#Fascist Criminal Narendra Modi

[xtruss]

World’s Most Wanted Criminal and Fascist Hindu Extremist Narendra Modi’s Illiberalism May Imperil India’s Economic Progress! Fulfilling His Great-Power Dream Requires Restraint, Not Abandon

— January 18th, 2023

“Politics And Religion Cannot Be Mixed,” ruled India’s Supreme Court in 1994 in what was then considered a decisive elucidation of the country’s secular constitution. Tell that to the millions who on January 22nd will watch Narendra Modi preside over the consecration of a controversial $220m Hindu temple, in a ceremony that marks the informal launch of his campaign for a third term as prime minister in elections to be held by May. To the alarm of India’s 200m Muslims, and many secular-minded Indians, it will mark a high point of a decades-long Hindu-nationalist project to dominate India.

Even as Mr Modi appears at the temple in Ayodhya in northern India, the other pillar of his mission continues apace: India’s extraordinary modernisation. The country is the planet’s fastest-growing major economy and now its fifth-biggest. Global investors toast its infrastructure boom and growing technological sophistication. Mr Modi wants to be India’s most consequential leader since Jawaharlal Nehru. His vision of national greatness is about wealth as well as religion. The danger is that a hubristic Hindu chauvinism undermines his economic ambitions.

To understand the strange symbolism of Ayodhya you have to travel back in time. Mr Modi’s once-fringe party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), built its name by campaigning over the status of a Mosque there from 1990. It organised a rally of Hindu activists in 1992 that led to its destruction, sparking Hindu-Muslim riots across South Asia.

The lavish Hindu temple that Mr Modi is about to open is built on the site of that destroyed mosque. For many Hindus this represents the righting of an ancient wrong: the location is also the mythical birthplace of the Hindu god Ram. Previous bjp leaders, such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee, downplayed the party’s Hindu-first ideology, known as Hindutva, to win mainstream support. After ten years in power, Mr Modi, who was implicated in deadly anti-Muslim riots in 2002 when he ran Gujarat state (he was later absolved by the courts), no longer seems so restrained.

The bjp’s radicals have been empowered. There have been Mob Attacks on Muslims. Several bjp-run states have passed anti-conversion laws. Mr Modi has exacerbated Islamophobia by, among other things, promoting a citizenship law that discriminates against Muslims. His strongman style of rule has also featured harassment and attacks on the pillars of India’s old liberal order, including the press, charities, think-tanks, some courts and many opposition politicians.

Were Mr Modi and the bjp to win a third term—as seems almost certain—many worry that the Hindutva project would go further. bjp activists are agitating to replace mosques with temples at hundreds of other sites. Mr Modi wants to scrap constitutional provisions for Muslim family law. A possible redrawing of parliamentary districts could see power accrue to the populous Hindi-speaking and bjp-supporting north, at the expense of the richer industrialised south. Mr Modi, aged 73, could rule as a strongman for a further decade or more.

The whiplash-inducing reality is that this religious and political struggle is occurring alongside enormous economic optimism. Growth has exceeded 7% in recent quarters. The country now has vastly improved transport infrastructure, huge and deep equity markets, stronger banks, massive currency reserves, a less complex tax system and less corruption. India is at last becoming a single market, letting firms exploit economies of scale and promising faster business investment. While manufacturing has yet to take off, industry is starting to couple with global supply chains, from internet routers to electric two-wheelers. The giant technology-services sector hopes to make a fortune as companies around the world seek help in adopting artificial intelligence.

Image: Alicia Tatone

The economic record is still far from perfect. The rate of formal job creation is much too low—one reason Mr Modi has built up digital welfare-schemes for the poor, augmenting his image among ordinary Hindus as a leader who cares about the downtrodden. India does too little to develop human capital and its education system is terrible. Some powerful firms have too much influence. Yet it is a foundation worth building on.

The question is whether the religious agenda and rapid economic development are compatible. The answer is yes, but only up to a point. In the past ten years many of Mr Modi’s economic accomplishments have existed alongside his religious agenda. The bjp’s parliamentary strength and Mr Modi’s popularity have made it possible to push through difficult reforms, including a national sales tax. The government’s unity and clout have given investors confidence that policy is stable, even though civil liberties have been eroded.

Yet if Mr Modi in his third term were to lurch further towards Hindutva and autocratic rule, the economic calculus would change. Take the north-south divide. If India continues to grow fast, the industrialised, wealthy and technologically advanced south is likely to pull further ahead, drawing labour from the north. But Hindutva holds little appeal in the south, and by pushing it further while concentrating more power in his own hands, Mr Modi could exacerbate already rising tensions over internal migrants, tax revenues and representation.

Or consider economic stability, which depends on the management of the economy by internationally credible technocrats, not bjp ideologues. You can overdo how much store companies put by the rule of law—they invested in China for decades. But if decision-making becomes authoritarian and erratic as Mr Modi grows old and isolated, and if institutions are weakened, firms will grow warier of deploying huge sums of capital.

As he stands at the ceremony at Ayodhya before admirers and acolytes—the leaders of India’s new, brash, nationalistic elite—does Mr Modi see this danger? He has in the past: before he was prime minister he tried to rebrand himself from a Hindu zealot into a pragmatic manager of his successful home state of Gujarat. With a third term looming, he should realise that, to fulfil his dream of making India a great power, the balancing-act must continue. It requires restraint, not abandon. If Mr Modi fails, the hopes of 1.4bn people and the prospects for the brightest spot in the world economy will be dashed. ■

— This Article Appeared in the Leaders Section of the Print Edition Under the Headline "Modi’s Juggernaut"

[gazetteweekly]

Modi and co using Sanatana ploy to divert attention; will face cases legally, says Udhayanidhi

He also launched a strident attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying he was "globe-trotting", afraid of facing questions over the Manipur violence.

CHENNAI: Under intense attack from the BJP over his alleged anti-Sanatana Dharma remarks, DMK leader and Tamil Nadu Minister Udhayanidhi Stalin on Thursday accused the saffron party leaders of “twisting” his statements and vowed to face all cases in this connection legally.

He also launched a strident attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying he was “globe-trotting”, afraid of facing questions over the Manipur violence.

“For the last 9 years, all your (BJP) promises are empty promises. What have you exactly done for our welfare is a question currently being raised in unison by the entire country against an unarmed, fascist BJP government. It is in this background that the BJP leaders have twisted my speech at the TNPWAA conference as ‘inciting genocide’. They consider it a weapon to protect themselves,” he said.

What is surprising is that those like Union Minister Amit Shah and Chief Ministers of BJP-ruled states were demanding action against him based on “fake news,” Udhayanidhi said.

“In all fairness, I should be the one filing criminal cases and other court cases against them for spreading slander while holding respectable positions. But I am aware that this is their mode of survival. They don’t know how else to survive, so I decided not to do that,” he said.

He was one of the political heirs of Dravidian stalwart, the late CN Annadurai, the founder of the DMK.

“Everyone knows that we are not enemies of any religion.”

“I would like to quote Anna’s comment on religions which remains relevant even today. If religion leads people towards equality and teaches them fraternity, then I too am a spiritualist. If a religion divides people in the name of castes, if it teaches them untouchability and slavery, I would be the first person to oppose religion,” he said quoting Annadurai.

He said DMK respects all religions that teach all lives are born equal.

“But without an iota of understanding about any of these, Thiru Modi and Co are solely dependent on such slanders to face the Parliamentary elections. On the one hand, I can only feel sorry for them. For the last 9 years, Modi has been doing nothing. Occasionally he demonetises money, builds walls to hide huts, builds new Parliamentary building, erects a Sengol (sceptre) there, plays around by changing the name of the country, standing at the border and making the white flag work,” he lashed out.

Has there been any progressive scheme from the Union government in the last nine years like the DMK’s “Pudhumai Penn” or the Chief Minister’s breakfast scheme or the Kalaignar’s women’s rights scheme, he asked. “Have they built the AIIMS in Madurai? Did they take forward any knowledge movement like the Kalaignar Centenary Library?”

“Afraid of having to face questions about Manipur in India, he is globe-trotting along with his friend Adani. The fact is, the ignorance of the people is the capital of their theatrical politics,” he claimed.

