The US President made it clear on and offscreen that he and Modi were on the same page where the need for a lasting and comprehensive India-US partnership to meet the threats faced by the international community in the 21st century was concerned.
Bangkok
Planning for a State Visit by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the United States had been ongoing since the beginning of the year, and this triggered an intense effort by the Sino-Wahabi lobby in the US to seek to have the visit put off indefinitely.
Almost all the media outlets that supported US President Biden launched increasingly acerbic broadsides about how there was “discrimination against minorities by the Modi government”.
No hint was given in their columns of the reality that every welfare scheme of the Modi government was applicable across the board to all citizens, irrespective of which religion they were born into. Repeated assertions that the world’s biggest democracy had morphed into an autocracy were made, ignoring the fact that the BJP has lost at least seventeen state Assembly elections to opposition parties, the latest being Karnataka.
A BBC presenter, spoke on 24 June morning of the unequal treatment given to “different ethnicities” by the Modi government, implying once again the Jinnah-Churchill canard that Hindus and Muslims were two nations, when in fact they have common ancestral roots at least where the Indian subcontinent is concerned. Despite a multiplication of such efforts as the 21-23 June State Visit drew closer, barely a handful of US Senators and Representatives joined in the boycott call given by lobbies eager to torpedo an India-US partnership that has been shown to have come of age during the Modi visit. Superbly assisted by First Lady Jill Biden, the US President made it clear on and offscreen that he and Modi were on the same page where the need for a lasting and comprehensive India-US partnership to meet the threats faced by the international community in the 21st century were concerned. In the past, the Indian side in particular (driven by remnants of Lutyens Logic still floating around South and North Blocks) was chary of drawing attention to the military to military aspects of India-US (or in the words of Prime Minister Modi to the US Congress, America-India or AI). Under the gentle prodding of the Prime Minister, that reserve was abandoned, and the defence aspects of America-India were brought out into the open.
Had Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh had the sort of control over the machinery of their government and party that Narendra Modi has in his, they would have moved faster towards establishing a fullscope partnership between the two biggest democracies. That task was left to Prime Minister Modi, who since 2014 has established confidence in the US side that India is a reliable partner in matters such as joint production of defence platforms, research into AI and other fields relevant to hi-tech, and in the securing of a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific free of efforts by a hegemonic power to dominate the same to the exclusion of others. Both the US and India together would have the capability to not just repel but defeat any move by the PRC to extinguish the sovereignty of parts of the Indo-Pacific. The creation of such a partnership would serve as a deterrent to those in the Central Military Commission (CMC) in Beijing who have visions of further conquest across its vast frontiers with other nations. Beginning from its inception in 1949, the PRC has steadily expanded the territory under its control, getting hold of formerly autonomous entities such as Xinjiang, Tibet, Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. In addition, it took control of territories belonging to India, Myanmar, the Philippines and other countries in its littoral, always to a resigned shrug from whichever administration was in charge in Washington. Such inaction has helped to breed a belief in the infallibility of the PLA within the CMC, leading it to encroach by stealth on territories in Myanmar and even the eastern parts of the Russian Federation, where settlements loyal to Beijing rather than Moscow have begun springing up, especially since Xi Jinping took over as CCP General Secretary in 2012
XI IS PREPARING FOR CONFLICT
Credible sources linked to the Secretariat of the CCP General Secretary and the CMC claim that extensive planning for war has been ongoing within the PLA and the “civilian” entities affiliated to it, most extensively about the occupation of Taiwan and the extinguishing of its existence as an independent country by 2027, the close of the third 5-year term of General Secretary Xi. At the same time as such planning is going on, teams of academics and officials connected with Taiwan affairs in the CCP have been fanning out across the globe assuring interlocutors that the PLA has no intention of invading Taiwan “unless a declaration of independence gets made”. Aware of such reports, even William Lai, who is the ruling DPP candidate for the 2024 Presidential elections, has reversed earlier calls for declaring independence and is now saying that there is no reason to openly declare what is already a fact, namely that Taiwan is a free country in all but nomenclature. The problem is that those conveying the reassuring message that the PLA will be on a leash are either unaware of the military stance or are deliberately seeking to mislead foreign audiences. During 2018 and 2019 in particular, there were popular demonstrations within the metropolis against tightened CCP control over Hong Kong institutions. Those in favour of continued autonomy were far more in number than those who sought full CCP control. Xi gave orders to walk away from the 1998 vow by the CCP that the Hong Kong Special Autonomous Region would have its own system of governance and not follow that in Mainland China. Since then, those fighting for autonomy have been either jailed or driven out of Hong Kong to foreign shores, and any show of dissent has been quelled by a once professional (rather than ideological) police force and judiciary.
