Striking Indian Workers Sept. 2, 2016. Credit: Love & Rage Media

=By= Vijay Prashad

transcript

SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: It’s The Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore.On Friday, an estimated 150 million workers refused to show up for work in India and instead took to the streets to demonstrate against labor conditions.

~~~UNIDENTIFIED: We are demanding that ordinary workers should also get a rock-bottom of 18,000 a piece minimum pay, take-home pay, so that they can have a good, a happy family life. We want that every worker should get at least, at the fag-end of their life, 3,000 rupees minimum pension. We want that in–there are many contract employment in perennial nature of jobs. Those jobs should be regularized. And also they should be given protection of social security and job security.

~~~PERIES: The unions involved issued 12 demand to the government of Prime Minister Modi, which included raising the minimum wage, enforcement of labor laws, introduction of universal social security, and a stop to foreign direct investment in railways and national defense. Joining me now to examine all of this is Vijay Prashad. Vijay is the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and professor of international studies at Trinity College. He’s the author of many books, including The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution.Vijay, good to have you with us again.

VIJAY PRASHAD: Thanks a lot.

PERIES: So, Vijay, it is estimated that this one-day strike could be one of the largest in history. Workers are clearly unhappy. Will it have any effect on the Modi government?

PRASHAD: Let’s first register what you just said. It’s probably the largest strike in the history of strikes over the last 200 years, up to 150 million people. This is extraordinary. It’s larger than the strike last year, which we thought was very, very robust presence on the street. But the reason I say last year’s strike was robust is that it had minimal impact on the Modi government. The Modi government is hell-bent upon a growth strategy that requires, essentially, crushing labor laws, rolling back labor laws, and seizing, allowing private business to have a larger section of the social surplus produced by these workers. So both in terms of workplace democracy and in terms of the share of the surplus that workers have been demanding in both these directions, the Modi government has tilted firmly with management against labor. So it will not directly influence the Modi government, but it certainly strengthened the confidence of the Indian workers to stand up and not allow this government to basically run roughshod over them.

PERIES: And let’s talk about some of the conditions that these workers are facing that they want fixed by this demonstration.

PRASHAD: Well, the labor laws that the Modi government have put forward have such things as increasing the threshold of hours before overtime can be claimed. Previously the threshold was, say, 50 hours. Now they want to increase it to much higher threshold. So before you even come near that threshold, you cannot claim overtime. At the same time, they are making it very difficult for new labor unions to be formed. It’s important for people to understand that in the Indian labor market, 90 percent of the workers are in the informal sector. That is, they are in the sector outside the ambit of most labor law, and certainly trade unions. This strike, I think, very particularly, in a very focused way, was a strike of all kinds of workers, workers in the formal and informal sector. And both workers in formal and informal sector made it very clear that the demands they were fighting were not merely for formal sector workers, for bank employees or railway employees, etc., but they were also for the women who work in crèches, for instance, the Anganwadi workers who are very, very militant in their opposition to this government because they have been pushed against the wall for the work that they do. So this particular strike is about linking the formal sector workers to the informal sector workers and to fight for the rights of informal sector workers to create trade unions and recognize those trade unions within Indian labor law.

PERIES: And in the demands that was made by the unions, they isolated particularly the foreign direct investment in railways and national defense. Why are these sectors particular to the concerns of the trade union?

PRASHAD: Well, there were three that they picked: railways, insurance, and national defense. And there are several reasons why these are important. The question of national defense of course raises issues of sovereignty. These are political questions, not merely questions of workers’ rights directly. The area of railways and insurance, I think there is a great worry. Railways are one of the largest employers in India and certainly one of the backbones of the formal sector unions. And the increase of foreign investment in railways will come in a very compromising way from labor. It’s going to probably move the workers in the railway industry towards more contractorization, you know, where there’ll be more subcontracted work, there’ll be more so-called casual labor rather than full-time labor. So the unions in the railways are very concerned that the increase of FDI is going to increase casualization of the workforce and the railways. With insurance, I think there’s again the issue of insurance companies from abroad coming in, you know, basically rationalizing their procedures, firing very large numbers of workers. You know, this is again a strong public sector side of the Indian labor market. But again here there’s a political dimension, because there’s a fear that foreign insurance companies will come in, they’ll use the massive pension funds or the casino Wall Street, and not for the betterment or the protection of labor as labor ages. So, for these political and workplace reasons, the unions are very much opposed to foreign direct investment.

PERIES: Now, lastly, Vijay, of course this kind of massive protests in India is resonating throughout the world. We see these kinds of labor protests in France and other parts of the world. Can you link these struggles?