“Thiru Modi and co are using the Sanatana ploy to divert the attention from the facts including the killing of more than 250 people in the riots incited in Manipur and the Rs 7. 5 lakh crore corruption,” he charged.

There was a lot of work for the party workers, including preparing for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, he said and asked them to focus on that. “I would like to inform that I will face the cases filed against me legally with the guidance of our party president (TN CM MK Stalin) and on the advice of our party high command,” he added.

[mzemo0]

2 Billion Muslims Must Send A Stern Warning To India’s Nazi-Like Government To Stop Its Anti-Islam Discourse

The extreme right-wing government of India, headed by Narendra Modi of the openly fascist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) is carrying out a vicious campaign of persecution, vilification and terror against the country’s large Muslim minority.

The real but undeclared goal of this manifestly criminal racist policy is to bully the estimated 200-250 million Muslims of India to choose between converting to the non-monotheistic Hindu religion or putting up with mounting persecution and humiliation. Learn More

Islamophobia

[theculturedmarxist]

The decade of socialist revolution begins

       3 January 2020  

The arrival of the New Year marks the beginning of a decade of intensifying class struggle and world socialist revolution.

In the future, when learned historians write about the upheavals of the Twenty-First Century, they will enumerate all the “obvious” signs that existed, as the 2020s began, of the revolutionary storm that was soon to sweep across the globe. The scholars—with a vast array of facts, documents, charts, web site and social media postings, and other forms of valuable digitalized information at their disposal—will describe the 2010s as a period characterized by an intractable economic, social, and political crisis of the world capitalist system.

They will note that by the beginning of the third decade of the century, history had arrived at precisely the situation foreseen theoretically by Karl Marx: “At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.”

What, in fact, were the principal characteristics of the last ten years?

The institutionalization of unending military conflict and the growing threat of nuclear world war

There was not a single day during the last decade when the United States was not at war. Military operations not only continued in Iraq and Afghanistan. New interventions were undertaken in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Ukraine. Even as 2020 is just getting under way, the murder of Iranian Major General Qassim Suleimani, ordered by President Donald Trump, threatens all-out war between the United States and Iran, with incalculable consequences. The involvement of an American president in yet another targeted killing, followed by bloodthirsty boasting, testifies to the far-advanced derangement of the entire ruling elite.

Moreover, the adoption of a new strategic doctrine in 2018 signaled a vast escalation in the military operations of the United States. In his announcement of the new strategy, then defense secretary James Mattis declared: “We will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists that we are engaged in today, but great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.” The new doctrine revealed the essential purpose of what had previously been called the “War on Terror:” the attempt to maintain the hegemonic position of American imperialism.

The United States is determined to maintain this position, whatever the financial costs and the consequences in terms of human life. As the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) states in its recently released Strategic Survey: “For its part, the US is not likely voluntarily, reluctantly or after some sort of battle, to pass any strategic baton to China.”

All the major imperialist powers escalated, during the past decade, their preparations for world war and nuclear conflict. The trillion-dollar military budget adopted in 2019 by the Trump administration, with the support of the Democratic Party, is a war budget. Germany, France, the UK, and all the imperialist countries are building up their armed forces. The targets of imperialism, including the ruling elites in Russia and China, alternate between threats of war and desperate efforts to forge some sort of agreement.

The institutions developed in the aftermath of World War II to prevent another global conflict are dysfunctional. The Strategic Survey writes:

The trends of 2018–19 have all confirmed the atomisation of international society. Neither ‘balance of power’ nor ‘international rules-based governance’ serve as ordering principles. International institutions have been marginalised. The diplomatic routine of meetings continues, yet the competing exertions of national efforts, too rarely coordinated with others, matter more—and most often they are erratic in both execution and consequence. 

The end of a “global rules-based order”—i.e., one dependent on the unchallengeable dominance of US imperialism—sets into motion a political logic that leads to war. As the Strategic Survey warns: “Law is made and sustained by politics. When law cannot settle disputes, they are shunted back to the political realm for resolution.” To understand the “realm” to which the IISS is referring, one must recall Clausewitz’s famous definition of war as politics by other means.

And what would a modern world war entail? The IISS calls attention to new plans for the use of nuclear weapons. “Meanwhile, the US and Russia are modernizing their arsenals and changing their doctrines in ways that facilitate their use, while the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir remains a potential flashpoint for the use of nuclear weapons.” The recklessness, bordering on insanity, that prevails among policy makers is indicated in the growing conviction that the use of tactical nuclear weapons is a feasible option. The IISS writes:

All that can be said with reasonable certainty is that a limited, regional nuclear exchange, under some circumstances, has severe global environmental effects. But under other circumstances, the effects could be minimal. [emphasis added] 

The movement toward a Third World War, which would threaten mankind with extinction, cannot be halted by humanitarian appeals. War arises out of the anarchy of capitalism and the obsolescence of the nation-state system. Therefore, it can be stopped only through the global struggle of the working class for socialism. 

The breakdown of democracy

The extreme aggravation of class tensions and the dynamic of imperialism are the real sources of the universal breakdown of democratic forms of rule. As Lenin wrote in the midst of World War I: “Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom. Whatever the political system the result of these tendencies is everywhere reaction and intensification of antagonisms in this field.”

Lenin’s analysis is being substantiated in the turn of the ruling elites, during the past decade, toward authoritarian and fascistic methods of rule. The rise to power of such criminal and even psychopathic personalities as Narendra Modi in India, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Donald Trump in the United States, and Boris Johnson in the UK is symptomatic of a systemic crisis of the entire capitalist system.

Seventy-five years after the collapse of the Third Reich, fascism is making a comeback in Germany. The Alternative für Deutschland, which is a haven for neo-Nazis, emerged during the past decade as the main opposition party. Its rise was facilitated by the Grand Coalition government, a corrupt media, and reactionary academics, who whitewash with impunity the crimes of Hitler’s regime. Similar processes are at work throughout Europe, where the fascist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s—Petain in France, Mussolini in Italy, Horthy in Hungary and Franco in Spain—are being remembered with nostalgia.

The decade saw the resurgence of anti-Semitic violence and the cultivation of Islamophobia and other forms of national chauvinism and racism. Concentration camps were constructed on the US border with Mexico to imprison refugees fleeing from Central and South America, and in Europe and North Africa as the frontline of the anti-immigrant policy of the EU.

There is no progressive tendency to be found within the capitalist parties. Even when confronted with a fascistic president, the Democratic Party refrains from opposition based on the defense of democratic rights. Employing the methods of a palace coup, the Democrats seek Trump’s impeachment only because he, in their view, has undermined the US campaign against Russia and the proxy war in Ukraine.

The attitude of the entire bourgeois political establishment to democratic rights is summed up in the horrific treatment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning. With the support of both the Democrats and Republicans, Assange remains confined in Belmarsh prison in London, awaiting extradition to the US. Manning has been imprisoned for nearly a year for refusing to testify before a grand jury called to indict Assange on further charges.

The persecution of Assange and Manning is aimed at criminalizing the conduct of constitutionally-protected journalistic activity. It is part of a broader suppression of dissent that includes the campaign of internet censorship and the jailing of the Maruti-Suzuki workers in India and other class-war prisoners.

The preparations for war, involving massive expenditures and requiring the accumulation of unprecedented levels of debt, snuff the air out of democracy. In the final analysis, the costs of war must be imposed upon the working people of the world. The burdens will encounter resistance by a population already incensed by decades of sacrifice. The response of the ruling elites will be the intensification of their efforts to suppress every form of popular dissent.

The degradation of the environment

The last decade was marked by the continued and increasingly rapid destruction of the environment. Scientists have issued ever more dire warnings that without urgent and far-reaching action on a global scale, the effects of global warming will be devastating and irreversible. The deadly inferno engulfing Australia, as the year ended, is only the latest horrific consequence of climate change.

In November, 11,000 scientists signed a statement published in the journal BioScience warning that “planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.” It noted that over the course of four decades of global climate negotiations, “with few exceptions, we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament…

The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity…. Especially worrisome, are potential irreversible climate tipping points and nature’s reinforcing feedbacks that could lead to a catastrophic ‘hothouse Earth,’ well beyond the control of humans. These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable. 

