Agencies and affiliates of the Chinese Communist Party have substantial linkages, including financial, with key policymakers in the US, Canada, the UK and other countries.
Accelerated progress in overall India-US and India-Europe cooperation, including in matters of defence, since the Narendra Modi dispensation began in 2014 has ignited alarm bells within the Leadership Compound in Beijing. Now that Cold War 2.0 between China and the growing cohort of countries resisting CCP expansionism has become a reality, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would like ties between India and the US in particular to return to the frosty, prickly state that they were in during Cold War 1.0. between the US and the USSR. CCP influence and asymmetric operations networks have been active in a multiplicity of ways in seeking to disrupt and downgrade the India-West relationship. It ought therefore to come as no surprise that toxic accusations, such as that the Indian state was carrying out extra-judicial killings in other countries, are increasing in number. Such an accusation was first made by Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself levelled the charge, not in a private conversation but in Parliament.
Since then, elements linked to the ruling coalition in Ottawa have repeatedly sought to level the same accusation at India, and try and get support for such a view amongst member-states of NATO. It may be mentioned that the diversion of NATO attention back from China to Russia, and from the Indo-Pacific to the Atlantic, has been amongst the primary objectives of CCP influence operations within the 75-year-old security alliance. Hence, tension between NATO and Russia that spiked significantly since the February 2022 entry of Russian forces into parts of Ukraine came as a boon to the CCP, which is therefore interested in keeping the conflict going while it is operationalising moves designed to extinguish the sovereignty of the island country by 2027.
Apart from his Parliamentary intervention, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has since sought to form a phalanx of western countries against India on the basis of a charge that remains unsubstantiated by evidence. Lack of evidence has not prevented Trudeau from constantly uttering the word “credible” to describe his unsubstantiated allegations against the Indian state, much to the glee of elements of his coalition who for decades have remained unmolested by the security forces despite being involved in the funding and empowering of terrorist networks directed against the 1.4 billion citizens of India. Oddly, given the security situation in the Indo-Pacific caused by the aggressive expansionism of the PRC, the US has emphatically joined Canada on a quixotic path that could have the effect of distancing the US from India, an objective that ranks at the top of the objectives of the Chinese Communist Party leadership. Within the diplomatic community in New Delhi, President Joe Biden’s personal pick as envoy to India, Eric Garcetti, has by recent verbal sallies conveyed an impression that to the Biden administration, India is what Iraq or Afghanistan was in the past, subsidiary states over which the US sought to impose its views.
Ambassador Garcetti has in recent days been doing an effective job of turning public opinion in India against the US. Given that he himself must be aware of the potential damage to India-US ties caused by such careless use of minatory language, the question is who in the Biden Administration is motivating him to act in a manner that runs the risk of making him an unwelcome presence in some circles within the National Capital Region. It is hardly rocket science that the US and India need to work in concert to ensure that the Indo-Pacific be brought to a situation where its waters are open to all. Already, the CCP has secured substantial control over the ASEAN Sea, presently misnamed the South China Sea, a situation that needs to be rectified so that freedom of navigation of the waters of the Indo-Pacific meet standards set by international law. Despite an outward show of indifference by countries in ASEAN barring the Philippines to CCP expansionism as the US under Obama in particular was, public anger within ASEAN against aggressive expansionism by the PRC is growing, so much so that politicians within the group that are considered subservient to Beijing are losing popularity.
The CCP has long worked through its disinformation network to demonise India and the West to each other. It is not unknown that agencies and affiliates of the CCP have substantial linkages, including financial, with key policymakers in Atlanticist countries such as the US, Canada, the UK and others. There has been repeated reporting of financial ties with entities in the PRC of several influential individuals in the US, Canada, the UK and other countries that form part of the Atlantic Alliance. Trudeau’s strategically irresponsible charges against India, David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt’s reported bid to open the market in India to electric vehicles made in China but assembled in the UK, the noises coming out of elements in the Biden administration targeting India, have all been deciphered by some analysts as evidence of the fruits of the work of CCP-directed networks against India. What is clear from the facts is that there is a concerted effort by CCP-directed networks to distance the Atlantic Alliance from India, and vice versa, and that several policymakers appear to be unmindful of such a danger while going about their duties.
What gives military planners in the PLA and their political bosses in the Central Military Commission of the People’s Republic of China sleepless nights is the worry that India will (a) establish a strong security relationship with the US in particular, (b) further establish itself as the most effective and credible champion of the Global South, and (c) ensure that its economy grows at double digits in the manner that was witnessed for over a decade in the PRC once Deng Xiaoping introduced what may be termed “Capitalism with CCP Characteristics” in the 1980s. Apart from the US, by 2021 the country on which the maximum expenditure incurred by organs of the CCP on asymmetric (including influence) operations is India. As a consequence, even artisans producing traditional saris working in specific locations within India are facing extinction as a consequence of low grade fakes made in China. Such duplicates are capturing the market because of fixing prices that are less than half those charged for the genuine article. Rapacious middlemen in pass off such fakes as genuine, fooling the buyers and damaging economic prospects. It is no accident that just when Indian products are gaining ground in the region, calls to boycott Indian goods (and by extension buy Chinese) are becoming frequent in Bangladesh, just as had been the case in the Maldives earlier.
Just as the British had in the past a multitude of Indians who worked on their behalf to loot the public, PRC entities have over the past two decades developed networks of “Sabse Bada Rupaiya” (Money is King, Money is All) types in multiple cities across India. Such individuals and entities work to conceal the extent of smuggling and under-invoicing that is indulged in by CCP-controlled entities as they work at killing domestic enterprises, including traditional crafts. Since 2021, the scale of operations of such networks has been curtailed as a consequence of the thrust given to the Atmanirbhar policy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. As a consequence, CCP efforts to ensure that consumers in India continue to expend over s hundred billion dollars annually on buying PRC-sourced goods, whether through legal or illicit channels, has redoubled.
Anxious about the rising curve of shifts away from the PRC of foreign production platforms to India, CCP networks have been found to be active in activities as varied as fomenting labour violence in Haryana and Karnataka in foreign enterprises, and in generating through misleading social media outbursts, spasms of public rage that get manifested in violence. Despite all such efforts, the shifting tectonic plates of geopolitical reality are steadily raising the profile of India both as a security partner and as an investment destination within countries that are at the receiving end of CCP efforts at replacing their own production platforms with Made in the PRC substitutes. Despite occasional voices that wittingly or otherwise are playing to the CCP tune, overall the centrality of India in the security calculus of the democracies has become widely accepted. Should the 2024 Lok Sabha elections ensure that the alignment of policy with Indian interests continues, it would result in double digit growth that lifts remaining millions of the underprivileged out of poverty. Such is the case under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and an electoral verdict that reflects what opinion polls presently claim would result in double digit GDP growth that lifts remaining millions from poverty is on the horizon.