Security agencies in US, UK and Canada have collected extensive information about the ISI-sponsored ‘Khalistan’ movement within their borders since 1985. However, the reaction of the local authorities to these findings has been one of unconcern.
NEW DELHI: Researchers tracking the infiltration of CCP-linked online entities into chat forums in the United States and India identified an intensification since 2017 of the Sino-Wahabi effort at (a) causing the fringes in both countries to grow at the expense of the moderate middle, and (b) creating mistrust within the population of each country about the other. It was in 2017 that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had surprised the PRC by ordering the military to resist the PLA’s effort to seize territory belonging to Bhutan. 2017 was also when President Donald J. Trump humiliated the well-funded PRC lobby in the US by imposing higher tariffs on a range of Chinese imports. That the online space in India was being misused by PLA-linked entities for purposes of hybrid warfare by the PRC against India was quickly understood by Modi, who in 2020 became the first world leader to impose a ban on a broad range of metadata-accumulating China-linked online apps popular with the public, including Tik-Tok. Even a superficial examination of the difference between outcomes and effects caused by the difference between the algorithms used in the US by ByteDance (the PRC company that controls Tik-Tok) and those used in China would show why Tik-Tok, a popular CCP-controlled social media platform, has, through its functioning, encouraged behaviour in young US and Indian citizens that promoted societal divisions and anger, in contrast to Douyin, the PRC version, which clamps down on searches that incite such negative feelings in contrast to Tik-Tok in the US and India versions. It was this transparent effort at causing social tensions and a climate of rage within the young in particular that caused the ban on Tik-Tok in India and which is fuelling efforts to replicate that action in the US. Of course, given the tens of billions of US dollars that are being spent by the Sino-Wahabi lobby in the US, this is not proving an easy task thus far, especially where the ruling Democratic Party led by President Joe Biden is concerned.
After PM Modi’s ban on the app in June 2020, by which time it had acquired over 240 million users in India, a turbocharged lobbying effort was launched within the US to ensure that the world’s most powerful democracy did not go the India way. Given the infiltration of elements of the Sino-Wahabi lobby in the US Government (USG), it is no wonder that despite several forensic studies having been made of the toxic effects of the CCP-controlled platform on the behaviour of impressionable US youth, Tik-Tok has yet to be banned in the US except recently in the case of government cell phones. The White House is being told daily by CCP lobbyists that a ban on Tik-Tok would further reduce President Biden’s popularity with young voters, and that even if the Senate and House of Representatives vote for a ban, he should veto it. The only obstacle to such lobbying is that evidence of the corrosive effect of PRC-related apps on social behaviour is becoming impossible to ignore, and is causing a voter backlash. Those who argue that young US citizens prefer the doubtful joys of a Chinese app to the security of their country are guilty of a libel against such citizens, who are every bit as patriotic as their elders. Unfortunately, this far the White House has desisted from a fullscope campaign of educating the public about the toxic effects of CCP apps that funnel in metadata about US citizens that are accessed by the PRC military and security agencies. Despite such a wilful lack of provision of such information, more than 51% of US citizens now favour a ban on Tik-Tok.
TIK-TOK DATA ACCESSED BY CCP
There has been a proliferation of actions and published commands since 2017 that mandate that all social media platforms operating within the PRC or controlled by Chinese entities have an obligation to make available all metadata collected by them to CCP-designated authorities. As a consequence, efforts are being made by those US legislators who have not fed at the CCP trough to bring forward charges of perjury against the Tik-Tok CEO in the US, Shou Zi Chew. This PRC citizen has repeatedly asserted on oath to the US Congress that to his knowledge no data was being supplied by his company to state agencies of the PRC. Had this actually been the case, neither Chew nor his family would be safe inside the PRC, nor would he be allowed to continue in his present job by ByteDance. Apologists for the CCP online platforms active in hybrid warfare. especially those specifically engineered to cause societal rage and consequent turmoil, point out that even US, UK or European online platforms have a legal obligation to hand over when ordered by their governments data collected by them. What goes unmentioned by such Tik-Tok apologists is that US, UK and European or Indian platforms need to hand over to their governments only specific data relating to an individual under suspicion or surveillance. In the case of Chinese platforms, keys to the entirety of the data collected by them are in the hands of overt and covert CCP members whose function is to act as seamless real time transmission belts to send the information over to the military and security agencies of the PRC. Such CCP transferrers of metadata from nominally private Chinese companies to state agencies pose as employees of the concerned company, thereby acquiring the cover needed to access and immediately transfer prodigious quantities of meta data to designated state agencies in China.
CCP HAS BANNED
TIK-TOK IN CHINA
From the time such input on hundreds of millions of foreign citizens gets collected by CCP-linked online platforms, that metadata flows into Artificial Intelligence machines that differentiate and prioritize them on various grounds related to hybrid warfare operations. It is no accident that since the twin events of the 2017 Bhutan standoff between the Indian military and the PLA and the Trump tariffs (boosts in customs duties that thus far intense lobbying by the cash-rich Sino-Wahabi alliance has not succeeded in getting the White House to rescind), the use within the US of CCP-linked online platforms has accelerated. Tik-Tok itself presently has 156 million US citizens using its platform, or almost half the total population of the country. Such access makes it easy for directioning to vulnerable segments controlled messaging intended to stir up social conflicts. Such a task has become easier because of the PLA getting more expert in understanding the “hot buttons” embedded within the psyche of different elements of the US population that cause rage against other segments. Such subgroups are then bombarded with messaging designed to (for example) bring them out into the streets against a particular politician. There are even cases when temporarily depressed young people have been flooded with messages in Tik-Tok about how to commit suicide, so much so that several went ahead and took their own lives. Such toxic features are absent in the Douyin version of Tik-Tok that alone is permitted to circulate within China. When the PRC itself has banned the use of Tik-Tok within its shores, with what face can the company demand that other markets remain open to its toxic influence? Whether it be cellphones, infrastructure control systems or online applications, each has seen a quantum jump since Xi became CCP General Secretary in 2012, the year that ByteDance was founded.
