Transforming, Modernising, Powerful:Tighter Indo-US Security Embrace & Forthcoming Major Trade Agreement

Transforming, Modernising, Powerful: Tighter Indo-US Security Embrace & Forthcoming Major Trade Agreement

Our rapidly improving relations with the United States has a defining geopolitical history going back some decades.

Republican President Richard Nixon, who had tilted firmly towards Pakistan in view of India’s closeness to the Soviet Union; opened the doors to Chairman Mao’s China in 1972.

Nixon travelled quietly to Beijing, then usually called Peking. He stayed seven days, visiting three Chinese cities.  Richard Nixon was the very first American president to visit China after 25 years of no relations at all between the two countries.

It changed the geopolitics of the Cold War, and not just that of South Asia and the Far East. It had a profound effect on the USSR and all its Communist allies behind the “Iron Curtain”, in due course. Nixon himself called it: “the week that changed the world”.

America had pitted, it became clear over time, one Communist power, at the time only a populous developing country struggling with its economy, against the Soviet Empire, as well as its wider sphere of influence that included India.

 Over thirty years from the 1980s, China grew into the second biggest economy in the world. And this was largely on the back of Chinese exports to the US and its NATO allied countries.

The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, during the term of another Republican President , Ronald Reagan. And then the USSR, unable to keep up with the Americans in the so-called Star Wars arms race, also disintegrated.

President Donald Trump’s great security embrace of India in 2020 is the start of another “great leap forward”. It is predicated on top of initiatives taken by Republican predecessor George W Bush who legitimised India as a responsible nuclear power, and arranged for it to import Nuclear Power Reactors.

Both President Trump and Prime Minister Modi said the relationship has been raised to a Comprehensive Global Partnership. In addition to the $ billion  in defence sales, a new high in energy cooperation worth $2 billion was announced. Other items announced include women’s entrepreneurship, cooperation on mental health issues, drug trafficking, and other medical drugs. 

While relations have also warmed under various geopolitical pressures, during the recent tenures of Democrat presidents Clinton and Obama, no major breakthroughs can be pointed out. However, a tendency to lecture India in liberal values is more of a Democrat hallmark.

In the 1960s however, Democrat President  John Kennedy helped India from being overrun by China in 1962, and with India’s chronic food shortages of the early years. President Bill Clinton in his time forced Pakistan to pull back from the Kargil heights, even as he had imposed sanctions on India for going overtly nuclear.

President Donald Trump’s latest initiative comes on top of three enabling security cooperation related agreements between the two countries. These were necessary because India was historically excluded as part of the Soviet alliance and debarred from sensitive military and technology cooperation.  

Now, after several corrections to reflect the current day, the floodgates have been opened for sensitive high-tech and military equipment and intelligence sharing. These include armed missile firing drones and the attendant satellite support and software, state-of-the art attack helicopters, and advanced missile shields.

The documents signed during President Trump’s visit this time will account for a purchase of approximately $ 3 billion in armaments by India. The American high-tech missile shield on offer is despite its purchase of the latest missile shield from Russia over US objections and disapproval.

There are possibilities of increasing items in future that can be Made in India to run with the desired Indian policy in this regard. The joint briefing spoke in terms of becoming part of each other’s value chains.

By tightening this security embrace, the signal has been sent out to the world via President Trump’s exclusive two day visit to India.  America now stands solidly behind India is probably the message. This is partially because America seeks to maintain its own pre-eminence as the world’s number one global power. This beneficial security cooperation with India is seen to help in this regard. On its part, if India is to be a bulwark in South Asia, while ensuring its own defence, it must ramp up both its military and economic capabilities. It is, as many have pointed out a transactional relationship but as of now, a healthy one.

There is an obvious convergence of geopolitical objectives between the two countries. One also felt by several other countries in the Asia-Pacific and the Indian Ocean region. It is to contain the predatory and hegemonistic impulses of a resurgent China. The other is the desire of both countries to contain and roll-back the depredations of radical Islam generally, and Pakistan sponsored terrorism in particular.    

