So many things became clearer this week. First was the escalation of violence against Asian-Americans in America. Even a cursory glance suggests that this despicable outbreak began in & is still limited to states that went to President Biden in the November 2020 election. This doesn’t have anything to do with President Biden whom we have always considered to be a thoroughly decent man without many deep-seated biases. And he is demonstrating that now with his focus on addressing this anti-Asian violence & taking steps to stop it.
But that rankles the Democrat voting machine. So the Democrat-led Senate pretends to be impervious to this horrific state of affairs. To them, Asian Americans have always been a group that needs to shut up & support the Democrats no matter what. Not only have Asian-Americans begun to speak up but, horror of horrors, President Biden has joined their cries of outrage. That goes directly against the Democrat voting machine.
Further President Biden & Secretary of State Blinken are now going against long-held foreign policy positions of the Democrat establishment. The Biden team has come to the clear realization that China is today the most dangerous & powerful adversary of America. And they have further realized that the time is on China’s side and not America’s in this conflict. Most in Asia believe today that within a few years China will come to dominate Asia irrevocably.
Having realized this, the Biden team came to the correct conclusion that America needs to support Asian countries against China’s coercive & hegemonic behavior. So President Biden organized the first ever Presidential Summit of Quad leaders & his team stated Biden’s “belief in the centrality of the Indo-Pacific in national security of the United States”. Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s National Security Advisor, went farther and stated on record:
- “The Quad, at the end of the day, at the end of today, is now a critical part of the architecture of the Indo-Pacific”.
This makes India the center & the fulcrum of American policy in the western Indo-Pacific, the naval expanse of Eurasia.
This was a public repudiation of the Democrat foreign policy establishment, otherwise called the Council of Foreign Relations backed ecosystem of Academics, Think Tanks & the powerful US Financial sector. Not only an insult to the Democrat foreign policy establishment but also to the left wing of the Democrat voting machine that hates Prime Minister Modi & Hindus with a Nazi-like passion.
And immediately after the Quad summit came the visit of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to India, a visit that was designed & meant to further deepen the military relationship between America & India.
So the CFR ecosystem went into overdrive. Unfortunately for them, just as they launched their political missiles against US-India relationship, the Chinese foreign policy delegation delivered an unprecedented insulting tongue-lashing to America & Secretary of State Blinken.
2. About CFR campaign
The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) is a giant. It has been the pre-eminent voice in & often of US foreign policy. Nothing happens with money and CFR has gobs & gobs of it. Just look at the Board of Directors of CFR and notice the number of heads of huge Wall Street & Private Equity firms. Their influence touches everything & everywhere in US foreign policy, corporate-oriented foreign policy.
Is that why CFR was totally against labeling China as an enemy or even an adversary of America? We don’t know but it seems reasonable. From what we have read from CFR, it seems that CFR still considers Russia as the worst & more powerful adversary of America and wants an amicable relationship with China. Clearly the Biden team has disappointed them.
We are a bit clearer about CFR’s views about India, especially PM Modi’s India. Their chief for Indian Subcontinent has been Alyssa Ayers who served in the Obama Administration as US deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia during 2010-2013. Her major qualification for that position seems to have been her fluency in Urdu. Needless to say, she doesn’t know Sanskrut, the founding language of the Indian Subcontinent ethos. And, as we all know, the first couple of years of the Obama Administration were dedicated to reversing the pro-India tilt of President George W. Bush.
Like so many at CFR, Ms. Ayres is smart, whip-smart. She did switch to a pro-India profile before publishing her book on India titled “Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World”. After all, you have to be pro-India in public if you want to sell lots of copies of your book in India.
But her pro-India stance is not pro-Modi. Here she might be less biased than her spouse, Sadanand Dhume, who occasionally writes in the Wall Street Journal. Ms. Ayres is now Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington DC, the same University that had suspended a Jewish Student for displaying the Svastik, the global symbol of Heavenly Peace.
Speaking of NaPakistan, and as we recall, her boss & president of CFR, Richard Haass, has recommended in his book that “India should be more generous to Pakistan“. We have not seen Mr. Haass and CFR condemn NaPakistan for their treatment of the Hindus that remain in that land, not even the forced post-rape conversions of Hindu girls to Islam in that “pak” or “spiritually pure” land. Guess Hindus, even teenage Hindu girls, are not human enough to have rights!
CFR views are made known via its in-house publication called “Foreign Affairs”. It is considered as the publication to read about US foreign policy. Who is one of the editors at Foreign Affairs? Kanishk Tharoor, a son of Shashi Tharoor, we believe. Those who don’t know him, Shashi Tharoor is a old favorite of Sonia Gandhi, the Christian Catholic woman who was the ruler of India from 2004 to 2014.