Earlier in the year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that 821 million people, who were already suffering from hunger, face starvation as agricultural regions are impacted by global warming. Hundreds of millions could lose access to fresh water, while many more will be affected by increasingly severe weather patterns: flooding, drought and hurricanes.

Climate change, and other manifestations of environmental degradation, are the product of a social and economic system that is incapable of organizing global production in a rational and scientific manner, on the basis of social need—including the need for a healthy environment—rather than the endless accumulation of personal wealth.

The aftermath of the 2008 crash and the crisis of capitalism

Underlying all other aspects of the social and political situation is the malignant growth of extreme social inequality—the inevitable and intended consequence of all the measures adopted by the ruling class following the economic and financial crisis of 2008.

Following the financial crash, which occurred on the eve of the 2010s, world governments and central banks opened the spigots. In the United States, the Bush and particularly the Obama administrations engineered the $700 billion bailout of the banks, followed by trillions of dollars in “quantitative easing” measures—that is, the purchase by the Federal Reserve of the worthless assets and securities held by financial institutions.

Overnight, the federal deficit of the American government was doubled. The assets of the Federal Reserve rose from under $2 trillion in November 2008 to $4.5 trillion in October 2014, and the figure remains at more than $4 trillion today. With a new $60 billion a month asset purchase program, initiated in late 2019, the balance sheet is expected to surpass post-crash highs by the middle of this year.

This policy has continued under Trump, with his massive corporate tax cuts and demands for further reductions in interest rates. The New York Times noted, in a January 1 article (“A Simple Investment Strategy That Worked in 2019: Buy Almost Anything”) that the value of almost all investment assets jumped sharply over the past year. The Nasdaq rose by 35 percent, the S&P 500 by 29 percent, commodities by 16 percent, US corporate bonds by 15 percent, and US Treasuries by 7 percent. “It was a remarkable across-the-board rally of a scale not seen in nearly a decade. The cause? Mostly a head-spinning reversal by the Federal Reserve, which went from planning to raise interest rates to cutting them and pumping fresh money into the financial markets.”

All the major capitalist powers have pursued similar measures. The allocation of unlimited credit and money printing—and this, in the final analysis, is what quantitative easing is—intensified the underlying crisis. In trying to rescue themselves, the ruling elites enshrined parasitism and raised social inequality to a level unknown in modern history.

Benefiting from the limitless infusion of money into the market, the fortunes of the financial elite rose during the past decade to astronomical heights. The 500 richest individuals in the world (0.000006 percent of the global population) now have a collective net worth of $5.9 trillion, up $1.2 trillion over the past year alone. This increase is more than the GDP (that is, the total value of all goods and services produced) of all but 15 countries in the world. In the US, the 400 richest individuals have more wealth than the bottom 64 percent, and the top 0.1 percent of the population have a larger share than at any time since 1929, immediately preceding the Great Depression.

The social catastrophe confronting masses of workers and youth throughout the world is the direct product of the policies employed to guarantee the accumulation of wealth by the corporate and financial elite.

The decline in life expectancy among workers in the US, the mass unemployment of workers and particularly young people throughout the world, the devastating austerity measures imposed on Greece and other countries, the intensification of exploitation to boost the profits of corporations—all this is the consequence of the policy pursued by the ruling elites.

The growth of the international working class and the global class struggle

The objective conditions for socialist revolution emerge out of the global crisis. The approach of social revolution has already been foreshadowed in the mass demonstrations and strikes that swept across the globe in 2019: in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, France, Spain, Algeria, Britain, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Kenya, South Africa, India and Hong Kong. The United States, where the entire political structure is directed toward the suppression of class struggle, witnessed the first national strike by auto workers in more than forty years.

But the dominant and most revolutionary feature of the class struggle is its international character, rooted in the global character of modern-day capitalism. Moreover, the movement of the working class is a movement of the younger generation and, therefore, a movement that will shape the future.

Those under 30 now comprise over half the world’s population and over 65 percent of the population in the world’s fastest growing regions—Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia. Each month in India, one million people turn 18. In the Middle East and North Africa, an estimated 27 million young people will enter the workforce in the next five years.

From 1980 to 2010, global industrial development added 1.2 billion people to the ranks of the working class, with hundreds of millions more in the decade since. Of this 1.2 billion, 900 million entered the working class in the developing world. Internationally, the percentage of the global labor force that can be classified as peasant declined from 44 percent in 1991 to 28 percent in 2018. Nearly one billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa are expected to join the working class in the coming decades. In China alone, 121 million people moved from “farm to factory” between 2000 and 2010, with millions more in the decade since.

It is not only Asia and Africa that have seen a growth in the working class population. In the advanced capitalist countries, large sections of those who would have previously considered themselves middle class have been proletarianized, while the wave of immigrants from Latin America to the United States and from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe has added millions to a highly diverse workforce.

From 2010 to 2019, the world’s urban population grew by one billion, creating a network of interconnected “megacities” that are both hives of economic productivity and social powder kegs, where inequality is a visible fact of daily life.

And these workers are connected with each other in a manner that is unprecedented in world history. The colossal advances in science, technology and communications, above all the rise of the internet and the proliferation of mobile devices, have allowed masses of people to bypass the fake news of the bourgeois media, which function as little more than mouthpieces for the state and intelligence agencies. More than half of the world’s population, 4.4 billion people, now have access to the internet. The average individual spends over two hours on social media each day, largely on handheld devices.

Workers and youth can now coordinate their protests and actions on a global scale, expressed in the international movement against climate change, the emergence of the “yellow vests” as a worldwide symbol of protest against inequality, and the solidarity of auto workers in the United States and Mexico.

These objective changes are producing major shifts in social consciousness on the central question of social inequality. The 2019 United Nations Human Development Report explains that in almost all countries, the percentage of people demanding greater equality increased from the 2000s to the 2010s by up to 50 percent. The report warned: “Surveys have revealed rising perceptions of inequality, rising preferences for greater equality and rising global inequality in subjective perceptions of well-being. All these trends should be bright red-flags.”

The role of revolutionary leadership

The growth of the working class and the emergence of class struggle on an international scale are the objective basis for revolution. However, the spontaneous struggles of workers and their instinctive striving for socialism are, by themselves, inadequate. The transformation of the class struggle into a conscious movement for socialism is a question of political leadership.

The past decade has provided a wealth of political experiences demonstrating, in the negative, the critical role of revolutionary leadership. The decade began with revolution, in the form of the monumental struggles of Egyptian workers and youth against the US-backed dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. In the absence of a revolutionary leadership, and with the assistance of disorientation introduced by the petty-bourgeois organizations, the masses were channeled behind different factions of the ruling class, culminating in the reestablishment of direct military dictatorship under the butcher of Cairo, al-Sisi.

All the alternatives to Marxism, concocted by the representatives of the affluent middle class, have been discredited: The “apolitical” and neo-anarchist Occupy Wall Street movement in the US in 2011 was revealed to be a middle-class movement whose call for a “party of the 99 percent” sought to subordinate the interests of the working class to those of the top 10 percent.

New forms of “left populism” were promoted in Europe, including Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. Syriza came to power in 2015 and for four years implemented the dictates of the banks. Podemos is now a governing party, in coalition with the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), which is committed to a right-wing, pro-austerity program. The “Five-Star Movement,” presented as an anti-establishment insurgency, ended up in political alliance with the Italian neo-fascists. Corbynism, which peddled the illusion of a revival of the Labour Party as an instrument of anti-capitalist struggle, proved in the end to be synonymous with political cowardice and prostration before the ruling class. Were Sanders to make his way to the White House, his administration would prove no less impotent.

In Latin America, the “left” bourgeois nationalism that was part of the “Pink Tide”—Lulaism in Brazil, the “Bolivarian Revolution” of Chavez in Venezuela, and Evo Morales in Bolivia—has been shipwrecked by the crisis of world capitalism. Their own austerity and pro-corporate policies prepared the way for a sharp shift to the right, including the rise to power of Bolsonaro in Brazil and the US-backed military coup against Morales in 2019.

The trade unions, which have long served as mechanisms for the suppression of the class struggle, have been exposed as agents of the corporations and the state. In the United States, the struggles of auto workers have been waged in conflict with the corrupt executives of the UAW, under indictment or investigation for taking bribes from the companies and stealing workers’ dues money. The UAW, however, is only the clearest expression of a universal process.

