalculations before: 1971, Bangladesh; 1975, Vietnam, and so on. Ironically, POTUS Biden went to Vietnam after the G20 Summit, and announced billions of dollars worth of deals in semiconductors and AI, among other things. What a U-turn from the 1970s! Kissinger would be turning over in his grave, except he’s still alive.
A more optimistic reading of the G20 outcome could well be that India has finally become a swing state. While it is precarious being a swing state, it also has benefits: you get courted by both sides, and you can play them off against each other. India’s persistent and aggressive fence-sitting, combined with its robust economic performance, is now making others pay a little more attention to India’s needs. But it also invites hostility.
There was evidence of this new reality, in a back-handed sort of way, in Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s hissy-fit against India accusing it of a hit-job on a Khalistani terrorist. Trudeau has his own reasons (hurt amour-propre, perhaps), but the Washington Post reported that nobody else in the Anglosphere agreed to support him, with Biden going to great lengths “to avoid antagonizing India and court the Asian power as a strategic counterweight to China”. Even the usually hostile BBC said, “On the grand geopolitical chess board, India is now a key player”. Deep State is not amused. Nor are the rest of the Five Eyes.
India’s transition from ‘non-aligned’ to ‘multi-aligned’ has come at the right time. I do hope India does not get swayed by its own rhetoric of being the ‘champion of the Global South’ and go back to the Nehru-era ‘king of the banana republics’ self-image. Pretending to be the leader of the Third World, and all the NAM exertions got India nothing at all. In 1961, the entire Third World voted 90-1 against India’s decolonization of Goa, which was startling.
However, things are a little different now that India is looking out for its own interests first and foremost. In that context, the formal induction of the African Union into the G20 is a win for India, especially in light of the stacking of BRICS+ with friends of China.
Looking at it from India’s point of view, the African Union means especially East Africa, which is part of the Indian Ocean Rim, India’s backyard. Africa will be the fastest-growing area, in population and GDP, over the next few decades, and the giant continent’s people face problems quite similar to those Indians face. East Africa has millennia-old trade links with India. For instance, a 1500 year old Malabar-built uru, a wooden ship made of teak, was found buried, well preserved in the sands near Alexandria, Egypt, indicating ancient commerce.
It is in the context that the new Spice Route, or the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), is also a good initiative. For one, it is fairly direct competition to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has been dogged by accusations that it is ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ that ends up with valuable assets extorted from others, as in Hambantota port in Sri Lanka, now forced into a 99-year lease agreement as the debt payments became onerous.
Having said that, and despite the fact that a growing India will have more trade with Europe as in the millennia past, it is not entirely clear that the IMEC will take off. On the one hand, there is the history of prized Indian goods like spices, gold, gems, etc. The Roman Pliny the Younger complained that their treasury was being emptied because of the demand for spices and in satisfying “the vanity of [our] women” with cosmetics etc. from India.
India of the future may not become, or may not be allowed to become, a workshop of the world at the scale of China. After all, China will not go off into that good night without raging, raging. An article by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times pointed out that ‘peak China’ may be some time off. I usually disagree with the man, but here I agree: China’s obituaries are a bit premature. It will also double down on a new and improved BRI.
Going back to IMEC, there are also practical difficulties even if the political will and funding can be arranged: the port of Haifa, Israel, which would be a logical choice for it, has a major terminal where China is the concessionaire, and so does the Greek Port of Piraeus. Interestingly enough, Adani Ports has control over the older terminal at Haifa, and is reported to be seeking a terminal at Piraeus as well. How curious that Soros keeps attacking Adani again and again: perhaps he is acting on China’s behalf as well?
Chances are that IMEC will remain a pipe-dream, but there is more of a chance that the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) that India has excelled in may be appealing to many other nations. According to the World Bank, India only took 6 years to achieve development that would normally take 47 years, because of the efficiency improvements due to digitization. This is something the Global South can use.
There is also a negative from the G20. The upsurge in infiltration and the huge standoff against terrorists in Anantnag, Jammu and Kashmir, may well be a Chinese signal that they can ratchet up mischief any time, and that the G20 success should not go to India’s head. Given that there is a lot of alleged infiltration into and coziness by the Chinese into the Canadian establishment, Trudeau’s tantrums may also be inspired by China: the other shoe dropping.
