Trump Blinked At Multipolarity

 What got lost in the din of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday celebrations, vote-chori allegations by leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi and the Asia Cup India-Pak match chatter was the fact that US President Donald Trump blinked. Modi picked up the phone when Trump called for the fifth time, now to wish him on his birthday. According to a German newspaper, Trump’s previous four phone calls were left unanswered. That was the only way to handle a bully ––– stare him down.

Early this week, the US trade negotiation team led by Assistant Trade Representative Brendan Lynch was in Delhi. And that visit was a strong indicator to show the direction the talks were taking. Why would the chief negotiator fly down if not to hasten a deal? Meanwhile, India’s Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran said yesterday that he believed that the penal sanction would not go beyond November 30. He was quick to add that his optimism is purely intuitive and not based on facts.

The details of the give-and-take between the two negotiating parties have not been made public. The prospect of Indian red lines drawn around its farm and dairy sectors and its sovereign right to engage in trade with Russia remaining or getting diluted is too early to predict, as the India-US relationship has become unpredictable altogether. Soon after the phone call, Trump has gone around repeating his boastful lie of using trade tariff to force India and Pakistan to end the conflict. Trump is vaingloriously thundering that, “I have sanctioned them.”

No wonder India is seeking alternate markets for its exports. Garments, fisheries and leather are the most affected by the sanctions. Now, the exemption to US sanctions on the Chabahar port too are being revoked. India’s Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal is on a tour to find markets for the troubled sectors in the United Arab Emirates. He is talking about doubling the $50 billion trade with UAE and seeking newer markets in Central Asia and Africa.

Multilateralism, thus, is the key to safeguard sovereignty in all its manifestations –––security, trade, et al. Trump or any other US administration will blow hot or cold depending on its political, economic and security exigencies. But India can no longer afford to be at the receiving end of Western diktats, not because of any false notions of greatness, but because of genuine fears of loss of sovereignty. Even this visit by the US trade team and Trump’s fifth phone call were necessitated by Modi’s China visit for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit.

All those who poo-pooed the idea of multilateralism as a failed notion of being friendless should now sit up and take note. Is it not India’s dexterity in walking up to the Chinese leadership that made Trump blink; that led the US trade team to visit India just two weeks after the grand Russia-India-China huddle? Even a New York real estate wheeler-dealer would know when he has overplayed the cards. And the best of intelligence networks could easily pick up signals of new possibilities in global groupings.

Imports worth $86 billion are indeed a lot, no doubt. But it is not too much for a post-colonial nation to pay for its sovereignty. While Trump and his advisors were heaping abuses and relentlessly attacking India, it refused to respond, instead quietly mending its relations with China. Import markets can be found elsewhere, but sovereignty once lost will be lost forever. In today’s world, China offers a countervailing force and multipolarity.

India’s urgency was not met with cold cynical calculations. China’s response of warmly inviting, respectfully hosting and offering the all-important visual symbolism of the Russia-India-China pull-aside at Tianjin proved that the Asian giant is willing to play its role in balancing the geopolitical poles. Russian President Vladimir Putin had a big hand in making all this possible, but not without equal Chinese enthusiasm. This balancing act cannot be a one-off, but a perennial struggle to retain strategic autonomy to fight forces of neocolonialism.

In fact, Western enthusiasts baulk at this term. But if the Indian government had acceded to the Western diktat and stopped buying crude oil from Russia, India would have effectively become a neo-colonial vassal without sovereign agency. India refused to budge. It was at that juncture, the Russia-India-China huddle helped to restore the balance. Had it not happened there would have had no compulsion for Lynch to travel or Trump to call. The huddle worked.

That is a lesson that India needs to carry for two reasons: One, India shares a 3500-km-long civilisational border with China, unlike those created by the British with Pakistan and Bangladesh. It is militarily impractical and economically inconceivable to have inimical relations with a superpower on one’s border. Two, when China guarantees multipolarity, it is worth holding hands because unipolarity would only mean strategic servitude. So, it is in India’s interest to have a peaceful border and to strengthen multipolarity, which assures trade with everyone including the US.