PRASHAD: Well, of course they are in many ways against the kind of neoliberal policy slate that most of the governments around the world follow. But let’s just consider the scale of this. You know, this is about 150-180 million workers who have gone on strike. These are workers from the tea plantations of northern Bengal to the small factories that link Madras to Coimbatore. I mean, this has been across India. This is the largest strike perhaps that we’ve seen in 100 years at least. So the scale is just so gigantic that the comparison at one level is not possible. But certainly the issues that they’re all fighting for are related. You know, one of the striking features of this, Sharmini, is going to be that the press is barely going to report the fact that such a large part of the Indian workforce went on strike. There will be barely a mention of it. And this has got a lot to do with the fact of who owns the press. But I would like to say something to my friends in the press, that many of the newspapers and television channels are also running with labor practices that have been challenged by the Indian trade unions, so they should feel a personal stake in the struggles of the Indian trade unions. Those who work in television channels in France, in the United States, etc., they know what it’s like to have their pensions squeezed, they know what it’s like to get their benefits cut. So that’s precisely what the Indian workers are fighting for. They’re not fighting simply for themselves; they’re fighting to imagine a new dispensation.

PERIES: Alright. And, Vijay, in your article this week on Alternet you made a very important connection between these kinds of labor protests that are going on in India to what’s happening in France. What was the objective in doing that?

PRASHAD: Well, part of it is the idea of backwardness, you know, when in the old colonial days the suggestion was made that the people of the East, whether they are from North Africa, West Asia, South Asia, East Asia, they are somewhat backward to Europeans. And the idea that was put forward is that backwardness was premised on culture, not on material conditions. That was sort of left off the table. And the reason the West largely left that off the table was that they understood that the plunder that the West was conducting in places like India benefited the West, and so to then say let’s create education or drinking water for the Indians would somehow appear criticism of themselves. So they understood backwardness to be simply or merely a cultural phenomenon. So this new debate about burkinis and things like that in France is just a repetition of this old argument that somehow the people of the East are backward in cultural terms. What they don’t want to talk about is that the economic and political policies continue to make people in various parts of the so-called East have a difficult time producing their own futures, their own reality, their own kind of dignity, their own kind of advances. And suffocating them in that way and then criticizing them so-called on cultural grounds is the oldest colonial trick in the book. So when workers rise up in a place like India, they are rising up, I think, not only on the terrain of politics and economics, but also culture, because what they’re saying is, after all, we are human beings and we deserve to be treated like human beings, including how we decide to imagine our way of life.

PERIES: Alright, Vijay. As usual, enlightening. Thank you so much for joining us today.

PRASHAD: Thanks a lot.

PERIES: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

End

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College. He is the author of twenty books, including The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (LeftWord and University of California Press, 2016) and co-editor of Land of Blue Helmets: The UN in the Arab World (University of California Press, 2016) as well as editor of Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation. Vijay is the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books (leftword.com) and is a columnist for Frontline and AlterNet as well as a frequent contributor to The Hindu, Himal and Counterpunch.

Source: Real News Network.

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Nauseated by the
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Had enough of their lies, escapism,
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=By= Vandana Shiva

Chemical corporations are trying to impose patents on all living organisms… They are trying to destroy our local food systems and replace them with industrial junk food by changing food and health safety as well as bio-safety, through ‘harmonisation’.

The only way to counter globalisation just a plot of land in some central place, keep it covered in grass, let there be a single tree, even a wild tree.” This is how dear friend and eminent writer Mahasweta Devi, who passed away on July 28, at the age of 90, quietly laid out her imagination for freedom in our times of corporate globalisation in one of her last talks.

Our freedoms, she reminds us, are with grass and trees, with wildness and self-organisation (swaraj), when the dominant economic systems would tear down every tree and round up the last blade of grass.

From the days we jointly wrote about the madness of covering our beautiful biodiverse Hindustan with monocultures of eucalyptus plantations, which were creating green deserts, to the work we did together on the impact of globalisation on women, Mahaswetadi remained the voice of the earth, of the marginalised and criminalised communities.

She could see with her poetic imagination how globalisation, based on free trade agreements (FTAs), written by and for corporations, was taking away the freedoms of people and all beings. “Free trade” is not just about how we trade. It is about how we live and whether we live. It is about how we think and whether we think. In the last two decades, our economies, our production and consumption patterns, our chances of survival and the emergence of a very small group of parasitic billionaires, have all been shaped by the rules of deregulation in the WTO agreements.

In 1994, in Marrakesh, Morocco, we signed the GATT agreements which led to the creation of WTO in 1995. The WTO agreements are written by corporations for corporations, to expand their control on resources, production, markets and trade, establish monopolies and destroy both economic and political democracy.

