. Copyright of Hitler’s agenda, infringed upon by Narendra Modi in India — by Sumanta Banerjee

     Copyright  of  Hitler’s  agenda,  infringed  upon  by  Narendra     Modi in India — by Sumanta Banerjee ;I  am  raising  a  serious  issue  that  touches  upon  a  person’s  legal  right  of  exclusive  possession  of  his/her  personal  creation  –  whether  a  scientific  formula,  or  a  literary  piece,  or  even  a  political  programme. This  is  known  as  copyright,  or  patent  in  relation  with  certain  products.  If  anyone  uses  that  material  without  the  permission  of  its  original  author,  or  fails  to  acknowledge  credit  to  its  producer,  he  will  be  liable  for  prosecution. Now,  may  be  I  am  being  the  devil’s  advocate,  as   I  am  raising  a  hypothetical  question.  Suppose  if   Hitler  were   alive  today  (thank  God,  he   isn’t  !),  under  the  prevailing  copyright  and  patent  laws,  wouldn’t   he   have  been  entitled  to  sue  Narendra  Modi  for  infringement  of  copyright  of  the  Nazi  model  which  Hitler  alone  designed  in  Germany  in  the 1930s ?  After  all,  it’s   Hitler’s  ideas  and  tactics  that  Modi  has  plagiarized  from  the  Nazi  text  book.  Modi’s speeches,  like  those  of  Hitler’s   are  filled  with  misinformation,  religious  majoritarian  and  nationalist  chauvinist  sentiments,  and  aggressively  promote    his  personal  image  to  the  mindless  cheer  of  the  mob.  His  lieutenants  in  the  BJP,  in  their  public  utterances  and  lectures,  spread  vitriol   against  Muslims,  and  political  opponents  who  are  branded   as  urban  Naxalites  –  in  the  style  of    the  same  hate -filled   anti-Jewish  and  anti-Communist  propaganda  that  was  spewed  by  Goebbels  and  other  Nazi  leaders . Similar  to  Germany  in  the  1930s,  we  witness  today  in  India,  armed  marauders  and  murderous  gangs  of  the  Sangh  Parivar,  the  Vishva  Hindu  Parishad,  Bajrang  Dal  and  other  outfits  going  on a  killing  spree,  in  the  footsteps  of   the  Nazi  Storm  Troopers,    shouting  `Jai  Shri  Ram,’  almost  sounding  like  `Heil  Hitler !’ Even  India’s  official  snooping  department,  the  NIA  (National  Investigative  Agency),  has  taken  a leaf  out  of   the  book  of  the  Gestapo  (`Geheime  Staatspolizei’  –  the  Nazi  secret  police). Like  the  Gestapo  which  hounded,  imprisoned  and  killed  Hitler’s  political  opponents  and  other  intellectual  dissidents,  the  NIA  in  India  today  is  hauling  up  social  activists,  students  and  youth  participants  in  civil  liberties  movement,  independent  journalists  who  expose  cases  of  the    violation  of  human  rights  both  by  state  agencies  and  the  ruling  BJP  leaders. They  are  arrested  and  put  behind  bars  for  years,  without  trial.  (I  have  dealt  in  detail  with  the  neo-Nazi  functioning  of  the  NIA  in  my  article:  India’s  `Gestapo’ –  National  Investigative  Agency  in  Countercurrents,  26/12/21). If  we  turn  to  another  institution  –  the  jails  in  India  –  where  these  social  activists  and  political  dissenters  are  imprisoned,  we  again  find  that  the  Modi  government  is   stealing   the  patent  of  `concentration  camps’  that  Hitler  invented.  He  created  the  camps  in  Dachau,  Buchenwald,  Auschwitz  and  other  places,  and  established  a  strict  model   whereby  the  prisoners  were  to  be  exterminated  through   different  methods  –  gas  chamber,  torture,  starvation,  denial  of  medical  treatment  among  other  means. Narendra  Modi  has  adopted  some  of  these  methods  from  the  jail  manual  that  Hitler  fashioned  for  his  concentration  camps.  Instead  of  spending  money  on   setting  up   separate   gas chambers,  Modi  has  modified  Hitler’s  model  by  turning  the  Indian  jails  into  mini-gas  chambers. Thanks  to  the  suffocating  toxic  environs  within  their  premises,  polluted  drinking  water  and  food,  and  denial  of  medical  treatment,  the  number  of  deaths  in  these  jails  increased  by  seven  percent  from  2019  to  2020   –  according  to  the  officially  released  Prison  Statistics  India,  2020  report. Among  the  victims  of  these  mini-gas  chambers    in  Indian  jails,  there  are  prominent  social  activists   and  political  dissidents. To  mention   two  recent  cases  –  the  octogenarian  Father  Stan  Swamy  who  was  imprisoned  for  organizing  the  tribal  poor  to  assert  their  rights,  died  in  Taloja  Jail  in  Maharashtra  on  July  5,  2021,  after  having  been  denied  medical  treatment  by  the  jail  authorities.  On  August  25,  2021,  in  Nagpur Central  Jail,  a  political  activist  Pandu  Narote  died  –  again  following  similar  denial  of  necessary  medical  care.   Pandu  Narote  was  a  co-accused  with   G. N.  Saibaba,   a  professor  of  Delhi  University,  who   remains   confined   in  the  same  Nagpur  central  jail,  on  the  charge  of   association  with  Maoists.  Wheelchair-bound  Saibaba  is  90%  disabled,  and  is  confined  in  isolation  within  a  narrow  cell  which  is  shaped  as  an  oblong .  Known  as  `anda cells’  (egg-shaped  cells), similar  cells  have  been  set  up  in  other  jails  too  for  the  solitary  confinement  of  political  prisoners  and  social  activists. In  fact,  the  Modi  government  has  improved  upon  the  Nazi   model  of  concentration  camps  by  inventing  the  `anda  cell.’ In  the  Nazi  concentration  camps,  while  the  prisoners  could  at  least  share  each  other’s   company  and ordeals   (and  often  put  up  collective  resistance),  in  the  `anda  cells’,  the  individual  prisoner  is  left  alone  to  protest  against  acts  of  injustice,  and  wrestle  within  his  own  mind  to  protect  himself  from  sinking  into  mental  depression. Judging  by  the  record  of  the  style  of  governance  by  Narendra  Modi,  as  described  above,    Modi  should  acknowledge  his  debt  to  Hitler –  along  with  his  `gurus’  in  the  Sangh  Parivar  –  from  whom  he  derived  inspiration. He  should  not  have  any  qualms  in  including  a  foreigner  among  his  political  teachers,  or  even  placing  him  on  a  higher  pedestal,  in  his  altar  of  devotion. To  recall  the  past,    Narendra  Modi’s  Hindu  guru  M.S.  Golwalkar  way  back  in  1939,   paid  tribute  to  Hitler   by  praising  him  for  exterminating  the  Jews,  and  advised   Indians  to  imbibe  that  model  by   destroying   their  Semitic  counterparts  in  India,  the  Muslims.  Following  is  Golwalkar’s   infamous   statement: “To  keep  up  the   purity  of  the  Race  and  its  culture,  Germany  shocked  the  world  by  purging the  country  of  the  Semitic  races  and  the  Jews. Race  pride  at  its  highest  has  been  manifested  here….  a  good  lesson  for us  in  Hindusthan  to  learn  and  profit  by.”  (We  or  Our  Nationhood.  1939). Shouldn’t   Narendra  Modi  in  public  announcement,  pay  tribute  to  Hitler  for  `learning  and  profiting  by’  him  ? Only  by  this  acknowledgement,  he  can  overcome  the   allegation  of   stealing  Hitler’s  copyright   and  patent  rights  –  an  allegation  that  might  be    hurled  against   him  by  the  present  day  neo-Nazi  followers  of  Hitler  in  Europe  and  elsewhere. Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008);

