Avsnitt
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/greenland-canada-panama-how-trump-2-0-is-going-to-be-a-wild-ride-13852423.html
In a week when a staggeringly large wildfire laid Los Angeles low, for which the ‘progressive’ mayor and the governor could be partly to blame, it was also intriguing to see president-to-be Trump’s statements about purchasing Canada and Greenland, and laying claim to the Panama Canal.
There was also the withering attack on Britain – including direct accusations against their Prime Minister Keir Starmer – over the horrific gang-rapes of young girls there for decades. Presidential Buddy #1 Elon Musk used X (Twitter) to exhume this story of 250,000 girls (according to Musk) being turned into sex-slaves. It had been swept under the carpet.
My first reaction to these – how shall I put in politely – “imperial” assertions was that Trump is being himself, mercurial, and that he was merely making flippant comments with no intention of following through. But on thinking about it, there is a certain logic to it, as outrageous as it might appear.
On the one hand, there is precedent: the US did buy Alaska from Russia, and Louisiana from France. There is also precedent for invasions: it invaded Mexico and annexed, if I remember correctly, California, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and bits of several other states. Furthermore, the province of Panama itself was separated from Columbia by the US in 1903.
On the other hand, there are fairly good reasons for all this. I have been of the opinion that the recent H1-B narrative was astroturfed by the British Deep State (“Whitehall”); the Musk counter-narrative on rape affects both Whitehall and its Parliament (“Westminster”) as Starmer appeared unnerved in debate with his opposition; who knows if it might lead to his downfall.
Apart from any personal reasons Musk may have (he himself went through the H-1B system and may be sensitive about it), it is yet another indication that the alleged ‘Special Relationship’ between the US and the UK may now be mostly a pious myth. Trump, rightly, focused on the Quad, and it was Biden, an Atlanticist, who cooked up the AUKUS submarine alliance, which seems to have achieved very little so far, although The Economist magazine talks it up.
Britain, to nobody’s surprise after Brexit, is spiralling down into irrelevance.
Besides, the UK Labour Party allegedly indulged in election interference, with 100+ ‘volunteers’ sent to swing states during the US Presidential election campaign to support Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate. This, one could argue, is casus belli.
Trump has also in the past made noises about Europeans not bearing their fair share of the cost of the NATO military alliance: he prodded them to increase their spending to 2% of respective GDP, and now may want more. He does not seem to think it’s America’s duty to spend blood and treasure protecting wealthy Europeans from the alleged Russian threat.
But the Canada/Greenland offer is not so much about Europe as it is about China. It is about the fabled Northwest Passage, the alternative polar route for trade, which becomes viable as a result of global warming. This can become a new seaborne trade route between the Atlantic and the Pacific, much of which is now through the Panama Canal.
In an engaging conversation on pgurus.com, retired General and geo-strategist Rajiv Narayanan laid out the case for fending off the Chinese. He said they have been talking up the ‘Arctic Silk Route’, which alarmed the Russians, who immediately upgraded the military capability of some of their Arctic Ocean outposts.
China does have a problem. They are concerned about their dependence on the Straits of Malacca, which India (and possibly other Quad members) could blockade. They have been talking to the Thais about a canal through the Isthmus of Kra, and it is possible they may have grand plans of getting access to Chittagong (after surgically removing India’s control of the Northeast by invading through the Chicken’s Neck).
The Chinese are also active in the Panama Canal. A Hong Kong firm now runs two major ports, Balboa and Cristobal, at either end of the canal. Chinese firms also run the Panama-Colon container port under the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative). They also have a railway project that is a direct competitor to the Panama Canal, the 3000 kilometer Bi-Oceanic Corridor, from Brazil’s port of Santos to Peru’s port of Ilo, connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Thus, it is not purely idle talk on the part of Trump to pinpoint Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal. There is method to this apparent madness. There are also immense mineral resources in both Canada and Greenland, which will become accessible as the tundra thaws.
Canadians may well accept such an offer from the US, considering the mess their politicians, especially Trudeau, have made. The Canadian dollar is now at 0.69 US dollars, down from a peak of 1.06 US dollars in 2011. In addition, the Trump threat of 25% tariffs on Canada, if put in place, could squeeze that nation’s exports.
As for Greenland, its sparse population of only about 57,000 people may not feel particularly Danish, since they were actually colonized by the Danes around 1721. They may well be willing to join the US. Incidentally, we are all used to thinking Greenland is a gigantic landmass, but that is an illusion from the Mercator Projection. In reality, it is about 2/3rds the size of India, and about the same as Saudi Arabia.
Be that as it may, what is most relevant to India in these musings by Trump is whether it gives any clues as to how he may affect India’s interests. If he is intensely focused on China, then that is good for India. If he wants to cut Europe down to size, and to exit the disastrous Ukraine war, India would benefit. If he can end the Gaza war, great.
Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, visited India recently. It is likely that the intent was to bully India into unilateral concessions before Trump takes over. I saw a new AI roadmap on Twitter that shows a) allies with whom the US will share technology (basically the Anglosphere + Japan + some of Western Europe), b) friends with which it will be arms-length (most of the world, including India), and then c) foes that will be sanctioned (eg. China).
Then there is the Damocles Sword of tariffs hanging over India (Trump claims India has the highest tariffs in the world and he threatens to retaliate in kind), and these will hurt.
At the moment, trying to divine Trump’s foreign policy is a tall order. We have to read the tea leaves or chicken entrails, or extrapolate from whatever crumbs of information we get. This is going to be a wild ride.
The AI-generated podcast on this essay courtesy NotebookLM from Google:
1100 words, 11 Jan 2025
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe -
A version of this essay was published by deccanherald.com at https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/h-1b-rape-gangs-and-fact-checks-when-narratives-boomerang-3351471
For students of media, the last week of December and the first week of January have been a treat: a rare occasion to watch narrative wars in real time.
The first manufactured narrative was the all-out attack on H1-B Indians. An impartial Martian, on observing this, would have concluded that if only the million Indians (mostly engineers) were sent back pronto to India, all of a sudden world peace would break out, or whatever heralds the Millennium for those who believe in all that.
Au contraire, it was a mountain being made out of a molehill, an astroturfed story that didn’t have legs. It is true that there is resentment in the US about illegal aliens, as the 10 million or so that Biden allowed in are going to be a burden on the country both socially and economically. Illegal immigrants are committing horrific crimes, for example setting a woman on fire in the New York subway.
The subway story got visibility for a day or two (according to Google Trends), but then all of a sudden the narrative switched to H1-B Indians taking jobs away from natives. With a heady cocktail of xenophobia, racism and religious bigotry, the story turned into a tirade against Hindus in particular, and how primitive India is, according to extreme right-wing MAGA Trumpies.
‘Manufacturing consent’ usually has somebody instigating it, and normally it is the US left wing: remember the ‘critical caste theory’ circus and accusations of casteism against two engineering managers at Cisco in California, that fell apart in court? Tablet magazine had a long read titled Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment on the ‘permission structure’ created by Democrats like Obama to manipulate public opinion: a proverbial Deep State operation
But this time the US right wing was also in the fray. So you have to look further for possible puppeteers. The usual suspects would be China and Pakistan, as those most keen to put India down. But it may be Britain, based on anecdotal evidence: the Economist magazine’s choice of Bangladesh as the “country of the year” while Hindus are being genocided there; and the Financial Times’ decidedly sour take on D Gukesh’s staggering chess world championship win.
Brits continue to be severely prejudiced against India; they left a divided subcontinent with lots of fault lines; and they cannot come to terms with their fall and India’s simultaneous rise. Whitehall also has disproportionate influence on the Anglosphere.
But the H1-B controversy boomeranged on them, as it embroiled Elon Musk, who had been on such a visa, as he stoutly defended the idea that the US needed to attract talented immigrants.
It is a bad idea to fight Elon Musk, because he has Trump’s ear, and more importantly, he has the megaphone of X (earlier Twitter). He demonstrated that by bringing up what the entire British establishment had swept under the carpet: the long-running industrial-scale ‘grooming’ and rape of young white girls by Pakistani gangs. The cases in towns like Rotherham and Rochdale and many others got some publicity earlier, but that has long receded in the public memory.
But Musk turned the tables by highlighting the appalling allegation that as many as 250,000 underage (some as young as 11), mostly working-class white girls, often residents of foster homes (where they were because of problems with their families), were systematically targeted mostly by Pakistani-origin Britons. The girls were gaslighted, raped, gang-raped, tortured, forced into prostitution, trafficked, mutilated, and, in some cases, killed. It is horrendous sexual exploitation.
Even more appallingly it appears that UK authorities (including police and politicians) and the media deliberately suppressed all this in the interests of “preserving communal harmony”, a euphemism for political correctness and fear of violence. And instead of calling the perpetrators “Pakistani Muslims”, the term used was “Asian”, which is misleading. It wasn’t Chinese, Japanese, or Indians doing it, it was almost 100% Pakistani Muslims.
It is even alleged that Keir Starmer of the Labor Party, the UK Prime Minister, may be implicated because he was Director of Public Prosecution (2008-2013). This is a major crisis. The Anglosphere was falling apart already with Trump’s obvious contempt for Trudeau, which may have been partly why the latter quit
On top of this, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was dispensing with ‘fact-checkers’ and going with community notes, a la X. This is an implicit admission that much of the narrative on Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram etc. has been fake.
2025 is off to a good start. Manufactured narratives are in headlong retreat.
Here’s the AI-generated podcast about this essay, by NotebookLM by Google:
770 words, 8 Jan 2025
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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On November 14th every year, I mourn my old friend Varsha Bhosle on her birth anniversary. This year she would have turned 69. Unfortunately she passed away in 2012, and she had ceased being her fiery public self a few years before that when she went into self-imposed exile from her column-writing.
When she and I used to write together on rediff.com we used to dream of an India that would “be somebody” (credit Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront). Today India is beginning to matter, “not in full measure” (there, obligatory nod to Nehru, because Varsha shared a birthday with him), but there are “green shoots”.
In Malayalam, we say vyazhavattom, or a revolution of Jupiter (which is twelve years), to denote a significant period of time in which epochal things may well have taken place. What has happened in the dozen years since Varsha left us? Let me take a general inventory.
Despite misgivings about the lack of movement on serious Hindu issues (such as the freeing of temples from the grip of bureaucrats and hostile politicians) it must be granted that Narendra Modi’s 10+ years have substantiated what Varsha and I honestly thought: that the only thing missing in India is leadership. (I said that in my homage to her in 2012.) Maybe, just maybe, Modi is India’s Lee Kwan Yew.
India is finally moving away from its dirigiste Nehruvian stupor, which was exacerbated, and extolled, by the Anglo-Mughalai hangers-on of Lutyens and Khan Market and JNU, and which resulted in an increasingly depressing relative decline compared to the rest of Asia and the rest of the world.
That India is beginning to matter, especially economically, and consequently in the military and diplomatic domains, should be seen as the result of bhageeratha prayatnam, especially since the Swamp in India (not the Military Industrial Complex per se but babudom) is so powerful. Not to mention the Media, and the Judiciary.
But there is so much more to be done. And Varsha would have pointed this out with her signature directness and humor: she could get away with that because she was She Who Must Be Obeyed, and imperious. She used to say things that I wouldn’t dare say: for instance, she called Antonia Maino “The Shroud of Turin”.
Varsha would have had a field day with the silly viswaguru meme, for instance. For, it is much better to learn from others, rather than have everybody mine our traditional knowledge systems and then go and patent them and sell the result back to us (eg. basmati, turmeric, yoga). India should be vishwa-vidyarthi. Learn, and, if possible, steal from everyone. (Ask China how to).
Similarly, sabka sath sabka vikas sounds like a good slogan, but let me give you Exhibit A: Lebanon. I will not elaborate, but you can go look it up for yourself.
On the other hand, as a warlike Maratha, she would have been happy to see an assertive India, one that upholds its national interests and does not bend to threats or blandishments (Exhibit B: Dalip Singh of the US trying to bully India into a sanctions regime against Russia re Ukraine).
I am not quite sure what she’d have made of the Covid fuss, but I’m pretty certain she’d have gone hammer and tongs against the imperialism of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and the propagandists for the same (Exhibit C: I guess I can’t name names, but there’s a famous and prize-winning doctor who was on every TV channel at the time deriding Indian vaccines).
I write this on 18th November, another painful anniversary, that of 13 Kumaon’s last stand, and here too India has made progress, standing up to China in Galwan, going eyeball-to-eyeball on the Indo-Tibetan frontier. But India has made only very slow progress in catching up on manufacturing, and for the wrong reasons (Exhibit D: a famous Indian-American economist).
Yet, there is good news. Indians as a whole are more optimistic about their country’s future. This may be because the economic center of gravity is shifting towards us, and because it appears the Anglosphere, China, Europe, and Wokeness are all declining at the same time, and India may well benefit from being the swing state between the West and China, both hegemons.
I wonder what Varsha would have had to say about this bitter-sweet stage in India’s trajectory. Alas, I can only conjecture.
Varsha left us at a point when, as in the Malayalam saying, swaram nallappozhe pattu nirthuka, that is, as a singer you should stop singing when your voice is still good. People will ask you why you stopped singing, not why you haven’t stopped singing. She lives on in our collective memory, fierce, powerful, a compelling voice. I miss her. May she live on, forever young.
800 words, Nov 18, 2024, posted 7 Jan, 2025
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A version of this essay has been published by Open Magazine at https://openthemagazine.com/columns/shadow-warrior/
I have been thinking about the ongoing vilification of Hindus in the media/social media for some time, e.g. the Economist magazine’s bizarre choice of Bangladesh as its country of the year while Bangladeshis are genociding Hindus. The simplest way I could account for it is as the very opposite of Milan Kundera’s acclaimed novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. There is some karma at play here, and it is very heavy.
The nation of immigrants, or to be more precise, its Deep State, is apparently turning against some of its most successful immigrants: law-abiding, tax-paying, docile ones. Irony, while others go on murderous sprees. In an insightful article in Open magazine, Amit Majmudar explains Why They Hate Us.
There has been an astonishing outpouring of pure hatred against Indians in general, and Hindus in particular, on the Internet in the wake of Sriram Krishnan’s seemingly accurate statement that country caps on H1-B visas are counterproductive. But this was merely a spike: for at least a year, Hindus have been vilified and name-called as “pajeets” and “street-shi**ers” on the net.
It is intriguing that in 2024, both Jews and Hindus have been targeted: Jews by the extreme left on Gaza, and Hindus by both the extreme left and the extreme right, on what is, basically, a non-issue. H1-B is a very minor issue compared to, say, the wars and the US national debt.