Monsanto wrote the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement of WTO — which is an attempt to claim seeds as Monsanto’s invention, and own seeds as “intellectual property” through patents. It has only one aim — to own and control seed and make super-profits through the collection of royalties. We have seen the consequences of this illegitimate corporate-defined “property” right in India; with extortion of “royalties” for genetically modified (GMO) seeds leading to high seed prices.

Cargill, Inc wrote the WTO’s agreement on agriculture. As a result, India, the largest producer of oilseeds and pulses, has become the biggest importer of both these produce. The edible oils being imported are GMO soya oil and palm oil — both extracted with hexane through solvent extraction; both leading to massive deforestation in Argentina, Indonesia and Brazil. We are importing dal from Canada and Mozambique, while our fertile pulse growing lands are being handed over to foreign corporations for growing bio fuel. This model destroys agriculture and food systems everywhere. We are thus destroying our health as well as the health of the planet.

The junk food industry wrote the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) agreement of WTO. Our Prevention of Food Adulteration Act 1954 was replaced with the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), which is being used to shut India’s rich and diverse, small-scale, home and cottage industry-based food businesses, under pseudo-safety laws.

All new FTAs take away the sui generis option in TRIPS in WTO and are aimed at giving fangs to International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), which establishes rules of uniformity, at a time when we know that diversity is vital to nutrition as well as climate resilience.

Twelve countries, including Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam, signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership FTA in February 2016. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is an FTA between the Asean nations and their six trading partners — India, China, South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Since Asean countries are the most populous, RCEP will affect a greater number of people than other FTAs. And through RCEP, these countries may be dragged into the TPP under pressure of harmonisation, especially on issues related to seed.

The TPP requires all its signatories to join UPOV 91. It allows patents on “inventions derived from plants” which would open the floodgates of bio-piracy, as in the case of neem, basmati and wheat. The TPP has sections on “biologicals” which covers biological processes and products, thus undoing the exclusions in the WTO TRIPS agreement. Given how there is a rush to patent and impose untested and hazardous vaccines, and new GMO technologies like gene editing and gene drives, it is clear that the TPP is the instrument for the next stage of bio-imperialism.

At WTO, India managed to ensure countries could exclude plants and animals from patentability, which translated into article 3(j) in our patent laws. India ensured that UPOV could not be forced through WTO and countries had a sui generis option for plant varieties. This translated into the Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act 2001, for which the writer was a member of the expert drafting group.

Not having achieved total monopoly on seeds through the WTO, chemical corporations (biotechnology and seed corporations) are trying to impose patents on all living organisms and all production systems based on living organisms through new FTAs. They are also trying to further destroy our local food systems and replace them with industrial junk food by changing food and health safety as well as bio-safety, through “harmonisation”.

Finally, global corporations, and those who control them, are trying to define corporations as having personhood through investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) systems, which are secret tribunals where corporations and investors can sue governments for acting according to their constitutional obligations in the interest of their citizens.

Thus, corporations are trying to replace our democracies with secret agreements and secret courts controlled by the 0.01 per cent super wealthy. The time is ripe for a planetary freedom movement that defends and protects the freedoms of all beings from this 0.01 per cent.

Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and thinker. Director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology, and Ecology, she is the author of many books, including Water Wars: Pollution, Profits, and Privatization (South End Press, 2001), Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (South End Press, 1997), Monocultures of the Mind (Zed, 1993), The Violence of the Green Revolution (Zed, 1992), and Staying Alive (St. Martin’s Press, 1989). Shiva is a leader in the International Forum on Globalization, along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin

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=By= Radha Surya

Kashmir – police respond with deadly force to protesters. – Human Rights Watch

The facts speak for themselves. There is no escaping the implications of the horrors with which innocent, mostly unarmed civilians of India-held Kashmir have been bombarded ever since the present crisis erupted. The ongoing crisis in Kashmir has laid bare the palpable darkness that resides at the very heart of what is often perceived as a vibrant and successful democracy. As a mighty surge of mass resistance to Indian occupation welled up across Kashmir in the wake of the killing of beloved militant leader Burhan Wani on July 8, the Indian state unleashed a crackdown of which the savagery knew no bounds. Kashmiris are accustomed to sweeping as well as limited and less visible crackdowns by Indian forces. This is an old story. Still the current crackdown is of a different order of magnitude. Its ferocity may be without precedent in recent years. It is possible that repression on this scale was witnessed in Kashmir only in the nineties when India launched a brutal counterinsurgency operation to crush a rebellion against Indian rule. Now the no holds barred strategy has returned to a land which has been turned into a war-zone by Indian forces. Hardly surprising then that Kashmiri novelist and writer Mirza Waheed was moved to declare that something unimaginably dark, something sinister, has happened in India. Too many people here have called for more Kashmiris to be killed (https://twitter.com/MirzaWaheed/status/754678431799922689).

