Afleveringen
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A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-india-fights-alone-narrative-wars-western-gaslighting-and-a-missed-opportunity-13891339.html
From the 1st of May until the 20th I was traveling in the US, and thus had to depend on western media (mostly Twitter/X) for news about Operation Sindoor and the aftermath. It was self-evident that there was no point in reading things like the NYTimes, Wapo, the Economist, etc. because one look at their headlines confirmed that they were “manufacturing consent”.
Soft Power
Given the difference in X posts that I read in the US and those in India, I think the algorithms were deprecating posts for me in ways that are hard to detect. In other words, there is a narrative war where India has no say, but lots at stake. India’s soft power is seriously wanting. Joseph Nye, the academic who popularized that phrase, passed away this week: following in his footsteps, it behooves India to make a concerted attempt to improve its story-telling.
It faces an uphill battle, because Western, especially American, media has shown an ability to gaslight at scale in three major stories in the recent past: the COVID panic, the “Trump-is-a-Russian-stooge” meme, and the “Biden is mentally sharp as a tack” story. They are good at it, have no love lost for India, and so India needs a long-term plan to get its own propaganda story out, for instance developing an Al-Jazeera-style global footprint or an X-style social medium.
The entire Western narrative, for self-serving purposes, continues to be against India, for good reason: they do not wish to see India grow into a peer-level competitor at the G3 level. In this, both China and the West are of one mind, and it shows. Besides, the West has every incentive to try to block India from becoming a major arms exporter: they would prefer India to continue to be one of the biggest importers, preferably from them.
Narrative warfare is a Western specialty, as I said in Information Warfare, Narrative-Building: That Kind of Warfare. In addition to kinetic warfare, India needs to up its game here too. Narratives have real-life consequences.
The Pakistanis have been quite successful in their own narratives, riding on Western media: here is an example from the Nikkei (which owns the Financial Times) from a Pakistani journalist. This is typical of the stories created by Pakistanis and amplified by western media: basically that India took a major hit, with five or six high-end aircraft downed by Pakistani/Chinese weaponry. The story was repeated so many times that it essentially became the Truth.
A step change in aerial warfare
My personal belief is that India won a victory on the ground and in the air, humiliating Pakistan, attacking it at will and exposing its Chinese armaments as below-par. Some thoughtful neutral experts support this view: See Calibrated Force and the Future of Indian Deterrence. India also demonstrated surprising competence in the new age of electronics-based warfare. It may no longer be expensive fighter jets (and by extension, aircraft carriers) that tilt the balance, but missiles, drones and integrated air defense.
This must be emphasized. There are periodic step-functions in warfare that render earlier, victorious technologies/processes less valuable: this is similar to disruptive innovation, where the ‘insurgent’ firm nullifies the apparent advantages of the ‘incumbent’ firm. Often that means a point of inflection. An example is the arrival of the longbow in medieval times that made hitherto unstoppable heavy cavalry stumble. Another is the arrival of air power itself.
Today there may be another point of inflection. Experts have suggested that warfare going forward will be software-driven, including drone swarms that can autonomously reshape their formations (reminiscent of the murmurations of flocks of starlings). Presumably, there will be plenty of predictive AI built in as well. Given India’s poor track record in software products, it was generally assumed that India would not do so well in such a new environment.
In reality, there appears to have been a clever integration of indigenous and imported technology to create an “iron dome” of sorts against Pakistan’s Chinese missiles, of which an advanced variant, PL-15, was apparently shot down intact.
More interestingly, it appears that Lakshya and Banshee drones were programmed to masquerade as Rafales, Sukhois, etc. by emitting their radar signals, thus attracting enemy fire towards themselves. This might explain the claims of five or six Indian aircraft shot down by Pakistan, whereas in reality they may have simply shot down the phantom, mimic drones
The implications are large: in effect, India was able to attack Pakistan at will: video evidence shows significant damage to terrorist sites in the first round, and to military sites in the second round, including to key Pakistani air bases, as well as, it is said, the entrance tunnel to the nuclear storage facilities in the Kirana Hills. Indian air dominance appears to have forced the Pakistanis to beg for US support to suggest a cessation of hostilities.
This skirmish was proof in the heat of battle for India’s indigenous weapons, especially the BrahMos (although of course that is a joint venture with Russia). It may result in a number of serious queries from prospective customers especially in Southeast Asia, who will be interested in battlefield performance against Chinese missiles and aircraft. This would be a win for India’s arms industry.
Conversely, there is a singular sore spot: fighter jets. For a variety of reasons, most especially the fact that the Kaveri engine has not been allowed to complete its testing and development phase, India is still dependent on others for advanced fighters. And this is just fine as far as they are concerned, because the Americans want to sell F-35s, the French want to sell more Rafales, and the Russians want to sell Su-57s.
Here’s a twitter comment by a military historian who suggests that India’s fighter jets are inadequate. He deleted his further comment that indigenization is fine as industrial policy, but it doesn’t work for advanced weaponry. This is a typically sniffy attitude towards India, which is grist to the mill for the Chandigarh Lobby’s successful efforts to trash local weapons and gain lucrative middleman deals for foreign weapons.
Strategic Dilemma: To push on or not
There is also a strategic dilemma. India has an unfortunate habit of wasting its soldiers’ hard-won victories at the negotiating table due to bad political calculations. The epitome of this is of course, Indira Gandhi’s 1971 give-away of 93,000 Pakistani PoWs in exchange for essentially… nothing. There is some reason to wonder if something similar happened in 2025 as well. A tactical victory was possibly converted into a stalemate, and the old era of hyphenation and the nuclear bogey has returned.
What we saw in 2025 was that the Pakistanis were taken by surprise, and India had a massive advantage. But now that cat is out of the bag, Pakistanis and Chinese will regroup and figure out corrective tactics. Thus India has, to use an American expression, “shot its wad”, and the element of surprise is gone forever.
The end game for India is the dissolution of Pakistan into four or five statelets, which, one hopes, will then concentrate on Pakistani Punjab as the root of all their troubles. In that case, they will keep each other occupied, and India can live in peace without regular terrorist attacks. Of course, that may be a pipe-dream, given the Ghazwa-e-Hind formula many entertain, but the collapse of the Pakistani state is anyway desirable for India.
Should India have continued its offensive? Forget the murky issue of the nuclear assets in Sargodha. Should India have moved the Line of Control forward into some areas, perhaps into Gilgit-Baltistan (with Sharda Peeth and the Kishenganga) and up to the Jhelum River in Pak-occupied Jammu and Kashmir? The problem though, is that once you start moving past the border posts, you have hostile civilians to contend with, and your supply lines start getting stretched.
