INDIA — AMERICA’S NEW VASSAL STATE?

[PurpleStone]

INDIA — AMERICA’S NEW VASSAL STATE?

India has been invaded by foreigners for many centuries because of its location, rich culture, spices/food etc. For more than 2000 years, India kept succumbing to the invaders because, unlike China, it didn’t have a strong kingdom that ruled the entire country. Then India became free in 1947. However, merely 70 years after freeing itself from the ruthless British Empire, India is experiencing a collective amnesia and is quickly ceding its sovereignty to foreign interests, America being the biggest one.

A country’s sovereignty depends on its ability to own and control its economy, corporations, banks, media, military, technology, agriculture, politics and its policies. In all those areas, foreign governments and corporations have gained excessive influence.

In the name of privatization and reform, India is selling all its assets in the form of corporate ownership. US influence in the media is very obvious, with CNN, CNBC and other American logos prevalent on Indian TV channels. Control the media, you control the people.

Also, rather than developing its own versions of Facebook, Google, smartphones etc., India took the quick way out by simply “borrowing” those tools. However, these software programs are also tools that spy on Indians and manipulate what Indians think by censoring and filtering news and information. These tools also create dependency, which will be used against India if it starts to disobey in the future. Suddenly, all those things people take for granted — Facebook, Google, Paypal, Amazon etc. — will stop working if the Indian government doesn’t bow to Washington DC. For life under US sanctions, talk to Syria, Iran, Russia etc.

India’s economy also seems to be run by American experts. The gold confiscation attempt in India sounded an awful lot like what happened in the US in the 1930s. The currency experiment by Modi last year also sounds like an idea straight out of Wall Street. I haven’t done the research on the presence and influence of American puppet masters in India, but looking at the past American adventures in places like Chile and Russia, the similarity of striking.

It’s also beyond ridiculous that a developing nation like India has trade deficit every year. No, that’s only feasible for a country like the US that can print dollars. India can’t print US dollars — which is what India has to use to buy things from other countries — so it ends up selling its assets. From airlines to media to defense corporations to startups, India has been pawning its assets and future.

The banking crisis that’s unfolding now is a perfect excuse — and probably engineered by Wall Street or Harvard shysters — for privatizing India’s banks. Once Goldman Sachs and hedge funds take over the Indian banks, it’s a one-way ticket to serfdom.

As for military and geopolitics, India is obviously becoming a pawn in American chessboard. India will be used for proxy wars against China. A smarter way would have been to join the Belt and Road, use China’s leverage over Pakistan to solve the Kashmir issue, and create regional prosperity and stability.

Look at all the people who fought on behalf of the US — Cubans, Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese, Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis, Kurds, Libyans etc. All they got were destruction and death. At the end of the war, the US will simply walk away.

Indians are very smart, yet they lack strong institutions that can chart the course for long-term strategy.

For sustainable prosperity, develop your own software and other critical technology; demand that Indians have ownership of all assets, media, corporations and banks; get rid of GMO; never, ever let a foreign military base in your country; keep Russia and China close for strategic balance; and create a trade surplus so that you can use the savings to buy assets in other countries. Don’t turn into a colony again.

https://worldaffairs.blog/2018/04/03/india-americas-new-vassal-state/

 

[PurpleStone]

When the pot met the kettle: How Modi made India a lackey to the US
By Sanjay Kumar Published: July 4, 2017
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India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi hugs President Trump as they give joint statements in the Rose Garden of the White House. PHOTO: REUTERS

Finally, the pot and the kettle met, shook hands and hugged each other. Analysts world over are still debating possible gains and losses of a meeting between two unique characters of world politics today – Donald Trump and Narendra Modi.

They represent two very vibrant democracies of the world but they are not recognised as the real faces of their multi-cultural nations. They are treated more as aberrations of history, a mistake of time rather than a true face of the era and people they got their mandate from.

They both defy the norms of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. Their past sins and acts are not holding them back from achieving success; they are challenging goodness at every stage and are still getting away with it. They survive by selling their villainy. Poetic justice does not visit them.

Therefore, the individuals who are defined more by their negativity – the pot and the kettle – would receive more than the usual attention. They received this attention recently in Washington when Modi met his own image. Majority of the analysts in India kept the focus on the outcome of the talks and what headway the two democracies could make on the bilateral front.

