Brexit: Whither Indo-British relations?
Britain, remarked a US Secretary of State, long years ago, has lost an empire and not found a role: hyperbolic perhaps, but a nice turn of wit with more than a grain of truth. The role, such as it is, has been to cleave to the United States in self-abnegation. A huge pity since a Britain, true to herself, has much to offer the world. Indo-British relations are more talked about than fulfilled. Pessimism of the intellect once had an understandable context: India was perceived as a basket case, if not wholly, very substantially. Aid India consortiums were annual fixtures for the bounteous. But since the country’s release from the licence-and-permit raj, things have changed, and are changing with increasing momentum. Two-way trade and investment in recent years have been impressive, but the best surely is yet to come through educational enterprise and easier movement of labour and capital.
The political relationship would truly take-off with deeds replacing pious words if the de-hyphenation of India with Pakistan took true effect. This would be an encouraging start.. An Indo-British relationship, hostage to jihadi vote banks in Britain, cannot move in the desired direction. Jihadi attacks on Indian cities funded, armed and operated from across the Pakistan border is terrorism and hence precludes normal Indo-Pakistan ties. Kashmir and human rights are fit subjects for close scrutiny in the private sphere. India’s deep security concerns must be appreciated, since Britain in recent years has also been subjected to jihadi depredations. Put brutally, the choice is between an India going somewhere and a Pakistan going nowhere. The cloak of policy should be cut from the cloth of the national self-interest, should it not?
Understanding America’s global disorder
The American republic established over two centuries ago, notwithstanding the exalted sentiments of its Constitution, was blighted by slavery at birth. Its founding fathers were members of a slave-owning aristocracy; their successors for the better of the next hundred years presided over the genocide of indigenous peoples of the North American continent, condemning the dwindling descendants to miserable lives in Reservations, better described as Bantustans. The American uprising against British colonial rule was a rebellion against unjust taxes and nothing more. America was a land of opportunity for the poor and oppressed peoples of Europe; its manifold achievements in business, science, technology and cinema have been (and continue to be) astounding. But its centuries of territorial expansion, largely at the expense of Mexico, and its dismal record of oppression and violence in Latin America cannot be expunged by an embellished narrative.
Its political is dysfunctional, its corporate oligarchs greedy and corrupt, the media toxic, the judiciary biased towards wealth. The hunt for enemies, real or imagined, enemies, has the fevered excitement of the chase.
There are disasters aplenty abroad. The Greater Middles is a ruin. A conflict fuelled by profligate US arms supplies to regional clients looms large. The Wahabi kingdom of Saudi Arabia, mired in Yemen, is looking to engage militarily with Iran in a wider conflagration.
President Trump, meanwhile, on his jaunt through Asia left North Korea unfazed with his threats. Mr Trump cornered Japan and South Korea for perceived malpractice in trade, thence to China and a red carpet welcome, followed by a sumptuous banquet at the Forbidden City, topped up with commercial deals worth $250 billion, and promised Chinese cooperation on North Korea. China, as the largest holder of American debt is tied to Uncle Sam by an umbilical cord neither party can afford to sever just yet.
The Trump odyssey journeyed to Vietnam for APEC summit, where the President indulged in inebriated talk of America’s Manifest Destiny. A brief handshake with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who vigorous denied any Russian meddling in the 2016 US Presidential election followed; this was followed by a sensible joint statement by the two Presidents pledging to cooperate on defeating Islamic State in Syria.
With US-Russia relations at an all-time low, the US Air Force has built a weapon for space warfare. Caligula’s horse could have shown more horse sense: the arms race is set to take a more dangerous and unpredictable turn in the new orbit of confrontation.
And what of the touted 21st century’s defining relationship between the United States and so beloved of the salivating Indian media? Volunteer for action alongside NATO in Afghanistan or Iran, or wherever free world duty calls? Without this promised aphrodisiac of an American embrace their hallucinatory world will fall apart until, that is, when President Trump wags his little finger and sets them hallucinating again.
Reflections on the Russian Revolution
It was an edit-page article in the China-leaning Hindu newspaper by a professor at the Harayana-based Asoka University, a privately funded institution, of which the Soros Foundation could well be the most generous of its donors. George Soros, a billionaire financier, who acquired his wealth betting against the pound sterling in the 1990s has devoted his last years to character assassination of targeted individuals and organizations for their perceived association and collaboration with the Russian government reminiscent of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt of the early 1950s. The professorial piece in the Hindu manifested intellectual indigence and was light years distant of recognizable scholarship.
The Russian Revolution 0f 1917, like the French Revolution of 1789, occurred during the breakdown of society in a period of intellectual ferment. Each was a world-historical event of far-reaching significance. The message of each was universal, yet the national setting and tradition played a seminal role in their subsequent development.
The Russian state, founded by Peter the Great in the late 17th century, by the end of the 18th, under Catherine the Great, had become a great European power. In the early 19th century, Tsarist Russia destroyed Napoleon’s invading Grand Army in a conflict of epic scale and endurance. The churning of the 1917 Revolution led to the empowerment of the disadvantaged sections of society, especially the poorer land hungry peasantry and the industrial proletariat. Its impact on the anti-colonial movements of the 20 th century was immense. An agrarian and largely illiterate nation was transformed into an industrialized giant that obliterated the abomination of Hitler’s Third Reich, saving the world from a new Dark Age. At end of the Second World War, Soviet Russia emerged as the second superpower after the United States.
The stupendous achievement of Russian arms is well described by the iconic American General Douglas MacArthur (no friend of Communism or communists), who writes: ‘During my lifetime I have participated in a number of wars and have witnessed and have witnessed others, as well as studying in great detail the campaigns of outstanding leaders of the past. In none of them have I observed such effective resistance to the heaviest blows of a hitherto undefeated enemy, followed by a smashing counter-attack which is driving back to his land. The scale and grandeur of the effort mark it as the greatest military achievement of in history.’
The price was the heaviest of the war: 27 million Russian dead, 11 million and more on the battlefield. Britain and America between them lost less than a million troops.
The US Ambassador in Moscow, at this time, Averell Harriman, recalled his wartime experience. ‘Stalin the War Leader… was popular and there can be no doubt that he was the one who held the Soviet Union together…I do not think anyone else could have done it, and nothing that has happened since Stalin’s death induces me to change my opinion…I’d like to emphasize my great admiration for Stalin the national leader in an emergency – one of those historical occasions when one man made such a difference. This in no sense minimizes my revulsion of his cruelties but I have to give you the constructive side as well as the other.’
The Russian Revolution had its triumphs in space and science and more than its share of human tragedy. This calls for a just balance in judgment. The historian and biographer Isaac Deutscher does so admirably in his assessment of Stalin’s legacy. ‘The better part of Stalin’s work is certain to outlast Stalin himself as the better parts of the works of Cromwell and Napoleon have outlasted them. But in order to save it for the future and give its full value, history may have cleanse reshape Stalin’s work as sternly as it once cleansed and reshaped the work of the English revolution and of the French after Napoleon.’