Given all of the above, is it any surprise that Foreign Affairs, the in-house publication of CFR came out against the Quad, the US-India defense partnership against China, Indian Democracy & Prime Minister Modi?
3. CFR’s campaign against “Indo-Pacific”, the Quad and Modi’s India
CFR’s first missile was an article on March 12 titled America’s Indo-Pacific Folly, the most-widely read article on the Foreign Affairs website. The opening salvo of this article is a direct salvo against Biden-Blinken:
- “The goal of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” may sound noble, but pursuing it will lead the United States astray.”
How might it lead US astray, you ask? The article goes back to the old & decrepit India-Pakistan hyphenation:
- “India and Pakistan have come into conflict repeatedly over the last half century, indicating that the politics of South Asia are out of step with those of East Asia. They are different games. Washington risks losing that insight—and the ability to calibrate policies accordingly—when it views everything through the lens of a single mega-region with a single, albeit implied, mega-purpose“.
Meaning what? Losing the “ability to calibrate policies accordingly” means losing the ability play Pakistan vs. India? And “the lens of a single” Indo-Pacific region takes away the ability to reduce India only to a Pakistan-India level, the old hyphenated policy that was discarded by President Clinton in 1998? Have CFR’s editors not progressed mentally beyond 1998? Or is this the influence of the son of Shashi Tharoor, the old favorite of Sonia Gandhi?
Isn’t it important to side with India against last year’s Chinese attack in Ladakh? Not necessarily according to this article:
- “But China’s main conflict is on land in the Himalayas—against India, a dispute that does not concern U.S. interests. … The same is true of the United States’ decision to furnish India with intelligence during its recent skirmish with China in the Himalayas—a sensible move, assuming U.S. officials had reason to believe that better information was going to discourage violence.”
What about the Indian Ocean, the ocean in which China is obtaining bases as far west as in Africa & at the entrance of the Straits of Hormuz?
- “The surest path to preventing war in the Indian Ocean is restraint, not more troops in defense of a nonexistent redline. Greater militarization of this part of the world benefits nobody and costs the American taxpayer all the while.”
Since when has “restraint” worked against a hegemony seeker? Will restraint work against a China that is building up its capability to take Taiwan by force? And what about furnishing intelligence to India only if it was going to discourage violence? Meaning only furnish intelligence to India if India was going to surrender its territory to China?
The central message of this article is let China do what it wants in the Indian Ocean & restrict India to the old hyphenated role with Pakistan. And it fits with the basic CFR doctrine – let China be because it is a) too strong already & b) amicable relations with China lets CFR & its members prosper. And, as a corollary, it slaps down Hindu India to the old neutral with Pakistan status.
None of this is new. What is new is that this article was published just as President Biden inaugurated the first ever Presidential Summit on Quad and proclaimed it as the new architecture of the Indo-Pacific. CFR is not amused and they are letting Biden-Blinken know that.
The above first salvo only mentions India secondarily. How can CFR let India so easily off the proverbial hook? Of course they can’t and they did not. And they did it as smartly as they could. Using an old Mughal & British trick, they used an author with a perfect Indian (Hindu) name who is a with a Think Tank backed by India’s Tata group, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He tweeted his central question as below:
- Milan Vaishnav@MilanV – y new essay for @ForeignAffairs: India’s position has dropped in the democracy league tables. Yet, Modi is as popular ever. How do we understand the current political moment? “https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/india/2021-03-18/decay-indian-democracy”
Hmmm! Seems simple to us. “Democracy” is a form of government in which the people have the authority to choose their leaders. And even this Milan guy concedes that Indian elections “are largely free & fair”. So if Indian people practice “democracy” in a free and fair way, then the problem has to lie in the way Milan’s chosen body calculates league tables.
Therein does lie the problem. “Democracy” league tables in America are calculated by first deciding which democracies to rank high and then constructing factors that lead to the desired results. For example, if you define “Hindu” as less-democratic and “Christian” as more democratic, then automatically the “Hindu” majority of India gets lower score & the “Christian” majority of America gets higher score. Is that why India under Christian Catholic Sonia got high “democracy” scores while India under Narendra Modi gets “lower” scores?
Milan knows all this very well. But he doesn’t care. The unspoken reality is that Indian Americans ONLY get ahead in US Think Tanks when they think, speak & act anti-Hindu. This is old stuff. The British only promoted Indians who learned to think, speak & act British. This is why “elite” Indians to this day speak & act British and why ordinary Indians strive to speak Britlish.
This article is about one thing and one thing only – regime change or removal of Narendra Modi. Read the thrust of every point Milan makes:
- “But despite numerous controversies, Prime Minister Modi remains immensely popular. ( you can almost hear him sigh as he wrote this).
- “Modi sits at the heart of this transformation …. he remains incredibly popular.”