A vast political and social differentiation has taken place between the working class and an international tendency of politics, the pseudo-left, which is based on sections of the affluent upper middle class who purvey the politics of racial, gender and sexual identity. The politics of the upper middle class seeks access to and a redistribution of some of the wealth sloshing about within the top 1 percent. They wallow in their obsessive fixation on the individual, as a means of leveraging “identity” into positions of power and privilege, while ignoring the social interests of the vast majority.

The tasks of the International Committee of the Fourth International

[technologyinfosec]

No surprise! Modi appears among 'top ten criminals' in google search

(Web Desk) - The notorious Modi who has certainly branded himself as a refurbished prodigy of Nazism and can safely be called the fascist Hitler of the South Asian region, might have fooled his own people but the search engine ‘google’ has always showed the criminal face of the current Indian premiere. Back in 2015 Narendra Modi appeared among the ‘top ten criminal’ of the world for his infamous credentials, having been involved in the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat during his CM ship way back in 2002 for which he is known as ‘The Butcher of Gujarat.’

The right winger hardliner was also barred from entering the US for his criminal involvement in the riots where scores of Muslim women were raped, murdered and burnt alive. His murder spree and blood thirst never stopped and was again implicated in the Samjhota express carnage. Having said that, this is perhaps not the only facet of his personality recognized by ‘google search,’ he has also appeared amongst ‘The most stupid Prime Minister’ in the world.

Stupid or not but the dark side of his identity has surely taken over. After the false flag Pulwama Attack in February, he has resorted to imprisoning and confining the majority Muslim populous of IOK who have been fighting a freedom struggle against the Hindu nationalists hiding behind the garb of ‘shining secular India.’ The plight of the Kashmiris is no less than what the Jews of Germany witnessed in the concentration camps, as they too are being subjugated and stripped-off their fundamental human rights by a majority Hindutva ideologues that have been voted in by the  biggest democracy  of the world. So has Modi criminalized India or has India just removed the façade of Bollywood from its face. Whichever the case may be but India in its current form has no room for minorities and Kashmir is the living proof of the plight and suffering that humanity is going through at the hands of a dictatorial, fascist, Hindu supremisct regime. Read the full article

[tumbirus]

Count..,originating in America,signalled disillusionment with market principles founded in liberalism,more recently ,the "Yellow Shirts" infrance have made President Emmanuel Moacron sweat. Access wesrwen Europe,fascistic,nativist ,nationalist and reactionary parties have pushed the"Traditional parties"-to quote the Russian leader -hard and in the US Donald Trump actually triumphed Mr:Putin referred in Osaka only to the US and Europ. But he might have added Brexit in the UK.in the 20 leading countries whose leaders gathered Brazil, Narendra Modi,s India,XI Jinpings China are outside the aliberal sphers,though they follow some variety of capitalism. Mr:Putin doesn't exacity run a democracy.But nor do the leaders of many prominent countries. So what he is saying is that it is not right for any of them sermonise him. Dear world,many world wide leaders Osaka meetings not any public life benefit,enjoy the leaders life,so Russian president many words proof to many,India,America same many burocast leaders all life leader making aime thinking to today,old king Dom style,but this fuckir mad leaders where understanding public mood,Indian government is waist in the world,proof me,cheating and waist hop one is modi government, public is mad or cheater,so choose to cheater leaders no,so modi and all word is cheating to any second,why single not came to any street ,so immidiatly indian justice Kashmir public fundamental right check to good,who is the sha,gujarth innocent Muslims life lose on,how hominister,criminal government no,so this ones shape changing time ending to India.(thanks for the report) by De and world wide secret political anlizing dears) (at Mumbai, Maharashtra) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bza66T8l5NJ/?igshid=1cdp62qpgtym0

[xtruss]

World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Hindu Fascist and Butcher of Gujrat India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is being accused of hate speech for comments he made about Muslims at an election rally in western Rajasthan state at the weekend. World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Hindu Fascist and Butcher of Gujrat Narendra Modi said if the opposition Congress came to power again, Muslims would have first rights to India's assets. The opposition has hit back, accusing World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Hindu Fascist and Butcher of Gujrat Modi of trying to divert voter attention from the real issues. Nearly a billion Indians are voting in parliamentary elections. World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Hindu Fascist and Butcher of Gujrat Modi is seeking a third term.

[usnewsaggregator-blog]

Nazi in a sari

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Nazi in a sari

Image copyright Savitri Devi Archive

Savitri Devi, a mystical admirer of Hitler and a cat-loving devotee of the Aryan myth, seem destined to fade into obscurity after her death 25 years ago. But thanks to the rise of the extreme right, her name and her image now crop up online more and more, writes Maria Margaronis.

In 2012, browsing the website of Greece’s Golden Dawn party for an article I was writing, I stumbled on a picture of a woman in a blue silk sari gazing at a bust of Hitler against a blazing sunset sky.

What was this apparently Hindu woman doing on the site of an openly racist party devoted to expelling all foreigners from Greece? I filed her as a curiosity at the back of my mind, until the rising tide of extreme-right politics in Europe and America threw up the name “Savitri Devi” once again.

It isn’t hard these days to find discussions of Savitri Devi’s books on neo-Nazi web forums, especially The Lightning and the Sun, which expounds the theory that Hitler was an avatar – an incarnation – of the Hindu god Vishnu, and Gold in the Furnace, which urges true believers to trust that National Socialism will rise again. The American extreme-right website Counter-Currents hosts an extensive online archive of her life and work.

Her views are reaching a wider public audience, too, thanks to American alt-right leaders such as Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon, former Trump chief strategist and chair of Breitbart News, who have taken up her account of history as a cyclical battle between good and evil — a theory she shared with other 20th Century mystical fascists.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Richard Spencer in Charlottesville (August 2017)

Dark metal bands and American right-wing radio stations also roar about the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age of Hindu mythology, which Savitri Devi believed that Hitler was once destined to bring to an end.

Who was Savitri Devi, and why are her ideas being resurrected now? Despite the sari and the name she was a European, born Maximiani Portas to an English mother and Greek-Italian father in Lyon in 1905.

She learned Indian languages, married a Brahmin, and forged an elaborate synthesis of Nazism and Hindu myth

From an early age, she despised all forms of egalitarianism. “A beautiful girl is not equal to an ugly girl,” she told an interviewer sent by the Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel in 1978.

Swept up by Greek nationalism, she arrived in Athens in 1923 at the same time as thousands of refugees displaced after Greece’s disastrous military campaign in Asia Minor at the end of World War One.

She blamed the Western allies for Greece’s humiliation, and for what she saw as the unjustly punitive terms imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. In Savitri’s mind, Greece and Germany were both victims, denied the legitimate aspiration of uniting all their people in one territory. That view, combined with a passionate anti-Semitism which she claimed she learned from the Bible, led her to identify herself early on as a National Socialist.

Hitler was Germany’s champion but, she said, his desire to eradicate Europe’s Jews and restore the “Aryan race” to its rightful position of power made him her “Fuhrer” too.

Image copyright Savitri Devi Archive

Listen to Savitri Devi: From the Aryans to the Alt-right on the BBC iPlayer

In common with anti-Semitic thinkers since the 18th century, Savitri blamed Judeo-Christianity for destroying the glory that was Greece and the Aryans’ mythical ancient utopia. In the early 1930s she sailed for India in search of a living version of Europe’s pagan past, convinced that the caste system, by forbidding intermarriage, had preserved pure Aryans there. (Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who visited India in the 1970s, shared her misconception.)

So unusual was the sight of a European woman travelling fourth class by train that she was placed under surveillance by the British colonial authorities. But Savitri had little to do with the British in India until World War Two, when she passed information she gleaned from them to the Japanese. She learned Indian languages, married a Brahmin (whom she believed to be an Aryan like herself), and forged an elaborate synthesis of Nazism and Hindu myth, in which Hitler was a “man against time” destined to bring about the end of the Kali Yuga and usher in a new golden age of Aryan supremacy.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Young Brahmins training to be priests in Varanasi

In Kolkata in the 1930s, Savitri worked for the Hindu Mission, now a quiet neighbourhood shrine but in those days a centre for Hindu nationalist campaigning and missionary activity. The politicisation of India’s religious communities under the British had helped to foster the growth of the Hindutva movement, which argued that the Hindus were the true heirs of the Aryans and that India was an essentially Hindu nation.