Islam phobias in India

 

Islam phobias in India; JAN 08, 2023; Between the 17th and 19th of December last month, a large collection of major religious leaders, right-wing activists, fundamentalist militants and Hindutva organisations came together at Haridwar. The event they held, called ‘Dharma Sansad’or ‘religious parliament’, witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of hate speech calling for a genocide of the Muslims of India. But despite the violent exhortations hurled over the course of three days, authorities in India did not make a single arrest. Under the regime of Narendra Modi, right-wing hate and violence against India’s Muslims has acquired a sense of normalisation. But while they, along with India’s Dalit community, make the usual targets, it was only a matter of time till the hate spread on to other minority groups as well. On January 2, a mob in Chhattisgarh vandalised a church after right-wing leaders accused the Christian community of carrying out ‘forcible conversions’. While the global community has been slow to react to India’s slide towards Hindu nationalism, observers in Western capitals too are beginning to notice. As the year 2022 came to an end, outgoing Democratic Congressman Andy Levin warned: “I have been a vocal advocate for human rights in places like India, which is in danger of becoming a Hindu nationalist State rather than a secular democracy, the world's largest democracy.” In an exclusive interview with The Express Tribune, renowned Indian-American anthropologist and professor at the New York University Arjun Appadurai unpacked the historical ingredients that enabled an environment widespread right-wing Hindu nationalist sentiment in India. In conjunction with a global erosion of democratic ideals and yearning for quick results, he explained how India has found itself in a perfect storm of Hindu majoritarianism: I am among the very large number of people who are trying to tackle this big question of a kind of a worldwide trend, which is very apparent, although the differences among the locations where this is happening cannot be ignored.