Even though it is tragic to let go of an opportunity to thrash an enemy that’s on the back foot, and Pakistan will inevitably use the truce to rearm itself and come back ever stronger (the Treaty of Hudaybiyah is not a meme in the Islamic world for nothing), it is not clear to me what India could have done to militarily make the LOC irrelevant and make Pakistan implode, especially in the context of American pushback.
The role of the US
Why was there pressure from President Trump? One of the things I observed during my US stay is the total absence of DOGE and Elon Musk from the headlines after Trump’s 100 days, very contrary to their ubiquity early on. Similarly, the security implications of Trump’s recent embrace of Syria’s President Al-Sharaa contradicts Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s views on Syria as evidenced by her tweets. Further, there are U-turns on tariffs.
This means Trump is being mercurial as ever. Furthermore, there might be something to the idea that his family’s embrace of crypto may have endeared Pakistan – which is making noises about supporting crypto at scale – to him. All this is red-pilling many about Trump. Indeed, he may be allowing short-term, commercial considerations to drive policy, which may return to haunt the US: that is exactly what Clinton, Bush, Obama et al did with respect to China.
On the other hand, there are longer-term considerations, too. Pakistan is essentially a Potemkin nation, which has no particular reason to exist, other than it is being propped up. Initially, it was a British project for the Russian Great Game; then it was taken over by the US Deep State in order to fend off the Soviet Union. Pakistan was a “major non-NATO ally” (MNNA) according to Obama if I remember right, and earlier it was a member of CENTO and SEATO.
The IMF loan to Pakistan, approved in the middle of the hostilities, is not surprising, either: this has happened before. In a way, it is a complicated money-laundering activity. Funds from somewhere (possibly Qatar) are channeled to Pakistan, which then buys American arms. Thus the Deep State Military Industrial Complex is the winner.
With the end of the Afghanistan wars, Pakistan offers no obvious geographic and strategic value to the US. Unless, of course, the target is no longer Russia, but India. Perhaps in anticipation of its being a check on India, the US had helped Pakistan nuclearize, according to this archived article from the NYTimes: US and China Helped Pakistan Build Its Bomb, from a time when it was possibly more truthful. I am indebted to Brahma Chellaney for this link.
This may suggest that Pakistan’s nuclear ‘assets’ are not theirs, but are managed by American crew. On the other hand, though, the greater possibility is that such assets are loaned by China. Pakistan is a fantastic force multiplier for China.
Abhimanyu Syndrome
The bottom line, then, is that India is on its own: sort of an Abhimanyu Syndrome, with nobody to help. The most obvious ‘friend’ is Japan (because of the China threat), but it is severely constrained by American red lines: see how there was not a murmur from the Quad after Pahalgam. India’s very possible rise is in fact encouraging other powers to put it down: grow so much, but no farther.
There really is no alternative for India but to industrialize, manufacture everything possible for its large internal market, and increase the level of strategic autonomy in everything it makes: no more dependence on third parties, which may feel free to use kill switches, or deny spares or components at will. In this round, India did surprisingly well with indigenous technology, and it has articulated a strategy of escalating deterrence. To put teeth into this, innovation at home must continue.
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1975 words, 22 May 2025
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Please note: I wrote this on April 28th, and then was traveling abroad for the last few weeks, so I had no opportunity to post this until now, sorry about that: but nothing I have said here has been rendered wrong by Operation Sindoor and the near-war that happened after I wrote this.
Deccan Herald ran a slightly edited version as my regular column on May 4th at https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/on-pahalgam-imperial-fortresses-and-kashmir-s-settler-colonialism-3523731
With good reason, India has focused on Pakistan as the culprit behind the Pahalgam atrocity. It is telling that their army chief declared to Pakistanis that Hindus and Muslims are two different nations and that Kashmir is Pakistan’s jugular vein. He implied that Pakistan is the ideal Islamic state as in Venkat Dhulipala’s “Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India”. This could have been a signal to the terrorists to create maximum offence while massacring Hindus.
Given Kargil, IC 814, Bombay 26/11, Uri, Pulwama, and now Pahalgam, India is justified in cutting ties to Pakistan, including trade, sports, the cringe Attari circus, even diplomatic relations. India did once mass its forces at the Line of Control in Operation Parakram, but honoring the Shimla Agreement, did not cross. Now that Pakistan has canceled the Agreement, there is no legal reason for restraint, especially since the nuclear bogey is no longer credible.
But there is more. The Pakistani defense minister said that his country had been doing the dirty work for the US and the West for decades. Maybe he meant the Afghan war against the Soviets and post-9/11 somersaults by Pakistan. But that’s only scratching the surface.
Britain explicitly created Pakistan as a Great Game weapon against Russia/Soviet Union, and when that collapsed, against india. Britain has been using Pakistan as an “imperial fortress”, as I pointed out in “Britain’s outsized, malign role in global chaos”. Whitehall tilts strongly towards Pakistani interests, even in the case of widespread gang-rapes of minor white girls, not to mention their antics against Hindus in Leicester.
Official mouthpiece BBC never speaks of Pakistani terrorists, only ‘gunmen’; it’s always “Indian-controlled Kashmir”; and an extraordinary headline recently said: “Pakistan suspends visas for Indians after deadly Kashmir attack on tourists”. These are not accidents.
Britain and the US Deep State (eg. Madeleine Albright and other Atlanticists) worry about the waning influence of Europe (or “northwest Asia” as I wrote in “The End of the European Century”). Naturally, incumbent powers go to war with a rising power (Thucydides Trap: Graham Allison's thesis). This has been the rationale for containing Russia, now it is being turned to Asia. China is rather inscrutable and impregnable, so they attack India, which is easier prey.
Then there is the Otherization of Hindus and thus Indians. Even as staunch an atheist as Richard Dawkins (“The Blind Watchmaker”) admits Judeo-Christian cultural biases. Only Christopher Hitchens among modern atheists was self-reflective enough to avoid this. Abrahamics would like to make us disappear, and so engendered great famines in India (“Late Victorian Holocausts”). Now this is reprising through climatism (at an Alexandra Ocasio Cortez rally there was a woman earnestly saying “we have to eat babies” to reduce emissions). Covid was possibly another attempt at depopulating ‘deplorables’, that is black and brown people.
Let’s not forget China, also unhappy about India’s possible economic rise; so it dutifully regurgitated “all-weather” support for Pakistan. They have used Pakistan to keep India down, as a force multiplier for violence and trouble. Then China can market itself as a safe investment destination compared to a dangerous India where FDI may be risky. I suspect this is part of their siren-song to big firms (eg. Apple) now.
Finally, and most importantly, there is the settler-colonial complex of Muslim Kashmiris. They trot out South Africa, other European conquests and Gaza as examples of colonialists violating natives’ rights and imply the same in Kashmir. The bitter irony of course is that it is the Muslims who are the colonialists wiping out Kashmir’s indigenous Hindus who have a 5000 year history there. They have turned the logic on its head: see the Harvard Law Review paper “From Domicile to Dominion, India’s Settler Colonial Agenda in Kashmir”.
