It’s time to stand up for India

On 3 October 2022, US Ambassador to Pakistan, Donald Blome made a surprise visit to Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK). The US Embassy in Islamabad posted colourful photos on social media as Amb. Blome tweeted that he was “honored” to visit “AJK”—Azad Jammu and Kashmir. This followed US President Joe Biden’s pivot back to funding the Pakistani military with a $450 million package for F-16 fighter jets, and Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s trip to Pakistan in April, where she posed for a video at the POK Line of Control and accused India of “genocide”, a preposterous affront to the persecuted Kashmiri Pandits. The Biden team tried to spin the new Pakistan arms deal as a “counterterrorism” imitative, but Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar firmly stated that the US is “not fooling anyone.”
The US and India are allies and strategic partners, but everyone in Washington knows that the Biden family is dangerously compromised by the CCP; in 2013, then Vice President Biden visited Beijing with his son Hunter, who collected $1.3 billion from a CCP business partner—this was widely reported in US media as no big deal—and Pakistan is a proxy state of Communist China, so Amb. Blome can’t play coy with vapid tweets about textiles and monuments: he is sending a clear message that the China hands are back in control at the State Department and India will once more get the shaft.
I’m an American who has lived in India, admires and loves India, and I’m getting fed up with the relentless India bashing from our White House, our media, and our universities. US elites have gleefully taken so much CCP cash for so long they’ve become craven apologists for Communist China’s totalitarian dictatorship; the academics who promulgate a ludicrous infatuation for Marxist ideology—having never lived in a Marxist state makes it easier—the corporatists who profit off of slave labour in the CCP’s massive concentration camps, and the affluent liberals who boast of “having money in China” and are wholly unconcerned about the CCP’s Uyghur genocide or the Taliban’s honour killings, but shriek and wail about India’s “abuse of women’s rights” and the dangers of “Hindu chauvinism.” US elites conveniently forget that India is a secular state of many faiths, and India twice elected a female Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, and has always had many female Chief Ministers and ambassadors, but there is not one woman or minority in the senior ranks of the CCP.
Indian student groups at US universities are now viciously attacked for “Islamophobia”, which is absurd because many Indian Muslims are members of these student organizations, and India doesn’t get enough credit for being homeland to two of the most famous people on Planet Earth: Salman and Shahrukh Khan, Bollywood superstars and patriotic Indian Muslims. CCP state media churns out propaganda about the successful “re-education” of Uyghurs and Kazakhs in “training centres”, an obscene euphemism for death camps where the CCP is slaughtering their Muslim citizens and sterilizing Muslim women. The Indian government is not incarcerating millions of Muslims in death camps, and incidents of sectarian conflict are widely reported in Indian media. My late father, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served as US Ambassador to India in the 1970s, wrote: “The best quick test of the political nature of a regime is to read the local papers on arrival. If they are filled with bad news, you have landed in a libertarian society. If, on the other hand, the press is filled with good news, it is a fair bet that the jails will be filled with good men.”
The US China hands driving the narrative that Communist China is “superior” to “messy democracies” is baffling indeed, considering how many billions were spent to defeat Communism in the former Soviet Union. The People’s Republic of China has been wholly legitimised and integrated into the world economy, Communist China has a seat on the UN Security Council, whereas democratic India is denied such representation. The CCP has thus far paid no price for genocide in Tibet and Xinjiang, oppression of dissidents, or crippling the planet with the Wuhan Virus. The China hands proffer the party line that the CCP must never “lose face”, and that the Chinese people aren’t “ready for democracy”—an insult to the brave Hong Kong democrats and the people of Taiwan, as US academics whitewash the Tiananmen Square massacre. In 21st century America, the grim visage of Mao Zedong, history’s greatest mass murderer, has eclipsed Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of ahimsa.
While the icon of a yogi halting the mighty World Bank is a generic development joke, Indian yogis and villagers have stopped destructive development projects. The Indian state cannot impose drastic policies on its people without debate and dissent, whereas poor villagers in China have no protection against the CCP, which demolishes homes and villages to build colossal ghost cities, and now randomly locks down millions of its citizens with its merciless Zero Covid policy.
India is the oldest continuously functioning civilization on planet Earth, which has advanced the theory and practice of non-violence further and farther than all others. India has the largest and most diverse refugee population in the world. India gave sanctuary to the Dalai Lama and preserved Tibetan Buddhism, which the CCP labels “a disease to be eradicated.” India is the source of multi-million dollar franchises of yoga and Ayurveda, and ancient lineages of arts, crafts and textiles. Bollywood films have an audience which is more than half the world’s population. The Kumbh Mela is the world’s largest peaceful gathering, and India holds the world’s largest democratic elections.
It is time to stand up to the China hands who excuse every CCP atrocity and aggression and have done enormous damage to US influence and global security, and stand with our ally and strategic partner and say “Bharat Mata Ki Jai.”
Maura Moynihan is a New York based journalist and author, specialising in the Chinese Communist occupation of Tibet. Her website is: mauramoynihan.net.