 

It's difficult to see this in the way that one might, for example, see the Coronavirus where you can actually see it moving. The thing about the shift to autocratic authoritarian governments is you cannot see an obvious sort of circulation path although many of the leaders in these cases are aware of each other. But it's not easy to say that they're sort of mimicking or learning something, and we are forced to look for deeper trends.My main view is that though there are huge differences in the electorates and the populations in these different countries, a common element might be that many of these populations whether in Turkey or Hungary or the US, or India, have lost patience with the slowness of liberal democracy, to deliver whatever it is they want. There's a loss of patience and consequently, they are more ready than ever to vote for leaders who promise quick, essentially overnight results. The cost of writing that cheque is that we will have to get rid of this and that procedural hurdle. But other ideological attachments to these leaders then creep in and in many cases, that lubricant which lets people accept the promise that results will be delivered overnight is some form of majoritarian racism – a sense that some majority, however defined, has been poorly treated, and now their moment has come to restore their place.I used the word democracy fatigue in an essay I wrote about four years ago soon after Trump was brought into office, saying that people are exiting democracy by democratic means that is through elections and so on. In some other places, of course, even elections are dispensed with, but the disturbing phenomenon is places that have ostensibly democratic institutions, democracy itself is being dispensed with. The conventional storyline is not at all wrong, which is that for some reason, institutions – the democratic ones, the courts, the media, the press, the legislature and indeed the executive – in India by all accounts were quite healthy, vibrant and strong in the decades up to let's say, the early 2000s, when we begin to see the rise of the BJP culminating now in the in the very troubling situation under Modi. But in that long story, we must recall, of course, that even under Indira Gandhi's rule, we had the emergency, which was only a year but still showed a certain readiness on the part of even the liberal Congress to crack down hard on dissent. Likewise, the 1984 opprobrium on Sikhs or the whole Kashmir position of the Indian state starting with the birth of the two nations has been a very hardline position. I think it had some potentially flexible moments in Nehru’s early years, but quite quickly became the rigid view that we see today. There is a mystery about why this descent into right wing religious fundamentalism and majoritarian autocracy could happen relatively fast. You could make a longer history from Babri Masjid to today or you could make a shorter history from Modi's period as chief minister in Gujarat to today. But in any case, you can say it was obvious from 1947 that India was doomed to become a right-wing majoritarian state. It's hard to fully spell out what has happened, but its consequences are clearly massive and it has clearly led to the rise of very militant Hinduism, which has historical precedent. And it's a history that is now closely tied to a very powerful centralised state – it's not just regional rules, or doing little wars and business here and there, it's got a kind of elevator straight to Delhi.  India is a land only of minorities. Not also of minorities, but only of minorities. There is nobody who has a big writ. Even if you take these big categories like Hindu, Muslim, and so on, they have slowly crystallised over time, especially during the colonial period. It is very difficult to see a macro idea of Muslims and Hindus and so on as big identities. If you look even closely at riots in places like Lucknow in the 16th, 17th or 18th century, it's Shias vs Sunni. Nobody is holding up the flag of you know, the Ummah or some massive global Hinduism. It's all highly fragmented and this relates to caste as well, but not only to it.

 