India sees a major gain in the US’s decision to declare the Pakistan-based Hizbul Mujahideen chief, Syed Salahuddin, as a “global terrorist”. One needs to ask how such a declaration alters the ground realities in South Asia, how will it improve the relationship between New Delhi and Islamabad, and how will it solve the Kashmir issue? Domestic analysts in India don’t want to debate over how Washington is indirectly interfering in the bilateral relationship between the two South Asian neighbours.

The hard truth of the meeting was the decision to go in for a comprehensive review of trade relations between the two countries. Currently, the balance of trade is in India’s favour and the review will, in fact, put great pressure on India to open its market for American goods, which will not be easy. The businessman president of the US believes more in transactional relations than emotional bonding.

New Delhi is already a strategic partner of the US in South Asia and Modi is willing to play Washington’s game in the region. The overwhelming argument in India is that Modi’s embrace of the US, at the cost of its foreign policy autonomy, is the best thing to happen to India in the last 70 years. This narrative dominates popular discourse so much that there is hardly any space for questioning such an abject surrender of our strategic autonomy.

Our previous Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh signed a nuclear deal with the US and exalted India’s position as a strategic partner of Washington without surrendering the strategic autonomy despite continuous pressure from the US.

Modi, who won a historic mandate, made India a lackey to the US foreign policy.

The repercussion is for all to see. China, an inalienable neighbour, sees the entente between the two largest democracies as an attempt to contain its growing ambition. Pakistan, despite its inhibitions, has openly aligned with Beijing and become an important part of the One Belt and One Road (OBOR) policy. Bhutan, which has survived so far under India’s sphere of influence, wants to have its own say in dealing with foreign countries. India’s relationship with Islamabad is at an all-time low and the strategic bonding between New Delhi and Washington has made South Asia more fragile than before.

At a time when the US’s allies, like Germany and France, are talking about charting their own course in history, New Delhi’s bond with the US is anachronistic. It is investing in a leader which the developed West wants to keep at an arm’s length.

Compare the body language of Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron towards Trump with Modi’s. You will realise how narrow the mental canvas of the Indian leader is. German and French leaders rejected Trump’s hatred towards Muslims; they refused to endorse the American president’s political insularity.

Modi can’t do that because he is the mirror image of Trump in many ways. They both share a common hatred towards minorities, they abhor questioning and democratic dissent, and they are votaries of narrow nationalism. Moreover, they represent the political ethos of exclusion and nurture a deep hatred towards the media.

At a time when the world is passing through an extremely difficult phase of history, the leaders of the two biggest democracies are highly divisive figures. They can’t talk of leading the world out of the present chaos; they, ironically, represent chaos. The world cannot look towards them for leadership at all.

Immediately after independence, India became the voice of developing countries when the world was passing through a new wave of uncertainties. This happened because of the leadership of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Today, India’s leadership is under a man who stands for divisiveness and Hindu extremism and it cannot be a voice at the international fora. The same applies to Trump.

The irony is that the US-India comraderies cannot stabilise the world, it cannot play a positive role in calming down the domestic and international chaos. It cannot act as a moral force in bringing sanity in South Asia.


https://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/...ettle-how-modi-made-india-a-lackey-to-the-us/

LEMOA: Has India chosen to be America’s lackey?

• By Vasu Vashisht
• September 8, 2016
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India and the United States have just signed the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) a tweaked version of the Logistics Support Agreement (LSA). The agreement formalizes an ad-hoc arrangement already in practice and furthers India-US military-to-military cooperation. The agreement, put simply, provides access to each other’s military facilities for fueling and logistic support on a reimbursable basis. On the face of it the agreement looks harmless what could possibly go wrong, after all would just be providing “bed & breakfast” services to visiting American forces and vice versa if our forces visited United states or her Island territories.

The only bases which India will gain access to by signing the LEMOA agreement are those located in mainland United States and her island territories. To those who are saying that we will also get access to US bases all around the world and the strategically important ones in Indian ocean region, South-East Asia and East Asia are gravely mistaken.