In fact, the H1-B brouhaha may well turn out to be a medium-term plus for India if it compels young Indians to seek employment at home. It will of course be a minus for the million-plus Indian-origin individuals who are in line for Green Cards, given the per-country cap of 9800 per year: mathematically, it will take them over a century to gain permanent residence.
From the host country’s point of view too, it is necessary to distinguish between generally desirable immigrants who contribute to the national wealth, as opposed to others who are a net burden on the exchequer, as I wrote recently.
On reflection I attribute the withering assault on Hindus to four things: racism, religious bigotry, economics and geo-economics, and narrative-building.
Presumably, all this had something to do with British colonial propaganda, which painted India as an utterly horrifying and pestilential country. Motivated and prejudiced imperialists ranging from James Mill to Winston Churchill were considered truthful historians. And it continues. I mentioned above the Economist magazine’s baffling decision to certify Bangladesh’s Islamist reign of terror.
In another instance, in the Financial Times, a British chess correspondent (a nonagenarian named Leonard Barden), was underwhelmed by D Gukesh’s staggering feat of becoming world champion at a teenager, and seemed to suggest that a) Gukesh won because his opponent Ding Liren of China was ill, b) Gukesh would have lost to either of two Americans, Caruana and Nakamura (both immigrants to the US, incidentally) if they had been in the fray. Barden, who probably remembers imperial times, also seemed to think poorly of the emerging Indian challenge in chess. These Anglosphere prejudices affect Americans.
I also have some personal experience of American racism, as someone who went to the US on a student visa, got his Green Card and stayed on for twenty years before returning to India. A factor in my return was alienation, and the feeling of being an unwanted outsider, engendered by casual racism, even though on the face of it, I had a great life: good job in Silicon Valley, nice house, dream car. Obama’s and Biden’s regimes did nothing to change that feeling. Trump’s second coming may not either.
Racism
In general, I find Americans to be very nice people, gregarious, friendly and thoughtful: I had a number of good friends when I lived there. But I also think that racism is inbuilt into the culture (after all, it has not been that long since Brown v. Board of Education, Bull Connor, Jim Crow, George Wallace; and earlier the Asian Exclusion Act).
There have been many acts of discrimination and racism against Hindus (although the term “Hindoo” [sic] included Sikhs and Muslims as well). See, e.g., the serious anti-Indian riots in Bellingham, WA in 1907 when “500 working class white men violently expelled Hindoo migrants from the city”. (both images courtesy @Hindoohistory on Twitter).
Another remarkable story was the saga of Bhagat Singh Dhind, a Sikh, who was granted US citizenship three times, only to have it be taken away twice. The first time, in 1913, it was because, although ‘Hindoos’ are Caucasians, they are not white. The second time, because the Supreme Court ruled in 1923 (US v Bhagat Singh Thind) that it would retrospectively cancel the citizenship of some 77 naturalized ‘Hindoos’ based on the 1917 Immigration Act.
The “Barred Zone” provision in that 1917 Act denied citizenship to Indians and Southeast Asians by making a large swathe of territory in Asia verboten. Curiously, Japanese, Koreans and some Chinese were exempt. Iranians, some Afghans (and some Baloch, if you look at the map closely) were deemed white. So far as I know, that is still the working definition of “white” in the US. (source: qz.com)
There were real human costs: there is the sad story of Vaishno Das Bagai, a San Francisco businessman, who was rendered stateless after denaturalization, and seeing no way out (he was a Ghadar Party activist against British rule in India) committed suicide.
Anyway, Dhind, evidently a persistent fellow, got his citizenship a third time because he had served in the US Army in World War I. Third time lucky: his citizenship was not revoked again.
After the Luce-Celler Act of 1946, 100 Indians and 100 Filipinos a year were allowed to immigrate to the US, with the prospect of future naturalization as US citizens. Race based limitations were replaced with a quota system by the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (aka McCarran-Walter Act), but it still retained significant caps based on national origin; that Act also introduced the H-1 category for skilled immigrants.
As a result of all this, the number of Indian immigrants to the US (e.g. nurses) started going up. The general euphoria surrounding the Civil Rights Movement also conferred a certain respect upon Gandhi, because Martin Luther King reportedly was inspired by his non-violent techniques of protest.
But that did not mean US blacks made common cause with Indians, because often unofficial ‘minority quotas’ were achieved by bringing in Indians and Chinese, which in effect meant blacks did not get the jobs they legitimately spilled their blood for.
I was one of those who went through the ‘labor certification’ process in the 1980s, when it was relatively easy to get a Green Card because there were very few Indians applying. The trickle became a flood after the Y2K issue when a lot of Indians arrived on H1-Bs.
I personally experienced mild forms of public racism, for instance from Latinos in New Jersey calling me a ‘dot-head’, to an unseen voice shouting “No Indians wanted here” when I was being shown apartments in NJ. This was around the time Navroze Mody was beaten to death in Hoboken, NJ by ‘Dotbusters’.
Later, there were whites asking if I were leaving the country when I walked out of a mall with a suitcase in Fremont, California. When I said yes, they expressed their approval.
Religious bigotry
The death of former US President Jimmy Carter at the age of 100 is a reminder of the power of fundamentalist Christians in the US. He was a faithful member of the Baptist Church, and in his eulogies, he was praised as a simple and decent man who upheld his Christian beliefs.
But the impression of Baptists, and American evangelists in general, in India is vastly different. They were implicated in the story of the fervid young American man who attempted to evangelize the famously hostile tribals of North Sentinel Island. They promptly shot him dead with arrows for his pains.
The result of Christian conversion in India has often been negative, contrary to pious platitudes. It has created severe fissures in society, turning family members against each other. The net result of conversion has been to create separatism.
Verrier Elwin, a missionary, converted large numbers of people in the Northeast of India, and the result has been calls for a separate Christian nation in that area. Sheikh Hasina, before being deposed, claimed that there were plans afoot for a Christian “Zo” nation, for Zo/Kuki/Mizo/Naga converted tribals, to be carved out of India and Bangladesh.
There are precedents, of course: the Christian nations of South Sudan (from Sudan) and East Timor (from Indonesia).
The Indian state of Manipur which has seen a lot of conversion recently, is also troubled, with armed Kuki Christian terrorists killing Hindu Meiteis. .
The bottom line is that the very precepts of Abrahamisms, of an exclusive god (or god-equivalent), an in-group out-group dichotomy, and the demonization of non-believers as the Other, are antithetical to the Hindu spirit of inclusivity and tolerance.
Hindumisia or Hindu hatred is rampant in the West, and increasingly on the Internet. The evolution of this hostility can be seen in a taxonomy of monotheistic religions:
* paleo-Abrahamisms: Zoroastrianism, Judaism
* meso-Abrahamisms: Christian, Islamic religions
* neo-Abrahamisms: Communism, Fascism, Nazism, DMK-ism, Ambedkarism, and so on
The arrival of Christians in India was far from peaceful; the historical record shows that the Jesuit Francis Xavier was proud of his idol-breaking. Claude Buchanan made up lurid tales about his alleged encounters with Hindu practices; William Bentinck and his alleged abolition of sati were lionized far beyond reason, because sati was a very isolated practice.
The continued deprecation of Hindus by Christians can be seen vividly in Kerala, where Christians are considerably more prosperous than Hindus (data from C I Issac, himself a Christian and a historian). Here’s an American of Kerala Christian descent hating on Hindus, perhaps unaware that “Thomas in India” is pure fiction, and that Francis Xavier, the patron saint of Christians in India, was a fanatic and a bigot. ‘Syrian’ Christians of Kerala who claim (without proof) to be ‘upper caste’ converts discriminate harshly against ‘lower-caste’ converts to this day. Hardly all ‘children of god’.
Incidentally, there may be other, political, considerations here. This woman is apparently married into the family of Sydney Blumenthal, which is part of the Clinton entourage, i.e. Democrat royalty. Tablet magazine discussed the ‘permission structure’ used by Democrats, especially Obama, to manufacture consent. Hindus may be getting ‘punished’ for supporting Trump.
I personally experienced Christian bigotry against Hindus at age 10 in Kerala. My classmate Philip (a local Malayali) told me casually: “All your gods are our devils”. Reflexively, I told him, “Your gods are our devils, too”, although no Hindu had ever told me Christian gods were devils.
Others have told me identical stories from places like Hyderabad. This meme likely came from Francis Xavier himself. It may well be taught to impressionable children as an article of faith in church catechism.
Francis Xavier invited the Inquisition to Goa, and many, if not most, of the victims were Hindus. Here’s an account from Empire of the Soul by Paul William Roberts:
“The palace in which these holy terrorists ensconced themselves was known locally as Vadlem Gor – the Big House. It became a symbol of fear… People in the street often heard screams of agony piercing the night… Children were flogged and slowly dismembered in front of their parents, whose eyelids had been sliced off to make sure they missed nothing. Extremities were amputated carefully, so that a person would remain conscious even when all that remained was a torso and head. Male genitalia were removed and burned in front of wives, breasts hacked off and vaginas penetrated by swords while husbands were forced to watch”.
Below is a tweet by another American presumably suffused with Christian compassion. I am reminded of a Kerala Christian woman repeatedly trying to convert a Scheduled Caste friend, using similar memes denigrating Kali. Finally, my friend got fed up and asked her: “You worship the mutilated corpse of a dead Arab stuck on a stick. And that’s better?”. Her jaw dropped, and she blubbered: “But… but, that’s a metaphor”. My friend retorted: “Then realize that Kali is a metaphor too”. Not much self-awareness on the part of the would-be converter.
Therefore, the religion factor, of Hindus being the ultimate Other, cannot be overstated. There is basically no way to reconcile the Hindu world view with the Christian. Dharma is incompatible with Abrahamisms/Semitisms. And no, it’s not Jimmy Carter who’s relevant, it’s Francis Xavier.
Economics and Geo-economics
There is a serious issue with the engineering community in the US, which has nothing to do with the H1-B program. Engineers have been unable to unite, create a cartel, keep their numbers low and value to the consumer high, and bargain to keep salaries high. This is a signal failure on the part of the US engineers, and blaming others isn’t going to solve the problem.
Consider, in contrast, doctors (and to a lesser extent, nurses). They keep their numbers very low, successfully portray their contribution to society as very high, and keep out foreign doctors as much as possible: the result is that their salaries are astronomical (a recent Medscape survey suggests that the top-earning specialty, Orthopedics, earns an average of $568,000 a year. And that’s the average).
In contrast, according to Forbes in 2023 the highest-paid engineering specialty, Petroleum Engineering, earned only $145,000, and in fact wages had actually declined. Even much-ballyhooed software engineers ($103,000 ) and AI engineers ($128,000) make very little. And lest you think H1-B depresses wages, there are almost no H1-B petroleum engineers. The bottom line is that engineering is not a high-income occupation in the US. Why? No syndicate.
How about nurses? According to a report, Nurse Anesthetists make an average of $214,000.
And there are plenty of Indian-origin doctors and nurses in the US. Why does this not create a hue-and-cry? The answer is two-fold: one, the scarcity value, and two, those in medicine have created a narrative, and the public has bought it, that their services are so valuable that the nation must spend 20% of its GDP on what is, by objective measures, pretty poor outcomes in health: ranking tenth out of 10 in high-income countries, at very high cost.
There have been grumbles about the helplessness of American engineers for years: I remember forty years ago some guy whose name I forget constantly complaining in the IEEE’s email groups about immigrant engineers enabling employers to lower the salaries they pay.
In addition, engineers regularly go through boom-and-bust cycles. They have no leverage. I remember after a boom period in the 1970s, unemployed aerospace engineers were driving taxis. If there is another ‘AI winter’, then we’ll find unemployed AI engineers on the street as well, despite massive demand right now.
It is true that there may be subtle intricacies, too. The US companies that contract out their positions to H1-B engineers may well be paying prevailing wages, say $60 an hour. But there are middlemen: big IT services companies who take on the contracts, and provide ‘body-shopping’ services. They may well be severely underpaying the actual engineers at only, say, $35 an hour, in a bizarre revivification of ‘indentured labor’, i.e. wage slavery. It is difficult for those on H1–Bs to change employers, so they are stuck.
There is a larger geo-economic angle as well. The US likes being the top dog in GDP, as it has been since 1945. Unfortunately, through the fecklessness of all Presidents from Nixon onwards, they have somehow allowed China to ascend to a strong #2 position. At this point, I suspect the Deep State has concluded that it would be impossible to dislodge China, given its manufacturing clout.
I wrote a year ago that a condominium with China may well be the best Plan B for the US. Let us consider what has happened to the other countries that were at the top of the economic pyramid: Germany and Japan.
The 1985 Plaza Accord whereby the US dollar was depreciated led to a Lost Decade for Japan, which has turned into a Lost Four Decades; that country which was booming in the 1980s lost, and never regained its momentum.
Germany was doing pretty well until the Ukraine War and the arrival of the Electric Vehicle boom. But at this point, it has more or less lost its machine tools business, its automobile business; add its social and political views, and its future looks grim.
If this is what has happened to #3 and #4, we can expect that an aspiring #3, namely India, will face a concerted effort to ruin it. It is in the interests of both the US and China to suppress a potential competitor, especially when there is the tiresome mantra of “India is the fastest growing large economy in the world”.
The Bangladesh coup, which benefits both the US and China by creating a massive new war front on India’s East, is therefore possibly the result of a tacit collusion between the Deep State and the CCP. Similarly, the sudden spike in anti-Hindu rhetoric and this H1-B hoo-haa may well be financed by Xinhua, and it clearly benefits the Democrats, as it has driven a wedge between Christian fundamentalist MAGA types and other Trump supporters. It also puts the Indian-origin and/or Hindu members of Trump’s team on notice: they better self-censor.
Even immigrant Elon Musk, not to mention Vivek Ramaswamy, Kash Patel, Jay Bhattacharyya, and the non-Indian Hindu Tulsi Gabbard, are all in the firing line of the Deep State. Even though the IEEE has been moaning about depressed engineering salaries for half a century, it is curious that this became a cause celebre just days before Trump’s accession to the Presidency.
Narrative-building
There was a sobering incident in New York’s subways on December 22nd, when a woman, now identified as 61 year old Debrina Kawam, was set on fire by an illegal immigrant, Sebastian Zapeta, from Guatemala, who had been deported earlier but came back to the US. I saw a video purportedly of her burning to death, shockingly without screaming, rolling on the ground to douse the flames, or anything else. She just stood and burned, as Zapeta fanned the flames.