No one was not a minority in India over a massive part of its history. The big question is how does a majority get produced in this place? In a place like Serbia or Japan, there are of course minorities, but you can also see there is some objective basis for a certain group of people to say we are the majority. We look and talk the same, and eat the same and these ‘untouchables’ in Japan or Okinawans, or Kosovars in Serbia, are different. Now, in all cases, it is my belief that the majority has to be built, whether it's Serbia, Germany or here. It is not off the shelf. But in a place like India it is a huge task because of the minoritisation or the fact that you're in small cells, which have this quality that is so hardwired. I don't think we have fully plumbed the dynamics of the way a credible majoritarian identity has been not only created but also installed, you might say in digital terms, into the population. I think the big force, which I don't understand well enough personally, is the RSS and its affiliates. They have clearly done a huge job in installing this majoritarian software on a place-to-place basis. And of course, Modi was a lifelong RSS person, a fact we sometimes forget. Each of these answers raises more questions. Still, I would say a preliminary shot at it would be that the BJP did the wise thing to keep the RSS relationship very alive. Otherwise, it would be like every party going up and down with electoral fortunes. So, whether you go slightly up in Punjab or down in Rajasthan or down in Bengal, there is a steady force keeping your political apparatus in place as a national affair and it's not the BJP alone, because the BJP alone, you know its leadership has a very particular configuration of essentially Gujarat, UP, and a couple of other states and the key actors. But RSS is in all those places. So somewhere there may be an answer to your question. I think he deserves to be taken very seriously. For one thing, he's the only person I would say at the national level who has genuine large-scale appeal and charisma. If you made a charisma index, he's close to 100 and everybody else is below 50, and most people are below 20. No one can take away from it. He's an incredible speaker. He knows how to make his appeals; he's also mastered how to make the cocktail of visibility and invisibility. He’s there all the time in front of you, but never at press conferences. You'd never see him with his hair out of place or him laughing. He's a purely hologrammed brand and you can't escape him. Modi has mastered what in the US in the 50s was called image politics. I admire that skill. He's also been extremely shrewd, considering that he's not a scientist – to put it mildly, not highly educated. He's been extremely smart on the IT front. These BJP IT cells are amazing to me. The IT game has totally been lost. He also has made a considerable effort, though this I think has largely been a failure, to bring the military in which is the big X Factor. The military is the 800-pound gorilla slightly off scene. General Bipin Rawat was the first exception, the line crosser, who lined up with the regime and said, hey, you know, this is the way to go and I'm at the service of this regime and its vision. But it's not clear how far down you see that interest in getting into the frontline of politics is in the Indian armed forces. But there are many other things in which Modi has been very shrewd, one of which is the question I still ask myself: how could this man in especially Europe and the US have a very benign reputation to this day? Erdogan has not achieved this. Nobody else has achieved this. Orban has not achieved this, Trump has not achieved this. Boris Johnson has not achieved this. But Modi is still seen as a wise and strong leader in developing countries. So he also gets credit there. I don't know whether credit is at the sending end in how he manages his image and statements or the receiving end that there is some, which has been my theory, that the receiving end has India locked in a kind of 1970s image, struggling democracy, developing country, and they just don't understand that a new chapter, a new drama has been going on for 10 to 15 years. There's a kind of arrest on the reception side. That's my private theory or my personal theory. But there too, we have to go because he's not allowed his image to correspond more to the reality of his policies. Gandhi represents the exact opposite of what Modi represents in terms of tolerance, abhorrence of violence and so on and so forth, commitment to truth. All these really put him in the opposite place. Conceptually, he's still the main alternative because Nehru was too much involved in day-to-day politics. Gandhi still has a certain special status, which sometimes is used to also distance him and say who cares, he's somewhere up in some other realm. But still, he is a kind of conscience for India. There is however, another side which is more tricky for where Gandhi feeds into the hardwiring of Indian politics and society in a way that is not totally separate from the world of Modi or others and that has to do with these ideas about Hindu and Muslim. Even if he had a different idea how they should connect, the idea became, I think, quite important him. Several people also have complained about Gandhi over the decades that while he was extremely humane, especially at partition towards the Muslim population of the Subcontinent, he never really understood Islam much in the way that he understood, say Christianity. There was a kind of imagination limitation – not a genocidal impulse but something soft, a lacking. Gandhi also had a certain social conservatism on caste on the order of things. You can attempt to reinterpret his writings but the landscape is there, such as the idea of Harijan, a term the Dalits hate. Although someone like Modi is not a subtle intellectual or historian, I think at a gut level he knows that Gandhi had a conservative Hindu side. Gandhi made it as humanistic and universal as possible, but the DNA was there. Modi just took that social conservatism and put it on steroids. Having said that, Gandhi was not genocidal or believed in majoritarianism – that's a Modi copyright. Gandhi would have been horrified and would literally be turning in his grave seeing this. I'm a firm believer that Mahatma Gandhi would have not supported what is happening in India. No doubt. I was recently stimulated by a colleague with whom I was in one-on-one correspondence to look at the election results for Modi over the last two elections. The numbers are not staggering – 40% or fully 45%. I mean, Nehru sometimes had 70 or 80% vote. So, the question is who's in that 40 or 45, and who's in the 60 or 65? Modi has managed to get a large part of the population to overcome their parochial or localised sectional interests to go for this big message that