- “On issues from taxation to agriculture to elections, Modi has championed the idea of “One Nation, One India” as the solution to India’s fractiousness.”
Isn’t the above the very definition of Democracy? And isn’t the above what they wrote about Mahatma Gandhi in the British colonial period?
It is all in the definition. In the eyes of CFR’s America, a democracy is only a good democracy when it fits the interests of the CFR ecosystem. If it doesn’t, then it is just a autocratic system run by popularity or an inherent tyranny. And “rights” are only human, when they meet the requirements of CFR ecosystem; otherwise they are neither rights nor human. That is why the British forefathers of CFR called Hindus as “beastly” or “monkeys”.
Finally Milan comes to his objective of regime change:
- “Would the BJP’s dominance be as comprehensive if Modi were not in the picture? The answer is likely no“.
But this resigned attitude does not stop Milan from hoping against hope of Modi’s departure and the “renewal” of an India servile to CFR agenda, just the way CFR’s British forefathers kept it.
- “The United States and other powers will struggle to steer Modi’s India back onto a more democratic course”
Notice Milan has a slave’s dedication to call returning to slavery as “democratic renewal“. Wouldn’t Milan have made a terrific servant of Jalal-uddin Muhammed or of the British East India Company?
- “India’s democratic renewal, therefore, must ultimately come from within.
Wake up if you can still can, Milan. India’s “democratic renewal” did come from within in 2014 & then it was amplified in 2019. We call it the Mental Independence of Indians.
Finally a suggestion to those who read Milan’s article – replace “India” by “USA”, “BJP” by “Democrat Party”, “political dissent” by “conservative views”, “Muslims” by “White Christians” and see how perfectly Milan’s article fits today’s America.
4. Democrat Party’s campaign against India
Look at the sequence of actions this week by or in consonance with CFR.
- First CFR publishes a nonsensical article that tries to argue the Indo-Pacific is essentially wrong and will lead the US astray (meaning away from the preferred CFR course of appeasing China).
- Then CFR publishes a hatchet job against India, the main fulcrum of the Indo-Pacific, and paints Prime Minister Modi as undemocratic & so unworthy of America’s beneficence.
- At the same time, Senator Menendez, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, writes a rambling & dumb anti-India letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. That letter falls flat.
- So the next day, a second letter is generated – this time to Secretary of State Blinken from both Senator Menendez & Senator Schumer, the Majority Leader of the US Senate.
Frankly, the Schumer letter is well-crafted even if it is false & made up. And it is full of the chutzpah. It makes no mention of the horrific violence unleashed against Asian Americans in mainly Democrat-voting cities & states. It makes no mention of minority status of Asian Americans taken away in Democrat controlled jurisdictions; of discrimination practiced against Asian Americans in & by American Universities & media companies. But it instructs Secretary Blinken to teach India how to “defend freedom” & “champion opportunity” .
Further Senator Schumer instructs Secretary Blinken to defend Twitter from a legal Indian instruction to shut down accounts that break Indian laws about sedition. This would be sad if it were not so funny. Mr. Schumer has praised the wanton abuses of Twitter in America in banning without any reason accounts that Twitter does not like.
But all that is besides the point. Senator Schumer is an extremely smart man. His letter is not about the truth or facts. He is shooting at the prospect of a deeper US-India partnership that is likely to emerge from the new commitment of President Biden to the Quad. In our opinion, he is pandering to the power of the Democrat left which considers all new defense relationships as taboo AND considers any relationship with Modi’s India as violating their agenda.
Their long term goal is removal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi but their immediate goal is to make President Biden & Secretary Blinken to conduct foreign policy according to their fervently believed but insane “principles”. And forcing Biden-Blinken to back away from Quad & downgrading India serves both these purposes.
Meaning regime change in India is a distant objective but forcing a change in Biden regime’s behavior is the immediate focus. If not, there is always the alternative.
That is why we think we saw this week’s concerted campaign against Quad & India by CFR-Carnegie and the Democrat Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
5. What about Indian Americans?
Senator Schumer became the Majority Leader of the Senate because Democrats won the Georgia Runoff in January 2021. According to many news reports, Indian Americans in Georgia helped Democrats win the runoffs and made Mr. Schumer the majority leader. And he knows that.
So why is Senator Schumer so bold or reckless in attacking the core values & passions of the Indian American community? Because he is a smart veteran politician. Senator Schumer knows that the Democrat party owns Indian Americans and the majority of them couldn’t care about what he says or does about India. Mainly because Indian Americans are almost wholly concerned about their own families. They are here in America mainly for economic opportunities & they have little appetite about the larger perspectives.
The moment Senator Schumer thinks he cannot take votes of Indian Americans for granted, he will write a completely different letter to Secretary Blinken & President Biden.
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