All in all, India gets a solid A- for its G20 efforts; the outcomes, alas, may only be a B-.
1300 words, 20 Sept 2023
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On the one hand, there is massive propaganda from the west, ably supported by native sepoys, that India is on the verge of some genocide of Muslims.
On the other hand, last month, the Speaker of the Kerala Assembly, a Muslim, said that Lord Ganesh was “a myth”. Instead of censuring him for hurting the sentiments of Hindus, the ruling communists of Kerala supported him.
This month, Udayanidhi Stalin, a minister, who is also the son of the DMK Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu M K Stalin, said Sanatana Dharma is like dengue, and needs to be eradicated. A former Union Minister, A Raja, compared Hinduism to HIV.
Thus there is de facto discrimination and hate speech against Hindus, and Stalin Jr’s call, for all practical purposes, is an invitation to genocide of Hindus.
Several bigwigs in politics, including the DMK’s allies such as the Congress, instead of censuring Stalin Jr for calling for crimes against humanity, have instead supported him.
Then there is de jure discrimination against Hindus as well. The Constitution through Articles 25-30 appears to give protection to non-Hindus (based on some strange idea that Hindus would oppress them), which has been interpreted by the courts as giving extraordinary privileges to non-Hindus in all sorts of ways. The same is true of governments as well: in fact there are Kerala government job postings reserved exclusively for converts to Christianity, not to mention the pilgrimage concessions given to Muslims and Christians, but not to Hindus.
The Supreme Court, on its own accord, forcefully chided Nupur Sharma merely for quoting correctly a verse from an Islamic source, and claimed she was causing fissures in society. But the Supreme Court has not bothered with any suo moto comments on Stalin Jr or A Raja.
This is apartheid, a classic oppression of majority populations to benefit minorities.
Anand Ranganathan’s recent book goes into detail in this, and I am sure it is worth a read. An apartheid state is unsustainable and needs to be reformed.
The fact of the matter is that there are several religions intent on world conquest, Christianity, Islam and their modern-day variants Communism and Wokeism. All of them view Hindus as targets and as sacrificial lambs for their glory.
Unfortunately, this is not even new. Here’s a letter to the editor published in the Hindu newspaper, apparently in the 1940s.
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* It’s illegal. There is a constitutional right to worship. Even more so there is a right to equality to all citizens.
* It’s immoral and criminal. To call for genocide. This is not free speech. This is hate speech
* This is pure propaganda
* Demonizing the enemy has a long history
* Spaniards called aztecs cannibals and vice versa, but white people got to write the history books
* Yellow peril
* Nazis called jews vermin
* Hutus in rwanda called tutsis cockroaches, and then genocide them
* N s rajarams’s comment on how caldwell, naicker etc were attempting the same in tamil nadu
* History of the justice party, dmk etc is shameful: basically arms of conversion, not anti-religion, only anti-hindu
* Anti-hindu memes in the west: california bill, equality labs, audrey truschke, against vivek ramaswamy
* Progressively from hindutva to hinduism to sanatana dharma. escalation
* INDIAlliance has shown itself to be purely anti-hindu
* But questions for BJP too: why are hindu temples still managed by the state? Anand ranganathan maintains that hindus are not even second-class, they are eighth class, with far fewer rights than others.
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A version of this essay was published by news18.com at https://www.news18.com/opinion/opinion-what-a-difference-ten-years-make-india-since-2014-8559632.html
I wrote ten years ago on Rediff.com (‘The great Indian rope trick and other illusions of progress’ https://www.rediff.com/news/column/the-great-indian-rope-trick-and-other-illusions-of-progress/20130716.htm) about how the average Indian is satisfied with illusion, never mind real progress. That made India a Potemkin State, where form is everything and substance is immaterial.
It turns out that I was wrong: Indians do want actual progress. I might be pardoned for saying what I said then because the country was at the fag-end of the Lost Decade, 2004 to 2013, wherein things deteriorated steadily. Decline had been par for the course throughout the Nehruvian-Stalinist decades of dirigisme. Conversely, there has been noticeable change in 2014-2023.
Apart from mis-steps in economic management, the political environment was also dicey. There was the appalling spectacle of a constitutional coup, as I noted at the time (‘Four ways the Congress won power by Constitutional coups’ https://www.rediff.com/news/column/column-rajeev-srinivasan-4-ways-the-congress-won-power-through-constitutional-coups/20140107.htm): by colluding with the Communist Speaker in the cash-for-votes scam, the Congress clung on to power violating democratic norms.