A major trade agreement, referred to several times during this visit, will have to wait till after the US presidential elections in November 2020, which President Trump expects to win. India has a positive balance of trade today. And America is now India’s largest trading partner.

A wide ranging Indo-US bilateral trade agreement could be a major modernising impulse for India. It could also benefit the consumer with a wide array of choices at reasonable prices on items such as pork and dairy items. Even the iconic Harley Davidson motorcycles, currently taxed quite heavily with import and customs duties, may become more affordable. This, even as there are plans to make smaller engined Harley-Davidson motorcycles in India to develop a mass market here.

The crowds, pageantry, hospitality and warmth experienced by the American visitors in the president’s delegation which include senior officials, members  of the president’s family and business chiefs, will go some way to hasten things along on the trade and industry front. So far, the international coverage of this visit has been uniformly positive.

In a sense, India, mostly on the fringes of American foreign policy over the years, has been ushered into a more central role. This suggests that the stature of India in official American eyes has gained considerable ground. The Indian diaspora in the US has also gained much influence.

The knock-on effect of this unambiguous endorsement from America will result in greater dynamism in relations with America’s NATO allies and those who take their lead from them.

It will also weaken Chinese opposition to including India in global fora, and efforts to seek a constant equivalence with its ally Pakistan. India’s own bilateral relationship with China has improved even as the wariness and rivalry exist alongside.  

To some extent the attitude of China has already changed. This is illustrated in its recent position at the FATF that endorsed Pakistan to remain in the Grey List till it does more against terrorist financing  and related activities. 

It is unclear as yet, besides joint military manoeuvres by air, sea and land, with America and others, such as China itself, others in the Asia-Pacific and Australia, whether India will take on a more global role. India has never hesitated to send military personnel for UN Peacekeeping Missions. But will it agree to taking on a more active role for the regional security concerns?

India may well begin to acknowledge its expanding role with logistic, surveillance, monitoring, intelligence and other infrastructural support in places beyond our borders. This may be necessary as the quid pro quo for increasing American support. However, it remains to be seen how this aspect progresses, probably more slowly than America may want.

India has made it clear that it will pursue a Nation First policy and trust itself to an active bilateralism in each instance. America too may have taken a page from the same book of late. So, nothing here suggests that the new security embrace is overtly aimed at any third party. However, it does cramp the room to move of any power with inimical ambitions.

(1,299 words)

For: Sirfnews

February 25^th, 2020

Gautam Mukherjee

Change Is A Tide That Rewrites History

Change Is A Tide That Rewrites History

India is moving relentlessly towards an ascendancy of its Hindu majority. This is not just in terms of a cultural and religious phenomenon, though these aspects are not lagging for the first time, but a decided political makeover.

So much so, that one opposition party after another, irrespective of its support base amongst Muslims and other minorities, is paying hurried obeisance to this country’s Hindu roots.

Question is, are their me-too initiatives to build temples and statues, conduct temple visits, aratis and other Hindu rituals, substantial enough to convince and carry the day?

Their attempt is to plump for a soft, non-assertive Hinduism, that may be acceptable to the so-called secularist, in tandem with the old reliable of Muslim appeasement.

The problem is the increasing lawlessness and rigidity of the Muslim, replete with wild calls to the community to rise up against the majority, hopes of breaking up the country, and praise for Islamic terrorists and Pakistan.

It is no doubt fearful of losing its privileges of the decades since independence. 

The Muslims demand their privileges in return for the block voting they practice. The blatant insistence on a quid pro quo is offending Hindus and embarrassing the liberal-leftist-communist combines. It puts the dependent opposition parties, most of them regional, and confined to one state, over a barrel. 

But it is understandable, because this arm-twisting worked quite well till the Congress collapsed nationally for the most part, and absolutely at the Centre.

Unfortunately, this backdrop greatly dilutes opposition gestures towards Hindus. This late acknowledgement of Hindu sentiments is meant to be sympathetic without endorsing the political muscularity of the Hindutva ethos and aspiration upheld by the Sangh Parivar.

