Confused about what’s going on in Kashmir? Couldn’t give a monkey’s about what’s going on in Kashmir? Not sure whether Narendra Modi is a Bollywood star good-guy or a political demon? Convinced that the nuclear threat died with the Soviet Union? The Slog offers some guidance, with one starting proviso: this is a minefield, not a jolly geopolitical jape.
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The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a cast-iron globalist neoliberal: that much has never been in dispute; indeed, he revels in the description. Solid facts about his political career include persistent attempts to raise foreign direct investment in the Indian economy, drastically reduced spending on healthcare and social welfare programmes, and the weakening or abolition of multiple environmental and labour laws. He is very much a vassalist happy to sell out every lower caste Indian’s future such as it is) via a permanently open pair of wizened-whore legs.
I wintered in India two years ago, and saw at first hand the exacerbation of an age-old Indian poverty problem produced by this man: health centres resembling MASH field hospitals, desperate beggars everywhere, astonishing social racism, deadly deregulated traffic anarchy, wholesale pollution causing chronic breathing problems, zero investment in water conservation, central government riding roughshod over local planning ecology, and the rise and rise of a truly nouveau riche class of brainless, tasteless and aggressive dickheads behaving badly wherever they went.
These last are just part of the corrupt rainbow of support that has re-elected Modi, and given him the confidence to revoke Article 370 of the Indian constitution giving special rights to the semi-autonomous state of Jammu and Kashmir. The area is the only part of India where there is a solid Islamic majority.
But while the globalist MSM continues to offer the simplistic view of Narendra Modi as the impoverished child stall-holder made good who promotes Indian nationalism, the truth is infinitely more complex….and geopolitical. As, of course, is the status of Kashmir.
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“Modi is very thick with the US in general, and the CIA in particular,” a retired Goan politician told me in January 2018.
This wasn’t earth-shattering news: Narendra Modi’s unhealthy relationship with America’s military-to-economic neocon foreign policy makers is no secret. Regular US-India liaisons are at best inscrutable, but some details have emerged. These include agreements to speed up the abandonment of cash in favour of digital payments in India, and military “advisors” provided by the Pentagon.
Equally, the US Alt State continues to have the neutralisation of Pakistan’s extreme Jihadism and the weakening of China (along with Russia) as central “strategic business” objectives.
Without knowing this background to Modi’s revocation of Kashmiri status, it is impossible to grasp what’s really going on here.
Here’s a simple map to spell it out:
For the US MIC and the unelected Indian State, bringing Jammu-Kashmir more closely under neocon influence is a win-win: China can be threatened from bases there, and recolonisation by Hindus begun in earnest.
The big, big difference in this case of tentacular culturo-mercantile advance is that all three of the nations involved in this sphere are nuclear powers.
This morning, China has “reassured Pakistan of its support and commitment” in an
official statement issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry. This followed a meeting yesterday between Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi.
Pakistan also issued a release confirming that ‘China supports Pakistan’s repeated calls for peace and stability. We will work together to highlight the voice of Kashmiris to the world.’
Some will speculate that President Trump is happy to up the anti on Kashmir in a bid to reach more favourable trading terms with Beijing. I rather suspect that is a simplistic view put forward by Libleft Trump haters.
Far more likely is that the American Alt State is desperate for Donald Trump to fail, and CIA rogue operations in India are driving events to ensure that Sino-American tensions rise. They have form on this dimension: the Texas-CIA-Pentagon axis deliberately scuppered Iranian hostage negotiations in 1980 to ensure failure for Jimmy Carter, and help elect their man Ronald Reagan. Reagan ‘chose’ haha George Bush Sr (a CIA lifer) as his running mate; after two terms, Bush became President.
The unelected US State was involved in the undermining of talks to demilitarise North Korea, and attempts to block Trump’s stated desire to withdraw from Syria.
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A lesser-known feature of India (in which the CIA is yet again involved) concerns an unhealthy – and growing – closeness of cooperation between the police and the army
In many cases, the two organs of State share the same premises. They are both enthusiastic supporters of Modi. Dealing with them is not a pleasant experience.
Slowly but surely, India is being turned into a devil-take-the-hindmost totalitarian ally of global hegemony politics.
Nearer to home, the pro-Islam Western Left will use these events to present Pakistan as a peace-loving victim of “Islamophobia”. But Pakistan has been a fellow-traveller with zero-tolerance, violent Islam for far too long: its alliance with China is in turn a massive hypocrisy given Beijing’s long history of coming down hard on Islamic demands in its western territories.
If we want to take sides on this issue, the choice in the Twenty-first Century is, as always, between the least of several evils, with fifty shades of grey in between. Ideologues and religious bigots, ironically, push with every sinew to force-fit their position into one of goodness and/or Godliness. In an effort to achieve this, no fake news, manipulated data, false virtue or imagined evil intention is too risible to be used.
Power-seeking is now so universal on our planet, cui bono is the only useful criterion of discernment left.
We are in the best and worst of times.
The Slog 