We see the same recklessness today in the US (“Let’s jail the leading opposition candidate”) and in Germany (“One party is getting too popular, let’s ban it”). It does not bode well. The New York Times, on August 21, 2023 ran the striking headline, “Elections Are Bad for Democracy” before changing it to “The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way”. Yes, democracy is too important to leave to the people. Let us elites tell them what to think.
The most striking example of this uncaring State, the very nadir of its contempt for the man in the street, was the length of the chain anchoring the mug in the loo in railway compartments: just three inches too short, thus shattering the illusion that you could actually clean your bottom. A daunting prospect for any traveler, especially because of the overwhelming stink, and a world of difference from Japan’s shinkansen and their amazing high-tech loos.
Recently I traveled in several train compartments, including ancient Jan Shatabdi chair cars and newish Hamsafar sleeper coaches, although, alas, not in Vande Bharat coaches yet; but I was surprised at how much better the toilets were. The ‘bio toilet’ means human feces are not dumped on the tracks; they do not smell terrible, and, wonder of wonders, there is a hygiene hose/bidet that is actually long enough to do the deed.
And, perhaps redundantly, the chain for the mug has been lengthened. And there is water!
It is hard to explain to a non-Indian what a difference all this makes. I had a cousin who denied herself food and drink while traveling by train just so she could avoid the toilet. It is a sea-change when you are granted a little self-respect. I am reminded of the placard held by a man at a Martin Luther King rally: “I am a man”. Yes, the proverbial average Indian aam admi is a human who deserves consideration: not only Lutyens and Khan Market types.
I am sorry to talk about a cringe-making topic like toilets, but this is something earthy and immediately understandable; it makes the point that India is, 76 years after the imperialists left and brown sahebs took over, finally on the march. Indians are beginning to see that they can demand respect from their rulers, and get it. Dignity, that watchword of the butler Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliant The Remains of the Day.
In a penetrating 1997 essay, “India shouldn’t have fantasies about the past, but face it” (https://www.indiatoday.in/india-today-insight/story/from-the-archives-1997-v-s-naipaul-india-shouldn-t-have-fantasies-about-the-past-but-face-it-1988599-2022-08-16) Sir V S Naipaul mentioned that those who have been oppressed and denigrated for centuries are now rising, and this rise will be messy. He was talking about those outside the charmed circle that ruled the country for long. It is also broader: the rise of the Other Backward Communities, that uncharming name for the majority of Indians, the bahujan.
Naipaul also said that the rulers will now of necessity be of the people, not overlords. It can be argued that for over a thousand years, Indians have been effectively ruled by a comprador ‘elite’, middlemen who did the dirty work on behalf of invaders or distant rulers. It is my suspicion that the zamindars and other local strongmen were largely from the upper or middle jatis, and it is only now that those from the bottom of the pyramid are finally getting a say in things.
No, this is not a jati-bashing exercise, and I may be extrapolating from my observations in Kerala, where a middle jati, Nairs, were the kulaks who lorded it over those below them in the hierarchy, such as OBC Ezhavas, SC Pulayas, and ST Mala-arayans. The latter are now rising, though not in full measure, yet. I think it’s similar in Tamil Nadu, too.
In the Soviet Union, Stalin liquidated the kulaks. In India, their eclipse has come about too late, though without violence. The usual woke Lutyens/Khan Market suspects were disappointed they couldn’t chortle about Chandrayaan-3 being yet another expensive failure a poor country could ill afford, echoing Brits upset that their alleged ‘aid’ was going to India (in reality, as per the UK Foreign Office, India politely declined any charity from them starting 2015; any money coming to India from the UK is foreign direct investment (FDI), or strictly in support of their geopolitical objectives, channeled via dubious NGOs or missionaries).
The ‘wokes’ also grumbled about ISRO engineers going to Tirupati and invoking the blessings of the Divine for their project. I am glad they got a munh thod jawab. There really is no dichotomy in Hindu thought between science and faith: science too requires faith and belief.
