For the CCP led by Xi, it has become a priority to disrupt and finally destroy the India-US partnership that was not allowed to take off under PM Manmohan Singh because of the brakes placed by Sonia Gandhi.
MANGALORE: Although the Russian lobby has been active throughout India and a few of its western partners in a bid to weaken ties between New Delhi and key Atlanticist states, since the 2016 US Presidential elections, the relentless CIA, FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency effort aimed at destroying Russian networks within the US has severely weakened Moscow’s reach. An unintended consequence of such efforts, which are reminiscent of the USSR-US Cold War 1.0 period, has been to permit the mushrooming of PRC networks within the US and its overseas bases and territories. Apart from information gathering, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “Agents of Influence” (i.e. those individuals who by their actions objectively assist in the fulfillment of the tasks and goals of the CCP ) have been given the responsibility of generating negative perceptions about India and the country’s Prime Minister in key American constituencies, including among media persons and academics. CCP networks have been more successful than their Russian counterparts in the recruiting of “Useful Idiots” (i.e. those who further the objectives of the CCP without understanding that this is what they are doing). Of course, the greater financial resources of the Chinese networks have also assisted in such successes.
Why the targeting of Modi? Those who have analysed the methods of work of Prime Minister Narendra Modi from his days as Chief Minister of Gujarat are aware that he has a 15-year plan that he is methodically implementing in carefully thought out stages across this time period. In other words, should Modi not ensure that the BJP get enough seats within the Lok Sabha after the 2024 elections for him to continue as Head of Government until 2029, several of his initiatives will be at risk of reversal, especially if the successor government is as fixated on the destruction of his signature achievements in the way Donald J. Trump was about trashing the policies of his predecessor Barack H. Obama. If sources within the US, Germany and the UK in particular who are Modiphobes are to be believed, their calculation is that a 220 LS seat tally for the BJP, or even up to 230 seats would very likely lead to a situation in which BJP would either have to sit in the Opposition benches or have to choose an alternative Prime Minister less determined in his drive to accomplish the outcome of making India the third superpower (after the US and China) in the global order.
THE ‘PUNISH INDIA’ CAMP IN TEAM BIDEN
The Sunday Guardian had earlier reported how a senior official in the Biden administration who has long had an obsessive desire to ensure the fragmentation of the Russian Federation was the driving force behind the US State Department punishing visa applicants from India through an expected waiting time of around three years. A few days before that story broke, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar publicly pointed out the incongruity of the world’s most powerful democracy making it impossible for a citizen of India to visit friends and relatives in the US or even to do business there, even as a citizen of the PRC could get a visa in as many days as it took in years for an Indian citizen. Even after that, this official has been working assiduously at punishing India in various ways, so much so that an influential individual in the US described the US State Department as “the enemy of India”. Other sources say that this is too harsh a categorization, and that while the State Department may not be as strong a backer of India as the Department of Defense (DoD) headed by Lloyd Austin, nevertheless “The Secretary (Blinken) is overall very supportive of India”. The naysayer to such a narrative retorts that “Blinken plays the Good Cop, even while at interagency meetings, while power down, State Department representatives remain fixated on measures to make India pay” for the lese majesty of not trotting along behind the NATO position on Ukraine in the manner that Quad partners Australia and Japan have. It was only when the realities of the Ukraine war began to hit home by July-September 2022 that the White House zeal to get India onto the same page as Japan and Australia got tempered. What is clear is that the Editorial Board of the New York Times, which in its views of the India of the present, is on the same page as media outlets such as the BBC, has its backers in such a view even within the Biden administration. It may be added that in interagency meetings, the DoD view on China is almost always far more realistic than the fixation of the State Department that it is not only possible to get Xi Jinping to oppose Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, but to return to the Jiang Zemin-Clinton dream of a G-2, in which the US and China would jointly divide up the world, leaving much of the Indo-Pacific to China. To their credit, neither Presidents Obama nor Biden signed on to such a distortion of reality, although both have given concessions to the PRC that already have, or will prove, damaging to overall US interests.