Twelve days into the crisis, despite consecutive days of curfew and other repressive measures, clashes have continued between young, undaunted protesters and Indian forces. The death toll has crossed 40. Over 2000 civilians have suffered injuries from state police, paramilitary and army firing with live ammunition and pellet guns. Victims of eye injuries resulting from indiscriminate use of pellet guns have become the emblematic casualties of the ongoing crisis. At one hospital alone over a hundred patients, mostly young people and even children, with pellets lodged in their eyes were brought in for surgeries. Skilled doctors toiled around the clock in their service. Nevertheless it is known that thirty of the injured are doomed to live in darkness for the remainder of their lives. The rest will be left with impaired vision. Such are the unimaginably ruthless methods used by the Indian state as it strains every nerve to retain its hold on Kashmir.

There has been some stone throwing by protesters as well as instances of large civilian crowds attacking and inflicting damage on scattered police stations and seizing weaponry. Much has been made in some reports of the so-called “violent” nature of the protests. For some reason it is assumed that an exclusively pacific response befits Kashmiri protesters when fired upon with live bullets because they broke curfew and assembled to pay their last respects to their slain leader. Indian forces on the other hand have license to maim, blind, kill and commit every possible war crime. The occupation forces have literally gone berserk. Some of the more visible atrocities committed in the wake of Burhan Wani’s funeral have gone on record. Even ambulances were waylaid and stormed by occupying forces when the injured were being rushed to hospitals. Victims of the disproportionate use of force—some with blood gushing from bullet wounds–were subjected to further trauma when they were pulled out of ambulances and beaten by paramilitary forces. Delays in reaching hospitals because of deliberate obstruction by occupying forces have resulted in loss of life in a number of cases. In their frenzied pursuit of protesters police stormed the main hospital in the capital Srinagar and fired tear gas shells in the Emergency ward sowing panic in the medical staff as well as patients and their attendants. The senseless brutality of the occupying forces knows no restraints. A physically handicapped boy was assaulted by soldiers as he played with friends in a field and was thrown into a ditch. He now lies in hospital with a fracture in his shrivelled leg. The heinous deed was perpetrated in an area where protests were not being staged. Then there is the harrowing story of a CRPF or paramilitary assault on a family on its way to the capital Srinagar. The mother was being taken to the hospital for treatment when the family’s vehicle was stopped and surrounded. Of her two children the young man—who was guilty of wearing a beard– was accused of being a terrorist and taken into custody for possible torture and killing. His sister was subjected to a rape attempt by an officer. Police who witnessed the incident intervened and were able to avert both outcomes. The story was headlined “CRPF men brutalise family, attempt to rape and kill.” Ironically its publication resulted in a gag order being imposed on prominent Kashmiri newspapers for a three day period. Printing presses were raided by occupation forces, printers were beaten up and copies of newspapers seized.

The savage crackdown that rages on the ground has its discursive counterpart in the inflammatory and hate-filled rhetoric of some of India’s jingoistic TV channels as well as in social media postings. New Delhi seems to have been taken by surprise as the conflagration overwhelms Kashmir. The Prime Minister was away on yet another of his all too frequent foreign jaunts when fires flared up in the valley. He remained silent in the initial days of the crisis although he had the time to tweet birthday greetings to all and sundry and to convey his sympathy with grieving survivors of the carnage in Nice, France. Analysts have been warning for some time that traumatized Kashmir long denied its aspiration for azadi or freedom is ripe for yet another outbreak of mass resistance to Indian rule. New Delhi has been urged to proactively seek a political solution to the conflict in Kashmir. But the Indian state has hitherto seen no reason to modify its policy of containing Kashmir’s political aspirations by means of brute force. In response to the current crisis the state has rushed 200 paramilitary troops to the valley. The number of active militants has dwindled to 200 or fewer as opposed to several thousand when insurgency was at its peak in the nineties. Nevertheless New Delhi continues to station over half a million soldiers in Kashmir making the state the most militarized zone in the world. By some estimates the number of soldiers stands at 800,000. Calls have been made without success in the last ten years or so for demilitarizing Kashmir or at least reducing troop numbers.