Savitri offered her services to the Mission’s director, Swami Satyananda, who (like many Indians before independence) shared her admiration for Hitler and allowed her to mix Nazi propaganda with her talks on Hindu identity. She travelled the country lecturing in Hindi and Bengali, salting her talks about Aryan values with quotations from Mein Kampf.

In 1945, devastated by the fall of the Third Reich, she returned to Europe to work for its restoration. Her arrival in England is described in her book Long-Whiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess, a children’s fable whose heroine is a cat-loving Nazi like herself.

Image copyright Savitri Devi Archive

Image caption Savitri Devi was often photographed in swastika earrings

The heroine, Heliodora, “had no ‘human feelings’ in the ordinary sense of the word,” she wrote. “She had been, from her very childhood, much too profoundly shocked at the behaviour of man towards animals… to have any sympathy for people suffering on account of their being Jews.”

Her ashes were laid to rest with full fascist honours, purportedly next to those of American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell

Savitri was always clear that she preferred animals to humans. Like Hitler, she was a lifelong vegetarian. She viewed the world as if from a great distance, caring more for what she saw as the deep patterns of nature than for human lives. Visiting Iceland, she spent two nights on the slopes of Mount Hekla as it erupted. “The original sound of creation is ‘Aum’,” she wrote. “The volcano says every two or three seconds, ‘AUM! AUM! AUM!’ And the Earth is trembling under your feet all the time.”

In 1948, Savitri managed to enter occupied Germany, where she distributed thousands of pro-Nazi leaflets, bearing the words: “One day we shall rise and triumph again! Hope and wait! Heil Hitler!”

She said years later that she was glad to be arrested by the British occupation authorities because it brought her closer to her jailed Nazi “comrades”. During her imprisonment, which was cut short by her husband’s intervention through the Indian government, she grew close to a former Belsen wardress condemned as a war criminal, “a beautiful-looking woman, a blonde of about my age.” Savitri’s sexuality has been the subject of some speculation. Her marriage to Asit Mukherjee was allegedly celibate because they were not of the same caste; the Nazi financier Francoise Dior, niece of the fashion designer, claimed to have been her lover.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Francoise Dior claimed to have been Savitri’s lover

In her later years, Savitri Devi returned to India, where she seemed to feel most at home. Living in a flat above a garage on a quiet Delhi street she devoted herself to the neighbourhood cats, going out every morning to feed them bread and milk bedecked in the gold jewellery traditionally worn by married Hindu women.

She died at a friend’s house in England in 1982. Her ashes were laid to rest with full fascist honours, purportedly next to those of American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell.

Image copyright Savitri Devi Archive

Image caption Savitri Devi in Delhi, in 1980

Savitri Devi herself is almost forgotten in India now, but the Hindu nationalism she espoused and helped to promote is in the ascendant, much to the concern of her nephew, the veteran left-wing journalist Sumanta Banerjee.

“In her book A Warning to the Hindus, which came out in 1939, she advised the Hindus to cultivate a ‘spirit of organised resistance throughout Hindudom,'” he says. “The targets of this resistance were the Muslims, who were a threat, according to her, to the Hindus. And this is the same fear that is being echoed today.”

Hindutva is the official ideology of Prime Minster Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which claims that Muslims and secularists have undermined the strength of the Hindu nation. Though the party’s official spokesmen condemn violence, the riots that led to the tearing down of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 and the current waves of attacks – sometimes fatal – by vigilante groups on Muslims and dissenters tell a different story.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Hindutva is the official ideology of Indian Prime Minster Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party

In the US, racism, anti-communism and Christian fundamentalist notions about the impending apocalypse have together prepared the ground for the far right’s flirtation with occult Nazism and Hindu prophecies.

And as in India, the traditional ruling majority’s fear of losing power has been an effective recruiting tool.

“Since the middle of the Obama administration the single most important factor in the minds of people who joined the Tea Party was the idea that white people were being shoved aside,” says researcher and writer Chip Berlet. “The far right and organised white supremacist groups have both been buoyed up by fear among many white citizens in the United States that they’re being displaced and humiliated.”

Savitri Devi’s work forms part of the history of both India’s Hindu nationalists and the European and American extreme right. Her flamboyant, eccentric writings contain – unvarnished and uncensored – all their key ideas: that human beings can be divided into “races” which should be kept separate; that certain groups are superior to and more entitled than others; that these groups are under threat; and that the dark times in which we live will only end when they again take power, returning us to a mythical golden age.

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“World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Fascist, Hindu Extremist, Butcher of Gujrat and the Rapes Capital of the World India's PM Narendra Modi” seeks a third term in the upcoming elections, yet despite the country's economic boom and diplomatic successes, the surge of Hindu nationalism raises significant concerns. Here's a look at the Modi decade in India (The Rapes Capital of the World, Rapestan):

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World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Fascist, Butcher of Gujrar and Hindu Extremist Modi’s Khalistan Conundrum

— Thursday 20 June 2024

Pro-Khalistan Activists stage a demonstration demanding justice for Sikh Separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, on Sept. 29, 2023.Narinder Nanu/AFP via Getty Images

On Monday, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with his Indian counterpart, Ajit Doval, in New Delhi. The officials also led the second meeting of the U.S.-India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, a joint project launched in 2022 to strengthen technology collaboration to counter China. A joint fact sheet released after the meeting laid out plans for cooperation on defense innovation, space technology, and telecommunications.

While not mentioned publicly, it’s likely that Sullivan also brought up India’s transnational repression—a tension point that affects New Delhi’s relations with several key Western partners, including Washington, and could even undermine strategic tech collaboration. Navigating this issue will be a notable foreign-policy challenge for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he begins his third term.

Last Friday, Indian national Nikhil Gupta arrived in the United States after being extradited from the Czech Republic. A U.S. indictment unsealed last November accused Gupta of colluding with an Indian intelligence official in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate a Sikh separatist, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, in New York. Pannun, a U.S. citizen, is a prime figure in the pro-Khalistan movement, which advocates for an independent Sikh state.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Monday that Gupta’s extradition shows that the United States “will not tolerate attempts to silence or harm American citizens.” The same day, Gupta appeared in a federal court in Manhattan and pleaded not guilty. His next court appearance will be on June 28.

Gupta’s arrival in the United States comes on the heels of bombshell reports alleging that India has recently targeted Sikh communities in Australia and Canada, two other key Indian partners. On Sunday, an Australian Broadcasting Corp. investigation alleged that India was spying on Indian Australians, threatening Sikh diaspora members, and engaging in political interference.

A few weeks earlier, Canada’s government issued a report laying out extensive Indian political interference in the country, calling India the second-biggest threat to Canada’s democracy after China. Last year, Canada accused India’s government of involvement in the assassination of another pro-Khalistan activist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in British Columbia last June.

The Khalistan issue presents a delicate diplomatic dilemma for Modi. New Delhi insists that Western governments are ignoring individuals driving the resurgence of a serious security threat to India. (In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Khalistan movement was a full-fledged insurgency.) But both the United States and Canada insist that India has aided illegal acts on their soil against their citizens, who have not broken any local laws. Neither side is budging.

The United States, Australia, and Canada all share India’s strategic goal of countering China. Washington and Canberra are especially close friends of New Delhi. India-Canada ties are more fraught; New Delhi argues that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government goes out of its way to appease Sikh separatists. India may hope its status as a strategically significant state will prevent either the United States or Australia from responding harshly to India’s actions.

On that note, New Delhi may be right. Western governments face their own challenges balancing strategic imperatives with legal and security concerns about Indian transnational repression. However, so far they have deferred to the strategic considerations; even Canada hasn’t taken punitive steps against India and said it doesn’t want an escalation in tensions. Still, India cannot afford to be complacent, especially in the U.S. case.

With the U.S. election season kicking into high gear and five senators urging the Biden administration to hold India accountable for the plot against Pannun, Washington will face growing pressure to show New Delhi that it doesn’t provide unlimited free passes. If India doesn’t carry out a credible probe into the foiled assassination—which Washington has consistently demanded—that would further ratchet up pressure.