is true. No one has succeeded in mobilising the other side in the same way, which is made up of bits and pieces. Modi’s side have been successful aggregators. The numbers are not overwhelming but it's a number enough to dominate the parliament. He has leveraged that number in a brilliant way. I think one thing has to be kept in mind and it holds not only for Modi, but all his predecessors Manmohan Singh, Narsimha Rao, basically the Indian Congress leadership, which is the topic of corruption. What do we mean by it? How do we measure it? Is it getting worse or better? No one would deny the flow of black money and other dubious money into Indian elections is one of the scandals of all democracies today. If you take the amount of rupees flowing in from black accounts, unknown people both used to manipulate elections and to launder that money in elections. That is a very large amount of money so we need to be cautious about fetishising elections, because this is not just a Modi issue. Modi has been very smart about how to capture elections, because elections without cash in India are a thing of the past. Modi has captured the national pot so that means he also captured the election machinery. The place where we can see his brilliance as far as elections are concerned is in Gujarat. He showed himself as the master of Indian electoral politics in terms of speeches, rhetoric, and mobilisation, and also how you control the money flow. This is definitely true about that aspect of the whole Indian electoral system that responds to national and international issues. Of course, a lot is going on, which is totally local. When those things are subordinated to issues of a bigger scale, I think what you say is absolutely true. The observation I would add to that is it is the same coin, which has two sides. One is creating a uniform commitment to Modi and to the BJP among people who have a lot of sectional interest but getting them to transit, in other words, producing a majority of some kind. The other side of the coin is that somebody has to be denigrated. So polarisation always means one side is becoming solid and the other side has to be liquefied, conceptually speaking. For me that is the most basic kind of anthropological sociological human issue I've been struggling with more or less my entire career. What is the ‘we’ they think, to produce a strong and aggressive ‘we’? Why is there always a need for ‘they’? Why can't I just say we are all Hindus and we are good people, let's all be together. No, until you say that those other people are responsible for all our troubles - they are spies or Pakistani agents, this or that. In a slightly different way, it applies to Christians and in a murky way to Dalits as well, who are both ‘us’ and ‘not us’ – ‘us’ as long they remain quiet and obedient, but not as soon as they talk back. But Muslims are in a permanent default state of ‘otherness’. The deep question that very few social scientists have been able to answer and I certainly cannot answer is why is a ‘they’ required in order to produce a ‘we’, both perennially in human history and in the era of modern nation states. The ‘they’ involved can be a religious idiom or an ethnic one. It can be a migrant idiom. But no one can say they promote a vigorous nationalism without any sense of some dark spectral figure that needs to be managed in prison or eventually removed. In India, this genocidal impulse exists because the numbers are so large. It’s not like there are a handful of Muslims. And the minute you think about Muslims this way, you ask, “what about Dalits, are they on our side?” People have pointed out to me that BJP has succeeded in co-opting a significant number of Dalits. But I still think that number is not large and those in the Dalit community who think radically against the BJP are many, and very vocal. However, it's obvious that BJP has not co-opted Muslims and the Muslims are quiet because they are afraid in India. The ‘we/they’ problem [in this region] is a historical question. Why has Modi succeeded in mobilising or intensifying that feeling which clearly has a longer history? There was always some deeper issue, at least as far back as Jinnah and Nehru. Modi did not manufacture the ‘us vs them’ problem but he has leveraged the hell out of it. I think the elected government has made inroads into the other independent branches of government massively. That's why I think, just as in Pakistan, you can talk about the establishment, we can talk about the BJP regime because there's more than just the prime minister's office doing its job with the court keeping an eye and the legislature doing its own work. It's become all too close and too tight. That's my reason for using the word. It is too deeply involved in the others for it to be a healthy democratic condition. Separation of powers is at the very heart of the idea of democracy. When all of these are very closely aligned with the current ruling party you have to find some word for that. My fears are that we are approaching something resembling a tipping point, which will go in one of two ways. One of them is where the BJP and Modi consolidate this regime and dissent is more or less eliminated. While the talk we have been noticing from some quarters is technically genocidal, that project is impossible in India with its 200 million people. Rather, it’s about producing fear and compliance on a large scale. Will that happen? Or will Dalits, farmers, urban intellectuals, Marxists, women, Sikhs, etc. find a way to make common cause and push this government out. I think that would require a new order of leadership – either one person or a few, who can rise to Modi levels of credibility. But the tipping point could go that way as well. It's a very troublesome and troubling question. I haven't really thought about that. Calling for genocide is one thing and carrying it out is another thing in the current year. The numbers are too big to make it possible. I think all these tactics are ways to produce fear. They are threats and statements of impunity about the vision, not the execution. Anybody in their right mind knows it cannot be done and is an extremely risky path to embark on. You can trigger many things, including overseas intervention. Do Modi and his allies want to run those kinds of risks? I think that the pragmatic, utilitarian part of this current government, which is also deeply concerned with facilitating massive corporate profit making, sets limitations to the actual execution of a genocidal vision. I take great comfort in that. But I still think the ability to say these things is alarming. And we have to ask, what is that agenda about? And secondly, how can we nip that in the bud – through legal means, public opinion means, elections or whatever else is possible? https://tribune.com.pk/story/2394796/the-makings-of-a-hindu-nationalist-state