CCP PLANS TO
‘RE-EDUCATE’ The TAIWANESE
The CCP has worked out a plan for the “re-education” of Taiwan once the PLA seizes the island, that would involve the sending to Xinjiang-style concentration camps of large numbers of Taiwanese citizens who through their social media posts and writings have been known to favour outright independence. The CMC is planning to set up “Taiwan Shock Brigades” as PLA auxiliaries from the island military, and the function of such formations would be to get used as cannon fodder in any future kinetic conflict, most likely with Japan and the US in the Taiwan theatre of operations. Such planning is similar to that employed by Chairman Mao in the Korean War of the 1950s, when former KMT soldiers who fell into PLA hands were mobilised and sent into the first waves to battle US forces and of course, to mostly perish. Academics and officials would be “re-educated” in the way many CCP cadres were “re-educated” by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Leading figures who were defiant in the face of PRC efforts at intimidation and conquest, principally President Tsai Ing-wen and Vice-President William Lai would meet the same fate as Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has at the hands of the Myanmar military, of being incarcerated and made to disappear from public contact. Extensive work has taken place in planning for both the takeover of Taiwan and its aftermath, and war plans have been readied that could be put into operation within six weeks of CMC Chairman Xi giving the go ahead for the same. Since 2019, the PRC has steadily widened its Zone of Control around Taiwan, both at sea and in the waters. The PLA is steadily expanding this zone, and in August 2022, just after Speaker Nancy Pelosi left Taipei after her visit, nearly 83% of the island was blockaded by the PLA, both as a test of its capability and as a way of finding out the reaction of Japan and the US to such an aggressive action. There was none. Indeed, US warships moved further away from Taiwanese waters as the PLA Navy and PLA Air Force were implementing their trial blockade. Even the large fleet of US vessels that was in the region for the RIMPAC moved away from rather than towards the Chinese warships and aircraft. Since then, both PLA naval vessels and aircraft have been steadily expanding the Zone of Activity (and therefore in effect control) inside both the waters and air space of Taiwan, with no reaction from Washington except for symbolic gestures such as USN vessels moving through the Taiwan Straits every now and then.
INDIA AND U.S. FACE THE SAME THREATS
The Ukraine example makes it clear that preventing a country that is attacked from going after its adversary within the territory of that adversary is a recipe for steady degradation of assets and loss of manpower. Unless Taiwan is given the means to lay waste key strategic establishments on the east coast of China, the island nation would be unable to prevent a steady accretion of advantage to its much larger adversary. The only way to rescue Taiwan from being overrun would be to respond to a PRC blockade of Taiwan with a blockade by the US and its partners in the Arabian Sea, the Malacca Straits, the north and south coasts of Africa and the Arctic. In other words, defeating a blockade limited to Taiwan with a blockade of PRC vessels across choke points in different parts of the world. In such a task, a high degree of collaboration and interoperability would need to be developed, especially between the two most powerful democratic militaries, those of India and the US. After the Modi State Visit, it is clear that the US and India are on the same page in preventing a conflict by making it clear to the intending aggressor that the consequences of such a move on itself would result in an economic and societal meltdown that could trigger regime change, or at the very least a leadership change within the CCP.
Defying efforts of both the Sino-Russian as well as Sino-Wahabi lobbies to derail the partnership between India and the US was put on display to the world by the iconic image of President Biden, Prime Minister Modi and First Lady Jill Biden walking arm in arm in full view of television cameras. So far, people of Indian origin have been an essential factor in US tech. From now onwards, the 1.7 billion people of the world’s two biggest democracies will work together to keep the world safe for their inclusive, participatory system of governance in the face of authoritarian expansionism. There was a period dating from the 1970s until the 1998 handover of Hong Kong to the PRC when the world’s biggest democracy and the world’s most populous country formed a partnership against a common danger. 2023 is witnessing the launch of a partnership between the world’s most populous country and the world’s most advanced democracy to confront, and ideally deter, an expansionary superpower whose leadership has made no secret of the fact that its purpose is to create a unipolar Asia first and subsequently a unipolar world. Should Biden and Modi succeed in their mission of deterrence through the strength and range of the US-India partnership they have together worked out and sealed, both would merit the Nobel Peace Prize. In the 1930s, world leaders forgot that expansionary and malign powers need to be stopped before their menace grows to uncontrollable heights. In the 2020s, Modi and Biden are determined that the democracies not make that same mistake again, this time not in Europe but in Asia.
XI WANTS CONTROL OVER INDO-PACIFIC
Xi is learnt to favour choking Taiwan through a blockade so as to stun the island nation into submission, believing that such a measure would not gather enough public support within Japan and the US to permit the leaders of these and other countries to challenge the PLA militarily. Once that gets completed, he will turn to other targets until he controls the entire Indo-Pacific. Given such a scenario and the risk of a conflict coming true in the manner that the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation did, it is clear that the only effective way of freeing Taiwan from a blockade is to impose a global blockade on the aggressor, thereby stopping him in his tracks in a way that was not done in the 1930s until Germany plunged Europe into war. The US-India partnership fashioned by PM Modi and President Biden has the capability to deter any effort at expansionism at the expense of smaller countries by a country that represents a common threat to both Washington and Delhi.