India’s military occupation of Kashmir is particularly relevant to the conversion of Burhan Wani to militancy. How Burhan the bright, cricket loving son of a school principal joined the armed struggle against Indian rule in 2010 at the age of fifteen is now a familiar story. Burhan and his older brother Khalid had gone for a bike ride in their village in South Kashmir when they were stopped by soldiers who sent them to buy cigarettes. The cigarettes were duly purchased and delivered but the brothers were given a beating all the same. Khalid was beaten till he became unconscious. Burhan vowed he would take revenge. Soon after the incident of gratuitous violence on the part of the occupying forces Burhan disappeared from his home and went underground. He joined the Hizbul Mujahideen, a militant pro-azadi group which has been active in the valley since the late eighties, and rose swiftly to the position of commander. Also well-known now is the story of how Burhan boldly stepped out of the shadowy realm traditionally inhabited by militants and attained almost mythical status through images and videos of himself and his comrades that circulated on social media. And of course there was the impact of his refusal to tolerate zulm or oppression and his espousal of the pro-freedom cause at the ripe age of fifteen. Both the visuals of the handsome Burhan with his earnest, guileless looks and the narrative must have cemented his place in the hearts and minds of Kashmiris who groaned under the Indian yoke and shared Burhan’s political aspirations. It seems correct to perceive exceptional historical significance in the post-Burhan moment as in the analysis of writer Mohamad Junaid at http://raiot.in/the-restored-humanity-of-the-kashmiri-rebel/. How else does one explain the outpouring of grief and anger at the killing of the youthful twenty-one year old leader. How else does one explain the fact that over two lakh Kashmiris broke curfew and placed themselves in harm’s way in order to pay their last respects to the slain commander. Or that protests spread across Kashmir in defiance of the military might—the lethal bullets and supposedly nonlethal pellets–of the occupying forces and continued for days despite the ferocity of the ongoing crackdown by the Indian state?

India too should weep for Burhan and others who shared his fate—all the young Kashmiris who were driven into embracing the armed struggle and were brought to an untimely end. Indeed protests against the crackdown in Kashmir have been held in Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai. But it’s too much to hope that outrage will be substantial or nation-wide. Despite witnessing such wanton destruction of life and human potential no doubt India will go on with business as usual. This time around as well the occupying forces will be able to bludgeon, blind, torture and kill Kashmir into submission. The status quo that existed prior to the current crisis will be restored. A limited acquiescence to Indian occupation will be re-established and will hold in place until the next crisis erupts

Radha Surya writes on issues in Indian and international politics. Her articles have appeared on Znet and Countercurrents. She lives and works in the United States in Bloomington, Indiana.

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by
Keith Jones

Modi and Obama: No doubt cementing an alliance to further planetary criminality. The disgrace of the world is that scum like these are put in positions of power.

With select comments from original thread

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s two-day visit to Washington this week marked a watershed in the transformation of India into a frontline state in US imperialism’s military-strategic offensive against China. This offensive—known in Washington parlance as the “pivot to Asia,” or “rebalance”—has already seen the US redeploy the bulk of its naval and air power to the Indo-Pacific region, strengthen military ties with traditional regional allies, elaborate plans for a massive aerial and sea bombardment of China (Air-Sea Battle), incite various Southeast Asian states to press their territorial claims against China in the South China Sea, and stage armed “overflight” and “freedom of navigation” exercises to challenge Chinese sovereignty over South China Sea islets.

Modi’s election, as those of democracy usurpers in many other nations, starting with the US, underscores the confusion enveloping the public mind, and the cynical exploitation of reigning prejudices and reactionary values by the global plutocracy. The new alliance between India and US proves that ruling classes have absoluitely no principles and no dignity, as it was Washington that turned Pakistan into a power capable of threatening India. Image by DonkeyHotey … © Attribution-ShareAlike License

The joint statement issued Tuesday by Modi and President Barack Obama following their talks outlined plans to increase Indo-US military cooperation across the Indian Ocean and Asian Pacific regions and in all “domains… land, maritime, air, space and cyber (space).”

India is to give the US military routine access to its ports and military bases for resupply, repairs and rest. Washington, for its part, has recognized India as a “Major Defense Partner,” meaning it can now buy the advanced US weaponry made available only to the Pentagon’s closest allies.

The Obama administration also pledged to press for India’s speedy inclusion in the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG), although India has not fulfilled a key condition of membership—ratification of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Inclusion in the NSG will give India improved access to advanced civilian nuclear technology, allowing it concentrate its indigenous nuclear program on weapons development.

Formally, India remains a “non-treaty ally” of the US and continues to stand outside the alliance system that US imperialism created in the aftermath of World War II to underpin its global hegemony. But this distinction is now little more than pretense.

In tandem with its burgeoning military ties with the US, India, under the two-year-old Modi-led BJP government, has dramatically increased bilateral and trilateral strategic ties, including military exercises, with Washington’s key allies in the Asia Pacific—Japan and Australia.