There have been seven tragic exoduses of Hindus from Kashmir: 1. 1389–1413 (Sultan Sikandar Shah), 2. 1505–1514 (Fateh Shah II), 3. 16th–17th Century (Timurid Period), 4. 1752–1819 (Durrani Rule), 5. 1931 (Anti-Dogra Riots), 6. 1986 (Anantnag Riots), 7. 1989–1990 (Militancy-Driven Exodus). Most Hindu Kashmiris now rot in refugee camps.
I wrote long ago in “India, the Kashmiri colony” about Muslim Kashmiris extracting tribute from the Indian/Hindu taxpayer. Worse, there is evidence emerging that local overground workers (eg. mule handlers) arranged the logistics for the Pahalgam massacre. Acts of terror need local support, possibly including from local politicians (a former CM referred to terrorists as “the boys with guns from the mountains”).
Yes, it’s good to punish Pakistan (eg. Indus Water Treaty), but terror will persist until Muslim Kashmiris realize their future lies with rising, multi-religious India, not jihadi failed-state Pakistan; and the Deep State desists from further mischief.
798 words, Apr 28, 2025
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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A version of this essay was published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/movies/column/what-made-shaji-n-karun-a-master-film-maker/20250429.htm
Just last week, I read in the local Trivandrum papers about Shaji N Karun receiving an award in the name of J C Daniel, an early pioneer in Malayalam films. That’s when I realized that the master film-maker had named his house ‘Piravi’ in memory of his extraordinary directorial debut in 1988. It brought back a flood of memories of that film, whose title means ‘birth’, but whose theme was death and loss.
Now comes the news of his own death, aged 73, from cancer. Om shanti, Godspeed, Shaji, as you join the Great White Whirligig in the Sky!
I met the director twice: once, about fifty years ago, when we both were volunteers for a local science fair, and he was a student at the Film and Television Institute in Pune; and then in 1988 or 1989, when he spoke at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where ‘Piravi’ was featured. The film had won the Cannes Camera d’Or-Mention d’Honneur, among many other prizes, including at Locarno, Edinburgh and so on: possibly more than any other Indian film.
What impressed me about his talk was his humility and reticence: even though he was an acclaimed cinematographer and ‘Piravi’ was received very well, he was quiet, even shy. He explained his use of the blue tints in the film: it is the color of apasmaram, he said, using the Malayalam/Sanskrit word for madness, which the father of the ‘disappeared’ youth in the film falls into.
Even though he made several other films, and he was the cinematographer who shot most of the works of legendary Malayalam film-maker G Aravindan, it is ‘Piravi’ that marked the zenith of his career. I can say without hesitation that it is stunningly powerful; as an art-film fan, I have seen hundreds of superb, even outstanding films, but this one, alone, spoke to me. I wept seeing it, tears streaming down my cheeks. No other film has ever affected me so much.
For a Malayalam speaker and one who had seen the Emergency, it was a viscerally powerful experience, especially because it was based on the real-life story of Rajan, a ‘disappeared’ engineering student. As I wrote some years ago in https://www.rediff.com/news/column/emergency-why-rajans-story-resonates-with-me/20150625.htm I could easily have been another Rajan, another number.
Rajan’s character is never seen in the film, except as a child; his father, played by octogenarian Premji, fills the screen with his presence, his anguish, at the loss of his only son born late in his life. And in real life, the father, Professor Eachara Warrier, who was one of my heroes, https://www.rediff.com/news/2006/apr/24rajeev.htm spent the rest of his life demanding justice from the uncaring State.
The film’s minimalist dialogue and focus on human despair, grief, and the struggle against systemic injustice resonate universally, transcending cultural boundaries. Its subtle yet poignant exploration of loss makes it relatable to global audiences.
Apart from the universal message of grief, there is also the story of the father-son relationship. I was strongly affected by passages from the film where you realize how much the predatory State took from the father, as per the Hindu tradition. I remembered my father 10,000 miles away in India, who too had no son to help him.
The film begins with an invocation from the Kaushitaki Upanishad; a dying man bequeaths his life to his son. The son accepts each of his gifts.
"My speech in you I would place". "Your speech in me I take.""My sight in you I would place." "Your sight in me I take.""My mind in you I would place." "Your mind in me I take.""My deeds in you I would place." "Your deeds in me I take.""My vital breath in you I would place". "Your vital breath in me I take.""May glory, luster and fame delight in you." "Heaven and desires may you obtain."
And from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, "Whatever wrong has been done by him, his son frees him from it all... By his son, a father stands firm in this world."
Personally for me, I think the film was a catalyst in my decision to return to India, specifically back to Kerala. Another Indian friend (I think he was a Telugu) who saw it with me in San Francisco said, “I’m so tempted to chuck it all and go live in a Kerala village”.
Apart from the overwhelming sense of loss, the film is remarkable from two points of view: visual storytelling and innovative techniques.
The muted lighting, traditional architecture, and atmospheric elements like rain mirror the characters’ emotional turmoil. The film’s stillness and sparse dialogue amplifies the actors’ expressive performances, particularly their eyes, conveying deep emotion.
The monsoon rain is a palpable presence with the sense of anticipation as we wait for its arrival, as the father waits for his son every day at the bus-stop till the last bus; heart-breakingly, we in the audience know he will never return. And then later, when the father falls in the rain, the ferryman’s dilemma: if he helps him up, his boat will drift away. The ferryman’s compassion prevails and he rushes to help.
The film’s use of weather, sound (e.g., the bubbling of water evoking anxiety), the simple everyday beauty of Kerala village life, and deliberate pacing created a meditative yet intense atmosphere. The use of color to invoke emotion (as in traditional ragas) is another technical innovation.
With ‘Piravi’, Shaji N Karun joined the select group of great masters of film: film as witness, sakshi, film as literature. Malayalam once upon a time used to produce such films. Today it is only mindless violence, politics, and grotesque humor: the films have no soul, although they are technically quite good. With Shaji’s passing, and earlier with his mentor Aravindan’s untimely death, an era is coming to an end.
976 words, Apr 29, 2025
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* Sectors negatively affected. Pharma with $12.72 billion will be affected, textiles $4.3 billion, agri products $2.58 billion, jewelry $11.88 billion, autocomponents $2 billon may face 26%+auto specific 25%, chemicals $5.7 billion. Steel $475 million, with 26%+steel specific 25%, footwear $456 million
* Sectors positively affected (supply chain attraction): electronics and telecom $14.39 billion will benefit for 54% on china, engineering goods like turbines $7.1 billion because of china and vietnam, petroleum and minerals $3.33 billion, already negative tariffs
* Pharma has a specific carve out, and both apparel and footwear companies are struggling.