HYBRID WAR AGAINST INDIA AND U.S.
Both the Sino-Russian as well as the Sino-Wahabi networks have been active in creating and making viral several negative misperceptions about each other within the US and India. The intention of the CCP (or more accurately, the Central Military Commission) is to prevent a strengthening of the alliance between these two large but very different democracies. Both networks have been assisted not merely by lobby-funded intrusion of hostile actors into the private space of citizens of the major democracies, but by the apathy shown by the key member countries of NATO in stamping out networks within their own shores that facilitate violence and terror against India. Security agencies in the US, the UK and Canada in particular have since 1985 collected extensive information about the intent, contacts and funding of the ISI-sponsored “Khalistan” movement within their borders, and are aware of the heinous nature of their activities. However, the reaction of the local authorities to these findings has been one of unconcern, as though they did not feel the need to break up networks operated by their citizens within their borders who were planning, facilitating and carrying out terror operations against India. Citizens who were in plain sight acting under the dictates of two foreign powers that are allies against the joint interest of the democracies.
‘KHALISTAN’ NETWORK GIVEN IMMUNITY IN WEST
While the sudden emergence of the Amritpal phenomenon in Punjab may have had to do with the initial lethargy shown by the local police, the ease with which violent attacks were made on Indian diplomatic missions in the UK and the US by “Khalistan” groups following attempts at Amritpal’s arrest by security forces in India make clear the impunity with which such groups have been functioning in the US, Canada and the UK. In the latter country, at least four Members of Parliament have contacts with the “Khalistan” groups despite being directly informed of the manner and effects of their blood-soaked operations in India. In Australia, the Victoria police this year itself knowingly deprived the public for six weeks about information about the identities of the perpetrators of attacks against Hindu temples in that Australian state, revealing them only after being asked to do so by federal authorities in Canberra. In the recent London attack by “Khalistan” groups on the Indian High Commission, CCTV footage and facial recognition software have identified many of the perpetrators, yet the British Home Office is keeping the identity of the perpetrators secret from the public, thereby facilitating future attacks. Neither Lord Mayor Sadiq Khan of London nor British Home Secretary Suella Braverman has punished the guilty or even made the obvious first step of making public their identities. With elected officials such as these, it is scant wonder that the Sino-Wahabi and Sino-Russian lobbies have been having substantial success in their ongoing campaign to reduce the level of trust and goodwill within the Indian public for the UK, Canada and the US. Despite the way in which Indian authorities had until now given visas freely even to known facilitators of the ISI-sponsored “Khalistan” movement, in all the three western countries, false atrocity stories featuring the Sikh community are regularly disseminated by the “Khalistan” network in the three western powers. The purpose of such constant maligning of India is to ensure a favourable decision by Canadian, UK and US authorities in the matter of hundreds of thousands of migrants from India, who seek asylum based on the false claim that they are being persecuted, a voluntary exodus which is based on economic grounds. While facts on the ground do not back up the charges made against India, this fact is sought to be covered up by a flood of misleading social media posts about the situation in the Punjab. These have lately received vigorous pushback by the diplomatic missions of India as a consequence of the instructions of Prime Minister Narendra Modi conveyed through External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar.
INDIFFERENCE TO TERROR GROUPS RANKLES PUBLIC
The public in India have long seen the indifference of the English-speaking western countries to Indian security concerns, and as a consequence, there has been some recurrence of their previous mistrust of such countries. Given the extensive information already available to western security agencies about the terror and narcotics links of several of those active in the attacks on India’s missions in select countries, the expectation is that there will soon be a crackdown on such elements by their host governments. That is essential for a return to health of the burgeoning partnership between the US and India in particular. As far as Canada is concerned, vote bank politics in the case of some of the parties in the Canadian Parliament are leading to some MPs and even Ministers publicly expressing incendiary falsehoods about the situation in India, especially in the Punjab or Kashmir. In the case of the UK, an unexpected fightback by British Indians has finally led to enhanced surveillance and possible prosecution of at least a few of those seeking to fund and foment terror in India. That in the US, Canada, the UK and now Australia, Indian diplomats risk their lives when they enter places of worship dedicated to the universalist teachings of Guru Nanak Dev, makes a mockery of the claim that law and order is present in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK. In such a partnership, unless each country’s security is seen as the responsibility of every other country in the Quad and a potential Quad Plus group of like-minded countries, such security networks will remain less than sufficient to turn back the menace of attempted domination by an authoritarian force that is bedeviling the Indo-Pacific. One for all, all for one, has become inevitable if Cold War 2.0 is to be won by the democracies in the manner that Cold War 1.0 was in 1991.