– India does not gain access to foreign bases which have a large US presence. For example, Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.

-India does not gain access to overseas US bases in foreign Nations such as Atsugi or Kadena in Japan, or Osan Air base in South Korea.

To gain access to these bases we will have to negotiate with the Host country. On the other hand, United States gains access to Indian bases in mainland India, & the Andaman & Nicobar Islands giving it a wider footprint in the region.

LEMOA strengthens the ‘US Pivot to Asia’ and India becomes a frontline state in the battle to contain China & further expand US influence in Asia.
The cons of such an agreement with the United States are far too many when compared to the pros.

India doesn’t gain anything out of this deal while the United States further cements its position in the region. US is more likely to need India’s port services and logistics support than India needing US’s port services or logistics support. The US is a global power which is present everywhere be it the Atlantic, Asia-Pacific region, Middle east, South China sea etc. US navy is routinely deployed in these areas and conducts a variety of operations, most famous of all the “freedom of navigation” operations, last year alone “freedom of navigation” operations were conducted against 13 counties including India!

Sadly, this is not the end of it LEMOA will pave the way for increasing India’s dependency on an unreliable partner and will increase the strain between India and its traditional ally Russia.

Moscow has been India’s most important and trusted weapons supplier for a long-time Friendship between the two countries has endured the test of time, but with United States getting closer and closer Moscow will find it increasingly hard to treat India as a special partner whom she has provided with cutting edge weapon systems such as Akula-II SSN or the upcoming joint development of Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft. India will be reduced to a cash cow and will lose its special relationship with Russia. It’s not only Russia that will be antagonized, Iran New Delhi’s important ally in the region and where India is investing millions to develop strategically important port will turn its back on India and might even offer the strategically important port, Chabahar, to China. New Delhi’s will no longer enjoy the special relationship with the unofficial leader of Shia world.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that Moscow and Tehran will strengthen their relations with Beijing-Islamabad axis once they start to see New Delhi drifting into Washington’s orbit.

India will have to sign 2 more Foundational agreements with the United States if it wants to get some serious cutting edge American technology, the two agreements are CISMOA and BECA. Key paragraphs of the CISMOA agreement signed between United States and Korea reveal the extent to which Americans will control the equipment they will sell India.

“Paragraph V of the agreement requires ROK to pay the full cost of re-configuring its communication systems to be inter-operable with US military systems, and for testing the Korean systems, whenever required.

Paragraph VII of the agreement states that- DoD-provided COMSEC equipment, keying and other materials, or the details of DoD-provided support services, will not be transferred to or revealed in any manner to a third party without the prior written consent of the USG

Paragraph IX of the agreement stipulates: DoD-provided COMSEC equipment and materials, including keying materials, will be installed and maintained only by authorized US personnel… When authorized by the US, qualified ROK personnel may remove and/or replace US COMSEC equipment previously installed by US personnel.

Paragraph X mandates that DoD-provided COMSEC equipment and materials, including keying materials, will not be subject to any cooperative development, co-production, co-assembly or production licensing agreements.”

Source- http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/121135.pdf

Not to forget that United States is yet to transfer any significant technology to India which India not herself possess or is in advance stages of development. The much famed Defence Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI) is gathering dust and is yet to result in even a single significant technological transfer. Even if by some miracle India manages to get some cutting edge American weapon system the usage of that system will be 100% regulated by Americans and can be rendered useless any moment like the F-14 fleet of Shah of Iran which was sabotaged by American personnel before leaving Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

If LEMOA is not immediately repelled by the present government, then almost 70 years of hard work of all previous governments to make India an Independent power and not just a lackey of any block will go down the drain.

With this one move Modi Government has reduced India from one of the major poles in the emerging multi-polar world to a lackey of declining power.

https://rightlog.in/2016/09/lemoa-india-us-modi-government/

 

[Chinese-Dragon]

With this one move Modi Government has reduced India from one of the major poles in the emerging multi-polar world to a lackey of declining power.

Disappointing. As much as I disliked India's foreign policy towards China, I always thought they were at least an independent country, aspiring to be one of the poles of power in a multi-polar world.

And one day, for some random reason, they signed the LEMOA. There was no threat of war, no imminent collapse on the horizon, yet they still signed it.