The deplorable situation of the Muslim nation;

 

The deplorable situation of the Muslim nation; Dr Amira Abo el-Fetouh; December 30, 2022;;

For me, the state of our Islamic nation breaks my heart. Indeed, every Muslim is saddened by the weakness and humiliation that our Islamic nation has witnessed. The nation has strayed for decades and whenever it tries to get back on course, it becomes more strayed and scattered. Its enemies speak out against it with hostility and who call Muslims terrorists, they fight Islam under the guise of "fighting terrorism" and utilise Arab rulers who appointed them in their countries, as spearheads in this malicious war.

 

The new year comes with the threat of dividing Yemen into two; separating the south from the north as part of a conspiracy by the United Arab Emirates, which armed and financed the separatists, claiming it had withdrawn from the Saudi-led coalition. The UAE destroyed Yemen, bombed the homes of Yemenis while they were sheltering within them, killed thousands of Yemenis and destroyed the country.

 

2023 will witness a worsening situation for Palestinian, with racism, abuse and the murder of Palestinians rising, especially as the extreme right-wing Netanyahu government takes office. There is no sign of hope for the establishment of the Palestinian state that they have been promising since the Oslo Accords, while the Zionist enemy continues to storm Al-Aqsa Mosque and shoot peaceful worshippers. Zionist settlers are storming the mosque and desecrating it, and in spite of the oppression, humiliation and abuse that Palestinians are subjected to, the "civilised" world remains inactive.

 

Should I highlight what is happening to the Muslims in Myanmar or the Uyghurs in China and the various types of torture and the systematic oppression they face, obliterating their lineage and uprooting their existence by the criminal fascist racist regime in China? It is tragic and shameful to hold an Arab-Chinese summit on the land of the Two Holy Mosques without mentioning these victims.

 

Or should I talk about the Muslims of Kashmir after India abolished the self-governance of the Muslim region of Kashmir? The first country that hastened to support India's decision was the UAE. The Emirates described the Muslims of Kashmir as terrorists.

 

Here I remember what happened to Timor and how they seized and separated it from the Muslim state of Indonesia under the pretext that its inhabitants are Christians. They established a state whose population does not exceed 900,000 people, but Kashmir, whose Muslim population exceeds 13 million citizens, is not allowed to be an independent state or be annexed to Muslim Pakistan, instead they stripped it of its self-governance status.

 

What about what is happening in Syria, and the conspiracies that are planned to divide and occupy its land by the Russians and the Safavids?

 

In Libya, colonial countries are competing to gain a part in Libya for their own interest, they use their agent Haftar to strike the capital, Tripoli, and kill its peaceful people who are defending their country and dignity, and today he plans to separate Cirenaica from Libya!

 

Today, Iraq is witnessing Iranian victories, as Tehran appoints presidents and governors who are directly affiliated with it to the extent that one of its leaders said Iran occupies the capitals of five Arab states; Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Bahrain. Yes, Iran or the Safavid state as it was called took over these five countries.

 

It is a new year, but nothing is new this year.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20221230-the-deplorable-situation-of-the-muslim-nation/?mc_cid=73c5aedf48&mc_eid=f50a97be6b

Top India Analysts Dispel "India's Size Illusion"

 

Top India Analysts Dispel "India's Size Illusion"

 

https://www.southasiainvestor.com/2022/03/top-india-analysts-dispel-indias-size.html

 

India's leaders and their western boosters have been promoting the country as an emerging superpower to counter rising China. They cite the size of India's economy, demography, military and consumer market to back up their assertions. These claims are challenged by India's former chief economic advisor Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman, former head of IMF in India, in an article titled "India's Size Illusion".  In a similar article titled "The Chinese Threat No One Is Talking About — And How to Counter It", Sameer Lalwani, a senior fellow for Asia strategy at the Stimson Center, has raised serious questions about India's ability to counter China in the Indian Ocean region. 

 

"Desh ka bahut nuksaan hua hai", acknowledged Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi after his military's 2019 failures against Pakistan in Balakot and Kashmir. This marked a major shift in Modi's belligerent tone that has been characterized by his boasts of "chhappan inch ki chhati" (56 inch chest) and  talk of  "munh tor jawab" (jaw-breaking response) and "boli nahin goli" (bullets, not talks) to intimidate Pakistan in the last few years.  These events should force India's western backers to reassess their strategy of boosting India as a counterweight to China.

 

India's Illusions:

 

Indian government's former Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian has enumerated and challenged arguments for what he calls "India's Size Illusion" as follows:

 

1. India’s economic size has not translated into commensurate military strength. Part of the problem is simple geography. (German Chancellor Otto Von) Bismarck (1815-1898) supposedly said that the US is bordered on two sides by weak neighbors and on two sides by fish. India, however, does not enjoy such splendid isolation. Ever since independence, it has been confronted on its Western frontier by Pakistan, a highly armed, chronically hostile, and often military-ruled neighbor. More recently, India’s northern neighbor, China, also has become aggressive, repudiating the territorial status quo, occupying contested land in the Himalayas, reclaiming territory in the east, and building up a large military presence along India’s borders. So, India may have fish for neighbors along its long peninsular coast, but on land it faces major security challenges on two fronts.

 

2.  Then there is the question of market size. As Pennsylvania State University’s Shoumitro Chatterjee and one of us (Subramanian) have shown, India’s middle-class market for consumption is much smaller than the $3 trillion headline GDP number suggests, because many people have limited purchasing power while a smaller number of well-off people tend to save a lot. In fact, the effective size of India’s consumer market is less than $1 trillion, far smaller than China’s and even smaller relative to the potential world export market of nearly $30 trillion.