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Tulsi Gabbard’s visit comes at a time when things are quite fluid not only in the Indo-Pacific but also in the North Atlantic. The Five Eyes are beginning to fray a bit, too. What does all this mean for the future of Indo-US relations?
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-britains-outsized-malign-role-in-global-chaos-13872084.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
Being a keen observer of the United Kingdom, I have lately noticed a few apparently unconnected events with dismay. If I were to connect the dots, it begins to appear that Britain has had an outsize influence on international affairs. Maybe the James Bond meme isn’t the total fantasy I had assumed it was: a juvenile wet dream about nubile maidens and irresistible heroes bumping off sundry villains.
The reality appears to be quite impressive. This tiny, rainy island off Northwest Asia has been running quite a number of worldwide schemes. Its administrative center, Whitehall, manages a global web of intrigue and narrative-building, and has created a number of ‘imperial fortresses’, thus punching above its weight-class
One of their principal assets in gaslighting others is the BBC (not to mention their plummy accents that, for example, make Americans just melt). The BBC has a sterling reputation which does not seem well-deserved. There have been many instances of motivated bias (eg. in their Brexit or India coverage), lack of integrity (eg. sexual transgressions by senior staff) and so on. In reality, it is about as unabashed at pushing its agenda as Al Jazeera is about its own.
Admittedly, Britain has made one major blunder along the way, though: Brexit, which left them in trisanku mode, sort of adrift mid-Atlantic. They were distancing themselves from the European Union, counting on their so-called ‘special relationship’ with the US to sustain them, away from what they perceived, correctly, as a declining and disunited Europe. They also thought they could dominate their former colonies again (see the frantic pursuit of a Free Trade Agreement with India?) without onerous EU rules. Sadly, none of this quite worked out.
The reason is a fundamental problem: there is not much of a market for British goods any more. Indians once coveted British products as status symbols, but today, with the possible exceptions of Rolls Royce cars and single-malt whiskey, there’s very little anybody wants from them. They still do good R&D, make aircraft engines (India could use that technology), and their apparently for-hire journalism is well-known, but that’s about it.
On the other hand, they have managed to stay entrenched in the international financial system, starting with colonial loot, especially the $45 trillion they are believed to have taken from India. It is rumored that they used stolen Indian gold to buy distressed assets in the US after the Civil War. It is possible they had the same game plan for Ukraine: acquire rich agricultural land and mineral deposits at distressed prices. Some point to the port of Odessa as another target
Ukraine: bad faith actor?
It is remarkable how Boris Johnson, then PM of UK, is alleged to have single-handedly ruined the chance of a ceasefire in April 2022 during his visit to Kiev in the early days of the Ukraine war, when there was a chance of a negotiated cessation of hostilities with all parties adhering to the Minsk 1 and 2 agreements.
In January, just before President Trump took office, UK PM Starmer signed a minerals agreement with Ukraine as part of a “100-Year Partnership” that appears to pre-emptively undercut Trump’s proposed $500-billion US deal. That lends credence to allegations about the UK’s coveting minerals, as well as its not being interested in ending the tragic war.
Gold: is it all there?
The UK does have a thing for tangible assets, including gold. A lot of the world’s gold (5000 metric tons) is supposedly held in secure custody in London. But there are fears that this may not physically be there in the vaults of the Bank of England any more. They may have indulged in ‘gold leasing’, where the actual gold ends up being replaced by paper promises after it is lent out to bullion banks, from where it may be moved around and be inaccessible
Extraordinary delays in gold deliveries in 2025 (on withdrawals to New York triggered by tariff fears) increase this concern. There is a lack of transparency in transactions in the metal in the UK. Spooked, many countries are taking their gold back. India repatriated 200+ tons of its own gold from London in 2024. Venezuela is fighting a court battle to get its gold back.
Then there are concerns raised by the arguably unfair freezing of Russian assets held abroad as part of Ukraine-war sanctions: Starmer recently promised to give Ukraine $2 billion, basically the interest generated by those assets. This doesn’t sound quite right, and has dented the image of London as a reliable financial hub. Brexit was a blow; the rise of Dubai, Singapore, Shanghai and Zurich all threaten the City of London, but it is second only to New York, still.
Imperial Fortresses galore
Another win for the British was the selection of Mark Carney, a former Bank of England governor, as the Prime Minister of Canada. The Anglosphere continues to be dominated by the UK, although the Commonwealth is a club that serves no particular purpose any more, except as a curious relic of the British empire.
This highlights the concept of ‘imperial fortresses’: far-flung outposts that have helped sustain British military power and diplomatic clout despite the loss of empire. Traditionally, these were naval bases/garrisons such as those in Malta, Gibraltar, Bermuda, etc. that allowed Britain to keep an eye on the ‘restless natives’. However, I contend that the entire Anglosphere has been treated as imperial fortresses by them.
Canada, Australia and New Zealand still continue to have the British King as their Head of State, which is astonishing for supposedly sovereign nations. But it’s far more interesting that, in effect, the US has been treated as another vassal by the Brits, pillow-talked into doing things that are generally only in the interests of Britain. All that pomp and circumstance has beguiled poor Americans. Whitehall, I assert, have been Svengalis to Foggy Bottom.
Master Blaster blowback?
The other metaphor is from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), where "Master Blaster" is a literal duo: Master, a cunning dwarf, and Blaster, his brawny, enforcer bodyguard. The Americans unwittingly have provided the muscle to the calculating dwarf’s machinations, which generally end up mostly benefiting the latter
But there is yet another imperial fortress that we should consider: Pakistan. It was created expressly to be a geographically well-placed client state for the Brits to continue their 19th century Great Game from afar to checkmate Russia, and incidentally to contain India. From that point of view, Pakistan has been a successful imperial outpost, notwithstanding the fact that it, despite decades of US largesse, is a failing state (see the Baloch train hijack recently).
This is part of the reason why Americans have a hard time explaining why they get involved in Pakistan and Afghanistan again and again to their ultimate regret, with painful exits. They have been induced to do this by the clever Brits, who, quite evidently, sided with Muslims against Hindus in the sub-continent, for instance in the British-led merger of Gilgit-Baltistan into Pakistan, contrary to the Instrument of Accession.
There is considerable irony in all this, because one could argue that Pakistani-origin Brits have now done a ‘reverse master-blaster’ to the Brits. That sounds eerily like the ‘reverse-Kissinger’ that Trump is supposed to be doing. Or maybe it is a ‘recursive master-blaster’, although the mind boggles at that.
Consider the facts: UK rape-gangs are almost entirely of Pakistani origin; several current mayors (including Sadiq Khan in London) and past mayors are of that ethnicity, indicating a powerful vote-bank; they have at least 15 MPs and a large number of councillors.
