M. K. BHADRAKUMAR— Clearly, such a massive shift in India’s military policies needs to be co-related with the fundamental postulates of foreign policy. That said, curiously, call it “bipartisan consensus” or whatever, India’s main opposition party apparently couldn’t care less about the shift. This is not surprising. The shift is actually about a nascent India-US alliance to counter China — and that is a policy front where it is difficult to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
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ERIC ZUESSE—That phrase “under illegal occupation by China for around 60 years now” is from India’s Government, not from the U.N. or any other international body that possesses actual authority to say what is and is not “legal” under international law; and, in fact, no such international body has ever asserted that a nation possesses some sort of legal right to determine what is and what is not legal within some different nation’s boundaries. In other words: India’s Government is lying here — deceiving — to say that China’s creating a bridge in that place is “illegal.” But the U.S. Government is, nonetheless, now clearly siding with India’s possessing such a supposed legal right to contest what China is doing inside China, and the U.S. is even participating with India’s Government in war-games against China regarding this supposed dispute about international law — but really about international power, and totally outside of any international law.
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ERIC ZUESSE—Given this reality, India has recently been tending to get off the ideological fence that it has been sitting on ever since 1947, to side increasingly with its fellow-anti-imperialist nations. If it finally (decisively) does so, then that would become the most momentous blow yet against the Rhodesist UK-U.S.-Zionist joint global empire ever since the UK itself lost India on 15 August 1947. India would then no longer be “neutralist.” It would instead become an additional enemy of the imperialist powers. It would become allied with China, Russia, and Iran, against the imperialist powers — including, finally, at long last, against the UK, which was India’s former master.
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VIJAY PRASAD—Indian farmers and agricultural workers have crossed the hundred-day mark of their protest against the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They will not withdraw until the government repeals laws that deliver the advantages of agriculture to large corporate houses. This, the farmers and agricultural workers say, is an existential struggle. Surrender is equivalent to death: even before these laws were passed, more than 315,000 Indian farmers had committed suicide since 1995 because of the debt burden placed on them.
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Red Lines host Anya Parampil speaks with Prasanth Radhakrishnan, a New Delhi based journalist with Newclick.in and People’s Dispatch, about the historic farmer strike currently sweeping India. Radhakrishnan explains why farmers are rising up, how they are organized, and how the neoliberal government of Narendra Modi has responded to the movement. Just one day after this interview, the Modi government raided the offices of Newsclick.in and detained its editors in what has been denounced as an act of intimidation against critical media.