The latest development of Pakistan-Saudi Arabia mutual defence pact signed by Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pak PM Shehbaz Sharif yesterday with Pak army chief Asim Munir accompanying him should be seen more in the context of Trump feting Munir than as an immediate aftermath of Isreal’s attack on Hamas leaders in Qatar. Pakistan has never posed an existential threat to Israel like Iran, and in return the Zionists never attempted to take out Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and missiles, which many believe are guarded by the West.

After all, West Asia was carved up by the British after the demise of the Ottoman empire making many Persian Gulf countries a Western creation like Pakistan. When two of them come together, it obviously cannot be against a third, favourite child of the same forces. Any Pak defence pact directly threatens India, particularly in the context of Op Sindoor. If this is another attempt by the West to corner India, it need only move eastwards opening its doors and windows to easterly winds of change.

Containing China, Threatening India

The letter “z” is pronounced as ijjed, issed or sometimes zed and rarely zee in India. Coming to think about it, these variations are a function of geography, mother tongue-influence and social class. In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, it is ijjed and that makes one wonder who would be calling themselves gen zee in neighbouring, poorer Nepal. Obviously, only the western educated, the wealthy or the Thamel crowd that caters to Western tourists; not the poor, unemployed, angry, frustrated young man who is waiting to catch a bus to Sitamarhi and then to Delhi to sell momos on the streets.

That seething youngster on the bus wouldn’t have a clue about “nepo babies”. In fact, only nepo babies use this term to attack fellow favourites of the entitled class. To see this phrase on a banner carried around as part of the anarchic violence is to identify a telltale sign of the well-heeled triggering a regime change, after failing to win elections. A viral video clip of a school kid adds to this doubt. A boy in expensive school uniform with a fake Western accent is attacking political parties over unemployment and corruption without probably ever having suffered lack of opportunity. His breathless schoolboy performance (now when seen during the violence) tragically ended up as a bad rehearsal for what happened later ––– cruel cops shooting down boys in school uniform. Then there are theories abound on social media about a Western-funded colour revolution bringing in regime change in Nepal.

Sudan Gurung, a 36-year-old activist at the centre of the tumultuous episode in Kathmandu, fits the bill. He used to run a nightclub OMG and became a “born-again” philanthropist after the 2015 earthquake, launching Hami Nepal, a non-governmental organisation (NGO). But the problem here is two-fold: Only a nepo baby can have a nightclub at the age of 26, whether he is in Kathmandu or Delhi. And if the nightclub is indeed in Thamel, then he ought to have very wealthy and hugely indulgent parents. Then again, only the blue-blooded can pull family strings to get multinationals like Coca Cola and Al Jazeera to support an NGO. That is how sickeningly nepotistic the Indian subcontinent is. But if Gurung had built his nightclub and his NGO with his own money and networking skills, then undoubtedly, he deserves to be the executive president of Nepal.

But the plot of a political upheaval unravels in its process and the identification of the beneficiary. Here, one can see that as in Bangladesh, the army let vandalism and violence play out before stepping in as an arbiter. A redux of the Bangladesh drama. It was army chief Waker-uz-Zaman, who announced Sheikh Hasina’s resignation on August 5, 2024, after the student protests. Two days later he invited the unelected Western darling Mohammed Younus as the new head the of the interim administration. The uncanny similarity gives away the plot.

According to news reports, Nepal Prime Minister KP Oli was asked to resign by army chief Ashok Kumar Sigdel as a precondition for restoring peace. Soon after ensuring Oli’s exit, Sigdel asked former Chief Justice of Nepal Sushila Karki to head the interim government. Nepal’s Constitution does not allow a former CJI to take up a post-retirement constitutional job. Someone’s South Asian playbook is in circulation. Elected representatives and the electoral process are getting discredited, while chosen individuals are being foisted on the nation after unconscionable violence by gen x, why or zee.

Is this a harbinger of regime change in India, as a social media influencer “followed” by a former armed forces chief, hopes? Or is it a Western attempt to contain China? Or is it both ––– containing China and threatening India. Though the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) between US, India, Japan and Australia was initiated in 2007, it became a coherent grouping only in 2017. China saw this as an attempt at containment and the Ladakh standoff of April 2020 was its response. Though India actively participated in the first-ever Quad military exercise in November 2020, it soon began diplomatic efforts to de-escalate and disengage. India did not want to play the proxy role offered by the West to clash with and diminish China ––– a role that could have destroyed its economy and security.