In the “US-India Joint Vision Statement for the Asia Pacific” issued by Obama and Modi in January 2015, India effectively announced a partnership with the US in East Asia, with Washington’s anti-China “rebalance” and India’s “Act East” policy proclaimed to be mutually reinforcing. Since then, New Delhi has faithfully parroted the US line on the ever more explosive South China Sea dispute and aggressively asserted a strategic interest in the South China Sea. In mid-May, four Indian warships sailed into the South China Sea on the first leg of a two-and-a-half-month tour of the Eastern Pacific, which will include a joint exercise with the American and Japanese navies near islets (Diaouyu or Senkou) held by Japan but claimed by China.

To emphasize the bipartisan support in the US for the Indo-American alliance, Modi, who until two years ago was barred from the US due to his role in the 2002 anti-Muslim Gujarat pogrom, was invited to address a joint session of the US Congress on Wednesday. He used his 45-minute address to avow the Indian bourgeoisie’s readiness to serve as a satrap for US imperialism. Not surprisingly, he was greeted with repeated standing ovations.

Proclaiming America to be India’s “indispensable partner,” Modi said “a strong India-US partnership” can “anchor” US strategic interests “from Asia to Africa and from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific.”

Modi addresses US Congress: an obligatory step for all satraps in the American empire. The nauseating official adulation is part of the diplomatic hypocrisy designed to fool the public.

He lauded the “sacrifices” made by the US military, the mailed fist through which US imperialism has fought social revolution and maintained its global domination, in the “service of mankind,” and painted Washington as the defender of peace and democracy against those who do not accept “international rules and norms” (one of a number of pointed anti-China references).

Modi combined kowtowing with a plea for India’s own great power ambitions to be accommodated through changes to “international institutions framed with the mindset of the 20th Century.”

The alliance between the venal Indian bourgeoisie and US imperialism represents a sea change in world geopolitics, with explosive implications for inter-state relations across Asia and the world.

Because newly independent India balked at US demands that it subordinate its foreign policy to Washington’s Cold War machinations against the Soviet Union, the United States treated New Delhi as an adversary until the 1990s. For decades, it built up India’s archrival Pakistan as its principal regional partner, encouraging Pakistan to pursue its military-strategic rivalry with India.

Now the US boasts of its plans to support India, with Obama arguing that the Indo-US alliance has the potential to be Washington’s “defining partnership” in the 21st century.

India is a desperately poor country. Hundreds of millions of Indians live in absolute poverty and three-quarters of the population ekes out an existence on less than $2 per day. But successive US administrations have coveted it as a major strategic prize.

In population, India is second only to China. It has a large and rapidly expanding military (at over $50 billion, India’s military budget is commensurate with that of France or Russia), equipped with nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers. It geographically dominates the Indian Ocean, the world’s most important commercial waterway and the vital lifeline for China’s economy.

In aligning with the US, India is tightening the strategic encirclement of China and bolstering the US threat to destroy the Chinese economy by denying Beijing access to the Indian Ocean in the event of a war or war-crisis. The Indian bourgeoisie is thus boosting and encouraging Washington in its reckless drive to compel China to accept US hegemony—a drive whose logic, as the Pentagon’s own plans attest, is all-out war between nuclear-armed powers. America’s imperialist offensive has already raised tensions in the South China Sea to the boiling point.

Buoyed by US support, India is aggressively asserting its claim to be the hegemon in South Asia, demanding that its smaller rivals acknowledge its predominance and pushing back against the growth of China’s economic influence. Recently, New Delhi bullied the Maldives into declaring that it would pursue “an India-first foreign policy,” and, although this proved less successful, it imposed an economic blockade on landlocked Nepal for five months in an attempt to force it to make changes to its new constitution to give India greater leverage over Katmandu.

The US pivot to Asia and promotion of India as its junior partner is inflaming a series of inter-state conflicts involving the states of South Asia, entangling them in the US-China confrontation and adding to each regional conflict an explosive new dimension.

An obvious case in point is relations between India and China, whose common border remains in dispute. But especially fraught are relations between India and Pakistan, the rival state created as a result of the communal partition of the Indian subcontinent. The two nations, both nuclear-armed, have fought three declared and numerous undeclared wars over the past seven decades.

Islamabad has issued increasingly shrill warnings that the Indo-US strategic partnership has overturned the balance of power in South Asia. But Washington, anxious to cement its anti-China alliance with New Delhi, has cavalierly ignored these warnings.

Pakistan’s response has been two-fold. It has expanded its nuclear arsenal, including developing tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons, and it has sought to strengthen its longstanding military-security ties with China—ties the US strongly supported when Beijing was allied with Washington in the last decades of the Cold War.