A New York City subway policeman walked by. The people who were busy capturing the footage on their smartphones did not intervene or help. It reminded me of Kitty Genovese, a 28 year old woman who was raped and stabbed to death on March 13, 1964, in full view of onlookers in the apartment block where she lived in Queens, New York. Nobody bothered to intervene as she died, screaming.
It is really odd when people refuse to get involved in helping a dying person. There’s something morally wrong here, and it should have been worth exploring in the very articulate media.
Yes, Debrina Kawam’s baffling story got widespread airplay immediately after it happened, but it died surprisingly quickly. Here’s the Google Trends index of interest in that story.
The big new story was H1-B, which shot up and displaced the subway murder story. Note the respective timelines: the Google Trends below is about H1-B. It is hard to believe this was an organic shift. It was “manufacturing consent” with placement aforethought.
I wrote recently about how narratives are created out of thin air with the intent of manufacturing consent. The abrupt U-turn on Sheikh Hasina was one of the examples. Now the neat and abrupt switch from the NYC subway burning-alive also points to something that is deliberately planted to divert attention away from inconvenient questions.
Let us now see how the H1-B narrative survives the New Orleans story of the son of immigrants, ex-soldier, and ISIS member driving a truck and ploughing into a New Year crowd, killing many. Of course, the narrative will carefully not say anything rude about the religion of the alleged perpetrator, because there will be… consequences.
Conclusion
The furious drama and narrative about H1-B will subside soon; ironically, it may well be to the benefit of the Indian nation if this kind of propaganda reduces the attractiveness of the US for talented would-be Indian immigrants, who might stay on at home and build innovative companies. Canada and Britain have already ceased to be desired destinations.
However, the underlying issues of racism, religious bigotry, economic warfare and astroturfed narrative are real and will not go away. These are danger signals about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for Indian migrants to the US, and that’s a sad start to 2025.
3450 words, Jan 2, 2025
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-comrade-kirillov-and-the-art-of-whistleblowing-13846569.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
One of the great Raja Rao’s slighter works is called Comrade Kirillov: it is what Graham Greene would have called an ‘entertainment’, as opposed to the ‘novels’ he wrote on themes of some gravity. I was reminded of the title in an altogether inappropriate way when I read of the assassination of General Kirillov in Moscow, allegedly by Ukrainian secret agents.
Then I read of the tragic suicide of Suchir Balaji, a whistleblower and former employee at OpenAI, surely the most glamorous company in Silicon Valley these days.
There is a thread here: it is not good for your health if you expose certain people or certain companies. You will pay a price.
You may just be minding your own business, but you happen to be in the way. This is what happened to Indian nuclear and space scientists over the last few decades. Homi Bhabha’s plane crashed in the Swiss Alps. Vikram Sarabhai died mysteriously at Halcyon Castle, Trivandrum, close to the space center that now bears his name.
Dozens of lesser-known Indian space and nuclear scientists and engineers died too, inexplicably. The same thing happened to Iranian nuclear scientists. Nambi Narayanan was lucky to escape with his life (“Who killed the ISRO’s cryogenic engine?”), though his career and reputation were ruined.
My friend Dewang Mehta of NASSCOM died quite suddenly too. I wrote a tribute to him years ago, “The man who knew marketing”. In hindsight, I think he was a friend, not just an acquaintance. I remember some very human details about him: eg. he asked a mutual friend to introduce eligible women to him, just as I did. But I digress: I believe Dewang was as important to the Indian IT story as Bhabha and Sarabhai to nuclear and space: they made us believe, and we rose to the occasion.
Then there was Lal Bahadur Shastri. The circumstances of his sudden death remain murky.
And Sunanda Pushkar, Shashi Tharoor’s wife, whom I was following on Twitter in real time. One night, she promised to make some startling revelations the next morning, presumably about dubious dealings in Dubai by the D Company. And lo! she was dead the next morning.
It is hard not to think that there is a pattern. Not only here, but in the trail of dead bodies that follows the Clinton dynasty around. The Obama chef who drowned. The whistleblowing CIA and FBI agents who… just died. The list is long. People who are inconvenient end up in body bags. I remember reading that when Sarabhai died, his family did not even ask for a post-mortem.
There are two broad patterns: geo-political assassinations and those for commercial reasons.
In Kirillov’s case, it was probably both.
General Kirillov claimed that there were bio-labs in Ukraine, etc. where the Deep State was cooking up banned biological weapons, in an eerie echo of Peter Daszcak’s Ecohealth Alliance and Anthony Fauci’s NIAID allegedly aiding and abetting prohibited gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He claimed biological crises were manufactured on demand to generate profits and increase government control. Presumably he opened a can of worms that the Deep State and Big Pharma didn’t want opened. Off with his head!
There is the ‘conspiracy theory’ that the entire COVID-19 circus was a bioweapons project that went awry. It was intended to depopulate the world, especially of black and brown people, to which the IITD paper (that was forcibly withdrawn) alludes: the genes that seemed to have been inserted into the original virus were from India, Southeast Asia, and Kenya, if I remember right. Of course, the powers that be do not want shocking stuff like this to come out.
It is straightforward to make it a false-flag operation with the Ukrainian SBU secret service to provide plausible deniability: much like the bombing of the NordStream pipeline. So exit, stage left, for Kirillov. As Sherlock Holmes might have said, “Follow the money”, or words to that effect. Cui bono?
I really don’t mean to trivialize human suffering, but to focus on the shadowy forces that organize and execute targeted assassinations. In particular, decapitation strikes can be devastating. In our own history, the loss of Hemachandra Vikramaditya in the Second Battle of Panipat, in 1526, to a stray arrow that hit him in the eye, was a point of inflexion.
Similarly, at the Battle of Talikota in 1565, the capture and beheading of the aged Ramaraya by his own troops that had gone rogue turned the winning position of the Vijayanagar Empire into a headlong rout and obliteration for the city-state.
The assassination of Ahmed Shah Masoud, the Commander of the Northern Alliance, with a bomb hidden in a news camera, turned the tide in Afghanistan in 2001. The American assassination of Qasem Soleimani of Iran in 2020 led to a significant erosion of Iran’s position, for example in Syria.
The silencing of whistle-blowers has, alas, become all too common. There were the allegations about Karen Silkwood in 1974, who died in a mysterious car crash as she was driving to meet a NYTimes reporter regarding problems at a plutonium processing plant run by Kerr-McGhee in Oklahoma.
In 2003, David Kelly, a British weapons inspector who claimed there were indeed no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, was found dead. The verdict was suicide.
In 2015, Alberto Nisman, an Argentine prosecutor known for his work on terrorism cases, was found dead days after he accused Iran of involvement in a car-bombing on a Jewish center.
In March 2024, John Barnett, a former Boeing employee, was found dead from a gunshot wound in his truck, just before he was scheduled to testify in a whistleblower lawsuit. There was also Joshua Dean, who died of a strange infection in May 2024, shortly after Barnett’s death. He worked for a company supplying parts to Boeing.
In November 2024, Suchir Balaji, all of 26 years old, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment. In October, he had made allegations about OpenAI violating copyright laws.
The bottom line: if you know something, just keep quiet about it. If you are a person of substance, take no risks, and be paranoid about your security. It’s a pretty nasty world out there.
The AI-generated podcast about this essay courtesy Google NotebookLM:
1050 words, 19 Dec 2024
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A version of this essay was published by the Deccan Herald at https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/the-depressing-regularity-of-regime-change-operations-3318109
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Imagine this scenario: In a certain country, there is someone in power who is not liked by one section of the population. Some global powers support this person; others support the opposition. One fine day there is a coup d’etat, and this person is overthrown and exiled. The opposition takes over amidst scenes of jubilation.
Pliant media condemns the former ruler and welcomes the new regime. “Democracy”, they chant.
But then shortly thereafter, darker things come to the fore. There are atrocities against certain sections of the population. These may be in violation of the norms of civilized society, and may include rapes, abductions, looting, murders, destruction, ethnic cleansing, and so on. In general, chaos reigns and human suffering is widespread.
Bangladesh, did you say? Yes, but I was also thinking of Syria. And then this is a scenario that plays out with depressing, even metronomic, regularity in many other parts of the world. To name a few examples, there were Iraq, Libya, Iran, Afghanistan; and to look outside West Asia, there were Chile, Congo, Guatemala, South Vietnam, Brazil, Ethiopia, Yemen, Cambodia, Laos, Tibet, to name just a few.
Yes, it’s not just the Americans, but also the Soviets/Russians and the Chinese that have indulged in overthrowing regimes they didn’t like. And usually with similar after-effects.
It appears that there is a simple playbook. Arm and support particular groups friendly to you or your ideology, get them to overthrow the person you don’t like, and then provide covering propaganda fire for the people you installed. This is despite the inevitable mayhem and revenge that the latter inflict on their erstwhile foes as well as the collateral damage on innocent bystanders.
It is safe to say that Ukraine’s regime-change, infamously attributed to an American diplomat, also did not turn out well for that nation’s civilians.
It’s not clear if these are unintended consequences, or whether the instigators truly don’t care about the damage inflicted on civilian populations. Suffice to say that there are losers at the end of the day, especially religious and ethnic minorities.
The reports coming out of Bangladesh about the atrocities being committed on Hindus there are horrendous. In effect, the Hindu population looks like it is on the way to being entirely wiped out, which was also the experience in Afghanistan after the latest Taliban takeover. The tragedy is that the rest of the world – including India – does not seem to care. Nor do such entities as the United Nations, nor the grandly-named US Council on International Religious Freedom.
In Syria, if there are any Syrian Orthodox Christians left (they are a community that predates the Vatican, has its liturgy in Aramaic, and owes its allegiance to the Patriarch of Antioch, not the Pope) they are surely bearing the brunt of the takeover by radical Islamists. Their forebears are said to have arrived in India around 345 CE, and some people in Kerala still call themselves “Syrian Christians”.
In addition, there are populations such as the Alawite sect of Islam, and other ancient groups such as Kurds and Druze either in Syria or in surrounding areas. The Kurds have been fighting for an independent homeland for a long time; the Druze inhabit border areas in Lebanon and have been generally neutral in the many wars there. Given the experiences of another ancient group, the Yazidi, when radicals attacked them ten years ago, things may not look so good for these groups either.
The net take-away is that regime-change induced from outside is generally a bad idea for any nation, and can lead to significant human misery. India would be wise to take this lesson to heart, because there is reason to believe there are regime-change operations mounted by, among others, an infamous financier. There is large-scale online propaganda against India, and against Hindus, as well as continuous unrest, large and small (see Manipur).
These efforts are supported by certain embedded assets inside the country: the “barbarians within” as in historian Will Durant’s words: “...civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.” (The Story of Civilization: Part 1, Our Oriental Heritage, pp 452, Simon and Shuster, New York, 1952)
If there is one strategic position India urgently needs to adopt, that would be to anticipate, forestall and thwart these attempts at regime change. They reflect not the will of the people, but malign interests.
760 words, 12 Dec 2024
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A version of this essay was published by deccanherald.com at https://www.deccanherald.com//opinion/border-closing-the-trumpian-shift-is-here-3279841
I am starting, by invitation, a new monthly column ‘Abroad at Home’ in print at the Deccan Herald newspaper.
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Illegal immigration is now a core concern in many western countries, and was one of the factors that propelled Donald Trump to his thumping victory in the US Presidential election. True to form, Trump announced on Monday that he would appoint Tom Homan, a strong proponent of leak-proof borders, as his ‘border czar’.
Then there’s Stephen Miller, designated deputy Chief of Staff, a known hawk about both legal and illegal immigration. The two of them defended things like family separation, including in a Congressional hearing.
Trump has vowed to deport illegal aliens on an unprecedented scale, hire thousands of border agents, and even invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 against drug cartels and criminal gangs to expel them without a court hearing.
Especially after recurring episodes of rioting, arson and loot in European capitals, and pro-Palestine protests in the recent past, this may be popular among the US public considering that some 11 million illegal migrants simply walked into the US under Biden.
There is another group, though: legal immigrants who have been in limbo for years, sometimes decades, in the bowels of the immigration system. As is well known, a lot of them are Indian-origin people, especially engineers, who went to the US on H1-B work visas.
In earlier times (before the 1999 Y2k scare, that is), there were fewer Indians in the US: most of them, like me, had come on student visas, and opted to stay on to work. Within a year or two, we went through a process called Labor Certification which in effect said that we were not displacing a US citizen of equivalent qualifications, and then we got a Green Card.
The catch is that there is a limit to the number of Green Cards (675,000 a year) of which 140,000 are for the employment-related category. In 1990, with a new Immigration Act, a per-country cap of 7% was imposed, which means that just 9,800 work-related Green Cards are available per year per country, including India.
There are also sub-categories, such as ‘persons of extraordinary merit’, those with advanced degrees and abilities, ‘skilled workers’, ‘professional workers’, and religious workers, so it does get quite complicated.
The net result is that post-1990 Indian immigrants now face very long waits, some say as much as 100 years. Meanwhile, applicants from other countries with shorter waiting lists are able to become permanent residents much quicker.
This leads to, I am sorry to say, a sort of indentured labor for Indians on H-1B visas. In a modern twist on the old system where the British took hundreds of thousands of Indians to places like the West Indies and East Africa, today they are in trisanku mode where they have no clarity when, and if, they will get permanent residency. The conditions on their visas sometimes prevent them from changing employers so that they are, in effect, stuck.
A friend’s son in Silicon Valley exemplifies this problem. He has been awaiting his Green Card for thirteen years, and he is now wondering if he will have to go for Plan B: which is to have his 10 year-old US-born, and thus citizen, son sponsor him when he becomes an adult!
Alas, that avenue may close, because there is speculation that the Trump administration wants to do away with the ‘birthright-citizenship’ clause, because, among other things, it is leading to ‘birth-tourism’ with heavily pregnant foreigners coming to the US just to deliver their babies.
The 14th Amendment, 1868, makes any child born in the US eligible for citizenship. There is the possibility that a rider will be attached to this: that only the children of citizens, or of Green Card holders, will be thus eligible.
On the other hand, Trump might make a distinction between two types of immigrants – let us call them ‘desirable' and ‘undesirable’ – and make exceptions for the former. They are net contributors to the US economy (an Economist study suggests that certain nationalities of immigrants are such); others are a net burden on the State.
Indian-Americans, who are the best-educated and highest-earning of all ethnic communities in the US, could fairly claim to be in the former category. Indians are also founders of the largest number of unicorns in the US.