 

Indo-Pacific Dominance:

 

In an article titled "The Chinese Threat No One Is Talking About — And How to Counter It", Sameer Lalwani, a senior fellow for Asia strategy at the Stimson Center, has raised serious doubts about India's ability to counter China in the Indian Ocean region. Here are a couple of excerpts from the article:

 

1. China has been building dozens of advanced warships that seem poised to head toward the vast body of water through which 80 percent of global seaborne trade transits.....Indeed, a deeper (US) partnership with India — the world’s largest democracy, on an upward economic trajectory, seemingly perfectly positioned to counter China on land and at sea — has been something of a holy grail for at least four U.S. administrations.......Yet what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a decade ago called a “strategic bet” on India does not seem to be paying off. Indian naval and political power in the Indian Ocean region is faltering, giving way to influence by Beijing. Many of these problems are of India’s own making.

 

2. There is increasing discussion and advocacy among China’s foreign policy scholars and former officials about an Indian Ocean fleet. Indeed, the idea is consistent with China’s efforts to acquire military facilities in the Horn of Africa, on Pakistan’s Indian Ocean coast, in Myanmar and in the UAE, which offers access to the Persian Gulf. China has also engaged in intelligence collection efforts in the region and increased its port visits and diplomatic presence.

 

India's "Accidental" Missile Firing:

 

India's March 9 "accidental firing" of Brahmos nuclear-capable supersonic cruise missile into Pakistan has raised serious questions about the safety of the Indian nuclear arsenal. Do the people in charge of India's nukes have basic competence to handle such weapons? Was this really an "unauthorized" or "accidental" firing? Why was there a long delay by New Delhi in acknowledging the incident?  Could Pakistan be blamed if it assumed that extremist right-wing Hindu elements had taken control of the missile system in India and fired it deliberately into Pakistani territory? Has the Indian government risked the lives of 1.6 billion people of South Asia?

 

Could this "errant" missile brought down commercial passenger planes that were in the air at the time of this "accidental" firing? Here's an excerpt from Bloomberg detailing air traffic in the flight path of the Indian Brahmos:

 

"Several planes passed through the direct trajectory of the missile that day, which flew from the Indian garrison town of Ambala and ended up in Mian Channu in Eastern Pakistan. They included a Flydubai jet heading to Dubai from Sialkot, an IndiGo plane going from Srinagar to Mumbai and an Airblue Ltd. flight from Lahore to Riyadh. All crossed the missile’s trajectory within an hour of its accidental launch, data from flight-tracking application Flightradar24 show.  Other international flights in the vicinity of the missile’s trajectory -- and within its range -- included a Kuwait Airways Co. jet heading to Guangzhou, China from Kuwait City, a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight to Riyadh from New Delhi, and a Qatar Airways service from Kathmandu to Doha, the data show. No advisory to pilots operating in the vicinity -- known as a notice to airmen or NOTAM -- was issued".

 

India: A Paper Elephant:

 

In an article titled "Paper Elephant", the Economist magazine talked about how India has ramped up its military spending and emerged as the world's largest arms importer. "Its military doctrine envisages fighting simultaneous land wars against Pakistan and China while retaining dominance in the Indian Ocean", the article said. It summed up the situation as follows: "India spends a fortune on defense and gets poor value for money".

 

After the India-Pakistan aerial combat over Kashmir, New York Times published a story from its South Asia correspondent headlined: "After India Loses Dogfight to Pakistan, Questions Arise About Its Military".  Here are some excerpts of the report:

 

"Its (India's) loss of a plane last week to a country (Pakistan) whose military is about half the size and receives a quarter (a sixth according to SIPRI) of the funding is telling. ...India’s armed forces are in alarming shape....It was an inauspicious moment for a military the United States is banking on to help keep an expanding China in check".

Europe’s big question: What a diminished Russia will do next

 

Europe’s big question: What a diminished Russia will do next

Nick Paton Walsh

Analysis by Nick Paton Walsh, International Security Editor, CNN

Updated 6:33 PM EST, Sun January 1, 2023

 

                  

 —

Russia’s war in Ukraine has proven almost every assumption wrong, with Europe now wondering what left is safe to assume.

 

Its invasion in February managed to startle in every way. To those who thought Moscow was sane enough to not attempt such a massive and foolhardy undertaking. To those who felt the Russian military would waltz across a land of 40 million people and switch to clean-up operations within 10 days. And to those who felt they had the technical and intelligence prowess to do more than just randomly bombard civilian areas with ageing artillery; that the Kremlin’s military had evolved from the 90s levelling of Grozny in Chechnya.

 

And finally, to those who felt nuclear saber-rattling was an oxymoron in 2022 – that you could not casually threaten people with nukes as the destruction they brought was complete, for everyone on the planet.

 

Still, as 2022 closes, Europe is left dealing with a set of known unknowns, unimaginable as recently as in January. To recap: a military once considered the world’s third most formidable has invaded its smaller neighbor, which a year ago excelled mostly in IT and agriculture.

