In our last week’s article about the new era in US Economic, Foreign & Defense Policy, we quoted the authors of that article in Foreign Affairs,
- “Another question is what exact form the United States’ coalitions should take, particularly in Asia. The United States need not replicate NATO in the region; the point is to form a coalition that checks China’s aspirations to regional hegemony. … Washington’s ties to New Delhi and Tokyo will anchor the coalition, … ” [final clause of this last sentence will be discussed in a later section of this article.]
There is now a focused & public discussion on why India is important, actually critical, to the success of the U.S. initiative to curb Chinese expansion. About two & half months ago, we had quoted Jacob Shapiro of Geopolitical Futures,
- “In the words of Lord Curzon in 1901, “As long as we rule India we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it, we shall drop straight away to a third-rate power.” …. In many ways, India gave Britain a sustained period of global hegemony.“
Shapiro then linked what British got from India to what America is looking for from India:
- “Today, the United States believes India will do the same for it. The U.S. doesn’t intend to conquer India by force, of course. … No, Washington wants to coax India to abandon its history of non-alignment in foreign policy and throw in its lot with a U.S.-led future.”
- “And if there is to be a U.S.-led future, Washington has little choice but to court India. Having identified China and Russia as strategic rivals and having committed itself to containing both Iran and North Korea, the U.S. needs an ally with India’s potential economic, political and military heft. Indeed, there is no country in the world that can come close to easing the immense foreign policy burden the U.S. carries more than India. For the United States to achieve its foreign policy goals while still maintaining its global primacy, it needs to enlist India’s support as a ready and willing ally.”
The above is not mere theory. The Trump Administration is increasingly showing their interest & willingness to build a US-India Defense Relationship that will “anchor” the US-India coalition. Look what the Daily Memo from Geopolitical Futures featured on Wednesday, December 18:
- “Courting India – Top defense and diplomatic officials from India and the U.S. will meet in Washington today for the second 2+2 dialogue, during which they are expected to sign an industrial security arrangement that will allow private sector technology transfer from the U.S. to India. The deal would enable U.S. companies to do business with Indian firms and allow major U.S. aviation and defense companies to enter the Indian air force’s tender process. (India has a strong aircraft manufacturing sector and currently is seeking at least 114 new combat aircraft for its military.) … The U.S. has plenty of other military hardware … it would consider selling to India too. Strategically, it makes sense why the U.S. would; India plays an important role in Washington’s Indo-Pacific defense strategy to contain China.“
China vs. U.S.-India Coalition
Remember the quote we left incomplete in the very first paragraph of this article? Let us now add the missing final clause to complete that quote from the article in Foreign Affairs:
- “Washington’s ties to New Delhi and Tokyo will anchor the coalition, but sustaining it in the face of a powerful China will require the United States to play an active leading role.”
This is a very important statement. Today the U.S.-India coalition is in its infancy & China is near its peak of arrogance towards India. But look forward 20 years or even 10 years and the picture changes substantially. As India grows more prosperous & militarily stronger especially in its force projection & space denial capabilities in the Indian Ocean, China will be forced to both confront India and also incentivize India against a close collaboration with America.
We think, materially speaking, the U.S. India coalition will be sustained despite what China does or offers. But that is only speaking materially, not philosophically, culturally or in a religious context.
You see Britain still casts a very long shadow over U.S.-India relations. And China is seen in India as a fellow victim of Britain while U.S.A. is instinctively seen in both India & China as a successor state to 19th & 20th century Britain.
Yes, both China & America have shrugged off the long shadow of Britain in the U.S.-China relationship. But sadly the U.S.-India relationship is still bogged down into & suffers from the long shadow of 20th century Britain, especially on the U.S. side. After all, the entire diplomatic, military & academic leadership in America, on both sides of the political divide, is still British-educated about India.
Religious Contempt & Virulent Hate towards Indian (Sindhu) Dharma in American Establishment
America became the world power overnight because Britain essentially surrendered its role & its global network of naval bases to America. That was America’s price for stepping in to Britain’s life or death fight with Hitler’s Germany. Britain had no choice but to pay the price. In one swift stroke, America became a global giant.
But that America was simply not ready to assume the diplomatic & foreign policy mantle of a global giant. America’s thinkers, policy makers & strategists were utterly ignorant & totally unskilled about many parts of the world that now looked to them for leadership. So just as U.S. took in many specialists & experts from among “moderate Nazis” from West Germany & let them run Germany to combat Soviet encroachment, the U.S. relied very heavily & followed what British specialists & experts taught them about India. .