On the other hand, if life becomes difficult for them, they may start a ‘reverse brain-drain’ back to India. That would not be, all things considered, such a bad thing either. India should make them welcome, as Taiwan did with astonishing results, such as pre-eminence in chipmaking.
775 words, 12 Nov 2024
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A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/opinion-what-makes-trump-a-better-candidate-for-india-and-world-13831800.html
An AI-generated (courtesy notebookLM.google.com) podcast based on this essay is here:
In all humility, I accept that my endorsement of Donald Trump for the office of POTUS doesn’t make a difference, but I think it’s important for me to articulate why I think Trump is the better choice for all concerned.
On the one hand, there are the purely objective factors: economic policies, foreign policy, immigration, and so on. On the other hand, there are the subjective factors: who I personally think is good for the US and for India, the only two countries, lets’ face it, that I care about.
The subjective factors are the ones that matter, I suspect, and my views are shaped by my own personal history. I grew up in an India that looked up to America; many houses had framed photos on their walls that showed a young John Kennedy walking with Nehru in the Rose Garden of the White House; as a food-deficit country we awaited the PL-480 shipments of foodgrains, so much so that cornflour in Malayalam is called ‘American maavu’ or flour.
I remember as a child when Marilyn Monroe died, and John Kennedy, and I listened to the Voice of America coming in on shortwave radio from, I think, Mauritius; I went to the nearby US Information Center to see an exhibit of moon rocks; my father’s PhD thesis was on John Steinbeck; I read SPAN magazine that showed a sanitized picture of life in the US that was aspirational.
In college, I devoured information about America, reading Time and Newsweek magazines. I went to the US consulate in Chennai to use the library; and my beloved professor Anthony Reddy, seeing our collective obsession with the US, referred to it as “God’s own country” (this was before Amitabh Kant as tourism secretary propagated that moniker for Kerala, and in any case I believed that my two homes – Kerala and California – were indeed God’s own countries, at least before systematic rot set in).
America permeated our consciousness. Those were the days before TV, and so American soap operas were not yet available in India, but American films were, and I still remember watching many of them. It was our Saturday ritual in the open-air theater. Do I remember many of them? No, but a few, like “Guns of Navarone”, “Death Wish”, still stand out. No, not exactly highbrow, but they left an impression. So did reading William Faulkner, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, Tennessee Williams, and even “The Exorcist”.
Nixon and Kissinger and their decision to send the 7th Fleet into the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India in 1971, and the shenanigans of Watergate, plus their coverup of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, gave me the impression that Republicans were not to be trusted and that they were the bad guys, as compared to the Democrats: I remembered the two Kennedy assassinations.
Taking the GRE and GMAT, and then going to grad school on scholarship was an achievement, especially because in those days relatively few from India were able to go to the US. Then working at Bell Labs, where I was active in the anti-apartheid movement there that asked AT&T to withdraw from any company doing business in South Africa. It was a just and proper position.
My friends in that effort were all, I suspect, Democrats, and when I was moving to California, they advised me to go Berkeley rather than Stanford, as I had been admitted to both. I didn’t, which was probably a good thing, as I found later that the People’s Republic of Berkeley, as it is derisively called in the Bay Area, was not that much to my taste anyway.
I was, however, left- and Democrat-leaning for years, and I used to even subscribe to the New York Times and Nation magazine. When I left for California, though, one of my friends at Bell Labs correctly predicted that I’d eventually prefer the Wall Street Journal. I became a member of Greenpeace, and I even joined the Green Party of California. In other words, I was pretty much like most of the other Indian-origin people in Silicon Valley. We thought immigrant rights were much more likely to be supported by Democrats; and also the rights of non-whites.
As for presidents, I sort of endured Reagan, whom I didn’t like because of what I thought was his over-rehearsed lines. I was sympathetic to Carter. I don’t remember much about Bush senior and junior, despite the post-9/11 exertions. Then I quite liked Clinton’s affable, avuncular charm, until, that is, I learned more about him. Obama, however, caused my political antennae to perk up: I thought he was sinister.
Somehow, along the way, I stopped being attracted to what I later realized was woke-dom. I began to see that the Republicans, despite their (what I had earlier dismissed as) somewhat primitive, troglodyte sentiments, were actually better for the US and in fact for the world. Clinton-era fossils like Madeleine Albright and Robin Raphel made me cringe.
Robin Raphel’s infamous rejection of the Instrument of Accession of Jammu-Kashmir in 1993, and her memorable characterization of Pakistan as a “modern, model, moderate Islamic nation” were landmarks in tone-deaf behavior by a US official. She was later investigated by the FBI in a counterintelligence operation on suspicion of having mishandled classified information and if I remember right, even of having passed some of this to other countries that need not be named.
Let us note that the US Council on International Religious Freedom, set up during the Clinton era, has been singularly focused on bashing and punishing India for imaginary offenses against religious freedom. It also never has a practicing Hindu as a Commissioner, only HINOs.
The USCIRF is a front organization for pushing a US agenda, in this case, evangelism. In that, it reminds me of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, signed under Johnson (Democrat), entered into force under Nixon (Republican), and intended almost entirely to prevent India from becoming a nuclear weapons power.
In the meantime, I had returned to India, and therefore the Indian perspective began to matter a lot more to me. Later, Clinton’s hyphenated 2000 visit to India and Pakistan (where he arrived in an unmarked plane immediately after Musharaff’s coup), and his lectures to India soured me even further on the intentions and objectives of Democrats.
It was during the George W Bush era, in 2005, that Modi became the only person ever to be denied a visa on the grounds of conducting “particularly severe violations of religious freedom” under section 212(a)(2)(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Yes, literally the only person ever. Dubya was so embattled and so much in over his head that it is not clear if it was a policy decision or a bureaucratic decision.
It is quite curious that this clause is not applied today to Mohammed Yunus who is not a head of state, but only ‘Chief Advisor to the Interim Government’ of Bangladesh. What it suggests, as many have noted, is that the Bangladesh regime-change operation was blessed by Biden and Harris and Deep State, and Yunus may be an “asset” they have long cultivated. Apparently a pogrom against Hindus does not constitute a “severe violation of religious freedom”.
Obama was notable in his dislike of India. Interestingly, at a young age when many American college students travel to India, Obama had instead gone to… Pakistan. He did make two visits to India as President, including as a Republic Day guest, but I could not shake the impression that this was done more as a marketing event than something with substance.
It was quite evident that Hillary Clinton was a particularly unappealing candidate, and that was why I thought that Trump would win in 2016, despite having, well, several character flaws. With Biden in 2020, I thought Trump was again the better candidate, both for the US and for India. In the latter’s case it was the Biden Amendment that delayed India’s cryogenic engine by 20 years.
Arvind Kumar suggests that Biden has been implicated in supporting many questionable rulers such as Pol Pot and Idi Amin, and with his Democrat friends has created havoc all over the place. His and Harris’ policies have not been positive for India: for example the downgrading of the Quad, or the rhetoric to bully India into toeing the US line on Ukraine and sanctions on Russia.
The completely unnecessary Ukraine war, based on an Atlanticist Cold War-era fantasy pushed by the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski, has merely succeeded in pushing Russia into China’s arms. And Biden has handled other wars badly too: the headlong withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the schizophrenic reaction to the Gaza war. There is every chance that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan will be mishandled too.
Biden’s proxy war on India, waged through Canada’s Justin Trudeau, using dangerous secessionist Khalistanis as a weapon, suggests that the Democrats do not believe in allies, only in vassals. The regime change in Bangladesh, the games played with Pakistan, and the evisceration of the Quad, only emphasize that the Deep State is capricious and unpredictable.
In the meantime, the California that I knew and loved is no more. It is no longer possible to stroll through downtown San Francisco, or park your car in the city, because crime and drug usage have become universal and ubiquitous, mostly thanks to woke Democratic governance. One of the greatest and most beautiful cities in the world is now becoming unlivable.
If this is what a Kamala Harris presidency would perpetuate, I believe it is bad for all concerned. Walter Russel Mead has invoked a crisis in leadership in America, and we have seen this aplenty during the Biden presidency, especially as the man himself exhibits signs of severe cognitive decline.
In the background, there is what appears to be the serious infiltration of Chinese agents into the echelons of US power (remember the advisor to the governor of New York?) and even of Iranian agents in high positions accused of passing Israeli plans to Iran.
Furthermore, the open and extremely generous support for Harris by Alex Soros, son of George Soros, is a red flag. Soros the elder had promised to spend billions of dollars to tackle “the spread of nationalism” (translation: regime change operations against the likes of India’s duly elected government); Alex is now engaged to Huma Abedin, a Pakistani-born woman who was earlier Hillary Clinton’s conscience-keeper and probably her handler.
Then there are the issues of the mishandled Covid crisis, with Anthony Fauci essentially toeing the Big Pharma line; the hard-to-believe invasion of the US by millions of immigrants, many of whom are criminals. Mark Zuckerberg recounted how Big Tech was weaponized to interfere in elections and to generally push a particular point of view to gaslight and manufacture consent.
And finally, Kamala Harris herself. I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area when she began her ascent, which was not necessarily because of merit, but because of friends in high places. I also do not remember her ever emphasizing her Indian roots: she always projected herself as a black person. This deliberate deracination may be clever electorally but it certainly does not endear her to me, nor does it sound particularly ethical on her part. (Note: Conversely, 2020 Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren claims to have Native American ancestry).
I was also pained by the fact that Kamala Harris did not attend the White House Diwali 2024 celebration, which I consider a slap on the faces of all the Hindu-Americans who have been supporting her because of her Hindu ancestry. Harris adds insult to injury by attempting, as leftists do in India, to detach Diwali from its Hindu roots, as Utpal Kumar notes.
On the other hand, Trump said something very statesmanlike, and the contrast is telling. Not only is he standing up for the rights of minority Hindus, he’s also saying that he will handle Bangladesh very differently, and that what Indians perceive as all-around anti-India actions by the Deep State will be curtailed. Trump is acknowledging that Modi’s signal of patching up with Xi at BRICS has been heard. This is a statement of some significance, geopolitics-wise.
I am also afraid that Harris has not covered herself in glory as a woman of intellect or one who has a vision of any kind. To be honest, she has come across as the Dan Quayle of our time, in other words “impeachment insurance” for Biden. I remember how her entire 2020 Presidential campaign was destroyed in under two minutes by Tulsi Gabbard on a debate stage. Harris looked like a deer caught in the headlights, quite in the manner of Dan Quayle or Rahul Gandhi.
Worse than Harris’ substance (such as it is) is her style. The incessant “unburdened by the past” slogan began to sound trite after about the fiftieth time. Can she hold a coherent argument without her teleprompter? How is she going to stand up to tough world leaders? Furthermore, her laugh no longer sounds funny. It actually sounds… creepy.
Compared to this litany of everything that has gone wrong with the Biden/Harris regime (which I suspect constitutes a kakistocracy), Trump did a good job in keeping out of wars, knocking heads together to get West Asian powers to a semblance of cooperation with the Abraham Accords, and fending off China’s attempts to dominate the world economically/militarily. The fact that he did not go to war is possibly the biggest reason that the Deep State despises him.
Admittedly, Trump is crude, a loudmouth and a braggart. But beyond the surface, his political instincts and policies were not bad: for instance, demanding that rich European nations must pay their fair share of the expenses for the military protection offered by NATO.
The interesting fact that the strongly Democratic Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have refused to endorse Harris (even though the usual suspects New York Times and The Economist have done so) suggests that despite the tsunami of disinformation and fake news via social media and a pliant Big Tech, the sentiment on the ground is that Trump has gained.
And then I came across a substack from a young man, Rishi Jaitly, a life-long activist Democrat, who is now wondering if the party that he cherished (he is a particular fan of Obama) is now living up to its advertised trajectory. I’d say no, and I suspect he’ll come to the same conclusion. That party has been in terminal decline for some time.
Now to move on to a purely objective perspective, choosing between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris involves evaluating their contrasting policies, leadership styles, and the implications of their potential presidencies. Here are key reasons some voters might prefer Trump over Harris:
Economic Policies
- Tax Cuts and Deregulation: Trump's promises include significant tax cuts, particularly benefiting corporations and wealthy individuals, which supporters argue stimulates economic growth. His approach emphasizes deregulation, which many believe fosters a more favorable business environment, although there is fear of rampant Big Business.
- Manufacturing Jobs: Trump has focused on reviving American manufacturing through tariffs on imports and incentives for domestic production. This strategy appeals to working-class voters who feel left behind by globalization. However, it remains to be seen if manufacturing jobs will in fact return, given supply chain constraints and loss of competency, especially in technician-level skills.
Immigration and Law Enforcement
- Strict Immigration Policies: One of the biggest concerns about Harris has been her mishandling, as border czar, of illegal immigration. While law-abiding and gainfully employed Indian immigrants wait for decades for green cards, illegal and even criminal aliens simply walk in and get everything, including the right to vote. Trump advocates for stringent immigration controls, appealing to voters concerned about border security and the perceived impact of immigration on jobs and public safety. His tough stance resonates with those who prioritize law enforcement and national security.
- Support for Law Enforcement: Trump's rhetoric often emphasizes strong support for police and law enforcement agencies, which can attract voters who prioritize safety and crime reduction. All the ‘Defund the Police’ rhetoric has boomeranged on the wokes.
Social Issues
- Conservative Values: Many Trump supporters appreciate his conservative stance on social issues, including opposition to abortion and support for traditional family values. This alignment with conservative ideologies can be a decisive factor for voters who prioritize these issues. However, some of this may veer into dangerous territory as racism.
- Populist Appeal: Trump's persona as an outsider challenging the political establishment resonates with many voters who feel disillusioned by traditional politicians. His direct communication style and willingness to confront political norms attract those seeking change.
Leadership Style
- Decisive Leadership: Supporters often view Trump as a decisive leader who takes bold actions. His approach to governance is seen as straightforward compared to Harris's more cautious style, which some may perceive as indecisive or dilly-dallying.
- Economic Performance: Some voters recall economic indicators during Trump's presidency—such as low unemployment rates before the pandemic—as evidence of effective leadership, contributing to their support despite controversies surrounding his administration.
- The Team: There are people such as J D Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are prominent in the campaign; there seems to be a well-thought-out program and plan that is waiting to be executed.
Foreign Policy
- America First: While there are potential irritants to allies in a MAGA (Make America Great Again) approach that prioritizes US interests, it is a lot more sensible than what Democrats offer: something that was lampooned by Kissinger as: “It is dangerous to be America’s enemy, but fatal to be its friend”. An interest-based (“there are permanent interests, no permanent friends”) foreign policy is not capricious, unlike an ideology-based approach that Biden has apparently followed in relation to Russia.