It also seeks to steal some of the BJP’s Hindutva thunder from a polity that seems to have been awakened to its potential. Unfortunately, this is not a proper bandage and unlikely to do the job. The Hindu has long felt like it was being pushed out to the windowless store room in its own large house.

The BJP, by way of contrast, will continue doing substantial things in addition to the CAA-NPR-NRC. Laws such as the Uniform Civil Code and the Population Control Bill are coming. Collectively they are designed to weed out illegal immigrants, and begin to significantly raise the per capita income of this country.

Lakhs of crores of rupees are going into the creation and upgradation of infrastructure and the railways. Despite setbacks suffered  by the economy mainly due to fiscal profligacy and loan defaults originating from the 10 UPA years, India has become a nearly $ 3 trillion economy in absolute terms. It is now the 5^th largest economy in the world.

India has overtaken France and Britain during the BJP’s watch already, and is determined to power on to $5 trillion in GDP. That this too is likely to be powered by the services sector, already accounting for 60%, as opposed to  the more traditional  markers of the economy, is the shape of a new vibrancy that cannot be dominated by a slowing global economy.

Absolute poverty too has declined drastically over the last six years. The armed forces are being modernised and supported like never before, and the foreign policy of the country has become effectively nationalist and India first without demur or apology. Manufacturing under Make in India is showing results in defence manufacturing, steel, and electronics. Space technology, developments in science and communications put to practical use, clean energy, sanitation, education, health, are all delivering results.  International diplomacy is now working markedly in India’s favour with old allies and new.

National icons, long ignored by the Congress, are being honoured at last, and there is a concerted effort to promote a wider study of India’s history and vedic heritage, reaching out considerably beyond the Mughals.

All this put together is making the old political model of socialism, welfarism, minority appeasement and economic profligacy obsolete. The tendency to call freebies a tool of progress and equity plays with the truth.

This government too does much for the poor, but it is largely by way of providing enablers that promote growth. It has also plugged the leakages that have prevented the largesse from reaching its intended recipients. To turn this on its ear without regard to revenue generation is a formula for economic disaster.

By 2024, when the next general elections are due, many of the economic benefits of the Modi doctrine of infrastructure driven growth will be evident. In addition, there will be quite an array of Hindutva successes. Some driven by new legislation designed to curb the false secularism of the past. Others via transformation of places like Jammu, Kashmir, Ladakh, Ayodhya, Varanasi and the North East. The architecture of the seat of the central government too is expected to be transformed by then.

Even if the coalition of opposition parties is able to unseat this government in 2024, it will have little choice but to build on all that has been changed. 

Narendra Modi and his government will have left its mark on history for all the world to see. And the most notable aspect of it will be the righting of the wrongs done to the Hindu majority.

Epoch- making tenures cannot be wished away. When the late conservative prime minister of Britain Margaret Thatcher took over, Britain was largely but not entirely done with the tensions of religious enmity. It had dominated  matters for centuries since Henry VIII broke away from Rome. Thatcher was prime minister from 1979-1990 and was initially confronted with a failing economy.

There were muscular trade unions nurtured by a post WWII Labour Party in every sphere except the armed forces. Quite a few loss-making government owned enterprises and services, also bitten by the socialist bug, dotted the sceptred isle.

Thatcher, described not only as the Iron Lady, but in possession of the “lips of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula”, knew what she had to do. She set about resolutely privatising utilities, deregulating the financial sector, the national airline, and anything else she could turn away from government control. She closed down loss-making coal mines. She took subsidies off the railways, the tube and the buses. She stood up to the European Union and its many one-sided dictates. She made common cause with Britain’s staunchest ally, the United States, then run by Ronald Reagan as President. She persuaded President Gorbachev to reform the USSR, leading, unfortunately for it, to its break-up. She promoted private ownership of property. She won the Falklands War.

Thatcher ran into a clamour of protests from the old order. Apart from marches and leftist jamborees, there were Gandhian fasts and the Irish Liberation Army (IRA) tools of the hunger-strike and the bomb. People died starving themselves, but Thatcher did not relent. The IRA even tried to kill her at Brighton in 1984, with a bomb that demolished part of the very hotel suite she was staying in.