There’s Pakistani-origin Sir Mufti Hamid Patel, the chair of the Office of Standards in Education; Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary; Humza Yusuf, the former First Minister of Scotland. This imperial fortress is fighting back, indeed, and winning. The UK may not have quite anticipated this outcome.
The American vassal-state is also beginning to rebel. Trump was personally incensed by the fact that Starmer sent 50 Labor operatives to work against him in the 2024 US elections: their interactions have been a little frosty.
Khalil, an embedded asset?
Then there is the case of a current cause celebre in the US, Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent. He has been accused of leading violent anti-Israel protests at Columbia University, and detained on that count. Interestingly, he had a security clearance from the UK, and was part of the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, living in Beirut and leading a scholarship program for Syrians. Yes, Syria.
And then Khalil suddenly showed up with a green card (not a student visa), got married to a US citizen named Noor Abdalla, finished his program at Columbia, and so on. To me, all this sounds like it was facilitated, and that he has certain powerful foreign friends. No prizes for guessing who they were.
Iraq, Libya and Syria: Humanitarian crises
Speaking of Syria, Whitehall spent at least 350 million pounds sterling between 2011 and 2024 in regime-change activities targeting the Assad government, according to Declassified UK.
The UK’s meddling in the Middle East, going back to the Sykes-Picot carving up of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and mandates in Palestine and Iraq, and even earlier to the antics of T E Lawrence, was clearly intended to advance and sustain British interests in, and influence on, the region. Which is not unreasonable.
The sad fact, though, is that it appears the British have actively fomented, or been deeply involved in, a lot of the military misadventures that have turned the region into a mess of human misery. To take relatively recent history, the invasions of Iraq, Libya, and now of Syria were arguably dreamt up or at least actively supported by Britain.
The invasion of Iraq was certainly endorsed by Tony Blair’s infamous September 2002 dossier about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which turned out to be imaginary, but then, lo! Saddam Hussein was overthrown and killed.
The invasion of Libya saw Britain take on an even more active role. David Cameron and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy in effect prodded a somewhat reluctant Barack Obama to invade, even co-drafting the UN Security Council Resolution 1973 in 2011 that was the formal permission for the war. The net result was the killing of Muammar Gaddafi.
In the case of Syria, Britain began covert operations in 2012, with MI6 allegedly organizing arms shipments, training and coordination of groups opposed to the Assad regime. The sudden fall of Assad in December 2024, driven by groups like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) that Britain indirectly supported, underscores the successful outcomes of this policy.
In all three cases, a secular dictatorship was overthrown and religious extremists took over. Earlier, civilians had reasonably prosperous lives; women were generally educated and present in the workforce. After the regime changes, all three are bombed-out hellholes, with no rights for women or religious minorities. In particular, the latter have been consistently subjected to massacres, as in the recent large-scale executions of Alawites in Syria.
Even though Americans were the principal players in all these cases, the impression is that British Whitehall’s gaslighting of their US counterparts in Foggy Bottom could well have tipped the scales and turned skirmishes into outright war and disaster.
Thus it is clear that Britain is still a formidable player in the world of international relations, despite the loss of empire and relative decline. It is unfortunate, however, that the net result of its actions is to add to entropy and chaos and the loss of human lives and rights. Perfidious Albion it still is.
1950 words, Mar 16, 2025
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The frenetic activity recently around the Ukraine war has brought into sharp focus several things. One is the irrelevance of the United Nations. Two, the fact that Europe has in effect reverted to being a backwater in the scheme of things. Three, the US may have finally escaped from being a British “Imperial Fortress”. Four, it would be generally a good idea for Europe to bury the hatchet with Russia, as they usually lose wars with Russia.
The United Nations, which is to say the “liberal rules-based international order” [sic] set up by the winners in World War II, may have reached the end of its useful life. The UN is going the way of its feckless predecessor, the League of Nations. There were resolutions and counter-resolutions at the UN and its Security Council, but none of it mattered. It signals the end of globalization, and the end of Europe’s brief dominance.
After Vladimir Zelensky made a spectacle of himself in Donald Trump’s Oval Office (which may have been instigated by Keir Starmer and others encouraging Zelensky to, as it were, stand up to Trump), there was the remarkable, hastily organized summit in London to drum up support for Ukraine. Alas, it showed instead the relative impotence of western Europe: despite their brave words, they cannot defend Ukraine without US support.
The participants were: Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Turkey, etc and Euro-grandees such as Ursula von der Leyen. It is unclear whether this motley crew can raise more than a few infantry brigades/squadrons of aircraft, and some munitions. Enough perhaps for a peace-keeping force after a standstill/ceasefire, but not for a defensive force if war were to continue.
A major problem with Europe is that they are living off of old glory. There was no reason to include both Britain and France in the UN Security Council with veto power after WWII, except for misguided American generosity. But there is a much bigger problem: after a brief ‘European Century’ (or to be precise, three or four centuries) of global importance, they are reverting to their natural, diminished state.
The economic center of gravity of the world, according to McKinsey and The Economist, has moved decisively to Asia from where it was in the post-war era (somewhere in the Arctic Sea near Iceland around 1950 and 1960). The Industrial Revolution enabled European conquest, and this caused a break in the pattern of Asian prominence.
The magisterial “Economic History of the World” by Angus Maddison for the EU showed how India was the biggest economic power in the world from 1 CE (where they started their study) up until the 1500s or 1600s. India and China dominated the world economy until European colonialism hollowed out both, especially India. Now the pendulum is swinging back. And with economic power comes military power, as well as influence.
My contention is that Europe isn’t really a separate ‘continent’, but only an appendage to Asia, and it should be called “Northwest Asia” henceforth.
A major reason for British power, apart from their guns, steel and ruthlessness, was their cunning use of far-flung ‘imperial fortresses’ such as in Malta, Gibraltar, Bermuda, Halifax, St Helena, Mauritius, Singapore, etc from which they could project power around the world. Interestingly, they were able to gaslight the United States into being another such fortress despite formal independence. Whitehall has led Foggy Bottom by the nose. In effect, NATO has been the instrument for this
The US now seems to have woken up, and is pushing back. Starmer was told by Trump that the best outcome is for the war to end and the misery to stop for Ukraine, despite loss of territory. In any case, territory in Europe has been very fluid, and they have been fighting interminable wars there such as the 30 Years’ War, 100 Years’ War, etc. Notably, the Crimean peninsula was ‘donated’ to Ukraine by Khruschev, himself a Russian-speaking Ukrainian.
There are age-old blood feuds in Europe. I realised this in the Soviet days when I had a study partner in grad school, a Ukrainian-American woman. By mistake I referred to her as a ‘Russian’ and she was most offended. I think this is because western Europe has been fighting with Russia forever, based partly on race (Russians are seen as ‘tainted’ by Asian blood) and religion (Russian Orthodox Church vs Catholics and other Protestants).