- Fortress America: There is the danger that Trump may turn his back on the rest of the world (America has done this navel-gazing periodically in the past). Given rapid globalization and the relative decline of the US, this may end up being counterproductive.
- Foreign Wars: Trump has promised to end the Ukraine war; he may be able to bring all parties to the table in Gaza and avoid an Iran-Israel all-out war; and he might put enough pressure on China through other means to avoid a disastrous war over Taiwan.
While both candidates present distinct visions for America's future, Trump's appeal lies in his economic policies, strong stance on immigration, conservative social values, clarity in foreign policy, and a leadership style that many find refreshing amidst political gridlock. Voters inclined toward these aspects may lean towards Trump over Harris in the upcoming election.
Finally, there is that intangible something: the courage Trump showed when he was shot in the ear by a would-be assassin.
Thus from both a subjective and personal perspective, and a more objective hands-off perspective looking at the benefits to the US, India and the world at large, I submit that Donald J Trump would be the right choice for the next President of the United States.
3100 words, 2 Nov 2024
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The potential consequences of a Trump presidency for India span multiple dimensions, including military, economic, trade, cultural, financial, and social aspects. Here’s an overview of these impacts:
Military and Geopolitical Implications
- Defense Ties: Under Trump, India may continue to strengthen its defense partnerships with the U.S., particularly in countering China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
- Transactional Foreign Policy: Trump's approach is likely to be more transactional, focusing on bilateral deals without attaching conditions related to so-called human rights or internal policies.
Economic and Trade Consequences
- Tariffs and Trade Relations: Trump’s protectionist policies could lead to increased tariffs on Indian goods, challenging India's export competitiveness.
- Supply Chain Shifts: Despite potential trade frictions, India could benefit from the ongoing shift of supply chains away from China.
- Economic Growth: India's domestic demand-driven economy might mitigate the long-term impacts of any slowdown in U.S. growth.
Immigration and Social Impact
- H-1B Visa Restrictions: Trump's administration is expected to maintain a hardline stance on immigration, which could complicate visa processes for Indian professionals. This may be a good thing for India, forcing H1B seekers to return to India, especially given worsening conditions in Canada.
- Indian Americans: The tightening of immigration policies may lead to increased backlogs for green card applications among Indian nationals in the U.S.. On the other hand, these are desirable productive, legal, immigrants. The US just sent a planeload of illegals back to India.
Cultural and Financial Dimensions
- Cultural Exchange: Attacks on hinduism may or may not diminish, given the preponderance of religious christians in his republican party
- Financial Markets: Indian markets may experience volatility due to Trump's unpredictable trade policies.
Long-Term Impact on Indians in India
- Economic Resilience: India's robust economic structure may help it weather any adverse effects from U.S. policies.
- Geopolitical Positioning: As the U.S. seeks allies against China, India’s strategic importance is likely to grow, potentially leading to enhanced economic and military cooperation over time.
* Dedollarization. The impact of this on India is unpredictable, but the signals are unmistakable that India seeks to reduce the impact of a total dependence on the dollar and on US reserves so that it may undergird its financial sovereignty.
And here, as always, is an AI-generated podcast ABOUT this podcast. As usual, interesting and engaging, thanks to Google NotebookLM and its robot anchors. And twice as long as my actual podcast above!
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* POTUS election: Trump has momentum, but this election looks increasingly like it’s going to be interfered with by the Democratic machine. Harris is likely to “win”; the DeepState will return with renewed vigor, and its embrace of thugs like Pannun, understandable only if you believe they have every intent to sabotage India, will resume.
* The BRICS+ shindig sends a signal to the US and the collective West that dedollarization may be upon us sooner than expected; but India should not jump into the BRICS currency without due deliberation because it exposes India to the economic and military might of China. However, it is a good signal to threaten the DeepState with.
* India’s neighbors, most recently the Maldives, are treating India as some easily-gaslighted uncle whom they can get free money from, while giving nothing in return. This has to stop. Extract a pound of flesh (like take an island or two, or maybe an airport as collateral for loans) especially from nasty people like the Maldivians who were just the other day shouting “India Out”.
Here’s the Google NotebookLM-generated podcast based on the transcript of the above podcast:
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-the-implications-of-a-kamala-harris-presidency-for-india-13828576.html
Here’s an AI-generated podcast based on this essay (courtesy Google’s NotebookLM): always entertaining and appealing.
Full disclosure: Parts of this essay were written by AI, and edited.
The entire sorry spat with the Canadians, the tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats and a virtual breakdown of ties leads to a good question. Are the Americans behind it (and if so why?), because for all practical purposes, Canada takes the lead from its Five Eyes friends and mentors? Several commentators have suggested that this is so.
Trudeau is not a serious politician, as he demonstrated in this photograph in blackface acting allegedly as an “Indian potentate”.
But the Deep State is deadly serious. They have meddled in country after country, leading to the utter misery of their populations. I can, off the top of my head, count several: Salvador Allende’s Chile, Patrice Lumumba’s Congo, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Muammar Ghaddafi’s Libya, Bashar Assad’s Syria, not to mention Sihanouk’s Cambodia.
We have to make a distinction between the US public in general and the Deep State. The nation as a whole still believes in the noble ideals of the American Revolution, and American individuals are among the most engaging in the world; however, the Deep State is self-aggrandizing, and now poses a potent danger to the US itself as well as others. Alas, it is taking its eye off its real foe, China, with what probably will be disastrous consequences.
The Khalistani threat is a significant concern for India because it appears that the Deep State is applying pressure through proxies. Since it likes to stick to simple playbooks, we have some recent and nerve-racking precedents: Ukraine https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/trudeau-is-us-deep-states-zelensky-2-0-why-india-should-fight-canadas-diplomatic-war-with-all-its-might-13827294.html) and Bangladesh https://rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/p/ep-134-the-geo-political-fallout.
So what exactly is in store for India after the new POTUS is chosen, which is just two weeks away? US betting markets are suggesting that Donald Trump will win, but it’s likely that Kamala Harris will emerge as POTUS. I was among the few in India who predicted a Trump win in 2016; admittedly I predicted a Trump win in 2020, and I do believe there were um… irregularities. I think in 2024 Trump would win if it were a fair fight, but it is not.
But I fear the vote will be rigged and lopsided, partly because of the vast numbers of illegal aliens who will be, or already have been, allowed to vote (by mail). Every day, I hear of strange practices in swing states, as in this tweet. There is room for a lot of irregularities.
On the other hand, the Indian-American voter (“desi”), apparently, will continue to vote for the Democratic Party, with some reason: there is racism in the Republican rank and file; but then let us remember that anti-black racism in the US South had Democratic roots: George Wallace and Bull Connor and “Jim Crow”. The Republicans had their “Southern Strategy” too, to inflame racial tensions. The racism Indian-Americans, particularly Hindus, face today is more subtle, but I doubt that the indentured labor and Green Card hell will get any better with Kamala Harris as President. I suspect 100+ year waits for a Green Card will continue.
A Harris presidency could introduce several challenges for India across various domains, including economics, foreign policy, terrorism, and military affairs. It is appropriate to consider historical contexts, especially the stances of previous Democratic administrations and notable figures. In particular, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Robin Raphel come to mind: they were especially offensive to India and India’s interests.
The Biden Amendment, and Bill Clinton/Hillary Clinton’s efforts delayed India’s cryogenic rocket engine and thus its space program by 19 years. https://www.rediff.com/news/column/who-killed-the-isros-cryogenic-engine/20131118.htm
One of the most vivid historical examples is that of Japan’s economy. After a dream run in the 1960s and 1970s, when they seriously threatened American supremacy in trade based on their high-quality and low-priced products, the Japanese were felled by the Plaza Accord of 1985, which forced the yen to appreciate significantly against the dollar.
The net result was that Japanese products lost their competitive pricing edge. Furthermore, it led to an interest rate cut by the Japanese central bank, which created an enormous asset bubble. The bursting of that bubble led to a Lost Decade in the 1990s, and the nation has not yet recovered from that shock. One could say that the reserve currency status of the dollar was used to bludgeon the Japanese economy to death.
Having observed this closely, China took special care to do two things: one, to infiltrate the US establishment, and two, to lull them into a false sense of security. Captains of industry were perfectly happy, with their short-term personal incentives, to move production to China for increased profits. Wall Street was quite willing to finance China, too. Politicians were willing to suspend disbelief, and to pursue the fantasy that a prosperous China would be somehow like America, only with East Asian features. Wrong. China is a threat now.
But the Deep State learned from that mistake: they will not let another competitor thrive.
The possible economic rise of India is something that will be opposed tooth and nail. In the background there is the possible collapse of the US dollar as the reserve currency (i.e. dedollarization), because of ballooning US debt and falling competitiveness, and the emergence of mechanisms other than Bretton Woods and the SWIFT network (e.g. the proposed blockchain-based, decentralized BRICS currency called UNIT).
Besides, the Deep State has a clear goal for India: be a supine supplier of raw materials, including people; and a market for American goods, in particular weapons. Ideally India will be ruled by the Congress party, which, through incompetence or intent, steadily impoverished India: see how nominal per capita income collapsed under that regime until the reforms of 1991 (data from tradingeconomics and macrotrends). The massive devaluations along the way also hurt the GDP statistics, with only modest gains in trade.
Another future that the Deep State has in mind for India could well be balkanization: just like the Soviet Union was unraveled, it may assiduously pursue the unwinding of the Indian State through secession, “sub-national diplomacy” and so forth. The value of India as a hedge against a rampaging China does not seem to occur to Democrats; in this context Trump in his presidency was much more positive towards India.
Chances are that a Harris presidency will cost India dear, in all sorts of ways:
Foreign Policy Challenges
1. Kashmir, Khalistan and Regional Dynamics: Harris has previously expressed support for Kashmiri separatism and criticized India's actions in the region. This stance could complicate U.S.-India relations, especially if she seeks to engage with groups advocating Kashmiri secession. The persistent support for Khalistan, including its poster boy Gurpatwant Singh Pannun who keeps warning of blowing up Indian planes, shows the Democrats have invested in this policy.
2. Alignment with Anti-India Elements: Her connections with leftist factions within the Democratic Party, which have historically taken a hard stance against India, may result in policies that are less favorable to Indian interests. The influence of figures like Pramila Jayapal could further strain relations.
3. Balancing Act with China: While the U.S. aims to counter Chinese influence in Asia, Harris's approach may involve a nuanced engagement with China that could leave India feeling sidelined in strategic discussions. Barack Obama, if you remember, unilaterally ceded to China the task of overseeing the so-called “South Asia”. Harris may well be content with a condominium arrangement with China: see https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-a-us-china-condominium-dividing-up-the-world-between-themselves-12464262.html
4. Foreign Policy Independence: An India that acts in its own national interests is anathema to many in the US establishment. The clear Indian message that the Ukraine war and perhaps even the Gaza war are unfortunate events, but that they are peripheral to Indian interests, did not sit well with the Biden administration. In a sense, just as Biden pushed Russia into China’s arms, he may well be doing the same with India: the recently announced patrolling agreement between India and China may also be a signal to the Harris camp.
Terrorism and Security Concerns
1. Counterterrorism Cooperation: A shift towards prioritizing “human rights” may affect U.S.-India counterterrorism cooperation, as can already be seen in the case of Khalistanis. If Harris's administration emphasizes civil liberties over security measures, it could limit joint operations aimed at combating terrorism emanating especially from Pakistan..
2. Support for Separatist Movements and Secession: Increased U.S. support for groups that advocate for self-determination in regions like Kashmir might embolden separatist movements within India (see Sonam Wangchuk in Ladakh, and the alleged Christian Zo nation that Sheikh Hasina said the US wanted to carve out of India, Bangladesh and Myanmar), posing a significant internal security challenge.
Military Affairs
1. Defense Collaborations: Although military ties have strengthened under previous administrations, a Harris presidency might introduce hesitancy in defense collaborations due to her potential focus on alleged human rights issues within India's military operations. This is a double-edged sword because it could also induce more self-reliance, as well as defense exports, by India.
2. Historical Precedents: The historical context of U.S. military interventions in South Asia, such as the deployment of the Seventh Fleet during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, raises concerns about how a Harris administration might respond to regional conflicts involving India.
3. Strategic Partnerships: Any perceived shift in U.S. commitment to India as a strategic partner could embolden adversarial nations like China and Pakistan, thereby destabilizing the region further. This, at a time when China is vastly outspending all its neighbors in Asia in its military budget (data from CSIS).
Economic Implications
1. Increased Scrutiny on “Human Rights”: Harris's administration may adopt a more critical stance towards India's human rights record, particularly concerning alleged violations of minority rights and alleged mistreatment of dissent, although there is reason to believe this is mostly a convenient stick to beat India with rather than a real concern: we see how the real human rights violations of Hindus in Bangladesh raise no alarms. This scrutiny could have economic repercussions, such as reduced foreign investment from companies concerned about reputational risks associated with human rights violations, and possible sanctions based on the likes of the USCIRF’s (US Council on International Religious Freedom) report.
2. Shift in Trade Policies: Historical Democratic administrations have often prioritized labor rights and environmental standards in trade agreements. If Harris follows this trend, India might face stricter trade conditions that could hinder its export-driven sectors.
3. Focus on Domestic Issues: Harris's potential prioritization of domestic issues over international relations may lead to a diminished focus on strengthening economic ties with India, which could stall ongoing initiatives aimed at boosting bilateral trade and investment.
Social Issues
1. Anti-Hindu feeling: There has been a demonstrable increase in antipathy shown towards Hindus in the US, with a number of incidents of desecration of Hindu temples, especially by Khalistanis, as well as economic crimes such as robberies of jewelry shops. The temperature online as well as in legacy media has also risen, with offensive memes being bandied about. A notable example was the New York Times’ cartoon when India did its Mars landing. And you don’t get more Democrat-leaning than the New York Times.
In summary, while Kamala Harris's presidency may not drastically alter the trajectory of U.S.-India relations established under previous administrations, given a convergence of major geo-political interests, it could introduce significant challenges stemming from her focus on so-called “human rights” and alignment with anti-India factions within her party. These factors could negatively influence economic ties, foreign policy dynamics, counterterrorism efforts, and military collaborations between the two nations.
Four more years of tension: revival of terrorist attacks in Kashmir, the chances of CAA-like riots regarding the Waqf issue, economic warfare, a slow genocide of Hindus in Bangladesh. It’s enough to make one nostalgic for the Trump era: yes, he talked about tariffs and Harley-Davidson, but he didn’t go to war, and he identified China as enemy number one.