 

 

Russia spent billions of dollars apparently modernizing its military, but it turns out that it was, to a large extent, a sham. It has discovered its supply chains don’t function a few dozen miles from its own borders; that its assessment of Ukraine as desperate to be freed from its own “Nazism” is the distorted product of nodding yes-men, feeding a president – Vladimir Putin – what he wanted to hear in the isolation of the pandemic.

 

Russia has also met a West that, far from being divided and reticent, was instead happy to send some of its munitions to its eastern border. Western officials might also be surprised that Russia’s red lines appear to shift constantly, as Moscow realizes how limited its non-nuclear options are. None of this was supposed to happen. So, what does Europe do and prepare for, now that it has?

 

 

 

Key is just how unexpectedly unified the West has been. Despite being split over Iraq, fractured over Syria, and partially unwilling to spend the 2% of GDP on security the United States long demanded of NATO members, Europe and the US have been speaking from the same script on Ukraine. At times, Washington may have seemed warier, and there have been autocratic outliers like Hungary. But the shift is towards unity, not disparity. That’s quite a surprise.

 

 

 

 

Declarations that Russia has already lost the war remain premature. There are variables which could still lead to a stalemate in its favor, or even a reversal of fortune. NATO could lose patience or nerve over weapons shipments, and seek economic expediency over long-term security, pushing for a peace unfavorable to Kyiv. But that does, at this moment, seem unlikely.

 

Russia is digging in on the eastern side of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine, and has the advantage that the Donetsk and Luhansk frontlines in Ukraine’s east are nearer its border. Yet its challenges are immense: poorly trained, forcibly conscripted personnel make up 77,000 of its frontline troops – and that’s according to the glossy assessment voiced by Putin. It is struggling for munitions, and seeing regular open, internal criticism of its winter supply chain.

 

Ukraine is on home territory, with morale still high, and Western weapons still arriving. Since the collapse of Moscow’s patchwork of forces around the northeastern city of Kharkiv in September – where their supply lines were cut by a smarter Ukrainian force – the dynamic has all been against Moscow.

 

The prospect of a Russian defeat is in the broader picture: that it did not win quickly against an inferior adversary. Mouthpieces on state TV talked about the need to “take the gloves off” after Kharkiv, as if they would not be exposing a fist that had already withered. Revealed almost as a paper-tiger, the Russian military will struggle for decades to regain even a semblance of peer status with NATO. That is perhaps the wider damage for the Kremlin: the years of effort spent rebuilding Moscow’s reputation as a smart, asymmetrical foe with conventional forces to back it up have evaporated in about six months of mismanagement.

 

 

The question of nuclear force lingers still, chiefly because Putin likes regularly to invoke it. But even here Russia’s menace has been diminished. Firstly, NATO has been sending unequivocal signals of the conventional devastation its forces would mete out were any form of nuclear device used. Secondly, Russia’s fairweather allies, India and China, have quickly assessed its losing streak and publicly admonished Moscow’s nuclear rhetoric. (Their private messaging has likely been fiercer.)

 

And finally, Moscow is left with a question nobody ever wants to learn the answer to: if its supply chains for diesel fuel for tanks 40 miles from its border do not function, then how can they be sure The Button will work, if Putin reaches madly to press it? There is no greater danger for a nuclear power than to reveal its strategic missiles and retaliatory capability do not function.

 

Despite this palpable Russian decline, Europe is not welcoming in an era of greater security. Calls for greater defense spending are louder, and heeded, even if they come at a time when Russia, for decades the defining issue of European security, is revealing itself to be less threatening.

 

Europe is realizing it cannot depend on the United States – and its wild swings between political poles – solely for its security.

 

 

Meanwhile thousands of innocent Ukrainians have died in Putin’s egotistical and misguided bid to revive a Tsarist empire. More broadly, authoritarianism has been exposed as a disastrous system with which to wage wars of choice.

 

Yet some good has come from this debacle. Europe knows it must get off its dependence on Russian gas immediately, and hydrocarbons in general in the longer term, as economic dependence on the fossil fuels of dictators cannot bring longer-term stability.

 

So, how does the West deal with a Russia that has experienced this colossal loss of face in Ukraine and is slowly withering economically because of sanctions? Is a weak Russia something to fear, or just weak? This is the known unknown the West must wrestle with. But it is no longer such a terrifying question.

 

For over 70 years, the Russians and West held the world in the grip of mutually assured destruction. It was a peace based on fear. But fear of Moscow should be ebbing slowly, and with that comes the risk of miscalculation. It also raises a less chilling prospect: that Russia – like many autocracies before it – may be fading, undermined by its own clumsy dependence on fear domestically.

 

Europe’s challenge now is to deal with Russia in a state of chaotic denial, while hoping it evolves into a state of managed decline. One abiding comfort may be that, after underestimating Moscow’s potential for malice, the risk for Europe would be to overstate its potential as a threat.