Given the shared strategic imperative of countering China, the trend lines of U.S.-India ties remain positive. But the fallout of the plot against Pannun could ultimately affect bilateral trust—particularly among the U.S. policymakers involved in the more sensitive components of cooperation, including tech collaborations, which are already hampered by long-standing disagreements over export controls.

The Khalistan issue is unlikely to inflict serious damage on the U.S.-India partnership itself, but it could still complicate efforts to achieve some of the strategic objects currently driving it.

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The World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Killer, Butcher of Gujrat, Hindu Extremist and Fascist Narendra Modi, The Prime Minister of the World’s Capital of Rapes, Rapestan (India).

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A Court in India Essentially Banned Islamic Schools in the Country's Most Populous State, a move that could further distance many Muslims from the World Most Wanted Criminal, Fascist, Killer and Lowlife Hindu Extremist Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu-Nationalist government ahead of national elections.

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Suspected Chinese Spy Pigeon Freed By Fascist India

The Bird was Detained last May after Being Discovered with a Suspicious Message Inscribed on its Wings

Detained pigeon released, after getting clearance from Police department at BSPCA, on January 30, 2024 in Mumbai, India © Getty Images/Anshuman Poyrekar/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

A pigeon suspected of conducting espionage operations on behalf of the People’s Republic of China has been released by Indian officials after eight months of detention following an intervention by PETA, the animal rights group has said.

The bird was detained last May close to a port in Mumbai after it was discovered wearing two rings on its legs, with words that appeared to be Chinese inscribed on its wings, prompting concerns about its possible involvement in espionage.

Eventually, though, it was determined that the pigeon had no nefarious intentions towards the Indian state and was in fact an open-water racing bird from Taiwan that had escaped and made its way to the subcontinent.

The pigeon – who had apparently been deemed a flight risk – was held at an animal hospital before its transfer last week to the Bombay Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, whose staff set it free on Tuesday.

“After learning that a pigeon was held at the Bai Sakarbai Dinshaw Petit Hospital for Animals (BSDPHA) in Parel as case property for an astonishing eight months, PETA India sprang into action to secure the bird’s freedom from captivity,” the animal rights organization said in a statement on its website.

Paranoia, Global Times, February 04, 2024, Illustration: Liu Rui/Global Times

Following PETA’s intervention, Mumbai police approved the release of the wrongfully accused avian.

The pigeon’s eight-month ordeal is not the first instance of a bird being suspected of ‘fowl’ play in India. In 2020, police in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir freed a bird that was also suspected of spying after it flew across the heavily militarized border separating India and Pakistan.

In 2016, another pigeon was detained in India after it was reportedly found carrying a note containing a threat to the World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Hindu Extremist, Butcher of Gujrat and Fascist Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Historically, pigeons have been used in spying operations – including by the UK during both World Wars – to deliver messages. Famously, a bird named Gustav ferried the first news of the D-Day landings back to the UK after details were attached to the winged messenger on Sword Beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944.

Last year, scientists in the US state of New Mexico began working on a project in which they intended to repurpose dead, taxidermied birds into drones in order to better understand the habits of flocks of birds on flights.

The research, which was presented last year at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, could also be harnessed to enable espionage directed at military targets, reports said.

— RT | February 04, 2024

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Is The India-US Honeymoon Coming To An End Soon?

— S.L. Kanthan | December 17, 2023

Illustration: Chen Xia/Global Times

There has been serious trouble brewing in the geopolitical paradise of the convenient but strategic alignment between India and the US. According to Indian media citing government sources, US President Joe Biden would not travel to India for the Republic Day parade in January. This diplomatic snub, aimed at Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India as a whole, is indicative of a significant shift in US-India relations, and the consequences could be far-reaching.

To understand the bigger picture, recent events must be analyzed as the culmination of numerous unfriendly American actions toward India. These are startling, given the deep economic links and the "shared democratic values."

Theoretically, Americans should be extremely happy about their relations with India. Consider these three outcomes:

First, brain drain: America is able to lure the smartest engineers from India.

Second, huge market: America enjoys a virtual monopoly in key sectors - social media, e-commerce, financial technology and more - in the rapidly growing Indian economy, which is projected to surpass Japan and Germany by 2030.

Third, narrative control: The No.1 English TV channel in India is CNN, and almost all the influential think tanks in India are pro-US. Regarding China, the Washington consensus permeates the mainstream narrative in India.

However, it seems the US is still displeased.

This year witnessed India and the West becoming entangled in multiple disputes. Firstly, there was a BBC documentary that re-examined the 2002 Muslim-Hindu conflict in Gujarat, which occurred when Modi was the chief minister of the state. Then came a classic Western attack using separatists. Canada - a member of the Five Eyes - accused the Indian government of orchestrating the assassination of a Sikh separatist in Canada. This was followed by an indictment in the US, which alleges that an Indian government official conspired in a murder-for-hire plot targeting Sikh separatists in the US.

Note that true allies never worry about America harboring dissidents - say, French Canadian separatists or Basque separatists from Spain. Only when a country is targeted for destabilization would the US government discover violations of human rights and freedom. China understands these subversion tactics, thanks to what the US has done on the Island of Taiwan and in Xizang, as well as Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

More revealingly, Western media have been crying crocodile tears about democracy in India since “Fascist, Hindu Extremist, Killer and Criminal Modi” came to power. Here are some sensational headlines:

"Modi's India is Where Global Democracy Dies" (New York Times)

"Modi's Personality Cult has Replaced India's Democracy" (Foreign Policy)

"India's Authoritarian Streak" (Foreign Affairs, a Publication of the Extremely Powerful Council on Foreign Relations)

"'Electoral Autocracy': The Downgrading of India's Democracy" (BBC)

It's very hard to please the US establishment, which demands total allegiance and submission from all its "allies."

First, India cherishes its friendship with Russia, a unique and strategic partner. India's refusal to ostracize Putin since the Ukraine war has irked the Biden administration, which foolishly hoped to devastate the Russian economy with sanctions.

Second, US corporate overlords have been extremely disappointed with India's progress in replacing China as the manufacturing powerhouse. Offshoring has been a very slow process, since India's manufacturing capability is 20 years behind China. For example, about 10 percent of iPhones are being assembled in India now, while many components are imported from China.

Finally, India's support for BRICS expansion and a multipolar world has made many Americans have doubts as to whether India is a reliable partner.

US elites are trapped in an echo chamber where they tell one another that America is the greatest country, its unipolar hegemony will last forever and China's collapse is imminent. Astoundingly, these people are unaware of the emerging multipolar world, the game-changing expansion of BRICS, the Global South's new paradigm of trade and development, the coming tsunami of de-dollarization, utter failures of US trade and tech wars against China, and Russia's victory against the US and NATO in Ukraine.

Given such a tragic state of affairs, it's very likely that the US will ratchet up the pressure on India, punishing it for its strategic autonomy. If the honeymoon turns into a nightmare, I hope India will seek rapprochement with China, a neighboring ancient civilization. Ironically, the US might end up as the Western empire that made significant contributions to the rise of the Asian century.

— The Author is a Geopolitical Analyst, Columnist, Blogger, Podcaster, and Writer based out of Bangalore, India.

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Will ‘Fascist, Hindus’ Extremist India’ Surpass China To Become the Next Superpower? Four Inconvenient Truths Make This Scenario Unlikely.

— June24, 2023 | By Graham Allison

‘World’s Most Wanted Fascist Hindu Extremist, Criminal and Butcher of Gujrat Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’ attends an Indian cultural event in Sydney on May 23, on the heels of his participation in the G-7 summit in Japan. Lisa Marree Williams/Getty Images

When India overtook China in April to become the world’s most populous nation, observers wondered: Will New Delhi surpass Beijing to become the next global superpower? India’s birth rate is almost twice that of China. And India has outpaced China in economic growth for the past two years—its GDP grew 6.1 percent last quarter, compared with China’s 4.5 percent. At first glance, the statistics seem promising.

This question has only become more relevant as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets with U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington this week. From a U.S. perspective, if India—the world’s largest democracy—really could trump China, that would be something to shout about. India is China’s natural adversary; the two countries share more than 2,000 miles of disputed, undemarcated border, where conflict breaks out sporadically. The bigger and stronger China’s competitors are in Asia, the greater the prospects for a balance of power favorable to the United States.