Unfortunately for them, western Europeans have continually lost their wars to Russia: most notably, Napoleon and Hitler were decimated. It would be best for all concerned if the EU/NATO and Russia were to make peace; otherwise they will both end up dominated and turned into vassals by China.
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792 words, 4 Mar 2025
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The tongue-lashing received by Vladimir Zelensky in the Oval Office, in full view of the media, was a point of inflection. It highlighted something that we had suspected: the end of the ‘European Century’ (or two or three), wherein they had risen to be the Masters of the Universe. Trump is emphasizing that the Atlantic was a 19th century story; with the rise of the US, the Pacific was the story of the 20th century; and the 21st finds the Indian Ocean rising.
Zelensky’s debacle was not the only pointer: Keir Starmer of the UK, despite some polite talk about the mythical ‘special relationship’, was told sharply by Vance that there is no more free speech in the UK, and that it affects American technology companies and citizens. Let us remember also how Elon Musk lambasted the UK for its Pakistani rape gangs, and the limp-wristed reaction of its authorities. Trump also told Starmer “That’s enough!”
JD Vance, again, spoke some home truths to the Europeans at the Munich Security Conference, telling them their problems are home-grown: excessive migration, lack of democratic values, and censorship.
All this is shocking to the supercilious elites of Europe, who are now seeing their cozy world collapse in front of their eyes: no more free-loading, no more Uncle Sam to the rescue. Suddenly, NATO is meaningless, and decades of Greta Thunberg and V-dem style lecturing, virtue-mongering and pontification are coming back to bite them on the backside.
They must be recalling William Blake’s apocalyptic vision in The Second Coming. Their world is indeed falling apart.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
It’s hard to blame the Europeans. They have forgotten how it was only yesterday, as it were, that they were being hounded by the Barbary pirates, enslaved and turned into janissaries by the Turks. I read how the author of Don Quixote had been himself captured, enslaved for five years, and ransomed in 1580 for 300 gold coins, worth some $40,000 today.
The European Century has made Europeans, and us, Fourth Worlders or those formerly colonized by them (as V S Naipaul put it), forget that Europe is just a backwater, a mere peninsula, an appendage, to Asia. It is now reverting to just “Northwest Asia”. For most of recorded history, Europe was an uncivilized land of savages; it was only the lucky accident of the Industrial Revolution that gave it the wherewithal to dominate the world.
But that is in the past: the economic center of gravity of the world has indeed moved from the Atlantic to Asia.
Source: The Economist.com
The illusion that America is obligated to support Europe, and also to fight Russia to the bitter end as part of the Cold War, was nurtured by Atlanticist Eastern Europeans exercised by an age-old blood feud: that between the Russian Orthodox Church on the one hand, and Catholics and other Protestant churches on the other hand.
Those certainties are now falling by the wayside, as Trump pivots to the Pacific and Indian Oceans, as well as back to isolationist Fortress America. As Zelensky did mention in his tirade, America has the good fortune to have two oceans around it, a serious moat.
The US has been gaslighted for a long time by nose-in-the-air Europeans, most especially the mischief-makers at the UK’s Whitehall (who are the real Deep State). But that’s wearing off, and the blinkers are falling from their eyes. Sadly for Zelensky, he will be the first one affected by this new-found clarity.
Zelensky also made several rookie mistakes. First, you don’t go to your benefactor’s lair (ie. the US Oval Office) dressed in a sweatshirt. Second, you don’t talk over Trump. Third, you don’t get into a shouting match in English with native speakers when English is your second language: you might miss the nuances of “you don’t hold any cards”, for instance. Fourth, and most importantly, you don’t trust Starmer, Macron, etc. and take up cudgels with Trump.
The near-simultaneous “toolkit” tweets from a lot of EU grandees suggests they gaslighted Zelensky into his suicidal bit of bravado against Trump in the Oval Office. They used the exact same words! And Trump doesn’t take slights lightly.
The implications are dire. The Ukraine War is as good as over, because the Europeans alone cannot (or will not) supply Zelensky with enough weaponry to hold off Russia indefinitely. The most likely outcome is a ceasefire followed by a standstill agreement: what Ukrainian territory Russia currently holds it will continue to hold; Ukraine will be de jure partitioned. The rest is negotiable.
If the Europeans had any sense, they would patch up with Russia. NATO as we know it will come to an end, and EU+Russia is a pretty powerful force, and neither will have to kowtow to China. With the US out of the picture, divided EU and Russia will both fall into the dhritarashtra alinganam of sweet-talking China. To their ultimate detriment, of course.
It is good to contrast Trump’s treatment of all these Europeans with his much gentler treatment of the Japanese PM Shigeru Ishiba, and the Indian PM Narendra Modi, both Quad partners. He was polite and businesslike with them. Also, when a reporter asked about AUKUS, the brain-dead partnership with the UK that Biden dragged another Quad partner, Australia, into, his response was: “What’s that?”
There were early glimpses of a Trump foreign policy taking shape, as I mentioned in two prior columns: Chronicles of a Foreign Policy Foretold and Trump’s America and Modi’s India. Now things are clearer: there’s a new Sheriff in town, and things are going to be different. But, William Blake notwithstanding, it’s not the end of the world. We will all carry on.
1000 words, 1 Mar 2025
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Exactly a month into his new term, President Donald Trump’s latest major pick, Kash Patel, has been appointed as the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation after a grueling confirmation in the US Senate. Tulsi Gabbard had earlier been confirmed as the Director of National Intelligence. Both these are positive from India’s point of view: they signal that the sinister Deep State may well be reined in, after decades of anti-India activism on its part.
Over the last week or two, there have been revelations after revelations of bad faith on the part of the disgraced US establishment, most notably in the shadowy USAID agency, which, it appears, was the absolute “Heart of Darkness” of the Deep State, neck-deep in covert operations, election interference, and general mayhem all over the world, and certainly in India.
Trump himself emphasized that $21 million in covert funds had gone towards affecting election outcomes in India. Presumably the reduced majority Modi got in 2024 could be traced back to this.
Fortress America
The general contours of Trump’s foreign policy are beginning to emerge. I predicted a month ago, before Trump had taken over, in ‘Greenland, Canada, Panama: Chronicles of a Foreign Policy Foretold’, that Western Europe, and the United Kingdom in particular, would find themselves treated as irrelevant to the new order to come. That has happened.
In fact, things have gone beyond what I anticipated. In a nutshell, Trump is downgrading the Atlantic, and his focus will be on the Americas, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific. Which, from a historical perspective, makes sense: the world’s economic center of gravity is moving towards Asia; trade flows in the Pacific and the Indian Oceans are increasingly more important than in the Atlantic; and a few centuries of European domination are pretty much over.