Beijing long sought to encourage Pakistan to seek a rapprochement with India as part of its own efforts to improve relations with New Delhi and thereby counter US efforts to make India the western pillar of its anti-China alliance. But with the Modi government spurning China’s offers for India to participate in the building of infrastructure to connect Eurasia (the New Silk Road) and instead integrating itself ever more completely into Washington’s strategic agenda, Beijing last year announced a $46 billion investment in Pakistan to build a China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The CPEC would provide rail, road and pipeline links from Pakistan’s Arabian Sea post of Gwadar to western China, circumventing, at least to a considerable degree, US plans to blockade China by seizing the Malacca Straits and other Indian Ocean and South China Sea chokepoints.

The Pakistani military remains a significant ally and asset of Washington. But the US, frustrated by the strength of the Afghan insurgency, angered by the CPEC, and eager to woo India, is ratcheting up pressure on Pakistan.

Last month, the US violated a longstanding Pakistani “red line” when it summarily executed via a drone strike on Pakistani territory the political leader of the Taliban, blowing up Pakistan’s efforts to draw the Taliban into peace talks. With the likely aim of bullying Pakistan into assuming still more of the burden of the AfPak war, Washington is encouraging India to expand its presence in Afghanistan, long an arena of Indo-Pakistani strategic competition.

The Indian elite has long resented Washington’s refusal to give it a free hand with Pakistan and it continues to test how far Washington will allow it to go. Last year saw months of border clashes, and last weekend, India’s defence minister claimed that the window is rapidly closing on Modi’s highly conditional offer of peace talks with Pakistan.

Meanwhile, there are voices in US military-security circles arguing that strained US-Pakistan ties are to be welcomed as they facilitate the strengthening of the Indo-US alliance against China.

Desperate to offset the consequences of its economic decline and maintain its global dominance, US imperialism is pursuing aggression and war and in the process setting interstate relations in region after region aflame.

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=By= Mathew Maavak

Eurasia and Eurasianism. Map by Monsier Fou.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n April 24, Armenians commemorated the 101st anniversary of the 1915 genocide that consigned 1.5 million men, women and children to a torturous end. The Anglo-Saxon world, which was battling the Turks during this period, appeared powerless as another 700,000 Assyrian and Syrian Christians, 350,000 Greeks and an unspecified number of Syrian Muslim intellectuals were killed at the hands of sadistic Young Turks and their Kurdish errand boys.

A century of international double-standards

The post-WWI Treaty of Versailles did not extract any reparations from Turkey. Instead, it was hell-bent on imposing punitive terms on Germany while Japan– not deemed as a human equal to the West – were singularly denied their victor’s spoils. Turkey’s immunity from war crimes may have arguably emboldened Adolph Hitler in his own genocidal quest three decades later.

A group of Armenians from Zeytun that were forcibly brought to Marash on May, 1915: After half an hour of being photographed, Turks burned and massacred them all. The governor of Marash stands in the upper row. (Armenian Genocide Museum).

A toothless Treaty of Sevres (1920) was annulled by a subsequent Turkish-Armenian war in which Armenians suffered more losses in terms of population and territory. Attempts by Josef Stalin to retrieve lost Armenian territories in the aftermath of WWII were characteristically rebuffed by the US State Department whose kid glove treatment of Ankara continues today.

Since 1915, Turkey had invaded and occupied Northern Cyprus, and had suppressed Kurdish nationalism through unfettered pogroms. Turkey’s trailblazing decimation of minorities, especially of Christians in the Middle East, was emulated by its regional co-brethren for another 100 years, culminating in a similar, ongoing genocide in Syria and Iraq. History has indeed come a full circle due to the collusions and cowardice of a West-defined “international community.”

Few communities have suffered as protractedly as the Armenians, Assyrians and assorted Middle Eastern minorities in a century of “US exceptionalism.” The US is only perpetuating an ancient meme here, as history itself is a testament to the two millennia-old Western hatred of Eastern Christendom and Jewry.  This ceases to appear as an exaggeration when one compares the number of UN sanctions proposed against Israel since 1947 and similar, if any, motions proposed against Saudi Arabia during the same period.

Sanctioning Saudi Arabia, not Israel, has been the United States’ age-old red line. The usual American veto is favour of Israel is just part of the West’s good cop-bad-cop geopolitical circus. The May 4 Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day was in fact commemorated amidst the backdrop of US-sanctioned neo-Nazi thuggery in Ukraine, and a pandemic rise in anti-Semitism all over Europe.

Did someone say “Never again!”?

Perhaps, the growing chasm between Western rhetoric and reality was a reason why Russian president Vladimir Putin called for the creation of “a non-aligned system of international security to counter global terror” during his May 9 V-Day speech. He warned off the “double standards” and “short-sighted indulgence to those who are nurturing new criminal plans.”