The ‘wokes’ have reason to be worried, not only by the picture-perfect moon landing, but also by Praggnaanandhaa, who almost unseated the reigning World Champion in chess; Neeraj Chopra, who won the World Athletic Championship in javelin to go with his Olympic gold; the 4x400 relay quartet with their heroics of almost defeating the Americans in the heats while setting an Asian record; and Vivek Ramaswamy, who is unabashedly Hindu and at the same time a patriotic American and a force to contend with in the Republican party in the US.
Even though they haven’t been defenestrated, except perhaps some unfortunate folks at Ashoka University, India’s Left are less and less relevant: relics of a failed ideology. They should count their lucky stars: in Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew liquidated them. And indeed, even in the US, the ‘woke’ capital of the world, their star is setting.
There is another reason I brought up toilets: the unseemly obsession that westerners have with them. I was delighted to see this cartoon on Twitter, and it is obviously a parody of the earlier one in the sadly overrated New York Times, below.
While the racist derision of the original cartoon, and the celebration of the be-jasmined and be-bindi’d women in Indian engineering are the obvious takeaways, I was intrigued by a detail: the white guy in the cartoon is dragging a shopping-cart full of toilet paper behind him! I am not sure why toilet paper is some kind of atavistic guilty pleasure for westerners.
Despite being purely climate-related (they could not afford to melt ice and snow just to wash their bottoms, or for that matter their hands, thus cutlery), toilet paper has become a cultural staple for them. You might remember the hoarding of toilet paper in the early days of covid! It’s time westerners abandoned killing trees, and went for the more healthy bidet-like health faucet. For that matter, the squat in Indian closets is apparently better than the sitting posture on a western ‘thunder-box’. Recently while traveling in the Czech Republic, I stayed in a (fancy) hotel that had a bidet: such a relief! May their tribe increase!
Of course, some things never change. This was demonstrated in two ways: the thinly-veiled envy from the British that manifested itself in their assertion that an India full of open defecation shouldn’t be spending on space research, and The Economist magazine in their recent obituary of Bindeswar Pathak repeatedly emphasizing caste discrimination and manual scavenging. These are vestiges of the past, and mostly due to the $10 trillion (or $45 trillion depending on whom you ask) that the Brits looted, impoverishing India. But then, who’s counting?
Oh, you want to talk about open defecation? Once-beautiful San Francisco is now the champion, while India has built large numbers of indoor toilets all over the country. See the ‘poop map’ of San Francisco here (https://mochimachine.org/wasteland/# ).
One thing that has definitely changed in the last ten years is the amount of Hindu-hatred expressed in the West, particularly America. The California caste Bill, Equality Labs, Audrey Truschke, and the latest, tech journo Kara Swisher’s racist attack on Vivek Ramaswamy, are all related to the fact that Hindus have quietly become one of the most economically successful (but politically powerless) groups in the US. It is really a back-handed compliment, happily cheered on by rogues from the “Chindu” stable or similar. Caste is the weapon.
Hindus tend to be defensive about caste. We shouldn’t be. Caste is really a white invention, from the Portuguese casta, intended to segregate mixed-race people based on how white they are, half, quarter, one-eighth, etc: thus mulatto, quadroon, octroon, etc. It is their cross to bear. There is an ocean of difference between this caste business and jatis, but I digress..
Besides, there are de facto castes in the US: the investment banker caste, the doctor caste, the lawyer caste, the management consultant caste, etc. They all go to the same tony prep schools, the same Ivy League colleges (legacy admissions mean you easily get into Harvard, if your parent(s) went to Harvard, regardless of your grades. Raj Chetty has published reams of data about this); they are endogamous; and they all miraculously end up at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey. An outsider can’t break in. These castes are also Lindy (ask Nassim Taleb).
Perhaps, taking a cue from other groups that have prospered, Hindus (and Indian Americans in general) are becoming ‘white’, like others have before them. Irish, Italians, Jews, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese: there is a long list. ‘Whiteness’ is a construct. I was flabbergasted decades ago when a well-meaning white guy said, “You guys are almost white”. I stuttered: “But, but… we are brown!”.
If you have money, you pretty much become white. I give it another ten years. With India’s GDP at $10 trillion, and more Hindu-Americans creating unicorns, I bet by 2034 Hindus will be ‘white’. Maybe Vivek is the first white Hindu. I am not making a value judgment, merely making a prediction. You heard it here first.
1800 words, Aug 29, 2023, updated Sep 10, 2023
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