Today, it is clear that Margaret Thatcher broke the back of the old mass- entitlement ridden Britain, at least for a time, and certainly reduced the extent of government welfarism for good.

But, in 2020, it can be seen that a lot of the socialism has crept back despite her eleven years in power. Today, the Brexit achieved Britain, limping once again from lack of economic dynamism and joblessness, is in some danger of breaking up.

There is confusion in the air with radical Islamism exploiting the liberal political ethos to try and establish a formal hold on Muslim majority buroughs in London and elsewhere. Ireland is trying to reunite, Protestant Northern Ireland and Catholic Eire. If it becomes one country, the United Kingdom will lose Protestant Northern Ireland. The age-old enmity between Catholics and Protestants has abated to a great extent as the hold of the Catholic church on Eire has waned. United Ireland will probably retain its links with the EU.

Scotland too is restive, and seeking a fresh referendum to secede and keep its links with the EU.

India will not face a similar break-up simply because it has woken up in time to the minority threats, and elected a man like Narendra Modi, in 2014, and again in 2019.

By 2024, the electorate will probably be sufficiently mindful of internal and external dangers to prevent any political collusion between India’s rulers and those who do not wish it well. If it is still the BJP that wins another term, the future of the Hindu majority and India will have to be substantially rewritten.

(1,424 words)

For: Sirfnews

February 21^st, 2020

Gautam Mukherjee

Ideology, Poster Politics & Challenges To The Status Quo

Ideology, Poster Politics & Challenges To The Status Quo

Home Minister Amit Shah, at a media house summit recently, said he joined the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) when it had just two seats in 1980-1981. He did so based on his ideological convictions. His English professor of the time wondered how he had chosen a political party that involved more or less the task of pasting posters on the wall.

Today, some forty years later, his ideological convictions have not changed, even though the landscape of political power is much altered.

With two successive terms at the Centre, a substantial majority in the Lok Sabha, and sufficient support in the Rajya Sabha, even from political parties outside the National Democratic Alliance (NDA); the BJP has implemented major items on its long-standing to-do list.

This has put the old order on the back foot. Having failed to prevail in parliament, they have decided to take matters to the “people” on the street.

The road ahead under the BJP, promises to continue with the implementation of several other outstanding issues such as the Uniform Civil Code (UCC), which will put all the citizens of India on an equal footing with no special provisions for any minority.

And lately, based on a substantial pressure on the resources of the country, with over 1.3 billion people, and its relatively low per capita income - The Population Control Law.

The compilation of the National Population Register (NPR), already underway in some states, is a census between other censuses. This is to be followed by the implementation of the law entitled the National Register of Citizens (NCR). This latter is designed to identify and remove illegal immigrants from the voter lists, at a minimum.    

After the Delhi elections recently concluded, it is clear that the model for a section of the broader Opposition, including the much diminished Congress and the victorious Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), now with national ambitions afresh, may change somewhat.

A combination of populist measures, within a highly publicised “development model” that focuses attention on basic health, primary and secondary education facilities at government schools, provision of electricity, water, pollution, street lighting, and other similar civic necessities may become more widespread. 

This is expected to enthuse the young voter, women who run their households with limited means, and those who receive the largesse of free items. These sections have voted strongly for the AAP.

In addition, because of the monolithic pattern of voting practiced by it, the concerns of the Muslim community will be given pride of place. This is already the case, most prominently, in West Bengal, which has a large minority population at some 30% of the total. Delhi, by contrast today has only 12%.  However, this is a reliable vote bank for both the Trinamool Congress(TMC) in West Bengal, and the AAP in Delhi.

The AAP has taken some pointers from the TMC as well as others from the BJP itself. The BJP inspiration has been reinterpreted as a support to Hinduism as opposed to Hindutva. The effort, which seems to have worked, was to seize part of the BJP’s thunder as the party for Hindus.

While people are naturally free to vote as they please, and indeed  peacefully protest whatever laws they don’t like, it becomes worrisome when they break quite a few laws themselves in the process.

This includes providing a platform for blatant sedition, squatting on a main arterial road at the expense of a large number of people, indulging in destruction of public and private property, arson, violence.  