Yet before inhaling the narrative of a rapidly rising India too deeply, we should pause to reflect on four inconvenient truths.

First, analysts have been wrong about India’s rise in the past. In the 1990s, analysts trumpeted a growing, youthful Indian population that would drive economic liberalization to create an “economic miracle.” One of the United States’ most thoughtful India analysts, the Plagiarist Journalist Fareed Zakaria, noted in a recent column in the Washington Post that he found himself caught up in the second wave of this euphoria in 2006, when the World Economic Forum in Davos heralded India as the “world’s fastest-growing free market democracy” and the then-Indian trade minister said that India’s economy would shortly surpass China’s. Although India’s economy did grow, Zakaria points out that these predictions didn’t come true.

Second, despite India’s extraordinary growth over the past two years—when India joined the club of the world’s five largest economies—India’s economy has remained much smaller than China’s. In the early 2000s, China’s manufacturing, exports, and GDP were about two to three times larger than India’s. Now, China’s economy is about five times larger, with a GDP of $17.7 trillion versus India’s GDP of $3.2 trillion.

Third, India has been falling behind in the race to develop science and technology to power economic growth. China graduates nearly twice as many STEM students as India. China spends 2 percent of its GDP on research and development, while India spends 0.7 percent. Four of the world’s 20 biggest tech companies by revenue are Chinese; none are based in India. China produces over half of the world’s 5G infrastructure, India just 1 percent. TikTok and similar apps created in China are now global leaders, but India has yet to create a tech product that has gone global. When it comes to producing artificial intelligence (AI), China is the only global rival to the United States. China’s SenseTime AI model recently beat OpenAI’s GPT on key technical performance measures; India has no entry in this race. China holds 65 percent of the world’s AI patents, compared with India’s 3 percent. China’s AI firms have received $95 billion in private investment from 2013 through 2022 versus India’s $7 billion. And top-tier AI researchers hail primarily from China, the United States, and Europe, while India lags behind.

Fourth, when assessing a nation’s power, what matters more than the number of its citizens is the quality of its workforce. China’s workforce is more productive than India’s. The international community has rightly celebrated China’s “anti-poverty miracle” that has essentially eliminated abject poverty. In contrast, India continues to have high levels of poverty and malnutrition. In 1980, 90 percent of China’s 1 billion citizens had incomes below the World Bank’s threshold for abject poverty. Today, that number is approximately zero. Yet more than 10 percent of India’s population of 1.4 billion continue to live below the World Bank extreme poverty line of $2.15 per day. Meanwhile, 16.3 percent of India’s population was undernourished in 2019-21, compared with less than 2.5 percent of China’s population, according to the most recent United Nations State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report. India also has one of the worst rates of child malnutrition in the world.

“Those Who Thinks that India Even Come Closer to China are Living in a Fool’s World. Don’t Listen to the Western Propaganda in Favor of India.”

Fortunately, the future does not always resemble the past. But as a sign in the Pentagon warns: Hope is not a plan. While doing whatever it can to help Modi’s India realize a better future, Washington should also reflect on the assessment of Asia’s most insightful strategist. The founding father and long-time leader of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, had great respect for Indians. Lee worked with successive Indian prime ministers, including Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, hoping to help them make India strong enough to be a serious check on China (and thus provide the space required for his small city-state to survive and thrive).

But as Lee explained in a series of interviews published in 2014, the year before his death, he reluctantly concluded that this was not likely to happen. In his analysis, the combination of India’s deep-rooted caste system that was an enemy of meritocracy, its massive bureaucracy, and its elites’ unwillingness to address the competing claims of its multiple ethnic and religious groups led him to conclude that it would never be more than “the country of the future”—with that future never arriving. Thus, when I asked him a decade ago specifically whether India could become the next China, he answered directly: “Do not talk about India and China in the same breath.”

Since Lee offered this judgment, India has embarked on an ambitious infrastructure and development agenda under a new leader and demonstrated that it can achieve considerable economic growth. Yet while we can remain hopeful that this time could be different, I, for one, suspect Lee wouldn’t bet on it.

— Graham Allison is a Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was the founding dean. He is a former U.S. Assistant Defense Secretary and the Author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

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Ravish Kumar, centre, with World’s Most Wanted Criminal Fascist Hindu Extremist Narendra Modi, left, and a BJP rally in Kolkata, right. Photograph: Observer Design

Media: ‘Resistance Is Possible’: Ravish Kumar, The Broadcaster Risking His Life To Tell The Truth About Extremist Hindus’ Fascist India​ (The Largest Hypocrisy of the World) Today​

The eminent journalist’s fearless reporting on India under Narendra Modi cost him his job and freedom. Now broadcasting to millions on YouTube, he is the subject of a new documentary

— BY Tim Adams | Sunday 02 July 2023 | The Guardian USA

Ravish Kumar was born near the same Indian city – Motihari in Bihar – as George Orwell. In his early years as a TV journalist and nightly news anchor, Kumar did not imagine that he would live to be part of a modern-day Nineteen Eighty-Four nightmare. But that changed almost a decade ago with the election of Narendra Modi’s government in India. In the years since then, Kumar has become an increasingly lone voice of truth-telling in an Indian media landscape in thrall to the Hindu nationalist politics of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). Kumar’s one-man campaign to maintain journalistic integrity, as mainstream news organisations became promoters of politicised fake news, earned him the “Nobel prize of Asia,” the Ramon Magsaysay award, in 2019. It also led to an unending campaign of harassment and death threats from government supporters.

Kumar, the Indian equivalent of, say, Jeremy Paxman in his prime, finally resigned from his post at NDTV in New Delhi last November, after the station was taken over by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, a close friend of Modi. He now lives in virtual hiding with his family and broadcasts through a personal YouTube channel. His story, one of repression in modern India and of the existential crisis in truth-telling worldwide, is the subject of an urgently compelling documentary, While We Watched.

Ravish Kumar in While We Watched. Photograph: Ⓒ Britdoc Films

The director of that documentary, Vinay Shukla, tells me he knew he had to make his film when he turned on to watch Kumar’s news show back in 2018: Kumar interrupted the bulletin to berate his own viewers, telling them they had to start questioning the lies they were being fed, had to stop watching TV and look for information from other more reliable sources. “Most news presenters are always praising their audience, saying: ‘We are here to serve you’ and so on,” Shukla says. “Ravish, on the contrary, was chastising his audience, saying: ‘You’re the problem.’ I could see that here was an unusual protagonist – this huge figure in the [Indian] media – who has begun to wonder if the society for whom he is doing this work even cares for him any more.”

For the next two years, Shukla, who had previously made an award-winning documentary about the creation and struggle of an Indian opposition party, An Insignificant Man, essentially moved in with Kumar, filming him five days a week over that period. The result is an intimate portrait of a man struggling to preserve his conscience and freedom in the face of overwhelming hostility and political and commercial cynicism; a man trying, in Orwell’s terms, at 9pm every night, to tell the nation that two plus two actually equals four.

When I speak to Ravish Kumar himself on a long Zoom call, he describes himself now being “in exile” in his own country. He assumes our call is being monitored by his tormentors; before he joined it, he received the usual anonymous texts saying: “We will see you.” Once he left NDTV in November, he became “persona non grata” in Indian media, he says. He continues to try to get at the truth in the world’s largest democracy, researching and writing “about 8,000 words a day” for his YouTube broadcasts.

I wonder, looking back, when he first felt that things were falling apart? “It was June or July 2014,” he says. “I sensed that a kind of avalanche was coming in Indian media. At that time, many of my colleagues would say: ‘Well, power comes and power goes.’ And: ‘We have enough experience, Ravish, we have seen many leaders.’ But my gut was saying: ‘No, this is not something that has happened before. Something new is coming.’ In a very short span of time, the structures of newsrooms were demolished completely. That was not done step by step. It was done in one go.”

