The battle between democracies led by strong leaders and the authoritarian protagonists on the other side in Cold War 2.0 is on.
NEW DELHI: In the 2024 Lok Sabha (LS) polls, despite a meticulously planned effort spanning multiple time zones, the BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi escaped from the 220-minus LS seats that had been the 2024 LS target of the Sino-Wahhabi lobby since the 2019 victory of the BJP in the LS polls. In the US, the electorate delivered a stinging shock to the Sino-Wahhabi alliance by voting in Donald Trump as the 47th President of the US. Trump’s first term was sabotaged from within by his establishment Cabinet picks, who were opposed to the systemic change that the 45th President of the US had promised the electorate that he would initiate during his 2017-2021 term. As a consequence, he lost the Presidential elections in 2020 to Joe Biden. Since 2021, the Biden administration worked hard to send Trump to prison, in the expectation that being a convicted and imprisoned felon would dent his electoral appeal. Had Biden ignored Trump in the way Trump had ignored Hillary Clinton after taking over as President in 2017, the Republican former President would have faded from public memory in the way Hillary Clinton did during the Trump years. Instead of downsizing his popularity, the persecution of ex-President Donald Trump by the Justice Department under President Biden once again brought the former President to centrestage, and added to his popularity rather than subtracting from it. Trump winning the 2024 US Presidential polls was a direct consequence of such persecution.
Since his election on November 6, the Sino-Wahhabi lobby has been working to ensure that Trump’s national security Cabinet picks are denied Senate approval. The reason is that each of them is a patriot who is committed to eliminating the growing tentacles of the Sino-Wahhabi lobby in the US. Even before Trump gets sworn into office on January 20, 2025 a fusillade of falsehoods about him have been regularly appearing in US “mainstream” media, which has become the megaphone of the fringe rather than the mainstream of US public opinion. As for Prime Minister Modi, after the shock waves generated by his defeating the efforts of the lobby at restricting the BJP from crossing the 220 LS seats that it was calculated would prevent a third term for PM Modi, a rising crescendo of disinformation and misinformation against him has been appearing on various online and other media platforms, some of which are unaware of the Sino-Wahhabi origins of much of the derogatory input they are getting about PM Modi. Other platforms have clear links to the lobby, mostly financial.
The effort of the lobby is to ensure that Modi does not complete his third term, but is forced out of 7 Lok Kalyan Marg before the 2029 Lok Sabha polls, which once again is going to become a Mahabharat pitting Modi against the Sino-Wahhabi lobby and its witting and unwitting facilitators. The success of PM Modi in ensuring that BJP-led state governments deliver improved lives to the people of their individual states will be key in the outcome of the 2029 LS polls. Otherwise, victories such as recently retaining control of states like Maharashtra and Haryana would be pyrrhic, were the 2029 Lok Sabha polls to go the way intended by the Sino-Wahhabi lobby in a way that did not happen in the last general elections held in India and the US.
A long-time foe of the Sino-Wahhabi lobby, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, lost his life in unusual and mysterious circumstances on July 8, 2022. It was Abe and Modi who revived the Quad in 2017 together with Trump. On July 13, an almost successful attempt was made on Presumptive Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, in which he escaped being killed by the narrowest of margins. As yet, the findings of any conclusive probe into the actual motivations and linkages of the shooter remain unknown, and similar is the case with the Abe assassination. And now the world is witnessing the effort to unseat South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, a move which was intensified after he broke with precedent and linked up with Japan and not just the US in an alliance designed to counter the efforts of the CCP lobby to weaken and if possible send into chaos South Korea. That Russia is part of the anti-Yoon effort in a way that is not the case with the anti-Modi effort by the Sino-Wahhabi lobby is linked to Yoon’s strategic error in involving South Korea in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, when he as well as Japan ought to have followed the example set by Modi for India and stayed out of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which was an echo of Cold War 1.0 in an era marked by the onset of Cold War 2.0. In the 21st century, it is no longer the Atlantic but the Indo-Pacific that is the primary theatre of confrontation, and which is where Japan and South Korea need to focus in the way India has. More and more information is coming out about the linkages of anti-Republic of Korea groups to the effort to get Yoon removed from the Blue House through impeachment. North Korean sympathisers such as US citizen Choi Jae-young have been active in the effort, even going to the extent of seeking to frame the First Lady of South Korea in a false case of accepting illegal gratification in the form of a Dior handbag worth a substantial sum of money. The North Korea-China connection of Choi and some politicians in South Korea who are hostile to Yoon is getting exposed in South Korean media, and the South Korean President’s popularity was rising as a consequence, when Yoon made the unwise step of imposing martial law. This was an impulsive and panicky step that was expectedly hugely unpopular in the vigorous democracy that South Korea is. The impulsive decision by Yoon was withdrawn within six hours of its promulgation, but the damage done has been sufficient to give steam to efforts at removing him from office through impeachment. Yoon is not bluffing when he warns that South Korea was being overridden by agents of North Korea and China, and it is these elements, together with others, that are behind the effort to remove and replace him with a President who acts in the delusion that a peaceful resolution of the existential, systemic Cold War 2.0 conflict between the US,South Korea and other democracies with China is possible.
The battle between democracies led by strong leaders and the authoritarian protagonists on the other side in Cold War 2.0 is on. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, so they say, and vigilance and countermeasures need to be put in place to ensure the same victory of the democracies in Cold War 2.0 as happened in Cold War 1.0 with the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991. India led by PM Narendra Modi, Japan led by PM Shigeru Ishiba, South Korea led by President Yoon Suk Yeol and a US soon to be led by the incoming 47th President of the US, Donald Trump, are on the frontline of Cold War 2.0, which in the manner that Cold War 1.0 was, is an existential conflict between competing political systems. The four leaders need to work closely together so as to ensure victory in what is proving to be a hard fought battle with the highest of stakes, the very survival of the system of democracy despite efforts by authoritarian powers to demolish every such construct.