2000 words, 23 October 2024
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The podcast above was made by the Google Gemini AI via notebookLM.
A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-narrative-building-of-west-and-the-threat-of-regime-change-13827231.html
While we can all laugh at the absurdities mouthed by Justin Trudeau in his crusade against India and Hindus, there are meta-questions that really beg for an answer: what the heck is going on? Who is behind all this? Why now? What other precedents do we look at? What do we see as immediate fallout?
I am a student of narrative building. I wrote of information warfare a couple of months ago in https://rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/p/ep-131-information-warfare-narrative and pointed out that this particular method of creation of narratives, while it has long been popular, now functions at warp speed, and the targets of such narratives often get blind-sided, or worse.
I spoke of the sudden U-turns that ended up deposing erstwhile friends like Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega; and I pointed out that something along those lines had happened with Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh in August. There are other examples: for instance, the Maidan Revolution courtesy Victoria Nuland that ended up in the overthrow in Ukraine of Viktor Yanukovych, the installation of Vladimir Zelensky, and… well, you know the rest.
There is a pattern: you unilaterally label somebody a terrorist, and then you proceed to topple him/her. In the old American idiom, “give a dog a bad name, and hang him”. With our supine obeisance to Big Tech and Western media, and thus the gaslighting, we (that is, anybody other than the elites running the West) just believe this, and blame ourselves for not noticing this all along. Total mind-control, in other words.
That makes me quite nervous about what’s going on with the Canadians. It’s true that the Trudeaus, pere et fils, have simply ignored the Khalistani terror problem, both before and after the tragic downing of Air India Kanishka, Flight 182, almost 40 years ago, and the deaths of 329 people. Since those 329 were mostly brown people, it appeared to be not an issue.
There was dissenting opinion: the Major Commission report from 2021 https://www.majorcomm.ca/en/reports/finalreport.html excoriated the Canadian government for incompetence and complacency. Here is an excerpt.
But nobody has ever been brought to book for the bombing. And this has gotten worse over time: Khalistanis like US citizen Gurpatwant Singh Pannun regularly threaten to blow up Air India planes, and warn that this will happen on specific occasions where he suggests people should avoid flying on Air India. These are acts of transnational terror and intimidation, but he gets a pass.
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but after Trudeau’s outburst earlier this week, there have been at least a dozen incidents of bomb threats against Indian-owned aircraft. One circumpolar Air India Delhi-Chicago flight ended up landing in an obscure Canadian airport in Iqualuit in the Great White North because of an online bomb threat. It’s possible that Khalistanis are involved.
Furthermore, there is some kind of a summons issued against Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval in a lawsuit filed by Pannun (who is a lawyer himself) in the comical case of an alleged plot to bump him off, wherein an alleged Indian operative allegedly tried to pay an alleged hitman money to do the deed.
The latest round of the hoo-haa has Canadians targeting Home Minister Amit Shah. Dutifully, the Washington Post with its old US State Department links has made a whole series of serious allegations, which would be funny if they weren’t noir.
The fact that the Ministry of External Affairs reacted sharply to this circus, alas, does not mean there is some new-found spine, but simply that the bureaucrats were peeved that one of them, the senior IFS officer who was Ambassador to Canada, was humiliated. Normally, most bureaucrats have children in the US, or are eyeing lucrative Western sinecures. They tend not to do anything that might damage their personal interests.
But this time it IS different. Things are coming to a head. The sum and substance is that, after the long-running attack on social media on Hindus as ‘pajeets’ and ‘street defecators’, now the stage is set to declare “the Modi regime” a “rogue government”, as though fascist, brutal, anti-minority, and other epithets they habitually use were not enough.
The next step would be regime change, of course. Is India prepared to defend itself?
All this is strictly from the Deep State playbook, so a priori I would blame either Foggy Bottom or Langley, but right now, in the middle of a grueling Presidential election? Don’t they have bigger fish to fry? So I started to wonder if it was some other entity that had prodded Trudeau.
It was interesting to see the closed ranks among the Five Eyes, which is to say English-speaking white countries or Anglosphere. Keir Starmer of the UK, again dutifully, supported Trudeau with alacrity, so much so that I began to wonder if this assault on India is actually a British plot, considering two things.
Brits must have been really annoyed that an Indian-origin PM, Rishi Sunak, ruled them for a while, and they think India is insufficiently respectful of the British King, who, oddly enough, is Canada’s Head of State, and probably Australian and New Zealand’s as well. Maybe they blame India for Chagossians finally getting out of brutal colonial control (which by the way means the end of the grandly named “British Indian Ocean Territories”) which has an impact on the US naval base at Diego Garcia, for which Chagos islanders had been displaced.
The Five Eyes have exalted opinions of themselves. For instance, one of the Biden administration’s many unfathomable decisions was to downgrade the sensible Quad (the brainchild of Abe Shinzo) and instead plump for AUKUS (which is all, well, white) with the remarkable story of wanting British technology transfer to Australia re submarines. Let me repeat that: British. Technology. Transfer.
And here I was, thinking the objective was to contain a rampaging China!
Then there are other little episodes that need to be remembered. Sheikh Hasina stated that the US wanted an island near Chittagong for a naval base, and more alarmingly, that there was a plan for a Christian Zo state that would include territories in India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. This is again a Deep State modus operandi, see East Timor and South Sudan.
Furthemore, the US Ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti, has been hyperactive in “sub-national diplomacy” along with other US officials, meeting a Tamil supremacist M K Stalin one day, doling out funds paying special attention to the restive Northeast the next day.
Not content with that, here’s more from the energetic Garcetti:
Assuming these tweets are authentic, things do look a little bleak for India and the “Modi regime” at the moment. Balkanizing India has long been a goal of the Deep State, reflecting the wishes of its proxies in Rawalpindi and Islamabad.
I hate to be a Cassandra, but a rising and strong India is not on the agenda of anybody but Indians, and that too only some Indians. Others, and you know who they are, are quite happy to revert to the status quo of the pre-1991 era, when India, the alleged socialist paradise, steadily lost ground and became poorer and poorer relative to other countries.
These are dangerous times. I have been nervous about Deep State intent since the days of Madeleine Albright and Robin Raphel, and I am concerned about the coming Kamala Harris Presidency (yes, she will be POTUS). I am worried about a faction of the US establishment that is congenitally anti-India.
Given the looming threat of China, I would much prefer a good working relationship between the US and India, my two favorite countries, and I’d like to take the protestations of common interests (including a very large purchase of Predator drones by India) at face value, but as Ronald Reagan said memorably, “Trust, but verify”.
1325 words, 17 Oct 2024
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I wrote a note in January regarding BKS (which I will not post because of some sensitive information), and here I share a summary, created by Google Gemini NotebookLM.
Summary
Rajeev Srinivasan argues that India can use technology to advance its traditional knowledge systems (BKS). He proposes developing a "BharatLLM" – a large language model trained on Indian texts – to preserve Bharatiya concepts and create a "Splinternet" of domain-specific text repositories. This would allow for machine translation into Sanskrit, protect intellectual property, and foster research in BKS. Srinivasan acknowledges challenges like access to computational resources and copyright issues, but believes that building these systems could benefit India's cultural heritage and technological advancements.
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The podcast above is also created by the same LM and its Deep dive audio output, which is amazing, and the male and female hosts are uncannily human.
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First, in 2003, exhorting India to be a hard state. i wrote this 20 years ago about why India needs to be #hardstate. coercion, carrots, covert action and containment: the principles remain relevant even though the dramatis personae are different. https://www.rediff.com/news/2003/feb/21rajeev.htm
Second, in 2008, the fear that India would be a failed state. I wrote this just after the invasion of Mumbai on 26/11/2008. https://rediff.com/news/2008/dec/08mumterror-are-we-heading-to-being-a-failed-state.htm…
2008 was antonia maino rule. no wonder India looked like a failing state then.
in 2022, I wrote of India, a serf state, as per the neo-feudal #deepstate:
https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/nupur-sharma-neo-feudalism-and-the-geopolitical-squeeze-on-india-10808101.html
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Dr Puri is a Telegram enthusiast (and a tech maven in general, despite his day job as a radiation oncologist), so he is particularly concerned about the full-court press against the app recently: its founder was arrested in France, its antecedents were questioned, its business model (which includes its own cryptocurrency, and also a million paying subscribers) was mocked, and there was a suggestion that it was nurturing crooks, criminals, child pornographers, human traffickers, etc.
There are some fundamental questions about Freedom of Speech, as well as about the US First Amendment as well as their Section 230 of the Communications Code that provides immunity to common carriers. In the context of problems faced by X in Brazil and Mark Zuckerberg confessing that he had been forced to censor things during Covid, the issue of the control over social media does come to the fore. What is “all the news fit to print”? Who determines that?
This may also be very different from laws in other nations: India’s First Amendment actually imposes restrictions on free speech, for instance.
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PS. The video is a little small, I think there was some conflict between Abhishek’s phone and my PC. The audio content should be fine.
PPS. As per Hari Mahadevan’s request, here are the slides that Abhishek put together that may not be so visible in the video.
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Note: Free subscribers can preview this podcast by clicking above. It is truncated; the full podcast is for paid subscribers. Please upgrade to a paid subscription if you can because that will help pay my bills. A good bit of my writing/podcasts will continue to be free, but some podcasts especially with guests will be only for paid subscribers. This is…
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The Dr B S Harishankar Memorial Lecture, Bharatiya Vichara Kendram, Trivandrum, 27th August 2024.
A Malayalam version of this has been published by Janmabhumi newspaper at https://janmabhumi.in/2024/09/01/3258051/varadyam/geo-political-implications-for-bangladesh/
A brand-new genAI-generated podcast with two different anchors (it’s really quite good, give it a listen!) courtesy Google NotebookLM added. Let me tell you, I liked it. Your comments on this, below?
It was startling to hear from retired Ambassador G Sankar Iyer on Asianet’s program with Ambassador TP Sreenivasan that the celebrated Malayalam author Vaikom Mohammed Basheer (once nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature) said in 1973: “In Bangladesh, we have created yet another enemy.” With his novelist’s insight, Basheer understood that the Two-Nation Theory held sway among certain sections of Bengalis.
In the current crisis situation in 2024, the ongoing pogrom against Hindus (amounting to a virtual genocide) and the forced resignation of teachers, police officers and other officials based only on the fact that they are Hindus (there are videos that show them being beaten and humiliated even after resigning) suggests that anti-Hindu feeling is running rampant in Bangladesh. It is another kristallnacht.
This is coupled with anti-India feeling. For instance, the current floods in Bangladesh are being blamed on India opening a dam in Tripura after torrential rains, although the Indian government has said that it provided all the hydrological data that it always has.
The fact of the matter is that the departure of Sheikh Hasina is a blow to India’s geo-political ambitions. It now appears as though India erred in “putting all its eggs into one basket” by cultivating only her Awami League, and not the Bangladesh National Party of her arch-rival Khaleda Zia.
The indubitable fact that Indian influence in Bangladesh has now been supplanted by forces inimical to India raises the question of who might be behind the regime change operation. Beyond that, there is the question of whether it was indeed a popular uprising based on the suppressed ambitions of the people that led to the ouster of Sheikh Hasina.
The third question is what this means for Bangladesh, India and the region going forward, especially as climate change may alter the very geography of the area. It is predicted that as much as 11% of the land area of Bangladesh could be underwater by 2050. This could displace 18 million people, which would lead to unprecedented migration of their population into India.
Regime Change operation: Who benefits from it?
Cui bono? Who benefits? That Latin phrase is used to consider who might be motivated to commit a crime (the other part is who has the means to commit it). In this case of regime change in Bangladesh, there are several entities who might benefit.
Obviously Pakistan. That country has never lived down its balkanization in 1971, and it had a number of its sympathizers already in place at that time. There were many who collaborated with the Pakistani Army in identifying Hindus and facilitating their killing or rape or ethnic cleansing, and also Muslims who were their political opponents. These are the people Sheikh Hasina referred to as “razakars”, and they are essentially in control now.
China is a clear winner whenever something happens that hurts India’s interests. There is the perennial issue of the Chicken’s Neck, that narrow strip of land that connects the Seven Sister states of India’s Northeast to the Gangetic Plain. It is a permanent threat to India that somebody (most probably China) will cut this off and truncate India, with the Northeast then becoming part of a Greater Bangladesh, with associated genocide of Hindus and Buddhists.
Former Ambassador Veena Sikri spoke to Ambassador TP Sreenivasan about something very odd indeed: Sheikh Hasina made a state visit to China in mid July, and she was thoroughly humiliated there. Xi Jingping refused to meet her; and she cut her visit short by one day and returned to Dhaka. This is an unheard-of protocol violation for a State Visit; what it suggests is that China had decided that Sheikh Hasina was on the way out. This is in sharp contrast to a Xi visit in 2016 when he made grand promises about Belt and Road Initiative investments.
The United States also has interests. Sheikh Hasina had alleged two things:
* An unnamed Western power wants St Martin’s Island (aka Coconut Island) off Cox’s Bazaar as a military base to keep an eye on both China and India,
* An unnamed Western power intends to form a new Christian Zo nation (for Mizo, Kuki, Chin) just like Christian homelands were carved out in East Timor and South Sudan.
The implication was that the unspecified Western power was the US.
It is not entirely clear that the US benefits greatly from a military base in the Bay of Bengal but there has been a long-running Great Game initiated by the British to keep India down as a supplier of raw materials and a market for their products. The US may have inherited this mantle.
Intriguingly, the US Deep State and its proxies in the Western media had built a narrative around Sheikh Hasina as a model leader for developing Asia, a woman who also succeeded in improving the economic status of her country. That Bangladesh’s per capita GDP had overtaken India’s, and that its garment industry was doing well were used to mock India’s own economic achievements. The switch to Hasina being a ‘dictator’ was a sudden change in narrative.
There is, therefore, enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that there was a foreign hand in the happenings in Bangladesh, although we will have to wait for conclusive evidence.
Was this indeed a regime-change coup or a true popular uprising?
It is true that Bangladesh under Sheikh Hasina’s fifteen-year rule was not a perfect democracy. But there are mitigating factors, including a violent streak that led to the assassination of her father and independence hero Sheikh Mujibur Rahman just four years after the bloody birth of the new State after the Pakistan Army’s assault on its Bengali citizens. The toppling and desecration of his statue shows that his national hero status may not be accepted by the entire population: in fact it looks like friends of Pakistan wish to erase his entire legacy.