Sorry Europe, Atlanticism is at an end
To put it bluntly, the vanity that Europe is a ‘continent’ is now being exposed as hollow: to be precise, it is merely an appendage, an outpost, to vast Asia. Europe is at best a subcontinent, like India is; it should probably be renamed as ‘Northwest Asia’. The saga of ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ post the Industrial Revolution is winding down rapidly. There is some schadenfreude in that the UK becomes even more irrelevant: just a small, rainy island off NW Asia.
The Putin-Trump dialog suggests that Ukraine, and even NATO, are now superfluous. Atlanticism has been a constant in US foreign policy, mostly pushed by two forces:
* Eastern European-origin State Department officials who have inherited a blood-feud with Russia from their ancestors, eg. Brzezinski, Albright, Nuland, Blinken, Vindman
* an ancient intra-Christian schism between the Eastern Orthodox Church and (for a change) an alliance of Roman Catholics and Western Protestants like Lutherans, Anglicans and Calvinists.
It is time that the Americans realized they’ve been turned into cats’-paws by these forces, and turned their backs on these ancient animosities, which have almost no relevance today. In fact one could argue that a NATO-Russian alliance is the right solution in the medium term, because otherwise both could become puppets of China. Bringing the Ukraine war to an end is a start.
The general tone of the Trump White House implies a Fortress America. In practice, this seems to mean that instead of being Globocop, the US focuses on a) the Americas, North and South, b) the Pacific Ocean, d) the Indian Ocean, in that order.
A new Monroe Doctrine in the Americas
The attention being paid to Canada and Mexico over and above the tariffs issues suggests that there is a plan to create a stronger and more unified North American entity; the noises about “Canada the 51st state” and “Gulf of America” suggest that maybe a new NAFTA-style agreement could be inked, especially now that the warming Arctic Ocean makes the thawing tundra of Canada more appealing.
It is true that there is no immediate thrust for a Monroe Doctrine-style exclusive US ‘sphere of influence’ in South America, but I suspect it is coming. Already, there have been positive vibes between Trump and Argentina’s Milei, and Salvador’s Bukele: the former for his DOGE-style chainsaw-wielding that’s showing results, and the latter for his strong law enforcement.
The Island Chains and other red lines in the Pacific
In the Pacific, there has been pushback against China’s moves on the Panama Canal: there are two Hong-Kong-based entities (read proxies of the Chinese government) controlling ports around it: Balboa on the Pacific side, and Cristobal on the Atlantic side.
On the other hand, there is increasing global support (with the judicious use of Chinese carrots such as BRI) for the annexation of Taiwan by China, including, if necessary, by force. A Lowy Institute study (“Five One Chinas: The Contest to Define Taiwan”) suggests that some 119 UN member states accept the official Chinese position on ‘reunification’. Only 40 countries are not on board with China’s claim of sovereignty over Taiwan.
It is very likely that there will be a showdown between the US and China over Taiwan, within the next two years. It is said that Xi Jinping has given a timeframe of 2027 for all this. It will be interesting to see how many states that condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will condemn China’s future attack on Taiwan. Chances are that many will be strategically silent.
Japan, Australia, South Korea and other friends of the US will have a hard time keeping the peace in the Pacific. The “Three Island Chains” act as increasingly critical red lines to contain an aggressive China. In fact, the Asia Maritime Initiative is speaking of five island chains (“China’s Reach Has Grown, So Should the Island Chains”), including those in the Indian Ocean (remember the “String of Pearls” intended to tighten around India’s throat).
The three island chains: 1. Taiwan, Japan, Philippines; 2. Guam, Marianas; 3. Hawaii
(Source: China is making waves in the Pacific, Alexandra Tirziu, Jan 2024 https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/china-pacific-conflict/)
Meanwhile, in a show of aggression far from its shores, three Chinese warships indulged in “live firing” in international waters between Australia and New Zealand, and commercial aircraft were warned to keep away. This is a warning to Australia, which, thanks to AUKUS foolishness, cancelled French submarines and now await British submarines… in the 2040s.
The increasing relevance of the Indian Ocean and the Middle East
Much of the world’s trade, including 75% of global maritime trade and 50% of its daily oil shipments, go through the Indian Ocean.
The main issues will be the control of the Straits of Malacca and Hormuz, and the alternative routes being explored by China via the Isthmus of Kra in Thailand, possible use of Coco Islands and other Myanmarese ports including Sittwe and (a bit of a stretch for China) access to Chittagong. There are also troublesome pirates, including Houthis, that make for perilous journeys leading to the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Aden, and the Red Sea.
Interestingly, the US is making moves in the Indian Ocean that will support both the IMEC (India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor) and I2U2, the India-Israel-UAE-US economic partnership. IMEC is the old Spice Route, revivified.
There is also the proposed Ben-Gurion Canal through the Negev Desert in Israel that would benefit Saudi Arabia as well (its futuristic NEOM city is nearby), and this would be made feasible by Trump’s proposed transformation of Gaza. It would be an alternative to Suez.
Following up on the Abraham Accords, Trump 2.0 would like to bring the Gaza war to an end, and create an environment in the Middle East where Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE et al will form a counter and a buffer to the machinations of Iran and Turkey.
The Indo-US joint communique is a statement of intent
It is in this global context that we need to analyze the joint communique between the US and India after the Trump-Modi summit. Both nations will be attempting to advance their own strategic doctrines. The US would like India to become a non-treaty ally. India would like to keep its multi-alignment policy going, along with Atmanirbharatha. These may make any bilateral progress a little rough but some give and take will work.
There are a few specific areas of interest:
* Defense
* There is an effort by the US to wean India away from its dependency on Russia for weapons. The most evident carrot here is the F-35 advanced fighter jet, which has now been offered to India for the first time, along with other conventional weapons such as Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stryker infantry combat vehicles, as well as the P8i Poseidon anti-submarine patrol aircraft, and various drones
* The P8i is already in service in India, and it would help keep an eye on the southern Bay of Bengal with its proximity to China’s submarine pen on Hainan Island
* The F-35 raises some questions. In the Bangalore Air Show it was pitted against the Russian Su-57, which is a lot less expensive. Also, the F-35 needs extraordinary levels of maintenance for its ‘stealth’ coating. Finally, should India invest in building its own AMCA 5th-generation fighter jet rather than buying?