And those British experts despised & hated Indians (or Hindoos as they called them) with a zeal & passion that matched or exceeded the hate German Nazis had for Jews. And this contemptuous hate of Indians (Hindoos) as a religious sub-species had seeped through virtually all sections of Britiah intelligentsia.
Mill, Macaulay, Kipling, Amery (who found Mein Kampf very interesting and stimulating), Churchill, all British thinkers & policy makers still studied in U.S. liberal arts programs, expressed hate towards Indians with a venom that matched Goebbels & his crew.
You can’t study Mill, Macaulay, Kipling, Churchill with reverence & not be influenced by their views about Indians & their “inferiority” to Muslims. No wonder U.S. foreign policy was instinctively skewed in favor of all-Muslim NaPakistan for over 50-60 years.
While the U.S. policy is now making a slow turn towards India, the U.S. media is still venomously anti-Indian from a religious ethos & culture point of view. There is not a single author in U.S. media or at the numerous think tanks that knows anything about Indian history. To them India begins with Timurid Mongols (Mughals) whom the British praised & then the British.
Actually even that is not true. No one in U.S. media even remembers the British break up of India in 1947 as was evident in the past few days.
U.S. Media’s hate campaign against India’s CAB
The British forcibly split up the Indian subcontinent into two parts based on religion – a Muslim homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims called the Land of the Religious Pure or Pak-i-stan and India (Hindoo-stan) for Indians. Over 5 million people moved from one to another in search for the state of their religion.
Understand the Muslims got a special status in this breakup. They got an all-Muslim or Muslim-dominated state of their own. The Muslims that did not want to leave India were NOT forced to leave. But those who did gave up Indian citizenship to move to their own Muslim state.
The direct result of this British-dictated breakup is that both Indians & Muslims got natural states, the natural state of Indians (Hindoos) being India (Hindoo-Stan) and the natural state of Muslims being Pakistan. Unfortunately, the Indians left in West Pakistan or Bangladesh (East Pakistan in 1947) were systematically cleansed out or converted to Islam over the past 70 years. Those who could escape ran to India as refugees.
Understand India (Hindoo-stan) is the ONLY country with Indian Dhaarmic ethos in the world. So while Muslims in today’s Napakistan or BanglaDesh can escape to a number of Muslim countries, Indians in those lands have nowhere to go but India. Their plight has long been a concern for Indians & now the Modi Government has recognized the right of such Indian refugees to Indian citizenship.
But Muslims in NaPakistan or BanglaDesh have no such rights & correctly so. They live in the states & homelands that were specifically created for them & from which Indians were systematically cleansed out.
That is why the CAB law passed by the Indian Parliament only allows non-Muslim refugees from neighboring Muslim states to get citizenship in India. That includes all religions persecuted in Napakistan & BanglaDesh – Buddhists, Christians, Indians (Sindhav), Jains, Sikhs. Naturally Muslim migrants from these countries are not included because they live in all-Muslim homelands that were specifically broken out of India to accommodate them. This is perfectly in accordance with the 1947 partition that created the Muslim homelands.
But that doesn’t fit the core objective & the deep venomous anti-Indian hate in U.S. media. Their basic objective is to eliminate the Indian religious & cultural ethos from India. This is no different than what the British tried to do from 1757 to 1947 – destroy Indian Dhaarmic ethos by systematically abusing Indians & showering praise & care on Muslims in India. They knew that without destroying Indian Dhaarmic (religio-cultural) ethos, India cannot be put down for ever.
Also note not one U.S. Think Tank has come out to discuss the CAB from an Indian point of view. Not even the so-called friends of India in the American foreign policy establishment.
Does any one think the Indian people don’t see this or recognize the deep hatred of Indian Dharma in the American establishment? They do but they are smart enough to keep a good thing going. But any one who thinks that a long standing U.S. – India coalition can be built on this U.S. foundation of contemptuous hate of Indian Dharma may be wrong, dangerously wrong.
The big positive is the attitude & the stance of the Trump Administration towards India & their refusal to give in to what the U.S. media is creating. Perhaps because the sections of the media that hate Indian Dharma & prefer NaPakistan are the same sections who hate President Trump, who dislike Christian ethos in America & who promoted free migration to America from Latin America.
But this big positive is tactical not foundational. It could be reversed in 2024. So unless we see a sea change in U.S. foreign policy establishment – Thinks Tanks, Academic Centers & media, we cannot feel sanguine about an abiding U.S. – India coalition. In this, we feel we are voicing the deep feeling among all Indians.
You see, it is kinda simple – the hated never feel secure in a coalition with the haters.
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