The history of democracy in independent Bangladesh is checkered and marred by violence. Before he was deposed and killed in 1975, Mujibur Rehman himself had banned all opposition parties. After Mujib, there was outright military rule till 1986, when the erstwhile Chief Martial Law Administrator Hussain Mohammed Ershad became the elected President.
When Ershad was deposed after (student-led) agitations in 1991, Khaleda Zia (BNP or Bangladesh National Party) became the PM and after that she and her arch-rival Sheikh Hasina (Awami League) alternated in power. The BNP boycotted the 2018 elections partly because Khaleda Zia was jailed on allegations of corruption.
In all of these twists and turns, ‘students’ were involved. In 1971, when Yahya Khan launched Operation Searchlight, the Pakistani army went straight for students and professors in Dhaka University, especially if they were Hindus. Later too, ‘student’ protests were instrumental in the overthrow of Ershad.
The proximate cause of the troubles in 2024 was also a ‘student’ uprising. There had been a 30% quota in government jobs for the children of freedom fighters; along with other such set-asides e.g. for minorities and women, a total of 56% of government jobs were ‘reserved’ by 2018. This reservation system was largely abolished by Sheikh Hasina’s government in 2018 after yet another student agitation.
In June 2024, a High Court in Bangladesh overturned the 2018 judgment as unconstitutional. Even though the Supreme Court reversed it, and restored the status quo ante (of drastically reduced reservations to 7% in total), the peaceful ‘student’ agitation suddenly morphed into a violent confrontation led by members of the Jamaat e Islami (an Islamist party) and the BNP. There was police firing. The Daily Star, a respected daily, found out that 204 people were killed in the first few days, out of which only 53 were students.
It appears the supposed ‘student revolution’ was taken over by professional agitators and agents provocateurs, and it rapidly led to the overthrow of Sheikh Hasina, with escalating violence, especially against Hindus, and the Army getting involved. Even though the Army is in charge now, there is a smokescreen of an ‘interim government’ that allows entities like the UN an excuse to not impose sanctions on Bangladesh.
It is hard to take it on face value that this was a popular uprising; circumstantial evidence suggests that there was a clear agenda for regime change, and since it suits both China and the US to keep India constrained, either of them could have been behind it. The diplomatic snub to Hasina in July suggests the Chinese were well aware of the coming coup.
On the other hand, the sudden U-turn in the narrative about Hasina in the Western media suggests that the US might have decided to dump her. The process by which the regime change happened is also similar to what happened in other countries that experienced ‘color revolutions’. The actions of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and of some diplomats in supporting the BNP, have been offered as possible evidence of US bad faith.
What is obvious is the role of the fundamentalist group, the Jamaat e Islami, which has strong connections with Pakistan. It seems likely that they were the enforcers, and had invested assets within the armed forces. They have called for the secular Bangladesh constitution to be replaced by Islamic Sharia law, and for non-Muslims to be treated as second-class citizens. The Yunus government has just unbanned the Jamaat e Islami.
The attacks on Hindus, including large numbers of lynchings, rapes, and abductions of women, suggests that there is a religious angle and the Jamaat e Islami’s prejudices are coming to the fore. Notably, the entire Western media, Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the USCIRF, human rights specialists all, had nothing at all to say about the horrific oppression of Hindus.
The New York Times even had a headline about “revenge killings” of Hindus, as though somehow the 8% minority Hindus had been responsible for whatever Sheikh Hasina was accused of. Upon being called out, the NYT changed the headline to just “killings” of Hindus with no explanation or apology.
The role of Professor Mohammed Yunus is also intriguing: he had been invited to head an interim government in 2007 but abandoned the attempt and in fact left politics. He had been close to Sheikh Hasina at one point, for instance he got the licenses for his Grameen Phone during her rule, but they later fell out. Yunus’ Nobel Peace Prize and his earlier stint in the US have raised questions about whether he is in fact managed by US interests.
Given all this, it is much more likely that it was a coup than a popular agitation. It remains to be seen who was behind the coup.
What next for India and the region?
There are several long-term challenges for India. None of this is positive for India, which is already facing problems on its periphery (eg. Maldives and Nepal). The coup in Bangladesh also makes the BIMSTEC alliance as unviable as SAARC.
1. Deteriorating India-Bangladesh Relations
The overthrow of Sheikh Hasina, seen as a close ally of India, has led to a rise in anti-Indian sentiment in Bangladesh. The new government may not be as friendly towards India, especially on sensitive issues like trade and security. This could jeopardize the gains in bilateral ties over the past decade. The presence of hardliners among the ‘advisers’ to the interim government suggests that India will have little leverage going forward.
2. Increased Border Security Risks
India shares a long, porous border with Bangladesh. The political instability and potential increase in extremist groups could lead to more infiltration, smuggling, and illegal migration into India's northeastern states, posing internal security risks. Monitoring the border region will be critical. As it is, there are millions of illegal Bangladeshis and Rohingya residing in India, which actually poses a threat to internal Indian security.
3. Economic Fallout
Bangladesh is India's largest trading partner in the region, with $13 billion in commerce under the Hasina government. A deterioration in relations could hurt Indian exports and investments. The economic interdependence means India also has a stake in Bangladesh's stability and prosperity. Brahma Chellaney pointed out that Bangladesh is in dire straits, and has requested $3 billion from the IMF, $1.5 billion from the World Bank, and $1 billion each from the Asian Development Bank and the Japan International Cooperation Agency to tide over problems.
4. Climate Change Challenges
Both countries are vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, floods, droughts and extreme weather events. Bangladesh is especially at risk due to its low-lying geography. Millions of climate refugees could seek shelter in India, straining resources and social cohesion.
5. Geopolitical Implications
The regime change has opened up space for China to expand its influence in Bangladesh. India will need to balance its ties with the new government while countering Chinese inroads in the region. The U.S. is also closely watching developments in Bangladesh. Instability in the region plays into the hands of Pakistan, whose medium-term ambition would be to detach India’s Northeast as revenge for the creation of Bangladesh and for increasing normalization in J&K.
6. Quota Implications
Indians, especially those agitating for ‘proportional representation’ should note that the Bangladesh quota system was abolished in its entirety by Sheikh Hasina’s administration in 2018 in response to student demands. India has a constitutional limit of 50% for reservations, but some are agitating for even more, which is a sure recipe for resentment and possibly violence. It is not inconceivable that it could be the spur for regime change in India as well.
7. Human rights for Hindus and Buddhists; Citizenship Amendment Act and the Right to Return
The Hindu population in Bangladesh has fallen dramatically from about 28% in 1971 to about 8% now, and there is every indication that this is a demographic under extreme duress. Buddhist Chakmas in the Chittagong Hill Tracts are also under stress. India should enhance the CAA or create a formal Right to Return for Hindu and Buddhist Bangladeshis. Writing in Open magazine, Rahul Shivshankar pointed out that Hindus had faced attacks and threats in 278 locations across 48 districts.
In summary, the fall of the Hasina government and the long-term threat of climate change compel India to rethink its Bangladesh policy. Fostering stable, democratic and economically prosperous neighbors is in India's own interest. Rebuilding trust and deepening cooperation on shared challenges will be key to navigating the new realities in the region.
2350 words, Aug 26, 2024
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A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/climate-tragedy-of-wayanad-and-the-vulnerability-of-western-ghats-13808331.html
Here’s a new AI-generated podcast courtesy of Google NotebookLM that summarizes this essay.
After days of intense coverage of the landslides in Wayanad, the news cycle has moved on to other calamities. But the problems remain, and things cannot be left to benign neglect as is usually the case. For example there was a strange thundering noise from deep underground that alarmed people in the area. This is ominous, as it may presage a tectonic movement, although there have been no big quakes here for centuries.
A dramatic before-and-after report from Reuters, using satellite images from Planet Labs, Google, Maxar Technologies and Airbus, shows how the landslide left a giant scar on the surface of the earth, washing away hundreds of houses, leading to widespread fatalities and destruction.
Prime Minister Modi visited the afflicted area. Better governance, both by Center and State, is sorely needed to tackle the problem, because it is not simple: there are proximate, preponderant and root causes. A lot of it is anthropogenic based on local factors, but climate change is also a major factor, as the local climate and rainfall patterns have shifted dramatically in the recent past. There was a drought in 2015, followed by the Ockhi cyclone in 2017, and then landslides and floods in 2018 and 2019.
As a resident of Kerala, who has visited Wayanad only twice (once in 2018 and the second time in April this year), both the problems and the possible solutions are of immediate importance to me, because the very same issues are likely to crop up all over the State, and unless remedial measures are taken now, we can expect further tragedies and endless suffering.
Proximate Cause: Excess Rain
The proximate cause is La Nina-enhanced rainfall, which has been higher this year along the west coast. In Wayanad itself, it rained 572mm in 48 hours before the landslide: about 1.8 feet, an enormous amount.
Before the Wayanad landslide, there had been another in Shirur on the Karnataka coast near Ankola, where a number of people were swept away. The story of Arjun, a Kerala trucker whose truck full of lumber disappeared, was all over the news, and after a weeks-long search, there was no sign of him or the truck.
The total rainfall since June 1 was of the order of 3000mm in Wayanad, which is unusually high, creating vulnerability to landslides. In a recent interview, environmental expert Madhav Gadgil mentioned that quarrying may have added to the intensity of the rainfall, because the fine dust from the mining and explosions forms aerosols, on which water molecules condense, leading to excessive precipitation.
The intense rainfall saturated the soil, and in the absence of sufficient old-growth vegetation that might have held it together, the hillside simply collapsed.
Preponderant Cause: Population Pressure, Over-Tourism, Ecocide
The preponderant causes of the problems in Wayanad are obvious: population pressure, over-tourism and environmental destruction. The forest has basically ceased to exist due to human exploitation. According to India Today, 62% of the green cover in the district disappeared between 1950 and 2018 while plantation cover rose by around 1,800%. Fully 85% of the total area of Wayanad was under forest cover until the 1950s.
Overpopulation, settlement and habitat loss
My first visit to Wayanad was in 2018, when we drove to Kerala from Karnataka: from the Nagarhole/Bandipur Wildlife Sanctuaries to the contiguous Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary, all forming a Project Tiger ecosphere along with neighboring Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary in Tamil Nadu. Together they form the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve.
Bandipur/Nagarhole actually looks like a forest. But I was astonished when we drove into Wayanad, because it does not look like a forest any more: it is full of human habitation. It looks like any of the other districts in Kerala: thickly populated, with settlements all over the place. It appeared to be only notionally a wildlife sanctuary.
Habitat loss, especially that of forest cover, is true of all of Kerala, as highlighted in a study by IISc scientists. It is startling to see how much of this has happened in just a few decades. But it is the culmination of a process that started at least a century ago.
Wayanad, according to myth and legend, was once a lovely, lush forest inhabited by a small number of tribals. There were fierce Kurichya archers (it is possible they were warriors banished to the forest after losing a war) who, with Pazhassi Raja, carried on a guerilla war against the British colonials in the 19th century until the Raja was captured and executed. I visited the Pazhassi Museum in Mananthavady this May, on my second visit to Wayanad. There were artifacts there from the tribal settlements.
Then, in the 20th century, there was a large migration of lowland people, mostly Christians from Central Travancore, to the Wayanad highlands (and the Western Ghats uplands in general). They encroached on public/forest lands, cleared the forests, and created plantations and agricultural settlements. Their struggles against malaria, wild animals and the land itself was the subject of Jnanpith winner S K Pottekkat’s renowned novel Vishakanyaka (Poison Maiden).
The public land thus captured eventually made some people rich, but the whole process also in effect enslaved the tribals, who became an exploited underclass: the very same story as of Native Americans, who are still struggling for social justice after centuries of being untermenschen.
Since most of the settlers were Christians, the Church became a powerful spokesman for them. Successive governments gave a lot of the settlers title to the land they had illegally captured. So there is a class of rich planters, and on the other hand, miserable plantation workers, often migrants especially from Tamil Nadu.
The green deserts need to be turned back into forests
Kerala’s highlands, over time, became ‘green deserts’, rather than ‘tropical rainforests’. The monoculture of tea, rubber, coffee, and especially invasive species such as acacia and eucalyptus is destructive. They crowd out native species, ravage the water table, do not put down deep roots, and offer almost no sustenance to wild animals. It may look deceptively green, but it is no forest.
An expert committee, the Madhav Gadgil Commission, recommended in 2011 that the entire Western Ghats was ecologically sensitive (ESA or Ecologically Sensitive Area) and 75% of it must be preserved intact with minimal human presence. The report was scathing about quarrying, including blasting with dynamite, which upset the already fragile ecosystem, ravaged as it was by the removal of old growth forest and the root system that held the soil together.
At the time, Gadgil did say that the calamity would not take a 100 years, but it would happen in ten to twenty years. He was right, but he was ignored as though he were Cassandra.
The Church opposed the Gadgil report tooth and nail, and the Government of Kerala pushed back on it. So the Central government created the Kasturirangan Commission (2013), which reduced the proposed ESA to 37%. It classified 60% of the Western Ghats as a ‘cultural landscape’ with human settlements, plantations and agriculture.
But that too was not acceptable. In fact, Jayanthi Natarajan claimed that she was forced to resign as Environment Minister because she actually notified the order on protection of the Western Ghats the day before she was removed. Her successor duly put the order on hold.
Sitting Congress MP in nearby Idukki, P T Thomas, says he was dropped in the 2014 elections because he supported the Gadgil report against “encroachments… illegal constructions, quarrying, timber smuggling, sand mining from the rivers and ganja cultivation…My stand upset the Idukki dioceses of the Syro Malabar Catholic Church. The Idukki Bishop had openly opposed my candidature.”
The GoK convened a third committee, the Oommen Commission (2014), which was specific to Kerala, and it recommended keeping all inhabited areas and plantations out of the ESA altogether. Mission accomplished. No more restrictions on land use.
Over-tourism and carrying capacity of the land
This is one reason for the proliferation of resorts and homestays in Wayanad. Every second house caters to tourists, as can be seen from a Google Map (of the area around Kalpetta). The environmental pressure from this (what about solid waste disposal? Do they dump liquid wastes into rivers?) is horrific and increasing. Trash lines the area near the Thamarassery Pass.
As a tourist myself, I did not choose a plantation resort, but instead a homestay which has a working farm. Perhaps I made a wrong choice, because a plantation has a lot of space to absorb the tourist impact. The homestay had many youngsters from Bangalore over the weekend, and it was perfectly nice, but I wonder how much I contributed to the human toll on the environment.