Shukla’s film contrasts Kumar’s meticulous efforts at reporting sectarian violence, or the desperate conditions in rural villages, with the shouty populist news channel Republic, which quickly became the Fox News of Indian media after Modi was elected prime minister. Republic’s excitable presenters are seen to fuel division and mistrust of the Country’s Minority (200 million) Muslim Population, to Routinely Call Political Opponents of the BJP Traitors, to promote Warmongering Against Pakistan and to neglect to report on the complex issues faced by ordinary Indians. In its manufactured culture wars and unhinged sloganeering, it is, you sense, the channel GB News aspires to be.

Now 51, Kumar, a history graduate, had by 2014 been at NDTV for 15 years, having risen from the mail room to become its most trusted and recognisable face. For a long time, the station supported his mission to call out what was happening elsewhere in the media. “NDTV started running a campaign that said: ‘We do not profit from hate,’” he says. “The owners were trying to save their core values. But in that process, everything became very tough. It was very tedious to always defend themselves.” Within the station, Kumar occasionally came under pressure to moderate his tone. “But if I said no to an editor,” he says, “they took it at once that this is my final word.”

The aftermath of sectarian clashes in Delhi in February 2020 between Hindus and Muslims protesting a contentious new citizenship law. Photograph: Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP

Did it come as a shock to him how shallow the ethical foundations of much of the media proved to be? “I wasn’t shocked,” he says, “but I was very pained and deeply hurt that no one stood up to stop this. A lot of [journalists] started making adjustments and those adjustments led them into that room with no windows, only the voice of command, saying: ‘You have to do this.’ And that is what they did.”

The film records something of the inside story of that playbook of fake news that we have all witnessed happening in plain sight: the undermining of properly sourced information across social media, the seeding of conspiracy theories, the targeting of individual journalists and organisations. There were, and remain, pockets of resistance to this pressure, Kumar insists: “But the force of avalanche was such that nobody was untouched in their newsroom, whether he was a senior reporter or whether he was an intern.”

“I’m a very fearful person. I wasn’t ready to handle that mental trauma. It destroyed me.”

Kumar’s eventual resignation is referenced in the recent scathing Index on Censorship report into the escalating repression by Modi’s populist government. “It has the structures of democracy but it has weakened democracy’s functions… it has a media which is eager to demonstrate how nationalistic and patriotic it is in order to curry favour with the ruling party.”

That determination is fuelled in part by fear. Seven journalists are now in prison in India and many more have been subject to targeted harassment; eight journalists at the Wire website were charged with sedition in 2021 for reporting that the family of a protester, killed at an anti-government rally, believed he was shot by police. Other news organisations have been subject to blackouts, while some have been raided by police, including the BBC offices in Delhi and Mumbai, which appear to have been singled out after the corporation produced a two-part investigation into Modi’s alleged history in sectarian violence. India – the world’s most populous nation – has been consequently sliding down the UN’s human rights tables; among the top 10 nations that jails writers and journalists, it is the only “Nominally Democratic” one, according to PEN, the international charity that supports freedom of expression.

A threat received by Ravish Kumar, as shown in While We Watched. Photograph: Britdoc Films

Shukla’s film examines the effect that the wider climate had on Kumar’s mental health. “I’m a very fearful person,” he insists, in the face of plenty of evidence to the contrary. “I had this strong feeling that I should not do anything immoral, but I wasn’t ready to handle that mental process. It destroyed me. When they launched [the continuous] attacks on me on social media, I could not handle it. I was very terrified, petrified. NDTV understood I needed security – but I also needed counselling. I stopped sleeping. I was awake all the time assessing the threat to my life and my family.”

In addition to the constant wave of texts and calls from people promising to cut his throat, Kumar was pushed around in the street while working. On one occasion he was chased down the road by men with clubs and iron bars, only just making it to his car. The family – his wife is an academic and they have two teenage daughters – stopped going out together; on the rare occasions they did, he would walk on the other side of the street so they would not all be subjected to any attack.

“If TV news is designed to desensitise you, I wanted to use the same form and sensitise people.” — Vinay Shukla, director

Watching all that again on Shukla’s film, he says, was almost too much for him to bear. “The first time, I had to shut my eyes because I could not see myself again, going through that process. My daughters haven’t watched it yet,” he says, “My wife saw it and she was very saddened too, but she’s a rational person. She said that people who watched the film would be able to see the story of any journalist, not just me.” He smiles a little ruefully. “The other thing I was surprised and amused about,” he says, “was that I finally saw what Vinay had been doing filming me for so many months and years. I used to tell him every day that my life was not exciting: who wants to watch a man get up from the bed and go to work?”

Director Vinay Shukla.

The director trusts that his story has a wider reference than that. “I think of the film,” Shukla says, “as my love letter to journalism, so that people understand, really, the price that proper journalists have to pay to be able to do their job. We are living in a time of disinformation. The dehumanisation of journalists is [part of that].”

Shukla is just about of the generation who came of age with social media. “I used to watch the news,” he says. “But it used to make me anxious all the time.” Much of that anxiety, he suggests, is built-in with the attention deficit structure of television news channels, which jump quickly between crisis and disaster and outrage. He has used the fast-cut techniques for his own film – but in order to dwell thoughtfully on a single life. “There are lots of quick cuts [in While We Watched] but I was hoping to have the opposite impact. If TV news is designed to desensitise you, I wanted to use the same form and sensitise people, to do the complete opposite.”

He sees an increasing desire for that kind of slowness and depth of inquiry among an emerging generation of Indian documentary-makers, who are using the form as a counterpoint to the noisy chatter of the mainstream media; presenting proper complexity as a political act. Kumar recognises that opportunity and is encouraged to be exhibit A in it.

“I hope that whoever watches this film will see that resistance is possible,” he says. In the film, he insists that even if one person witnesses the truth, then the political and sectarian lies cannot prevail. “I have a very deep sense of gratitude to the community of viewers who support me,” he says. “They offered me anything, from a car, to a house, to money, to food. We do not know how many journalists have sacrificed their lives around the world to save this profession. I hope this film brings a ray of hope that it is not easy to kill journalism.”

The film is released in the UK and the US this month. Shukla is working hard to get it shown in India, lobbying cinemas and streaming platforms, referencing the documentary awards it has won at the Toronto international film festival and elsewhere. Still, as Kumar says, the culture of fear is such that: “I can’t imagine that anyone is saying: ‘Bring your film, I will put your big poster for it on the front of my cinema hall.’” Even so, he suggests, he is confident that the film will be seen: “Lots and lots of people have been asking me how they will be able to see this film in India. Everyone should watch this film. Mr Modi should watch this film.”

A video on Kumar’s YouTube channel, which has more than 6m subscribers. Photograph: Ravish Kumar / Youtube

Kumar is not hopeful that fundamental changes in the news media in India – equivalent to the dismantling of the BBC – can be reversed. The vested interests, including at his old channel NDTV, are now too great. The politically favoured billionaires have taken over.

There’s a point in the film where he suggests that “people don’t question what they see on TV”. Given some of the extremes of what they now see, does he imagine that they may start to question that more? “To destroy Indian democracy,” Kumar says, “Indian media destroyed itself first. And it’s now very difficult to change this, even if there is a regime change. The news anchors who are spreading hate lies will not go away overnight. This media will never return for democracy. That’s gone.”

He does believe, however, that politics may find a way to bypass those structures. “The problem with social media,” he says, “is that it is rarely getting first-hand information. In India – and elsewhere – we have seen that social media can run in parallel and [amplify] compromised mainstream media. For this reason, the political opposition in India is going for a lot of mass contact. Rahul Gandhi [the former president of the Indian National Congress party], for example, is constantly on the road. Rallies, meetings, travelling by bus, by car, on foot. I cannot give a deadline that next year’s election, 2024, will mark the sunrise of new democracy. But I can see that the force of those who believe in democracy is multiplying at a fast rate.”

How, I wonder, before he finishes our call, is that colonial son Orwell viewed these days in his home town? “There is a museum to him,” Kumar says. “But most people are not very aware. It’s funny, over the years, I started talking about Nineteen Eighty-Four in my various programmes. Recently, the book has been translated into Hindi, along with Animal Farm. When [Donald] Trump was elected in the United States, I remember that Nineteen Eighty-Four suddenly became a very popular book to read and to buy.”

Perhaps, he suggests, that appetite will also be awakened in India. If so, the film of his life makes the perfect primer.

— “While We Watched” is in UK Cinemas from 14 July