* Even though there will be co-production agreements, the US is a whimsical supplier (remember Tarapur), and there will be little transfer of technology, so military procurement and cooperation must be carefully thought through by India
* Trade and Investment
* The goal is to reach $500 billion in bilateral trade by 2030, which would involve a doubling from current levels ($200 billion in 2023). Besides, the Trump doctrine of reciprocal tariffs and zero trade imbalance may make some of this difficult
* Indian firms are planning to invest $7.35 billion in the US
* Energy
* India will now get access to US civil nuclear technology, but there’s a small twist: the clauses invoking civil liability for nuclear damage will be deleted. This is reminiscent of Pfizer’s covid-era contract with developing countries: Pfizer was assured of indemnity (with the local governments being liable) in case of injury or death caused by its vaccine. This sounds like a bad idea
* India will increase its purchases of US oil and natural gas. This is a win-win: it will increase US imports to India, thus reducing the trade deficit, and India will be assured of additional supplies
* Technology and Innovation
* A whole raft of actions have been proposed, including a tie-up between the US National Science Foundation and the Anusandhan National Research Foundation in India, a program called TRUST, another called INDUS innovation, and one in the area of space collaboration, titled NISAR
* Multilateral Cooperation
* The Quad, IMEC and I2U2 figured in communique, but also something called the Indian Ocean Strategic Venture. I note this nomenclature progress with approval: there used to be the Asia-Pacific, then it was the Indo-Pacific, and now the Indian Ocean is being singled out
* In the area of counter-terrorism, the communique explicitly named Pakistani entities such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Toiba, among others. This is a welcome change from the shadow-boxing indulged in by the Biden administration and others, whereby Pakistani terrorists were treated as ‘assets’
* The extradition of Tahawwur Rana, a Pakistani-Canadian now in a Los Angeles jail, to India for investigation into his role supporting David Headley, in the 26/11/2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, is a welcome sign, after the curious Biden exertions in the Pannun case
* People to people links
* Indian parents are spending $8 billion a year to support 300,000 Indian students in the US. This amounts to a sort of ‘foreign aid’, and also incidentally supplies a lot of especially STEM graduates to the US economy
* Facilitating visas, which have become frustratingly difficult for Indian business and leisure travelers to the US. Last year, the wait for just a visa interview was 452 days in Chennai (as compared to 15 days in Beijing), which probably was the result ot the Biden State Department ‘punishing’ India for refusing to toe their Ukraine sanctions line
* The legal movement of students and professionals between the two countries is to be eased.
Overall, this is a statement of intent: both Modi and Trump are laying their cards on the table, and they will both (as they should) bargain hard to benefit their own nations. But India is no longer being treated as a pariah as it was since the Pokhran blasts, the denial of cryogenic rocket engines (via, yes, the Biden Amendment), and so on.
As Trump moves towards the inevitable multipolar world, he does not wish to leave Asia to eager hegemon China; as he wishes to move the US out of military entanglements in far-off places (for which he expects Europe and others to bear the burden of their own defense), it is natural for him to want India to punch its weight in Asia.
A mutually beneficial relationship free of the supercilious lectures by previous Democratic administrations (eg Daleep Singh on Ukraine sanctions, and he was, ironically enough, the great-grand-nephew of Dalip Singh Saund) would be welcome from the Indian point of view. Having a counterweight to China, and a G3 instead of a G2, would likewise be useful from the US point of view. Thus, there are glimpses of a possible win-win situation.
2222 words, 22-02-2025
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There are dramatic developments regarding immigration under the new Trump Administration in the US, and the long-term consequences for Indian-Americans are unclear. The harsh experiences of demographic change in Europe may be influencing lawmakers’ plans.
On the one hand, there is what appears to have been deliberately done under the Biden Administration: the ‘carte blanche’ to millions of illegal aliens to walk into the US and melt away into the general population. This has included hard-core criminal gangs as well as ordinary people who simply want a better life. As in the film ‘El Norte’, it is a dream for many from impoverished developing countries to somehow get to the fabled riches of the US.
As in some parts of India, local politicians may have encouraged illegal migrants expecting loyalty from them. With notoriously lax local laws in the US (no need to prove citizenship to vote), they may have calculated that they could permanently lock in a vote bank for themselves.
It is said that some number (70,000 to 700,000, the reported number varies) of illegal Indians have used ‘coyotes’ to get them into the US via the southern or northern borders (some may have overstayed their visas). The simple answer is that they will be extradited (if caught): some have melted away into ethnic enclaves, living in fear of the ‘migra’, like East Asian and Latino illegals.
There are allegations that the first batch of 104 illegal Indian citizens was sent back in chains, handcuffed, on a military plane, with limited access to toilets. This is inhumane, if true, and cannot be countenanced
There are also practical difficulties: many illegals have destroyed their papers, and have no incentive to prove their actual citizenship. They are, in effect, stateless. I am reminded of poor San Francisco businessman Vaishno Das Bagai, rendered a man without a country after the US canceled his citizenship in 1928, who committed suicide.
What do you do with stateless people? The facile answer is to imprison them, and Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay and Guantanamo have both been suggested as incarceration centers. But then what? It would be inhuman to simply jail them forever if they are not violent criminals.
There is also the fact that some sectors depend on foreign labor, for example agriculture (that needs fruit and vegetable pickers) and industry (some factories depend on low-wage illegal migrants), as well as the IT industry.
Talented and well-educated immigrants are giving the US an advantage in innovation and entrepreneurship. On the other hand, if they are forced to return, say to India, that might be good for the Indian economy.
Then there is the question of birthright citizenship. The 1868-vintage 14th Amendment grants citizenship to every child born in the US. It was done for freed blacks after the Civil War: before manumittance, slaves had been treated as chattel. This provision has been misused by ‘birth tourism’, wherein pregnant women show up just to deliver in the US.
Trump’s executive order canceling birthright citizenship was opposed by 17 states; and a Federal judge has stayed the order. It will end up in the Supreme Court, and the conservative majority will probably be unwilling to override something that is spelt out in the US Constitution. It would be virtually impossible to bring a new Amendment to overturn the 14th, because the legislature is finely balanced between Republicans and Democrats.
Thus, after a few months of wrangling, it is likely that birthright citizenship will stay on the books.
There is also a curious sideshow, with US citizen activist Kshama Samant of Seattle, and friends, invading the Indian consulate there demanding that she be given a visa to visit her ailing mother. No country is obligated to give anybody a visa or a reason for denying it.
Of course, there is a more immediate concern from the points of view of the million-strong Indian origin H1-B visa holders, mostly engineers, who are stuck with the 9,800 per-country annual limit of employment-based Green Cards. This means they are generally at the mercy of their employers. It is not clear that the US government will do anything to change this status quo.
Japan, China etc are facing a demographic crisis because of low fertility rates. So is most of Europe. The US has had the advantage of attracting immigrants. With the current confusion, the net result may well be that the US will cease to attract immigrants, which would in the long run be a net loss for the country especially if smart young people prefer to stay at home.
770 words, Feb 3, 2025 updated Feb 8
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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
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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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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.
The podcast above is AI-generated by Google NotebookLM.
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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