For what? An American promise to get them a NSG seat? They didn't even get that either.

 

[HamWatan]

It's easy to be 'independant' and 'non-aligned' when there isn't any hegemonic pressure on you to do anything else. Glad to see India going down the path it was destined for. Modi Zindabad.

 

[doorstar]

Disappointing. As much as I disliked India's foreign policy towards China, I always thought they were at least an independent country, aspiring to be one of the poles of power in a multi-polar world.

And one day, for some random reason, they signed the LEMOA. There was no threat of war, no imminent collapse on the horizon, yet they still signed it.

For what? An American promise to get them a NSG seat? They didn't even get that either.

They always were lackeys albeit on the sly. According some declassified paper, I read form somewhere (can't remember where now), Nehru had run to them in 1962 and had convinced them to help him against China. UK and USA were on the verge of bombing China but Chinese outsmarted all 3 and withdrew to their previous positions.

 

[PurpleStone]

https://thewire.in/external-affairs...ke-cutting-off-india-nose-to-spite-china-face

Modi's Beijing Policy Is Like Cutting Off India's Nose to Spite China's Face
Indian strategic thinkers have been quick to conclude that China’s goal is to cut India off from the rest of Asia. But this is a frog-in-the-well kind of perspective.

Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) guides Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to a meeting room in Xian, Shaanxi province, China, May 14, 2015. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

Prem Shankar Jha
EXTERNAL AFFAIRS
WORLD
12/MAY/2017

Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) guides Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to a meeting room in Xian, Shaanxi province, China, May 14, 2015. Credit: Reuters/Kim Kyung-Hoon

For three years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been indulging in acts of bravado in foreign policy that he believes, or wants the people of India to believe, are acts of bravery. The most recent is his boycott of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) forum meeting in Beijing next week.

New Delhi’s official reason for not attending the meeting is that the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) passes through Gilgit, which has been illegally occupied by Pakistan since 1947. Attending the meeting would, therefore, risk conceding sovereignty over Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (Azad Kashmir) to Pakistan. But this is poppycock.

The CPEC passes through the same territory as the Karakoram highway that China built in the 1960s. India has been lodging formal protests over this for the past fifty years. But this has not prevented it from increasing its trade with China by more than 20 times, and cooperating with it on all kinds of strategic and environmental issues in various international fora.

Modi could have safeguarded India’s legal position on Gilgit by issuing a similar formal caveat. But by making the recognition of Gilgit’s disputed status by China a pre-condition, Modi has cut India’s nose off to spite China’s face.

For India, the gains from OBOR would not have accrued so much from the investments in roads, railways and ports that it envisages, but from the immense investments that China would have liked to make in India’s infrastructure. Indian strategic thinkers have been quick to conclude that China’s goal is to cut India off from the rest of Asia, and destroy its hegemony in South Asia. But this is a frog-in-the-well kind of perspective, for China has far more compelling reasons.

First, it is an industrial juggernaut that produces close to half of all the consumer goods traded in the world and therefore needs safe trade routes more than any other country. India does not lie on any global trade route so OBOR cannot go through India. But all India has to do to benefit from it is invest in links to it via Bangladesh and Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Nepal and, one day, Pakistan.

Second, China is willing to spend colossal sums on OBOR because it desperately wants alternatives to the sea lanes it relies on for its oil, and its trade with Europe and Africa. Half of its exports, and 90% of its oil passes through the Malacca straits and the South China Sea. With 400 US military installations spread in an arc around it and carrier fleets equipped with thousands of Tomahawk missiles cruising the South China Sea, its wish to insure against a blockade of the kind that the US imposed on oil supplies to Japan in 1940 is understandable.

But its most pressing concern is to find orders for its huge capital goods industry. While India’s industrial production is wasting away because of its acute shortage of up-to-date infrastructure, China is literally suffocating in excess capacity. China produces more than 800 million tonnes of steel a year, almost exactly half of the world’s output, and has run out of places in which to use it. The provincial governments have built all the airports, container ports and all-weather highway they could think of. Starting with a single line with 20 pairs of bullet trains in 2005, the Chinese have built 19,000 km of high speed train track and are running 2,300 pairs of bullet trains on them today. And residential and commercial space is so overbuilt that as far back as 2013 China had 55 million square metres of unoccupied apartments.