Once India stepped back from the Himalayan brink, governments in the Indian subcontinent began falling one after another, to be replaced by assets, proxies and tinpot generals. The first to go was Imran Khan in April 2022. He is still languishing in jail. In July 2022, the Sri Lankan government was forced to kneel down to violent street mobs in Colombo with the Prime Minister first resigning and then the President fleeing the country. Two years later, elected Prime Minister Hasina was replaced by the unelected Western favourite Younus. Now, a year after that, Nepal’s Parliament has been gutted as if those who are going to replace the current set of political leaders would all be lily white puritans.

Myanmar is reeling under a crippling civil war which offers immense potential for trouble against neighbouring countries. Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir has already warned India that the next attack would come from the east. And now Nepal is on the boil. It can be read as a Western ploy to ring fence China, something that India failed. It could also be a two-pronged strategy because this line of containment faces both China and India.

Interestingly, the immediate trigger for violence in Nepal was a ban on Western social media platforms. Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong had in a recent statement on US tariffs pointed out that the US export of software services far outweighed its import of goods. This is particularly true about social media services run by tech giants, which are a huge drain on national wealth, productive energy; and they can also be used to create political upheavals. The Nepal violence could also be seen as a warning sign to those who consider measuring the export surplus created by social media platforms against import of goods.

Trump’s ceasefire claims underscore US’s bipartisan support for Pakistan

 

While the phone call was a bailout plan for Pakistan, the ceasefire announcement was an attempt to embarrass Modi, which Trump continues knowing well how it is playing out in Indian domestic politics

                   Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

 

The least that a mature democracy is expected to offer its men and women in uniform is a bipartisan consensus on military affairs. No cadet, when he signs up, wants a politician to berate a soldier's efforts, while calling another politician names. Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s latest jibe, “narendar-surrender” --- amplified by the Congress party spokesman, who called the PM a coward --- is a debilitating blow to the morale of the polity. Not because the PM has been attacked in the vilest possible terms, but because a successful military operation has been turned into a mean political joke. For, “surrender and cowardice” are terms that shouldn’t even be remotely associated with a military mission.

 

But wasn’t this expected? The BJP scored a domestic political point by trashing all the names offered by the Congress and hijacking the best speakers from the Opposition benches for its outreach to the rest of the world. Asaduddin Owaisi, Shashi Tharoor, Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, Manish Tiwari and Salman Khurshid were simply superb in their articulation of the national cause. The best oner-liner was from Kanimozhi. A mischievous European reporter, who came tutored about her party’s politics of Tamil linguistic pride, asked the prickly query on India’s national language. She nonchalantly replied that it is “unity in diversity”.

 

The embarrassment all this has caused the Congress party and Rahul Gandhi is immense. Three former Congress ministers have violated party’s written diktat (list) and crossed over to join the government’s team, while remaining party’s MPs. It was a body blow to Rahul and he took it badly. Rahul has claimed that US President Donald Trump made a phone call and asked Modi to stop fighting --- “Narendar surrender” is how Rahul fictitiously paraphrased Trump’s conversation. The alliteration is pedestrian and sounds like crass street politics, not statesman-like geopolitics. Then, how else could Rahul have responded to his best speakers (though he does not give them their rightful due) being stolen? He hit back the way he knows best.

 

Therein lies the problem. He did a comparison between his grandmother Indira Gandhi and Modi and claimed that nothing, not even the mighty US Seventh Fleet, could make Indira change her mind. Indira’s foreign minister Swaran Singh had signed the Indo-Soviet treaty of friendship, peace and cooperation on August 9, 1971, four months before the war began. Rahul doesn’t seem to have read Article IX of the Indo-Soviet treaty, which says, “ In the event of either Party being subjected to a threat thereof, the High Contracting Parties shall immediately enter into mutual consultations in order to remove such threat and to take appropriate effective measures to ensure peace and the security of their countries.” If this isn’t a military alliance, what is?