I had gone to Wayanad to visit the Thirunelli temple and the Edakkal caves, which have petroglyphs and drawings reliably dated back to 8000 Before the Present, making them second only to the Bhimbetka caves in Madhya Pradesh, whose rock art dates back to 10,000 BP and earlier. So this area, despite the geological fault lines, has indeed been inhabited for a very long time. The carrying capacity of the land was sufficient in those prehistoric times and even up until recently; now the land can no longer sustain the population.
It is also host to another recent influx. Muslims from nearby lowland Kozhikode and Malappuram districts have come up the Thamarassery Pass and settled in Wayanad in numbers. They have added to the population pressure in Wayanad. Incidentally this is one reason Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency (which includes areas from nearby Kozhikode and Malappuram districts that are heavily Muslim) is so dependably a Congress citadel.
When I made my trip in April, just before elections, I asked several people who would win there: the candidates were Rahul Gandhi (Congress), Annie Raja (CPI), K Surendran (BJP). All of them said “Rahul Gandhi”. One man told me “Rahul Gandhi is going to become the PM”. Another laughed and said, “Are you joking? We all know the answer”. It was, pun intended, a landslide win for the Congress candidate.
Root Cause: Geology and Errant Rainfall
The root cause of the problems in Kerala is the increasingly unstable landscape. It is remarkable that Kerala has such a high number of landslides and vulnerable spots. India Today reports that Kerala has recorded the largest number of landslides in the country, 2,239 out of 3,782 that occurred between 2015 and 2022. The “Landslide Atlas of India 2023” from ISRO lists 13 out of 14 Kerala districts among the top 50 landslide-prone areas of the country.
This is surprising, because the more obvious fault lines must be in the North, where the Indian Plate continues to grind up against the Eurasian Plate, and the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau continue to gain a few centimeters in elevation every year. Indeed Arunachal, Himachal, J&K and Uttarakhand are landslide-prone. But why Kerala, at the other end of the land-mass?
It must be the case that there have been severe tectonic movements in Kerala in the past: the Parasurama legend of the land coming up from the sea is based on a real event, presumably caused by an earthquake in a prehistoric time frame. More recently, the thriving Kerala port of Kodungalloor (aka Muziris), the principal West Coast port in historical times along with Bharuccha in Gujarat, was suddenly rendered bereft in 1341 CE after a severe flood in the River Periyar, and port activities shifted to nearby Kochi.
More recently, old-timers talk about the Great Flood of ‘99, i.e. 1099 Malabar Era, or 1924 CE. Exactly 100 years ago there were torrential rains in July, and records suggest it was 3368mm or 1326 inches over three weeks, that is 11 feet of rain. Floodwaters rose up to 6 feet, rivers changed course, and at least 1,000 people died along with large numbers of livestock, and there was massive destruction of agricultural land and foodgrains. The Flood of ‘99 became etched in the collective memory of the area, but it mostly affected the lowland areas of Travancore and Cochin, leaving the highlands largely untouched.
That has changed with deforestation, quarrying, construction, and denudation of hillsides.
There were the floods of 2018, which affected the hills, especially in Munnar. A full mountainside fell 300 meters into a river there. Entire settlements were washed away. A total of 2,346mm of rain or 923 inches was recorded in July and August, almost 50% higher than the norm. 483 people were killed, with many more missing and unaccounted for. Infrastructure was wiped out, including roads and clean water supply. Dams had to be opened, wreaking havoc on those downstream.
There is also the perennial threat of Mullaperiyar Dam overflowing or being breached, which is, among other things, a source of friction between Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
Other root causes include the following:
* Climate Change: A study by the World Weather Attribution group indicated that climate change has intensified rainfall in the region by about 10%, contributing significantly to the severity of the disaster. The ongoing increase in global temperatures has led to more extreme weather patterns, including heavier monsoon rains.
* Soil Characteristics: Wayanad's soils are loose and erodible, particularly in areas with steep gradients exceeding 20 degrees. When saturated, these soils lose their structural integrity, making them susceptible to landslides. The presence of large boulders and mud further complicates the stability of the slopes during heavy rains.
* Soil piping: Previous landslides in the region, such as the 2019 Puthumala event, created conditions for soil piping, where voids form in the subsurface soil, increasing the risk of subsequent landslides during heavy rainfall.
* Lack of Effective Land Management Policies: There is a notable absence of comprehensive land use and disaster management policies in Kerala, particularly in ecologically fragile areas. Despite previous disasters, there has been insufficient progress in implementing hazard mapping and community awareness programs to mitigate risks associated with landslides.
Thus Kerala is vulnerable to a host of issues, especially climate change (which is also eating away at the coastline). Behind the tropical paradise facade of “God’s Own Country”, there lie tremendous dangers related to excessive human exploitation, amounting to ecocide. What is the solution?
Maybe Madhav Gadgil was right, after all, and strict controls should be imposed on human activity, especially denudation of forest, and quarrying. His report had included Vythiri, Mananthavady and Sulthanbathery taluks in Wayanad as Ecologically Sensitive Zone ESZ-1, which means no change whatsoever in land use is permissible there. Chooralmala, Mundakkai, and Meppadi, where the worst of the disasters happened, are all in Vythiri taluk.
No effective disaster prevention or mitigation efforts have been put in place. The only solution is reforesting and restoring green cover, and stopping construction, quarrying, and tourism and the most contentious issue, relocating people away from the ESZ. Unfortunately the tropical rainforest may not restore itself if simply left alone (as temperate-zone forests do), and perhaps efforts such as Miyawaki foresting with native species may need to be pursued.
It is to be hoped that we have not passed the point of no return. Kerala’s population is shrinking (Total Fertility Rate is 1.80, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman), but there is no limit to human greed.
What needs to be done
There are no magic solutions, but comprehensive climate action and improved disaster management strategies can mitigate things to an extent. Experts emphasize the importance of:
* Enhanced Communication and Coordination: There is a critical need for better intergovernmental communication regarding disaster preparedness. This includes timely warnings and efficient evacuation plans to mitigate the impact of natural disasters.
* Land Use Policies: Implementing stringent land use regulations is essential to prevent construction in ecologically sensitive areas. The degradation of green cover due to unregulated development has significantly increased the risk of landslides.
* Early Warning Systems: Developing robust early warning systems for landslides and floods can provide crucial alerts to communities at risk. These systems should be supported by regular community education and drills to ensure residents are prepared for emergencies.
* Afforestation and Environmental Conservation: Massive afforestation and reforestation drives (especially with native species) are necessary to stabilize hillsides and reduce landslide risks. Protecting and restoring natural habitats can help mitigate the effects of climate change and enhance biodiversity. Collaborating with local communities for reforestation projects can also provide economic incentives and foster a sense of stewardship.
* Community Engagement: Empowering local communities to participate in disaster preparedness and environmental conservation efforts is vital. Education on risks and proactive measures can significantly reduce the impact of disasters.
* Tourism Management: Over-tourism can exacerbate environmental degradation. Developing a sustainable tourism strategy that limits visitor numbers, promotes eco-friendly practices, and educates tourists about environmental conservation is essential. Establishing eco-tourism zones and supporting community-based tourism initiatives can provide economic benefits while preserving the natural environment.
* Regulation of Quarrying and Construction: Strict regulation and monitoring of quarrying and construction activities are necessary to prevent ecological damage. Implementing sustainable practices in these industries, such as controlled quarrying methods and responsible waste management, can mitigate their impact on the environment. Regular audits and penalties for non-compliance can enforce these regulations.
* Surveillance and meteorological data collection: With modern technology like drones, continuous monitoring of the landscape is possible at a relatively low cost; and this can also be used for collecting large amounts of meteorological data to support early-warning systems. Satellite images from India’s own as well as foreign sources can be used to warn of dangerous construction, quarrying, and loss of forest cover.
Some of these are purely technical solutions, offering computerized forecasts and disaster warnings. The social and governance aspects are even more important: discipline, co-operation and awareness on the part of the residents, and the strict enforcement of land use rules and regulations.
Dealing with powerful settlers, encroachers, and vested interests requires a delicate balance of enforcement and negotiation, carrot and stick. Government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and local communities must collaborate to develop and implement policies that address these challenges. Advocacy for stronger environmental laws and community involvement in decision-making processes can help align interests and foster co-operation.
With all these in place, it may be possible to repair the damaged hills of the Western Ghats, one of the global hotspots of biodiversity.
2200 words, Aug 17, 2024 updated 3000 words, Aug 19
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A version of this essay was published by news18.com at https://www.news18.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-beyond-lenient-laws-what-will-it-take-to-protect-indias-women-9023844.html
After this fortnight, it is not hard to see why some are demanding speedy punishment, including automatic death sentences for severe crimes against women. To put it bluntly, the Indian State is letting rapists and murderers get away with their crimes against both grown women, and especially tragically, against little girls. This is a blot on humanity. There needs to be recourse. There has to be a severe deterrent, and men should quake in fear at the prospect of instant, fearsome retribution.
The cry of anguish began with the extraordinarily brutal rape (suspected gang-rape) and murder of a 31-year-old doctor (revealed by her mother as Moumita Debnath) in the R G Kar Medical College Hospital in Kolkata on August 9th. As information trickled out, it became clear that she had also been severely tortured before being smothered to death. It is rumored that she had stood up to some important people and this may have been “punishment”.
The immediate parallel was with the gruesome rape-murder of Girja Tikkoo in 1990 in Jammu and Kashmir, where she was gang-raped and then sliced alive in two, screaming in mortal pain, on a mechanical saw.
There was also, in a hospital setting, the extraordinary case of Aruna Shanbaug, a 25-year-old nurse who was choked with a dog chain and raped by a janitor in a Mumbai hospital in 1973. She was brain-damaged and in a coma for 42 years, cared for by the nurses in the hospital until she died in 2015. Assaults on women staff in hospitals is especially ironic considering a recent finding that patients treated by female doctors have better outcomes possibly because of empathy.
Then there was the 2011 case of Sowmya, a 23-year-old shop assistant traveling in an empty women-only coach in a train in Kerala. She was chased around the coach by a one-armed vagrant named Charlie Thomas alias Govindachami, who repeatedly bashed her head against the walls. He then pushed her off the train, raped her and beat her head in with a stone. The lower courts sentenced Charlie to death, but the Supreme Court commuted it to life imprisonment.
Not about sexual crime, but about power over women
This is not about a sexual crime, it is about something more vile and reptilian. It is about sadistically inflicting pain and humiliation, dominating women, exerting power over them. It is extreme misogyny, and is motivated by pure hatred, possibly intent on sending a message. It is also about “putting women in their place”, so that uppity females are “taught a lesson”.
The rape-murder of “Nirbhaya”, later revealed by her mother as 22-year old paramedical student Jyoti Singh, in 2012 in Delhi, was similarly traumatic. Four of her assailants were executed after seven years, and one killed himself in jail, but the worst offender, who instigated the ramming of an iron rod into her genitals, was let go in 2015 on the flimsy reason that he was allegedly a juvenile. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal presented a sewing machine to the offender upon his release.
There was also the 2016 case of Jisha, a 30-year-old law student in Kerala who was subjected to extreme violence, including disembowelment in her rape-murder. A migrant laborer was charged with the crime, and sentenced to death, which was upheld in May 2024 by the Kerala High Court. However, it is rumored that Jisha was the illegitimate daughter of a local bigwig, and that she was “punished” for demanding a share in his property.
In Kerala again, there were the Walayar sisters, a 13 year old and a 9 year old, who were found hanging, two months apart, in 2017. The initial conclusion was ‘suicide’, but after an uproar when postmortems confirmed sexual assault, the case was reopened. Several politically connected people were involved, whom the POCSO court acquitted. But the Kerala High Court ordered a retrial of the five accused, including a juvenile, and the case is with the CBI as of now.
Every sinner has a future, maybe, but he denied his dead victim her future
There was the startling “every sinner has a future” Supreme Court verdict of 2022 that commuted the death sentence of a rapist-murderer of a four-year-old child into imprisonment for 20 years. The court also held that this was not a “rarest of the rare” case.
Using this “every sinner has a future” precedent, the Orissa High Court in May 2024 also commuted the sentence of a rapist-murderer of a six-year-old child. He had been on death row, but they commuted it to “life imprisonment”. In India, “life imprisonment” usually means the convict will walk after 14 years, so that is the total sentence the murderer will serve in practice.
On August 20th came another shocker. After 32 years, a POCSO court has convicted six men in Ajmer of raping/molesting, photographing and blackmailing over a hundred minor girls. It took 32 years for what should have been an open-and-shut case. The assailants are said to have political connections with a particular party.
Also on August 20th, the Justice Hema Commission published its report on the plight of women in the Malayalam film industry. It alleges that sexual exploitation including the ‘casting couch’ is rife, discrimination such as the lack of even basic amenities like toilets on sets is common, and that a ‘criminal gang’ of senior actors, producers, and directors perpetuates a cycle of abuse.
Soft on crimes against women and girls
All this signals that the Indian State, especially the Judiciary, is soft on horrific crimes against women and girls. This cannot continue in a civilized nation. One possible outcome is that the Executive and the Judiciary will take cognizance of these lapses, and provide severe deterrence, which can only come with fast-tracking of these cases, and enforcing capital punishment, instead of vague homilies quoting Oscar Wilde.
Another possibility is vigilante justice. There was the 1974 film Death Wish about an unassuming architect in New York who takes the law into his own hands after his wife is murdered and his daughter raped by violent criminals. He stalks muggers and criminals. Ordinary citizens may be tempted to do the same in India.
The third thing is to drum it into males from a young age, especially in school, that they have to respect women as human beings, not see them as sexual prey. Repeated insistence on that message will get through to them.
Furthermore, there is every reason to try juveniles committing heinous crimes (such as rape and murder) as adults. The existing Juvenile Justice Act is sufficient for this; it may well be that prosecutors are not using the law to its full extent. Prosecutorial incompetence was alleged in the Sowmya case as well, along with the involvement of shadowy benefactors for the murderer.
Copycat crimes, in particular against babies and toddlers, are becoming more frequent. In November 2023, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl was raped by a 17-year-old boy in Buldhana, Maharashtra. In August 2024, a Class 9 student was detained for allegedly raping a three-year-old girl in Mumbai.
This sort of thing simply cannot continue. It is not the case that India is particularly prone to sexual crimes against women: the number of reported rapes is not high compared to other countries, but for a nation that calls itself the Motherland and worships many female deities, the cavalier treatment of crimes against women is a disgrace, and must be stopped.
1100 words, 20th August 2024, updated 21st August
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