XI UPSET ABOUT INDIA-U.S. TIES
For the CCP led by General Secretary Xi Jinping, it has become a priority to disrupt and finally destroy the India-US partnership that was not allowed to take off under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh because of the brakes placed by UPA supremo Sonia Gandhi. It was only after Narendra Modi took over as Singh’s successor in 2014 that the India-US relationship blossomed into what is turning out to be a comprehensive alliance with the potential to benefit not just the two countries but the world. Some of the reforms operationalised by PM Modi had been sought to be initiated under Manmohan Singh, but were sabotaged by vested interests, an example being the GST. That the digital world would become the future of India was first thought out during the period in office of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, but although much was done by him in improving connectivity through telephony, digital progress remained slow even in the 1990s. It was only after 2014 that things speeded up, such that by 2029, it may not be necessary for almost any citizen of India to physically meet an official in order to get his or her work done. Already, under Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who has proved an able lieutenant of the Prime Minister, physical meetings with tax officials are becoming less and less necessary, even while the tax terrorism of the Chidambaram era has been sharply reduced. Unlike in the past, efforts to smother and stifle innovations (an example of which was recently brought out by strategic expert Bharat Karnad where indigenous defence equipment was concerned) are getting uncovered, and those guilty of assisting Chinese and other external vested interests are on the way to being punished. Modi 2.0 has seen a significant qualitative leap in the effectiveness of the implementation of the reforms conceived or promoted by Modi 1.0. All such growth-inducing measures would be placed by PM Modi on an irreversible forward track by 2029, hence the intensified effort at (i) convincing the youth that their future is dark under the present dispensation, (ii) the middle classes that their interests and centrality to the growth process are being ignored by the union government, and (iii) the minorities, especially the Muslims, that they are the targets of attack by those who support the present dispensation. Given the reality of elections being only a little more than a year distant, it is no surprise that international outlets that have bought into the narrative of India as a cesspool of hate and violence have been exceptionally active of late.
MIXED RESULTS OF PRC EFFORTS
The good news is that the efforts of PRC active or unwary agents of influence in the US or in other western democracies seem to be failing. After the visa fiasco, President Biden has so far ignored the voices within his administration calling for self-destructive measures such as sanctioning India over Ukraine or classifying the country together with Pakistan or Afghanistan. The bad news is that Biden has not so far responded to the trampling of sovereign rights of countries other than Ukraine, even countries that are much more important to US security, such as India or Taiwan. Recently a US assistance package of arms to Taiwan was changed within the Biden bureaucracy into weapons sales, boosting the confidence of Xi Jinping in his expansionism and giving him oxygen to publicly humiliate President Biden by refusing even to take the US President’s telephone call. Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany is the latest western leader to understand the resonance that India under PM Modi enjoys within the populations even of Europe and the US, despite the waves of abusive propaganda of the BBC variety. The German Chancellor publicly acknowledged at the Munich Security Conference (where he obeyed the command of NATO to disinvite Russia) that External Affairs Minister Jaishankar was correct in admonishing a journalist for believing that “Europe’s problems are the world’s problem, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problem”. The exclusion of Russia from the Munich Conference has been welcomed in Beijing because of the CCP’s interest in deepening the rift between Moscow and the Atlanticist world. The PRC remains disappointed that India did not go against Russia despite intense pressure from within NATO and that so far, the Nulands have not prevailed over saner voices within the Biden administration.
THE REALITY OF AYODHYA
As has been pointed out by scholars such as Aravind Neelakantan, there are more than two dozen mosques in the vicinity of the Sri Ram Janmabhoomi at Ayodhya, including one only a short distance away. Whether it be the BBC or some voices in India, since 1992 there has been the allegation that a crazed mob of Hindu fanatics razed what was a long-disused mosque to the ground. This was because the Sri Ram Janmabhoomi at Ayodhya, the Sri Krishna Janmasthan at Mathura and the Gyan Vapi at Varanasi have been constructed on sacred land. No other mosque in the country is on the three pieces of land that are sacred to the Hindu community, including in these three locations. Had the mob at Ayodhya been even a tenth as crazed and hate-fuelled as those who set alight those train compartments at Godhra railway station on 27 February 2002, few of those two dozen and more mosques at Ayodhya would have been left standing by the end of that day. Instead, none of the mosques except the long disused masjid on the site of the Sri Ram Janmabhoomi was touched by the “frenzied, crazed, hate-filled” mob. Of course, in the BBC’s imagination, even the Godhra train burning was “disputed”. To its editors, those inside the compartment probably set themselves on fire, being after all “crazed”, “frenzied” Hindus”. The good news is that such a false and toxic narrative has thus far found few takers beyond the usual bubble of India-haters in the West, most of whom are those who regard the Hindu faith in the same ignorant and therefore contemptuous way as they regard the religious practices of the American Indians. Such India-phobic elements fail to appreciate that freedom to follow one’s faith is indeed under attack, but not in India but in countries where a monopoly is sought for a favoured variant of a specific faith, including where that faith is political rather than religious. Because of its living tradition of inclusivity, India under Prime Minister Modi is respected by people across the world to a level unprecedented since the early 1950s, much to the dismay of the infowar planners of the Central Military Commission of the CCP.