The world market too is saturated and in a recession. Beijing’s attempt to dump some of its steel on it last year caused a crash in prices that forced US Steel to lay off 39,000 employees, and precipitated a crisis in Arcelor-Mittal. The global outcry that followed forced it to promise to close down 150 million tonnes of steel making capacity by 2020. That is almost twice the entire steel-making capacity of India today.

Overcapacity is even greater in its heavy engineering industries – the industries that build the industries that manufacture its products. In the four years that ended in December 2015, China added more than 300,000 MW – more than India’s entire power generating capacity – to its coal power generating capacity. But it was able to bring only a fraction of it into use, and that too only by reducing the capacity utilisation in existing plants.

Today, the only orders these plants are getting are from enterprises that are modernising their existing production capacity.

OBOR is an extension of China’s original shift of investment to the western provinces, and is the only way left to keep the millions of workers in the heavy industries employed. But just the ‘belt’ and ‘road’ as conceived today will not suffice. For that China needs India to become a partner, for while the combined GDP (in hard currency) of the seven countries in which the bulk of OBOR investments are currently envisaged: Russia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Malaysia was $2.1 trillion in 2015, that of India alone was $2.256 trillion.

India’s joining OBOR could, therefore, make the difference between a quick, relatively painless recovery from its recession and a prolonged, painful one. Its keenness to have India join is reflected in two articles published in the Global Times on March 20 and May 7 this year.

In the first, the writer explicitly conceded the validity of India’s concerns over the sovereignty issue but asked New Delhi to distinguish between “normal commercial investment and ones that could violate India’s sovereignty”. In the second, written only last week, the writer said, “Beijing respects New Delhi’s sovereignty concerns” and pointed out that “China’s infrastructural initiative will not only bring economic benefits, but also fulfil India’s ambition to be an influential economic power in the region”.

The significance of these articles is that they were written after Modi replaced cooperation with confrontation in India’s relations with China. They indicate, therefore, that China still attaches greater importance to economic cooperation with India in OBOR than to its growing political differences with the Modi government. The benefits, especially in terms of ease of doing business and increase in employment that would flow to an investment starved India do not need to be spelt out. But these do not seem to matter to Modi.

 

[samv]

Like Manmohan Singh didn't lick American boots?

 

[PurpleStone]

Like Manmohan Singh didn't lick American boots?

India became a vassal in 1998.

 

[PurpleStone]

Disappointing. As much as I disliked India's foreign policy towards China, I always thought they were at least an independent country, aspiring to be one of the poles of power in a multi-polar world.

And one day, for some random reason, they signed the LEMOA. There was no threat of war, no imminent collapse on the horizon, yet they still signed it.

For what? An American promise to get them a NSG seat? They didn't even get that either.

India could have got NSG but for China.

 

[ashok321]

When the pot met the kettle: How Modi made India a lackey to the US

India is akin to a tea in a US kettle. US can pour it any time it wants.

 

[doorstar]

Oh Christ! look at their facial expressions and hand positions.

India could have got NSG but for China.

get him to stop molesting world leaders and start behaving like a statesman. Then he might be able to get somewhere, somewhere fruitful.

As things stand he looks like he is ready to mount first man he sees.

 

[ashok321]

Trump's increasingly transactional approach to international relations and narrow geopolitical calculations have generated growing American pressures on India, including to slash its $25-billion yearly trade surplus, cut back its ties with Russia and Iran, and maintain full diplomatic relations with Pakistan, despite the latter's export of terrorists.

The Trump administration did not issue a single statement in India's support during last summer's 73-day Doklam military standoff, even as Beijing threatened virtually every day to teach India a bitter lesson. By contrast, Japan publicly sided with India.

 

[doorstar]

I wonder why it looks as if Trump is holding his breath thus turning his orange hue into red.

 

[Taimoor Khan]

To be fair to Modi , the process started way back in 90s. It's a path choosen by Indian deep state.

 

[PurpleStone]

To be fair to Modi , the process started way back in 90s. It's a path choosen by Indian deep state.

Not deep state but cheap state.