It is also of concern when that support extends to opposing democratically debated and passed laws in parliament such as the Citizens’ Amendment Act (CAA).

The anti-CAA protestors, in Delhi and other parts, simply want the law rolled back. And, apparently, nothing short of a repeal will satisfy them. This despite the support the law enjoys from some 70% of the population, according to a recent survey.

The protestors insist it is discriminatory on the grounds of religion and therefore anti-constitutional. The Supreme Court (SC), is expected to pronounce on its validity in the not too distant future, but is unlikely to call for its abrogation.   

It is increasingly clear that the minority community does not, and will not, vote for the BJP with the exception of some women grateful for the enactment of the Triple Talaq Act, and possibly, some Shia. The Shia, along with other smaller sects, are a minority within the minority.

This divide too is ideological, because the BJP is seen as the party of the majority Hindu community. Its stated objective of Sabka Vikas is not believed. The polarisation, long existent, but now out in the open, is along religious lines on both sides. The new issue is an apprehension of challenges to the status quo that has long favoured the minorities.

The BJP is determined to create a level playing field, and enjoys broad support in this endeavour. The only people who don’t want this are those who have benefited from the old order, the partisan interpretation of secularism, and the voting patterns it has elicited in their favour.

But the electoral challenge that the recent AAP landslide in Delhi represents may need a strong economic response to bolster the BJP’s appeal. The Hindu voter may decide against making a meal of ideology alone going forward.

  

(886 words)

For: WIONNEWS

February 15^th, 2020

Gautam Mukherjee

Muslims Alone Cannot Deliver Electoral Wins Any Longer

Muslims Alone Cannot Deliver Electoral Wins Any Longer

The recipe to political success has conclusively changed after seven decades. This may become apparent in the forthcoming Delhi assembly election, and thereafter in Bihar too, if BJP wins both in alliance with its partners. 

In Delhi certainly, the BJP is gaining ground daily in the run up to the 8^th   of February, and the AAP is likely to be forced to sit in the Opposition.  There is a reason for this, and it makes a much more portentous point for the future.

The change has come about gradually, imperceptibly, unnoticed by most used to not seeing what doesn’t suit their world view. It is a change in perception of the realities that has worked itself, in an all but subterranean manner. And within the unflashy and largely silent majority.

It has changed, in reaction to the excesses committed by the powers that be who mistakenly thought they had established a monopoly on India’s self-image. It has changed in smoldering anger at being vilified, pushed aside, exploited, ignored and taken for granted.

By sheer repetition, propaganda and a Leftist recasting of history, people in the ruling elite of mostly high-caste Hindus and well-off Muslims thought that their version of The Idea Of India was well-nigh indelible- planted firmly in the Indian psyche for all time to come.

But now in 2020, a fundamental and tectonic shift will shortly become apparent, in continuation of the changes seen since May 2014. One that will pull the remainder of the carpet from under the Socialist-Lohiaite parties of India that came about in two stages.

Stage one was the Harold Laski influenced secularism of Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1950s. Stage two was the Jayaprakash Narayan led churning of the seventies. This latter spawned a number of regional parties and relatively lower caste Hindu leaders such as the Yadavs, alongside the more humble Muslim ones.

These political entities replaced the proxyism of the Brahmin-Chowdhary-Sayyid leadership of the Congress. But, it began to jostle for the same Congress space. Which, to be fair, was indeed the entire political universe of the time.

The old majority governments that the Congress enjoyed ever since independence melted away, and were replaced by an “era of coalitions” as IK Gujral put it.

A last hurrah of the old older was the majority government of Rajiv Gandhi in the eighties, after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. That this opportunity to consolidate anew was wasted, is a matter of fact. The subsequent minority government of Congress’ PV Narasimha Rao and others, the short-lived Janata Dal governments, the NDA coalition under AB Vajpayee and the UPA thereafter; all lived by the ways of the so-called coalition dharma aka the division of the spoils.