Greater Eurabia is America’s “Free World”

Since 1915, the US has taken over colonial Britain’s lead in completing a contra-civilizational compact in the form of an undeclared “Greater Eurabia.” It is an agglomeration of tin-pot dictatorships, sharia tyrannies, banana republics and soon-to-be failed states (Western Europe).  Whenever the US styles itself as the “leader of the free world,” it is actually referring to its headship of this tyrannical axis. With the United Nations functioning as its prime rubberstamp, Greater Eurabia decides what is wrong and right; what constitutes an infringement of international law; what constitutes a war crime and who should be punished for it.

Double-standards flow as naturally as flushed multinational waste inside an American sewer. China will be condemned for building outposts in the South China Sea. Russia will be similarly castigated over the Crimean reunification.

Obama, in fact, had a special message for China with regards to ASEAN and the South China Sea in his Washington Post Op-ed dated May 2. It accurately encapsulated American antipathy towards international law and trade:  

“… America should write the rules. America should call the shots. Other countries should play by the rules that America and our partners set, and not the other way around.”

The United States biggest fear was well-captured by Obama’s own rhetoric:

“…Asia-Pacific region will continue its economic integration, with or without the United States. We can lead that process, or we can sit on the sidelines and watch prosperity pass us by.”

There you have it. Greater Eurasian autarky is the West’s biggest fear and its existential death knell.

Yet, instead of global accommodation, the West is raising the stakes in the game of international double standards. A US judge can order Iran to pay $10 billion in damages to the families of 9/11 victims despite Tehran having had nothing to do with the terror attack. The same judge conveniently cleared Saudi Arabia of any culpability despite 15 of the Magnificent 19 being Saudi nationals. The White House and the US Congress concurred. President Barrack Obama’s rationale for this jurisprudential schizophrenia was timeless: “If we let Americans sue Saudis for 9/11, foreigners will begin suing US non-stop.” Iran was exempted, of course, as well as an increasing number of nations standing up to the jaundiced justice of the United States.

The irrelevancy of the UN

As US-facilitated lawlessness abound, can the United Nations play any meaningful role in promoting a semblance of international law?

Sooner or later, the people of Greater Eurasia, particularly within the core nations of Russia, China and India may demand a governmental reappraisal of their UN memberships. What does the UN do? Prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, which, failed in the case of Pakistan, North Korea and possibly Saudi Arabia? Prevent the emergence of Western-backed transnational jihad from the Mujahedeen-era to present-day Syria and Iraq?   Prevent Western-backed regime changes and colour revolutions?

Even neutral UN drafts are conveniently reinterpreted by the US to satiate its geopolitical bloodlust.

Between 2012 and 2015, the UN Security Council (UNSC) passed eight resolutions concerning Syria. Although the wording of each was neutral, the US and its allies mendaciously depicted them as a “unanimous” international condemnation of Damascus.  Resolution 2209 (2015) was particularly noteworthy: While the envoys of Russia and China condemned the use of chemical weapons in Syria, both avoided blaming any party before formal investigations were complete. The US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, however had no hesitation in blaming Bashar al-Assad’s culpability in the official draft.  Later, an 85-page UN report issued on Dec 13, 2013 acknowledged that chemical weapons were indeed used – against Syrian “soldiers and civilians!”

In the meantime, up to 500,000 Syrians have been killed, many of them via beheadings, crucifixions and immolations. More creative execution methods include RPG firing squads and freezing deserters to death. How can the Islamic State afford such sadistic extravagance?

The Syrian human toll does not include the rapes, enslavement and forced conversions perpetrated on the Yazidi and Christian minorities. While this article is being read by someone, somewhere, some minority Syrian girl is being caged, raped in captivity or sold off by terrorists propped by Greater Eurabia.

A US-led UN resolution is therefore tantamount to a national Siren Song. Blood inevitably flows, lives will be snuffed out and targeted nations will be ruined.  (Luckier nations like Cuba and Iran only get sanctioned). It doesn’t matter that the stats are pretty incriminating. If the US had militarily intervened in 30 nations in the past 30 years, all 30 of them would be showpiece basket cases. One study claims that the US had “killed More Than 20 Million People in 37 ‘Victim Nations’ Since World War II” while yet another shows that the US has been at war 93% of the time – 222 out of 239 years – since 1776!

In the final analysis, one should ask: As a pan-Eurasian institutional and arbitration complex takes shape, is the post-WWII UN model relevant anymore?

Mathew Maavak is a doctoral researcher in security foresight at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). His areas of study include strategic foresight; open source intelligence (OSINT); science, technology and innovation (STI); national policy-making; Eurasian integration; and global risks and uncertainties.

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