The monolithic vote banks of Muslims and Dalits and other backwards castes all voting for Congress were fragmented forever. The Hindu revivalist parties, such as the Hindu Mahasabha, active at independence, the suppressed RSS, and the early Jan Sangh, were below the radar in terms of political power for all the decades till the Janata Dal experiment. They had been squashed by Nehru’s brand of secularism, and only properly reemerged after the Ayodhya movement of the nineties that culminated in the first NDA government.

But, with the 10 years of the UPA that followed thereafter, it was seen as an aberration in the narrative by the liberal-left thinker, a “communal” fluke, unlikely to be repeated. It was understood that the BJP could not, indeed should not, get more than 160 seats or so on its own at any of the general elections going forward.

The prevailing political theory was that the Hindu religion in the hands of the RSS, BJP and their Sangh Parivar, could not unite people sufficiently, because it was casteist and controlled by a Brahmin-Bania nexus.

But the Muslims, particularly the majority Sunni, could be scared into fearing majoritarianism, and voting en bloc for a number of very similar socialist parties. All of them purportedly eschewed religion of any kind in the name of secularism, but were increasingly forced into large doses of Muslim appeasement when their dependence on this demographic became more and more apparent.

And this is what has once again turned the tide as the majority stopped believing in the secularism and socialism of the various.

So not only did Narendra Modi win majorities for the BJP alone, plus more seats with the NDA, both in 2014 and 2019, the trend has flowed and ebbed in the states, municipalities and other elections too. Nothing is too small to be counted any more, and the BJP is always a contender. 

The reverse consolidation against excessive Muslim appeasement is working very well for it. It will likely win not only Delhi and Bihar but probably take West Bengal as well in 2021. And for the very same reason above all other things. The Opposition, particularly the Congress, the CPM and the TMC, sometimes calls it the polarization politics of the ruling dispensation. But the public sees it as a legitimate reaction to the politics of Muslim appeasement. 

Particularly, since it seems to encompass many anti-national elements such as Islamic terrorists, fundamental Muslim clerics, Pakistan and China sponsored separatism, murderous Maoism, dangerous fifth columnists masquerading as students in Communist and Muslim dominated universities

There are a number of other states that may be wrested from Opposition hands such as Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, perhaps using strategies and tactics other than another untimely election, without offending the voters. This is because there are less and less takers for the Congress  world-view, and those that agree with it amongst the regional parties.

This makes the ultimate point that despite being 17% of the population of India, concentrated in some places, the Muslims can no longer deliver wins. Once absorbed, this fact may induce a change in behavior amongst the Muslim leadership. The Muslim masses too may become more accommodative of the majority Hindu sentiment. It will also force their political dependents to change their ways if they wish to survive in electoral politics.

This  sea-change needs to be accepted by all concerned as early as possible, because the old order is truly over like it or not. The voter has been sensitized  about his best interests and cannot be ignored. If there is to be increasing plurality and tolerance practiced by the people of India, it is incumbent on the Muslims to step back from their stridency and aggression. Special Muslim privilege may have to go, replaced, if all goes well, by a level playing field for all communities.

Fact is, it was this that was in the minds of the great men and women who wrote the Indian Constitution. But, over the years, this intent was deliberately subverted to suit the purposes of a power elite that is happily no longer in power. And unlikely in the extreme to ever return unless much changed itself.

The vestiges of the old order, of course, are still everywhere- in the bureaucracy, academia, the judiciary and so on. But without the ongoing oxygen of power, these supporters of an absent and deposed overlord cannot go on for very much longer. They too will have to revise and reboot their outlook.   

There is always theorizing about a revival for those who have fallen from grace. But history teaches us that some things, like a political order that has outlived its usefulness, cannot be brought back.

India is a land of Hindus in which the majority has been held to ransom in its own house, by some of its own people, for all this time.

But now, that situation is being rectified, with structural changes that will be irreversible. The matter has now gone beyond politics into the birth of a New India that is still developing its content. But at a minimum, it will let the majority of the people breathe freely in a space they can call their own. The Minority tail will not wag the Majority dog henceforth.

 (1,328 words)

For: Sirfnews

February 3^rd, 2020

Gautam Mukherjee