 

In 1971, the Soviet empire spanned across two continents from China’s border in the east to Berlin in the west. And to thwart the threatening presence of the Seventh Fleet in the Indian Ocean, the Soviet Union had deployed nuclear-armed destroyers and a submarine from Vladivostok. Thus, it was not Indira’s resolve but the Soviet missiles that cowed down the US bully. But politicians are wont to be flexible with facts, which is par for the electoral course. 

 

Now, the Russian Federation is a mere shadow of its mighty predecessor, fighting bleeding battles with what was once a part of its civilisational past, just to remain afloat as a major power, not a Super Power. In this geopolitical context, a phone call from Trump can be heeded, particularly when India’s military objectives have already been met. 

 

India was ready for de-escalation soon after hitting the terror infrastructure. There was no point in going up the escalator of escalating damages. Already 11 airbases deep inside Pakistan were targeted, there were no tactical or strategic objectives to be met, it was the right moment to push the ceasefire button. War after all is diplomacy by other means and not an end in itself. Also, Trump’s call underlined in no uncertain terms that India cannot obliterate Pakistan, it cannot bomb Pakistan “back to the stone age”, and that the West will not remain a mute spectator to the humiliation of Pakistan. The West will intervene, discredit India and protect Pakistan and reaffirm the Western solidarity with IMF and World Bank loans.

 

In fact, the biggest takeaway for India from this limited conflict is that the US foreign policy remains bipartisan despite Trumpian eccentricities. All the electoral sloganeering of ab ki bar Trump sarkar and mera dost Donald Trump hasn’t made any difference to the US establishment. It began lecturing India about buying arms from Russia, not long after Trump’s phone call. The timing couldn’t have been just coincidence as Trump keeps on talking about his mediation --- the latest was during his conversation with President Putin on June 4, which was reported by Presidential aide Yuri Ushakov. 

 

Was Trump’s intervention only a quid pro quo for a crypto currency deal that Pakistan has allegedly made with his family-owned company World Liberty Financial Inc or was it also meant to embarrass Modi? His out-of-turn announcement of the ceasefire, sure had the Trump signature, but also the desired destabilising effect on domestic Indian politics. The ceasefire announcement and the repeated reference to it have elements of the long term regime change plan which the previous administrations and the so-called Deep State actors like George Soros had laid down over many years in India.

 

This was a much needed reality check for the Modi government. Something that our national security planners should factor in while wargaming kinetic counter measures against terror strikes by Pakistan’s semi-state actors. If the West continues to treat Pakistan as a military ally for whom it will make calls that would embarrass the Indian leadership, should not the latter rethink its membership of Quad? Is Quad really beneficial for India? If Quad is the only reason and provocation for China’s aggressive standoffs at Doklam and Ladakh, wouldn’t India be better off stepping out of NATO's replica in the Indian Ocean? There are no nuclear-armed destroyers and submarines waiting to sail into Bay of Bengal at India’s call. The West watches India with suspicion. India has to look East.

WHY THE WEST IS ANGRY OVER OP SINDOOR

 The new Indian doctrine calls the Western world’s bluff; Pak N-bomb is not an Islamic bomb aimed at Western world but leg irons to keep India down

 

The India-Pakistan conflict ended with bare minimum trouble to everyday civilian life but with a dramatic disruption in the region’s geopolitics. India has unveiled its new doctrine to call Pakistan’s nuclear bluff --- rather the sham should be rephrased as the Western World’s Pakistan Nuclear Bluff. It all started with the euphoria in the Western media over the shooting down of a Rafale jet. Of course, aircraft get shot down during combat routinely and that is called war wastage (Britain lost 8325 aircraft during WWII). What matters is the precision bombing of the targets, which was carried out with elan.

A news report that got circulated in journalistic WhatsApp groups in the initial hours of the conflict, purportedly published by a British newspaper, had a celebratory outburst about Pak-Chinese air defence mechanisms supported by a network of satellites not allowing a single Indian Air Force aircraft to even take off.

The malicious glee lent itself to high-strung hype: “India now knows that any venture into Pakistani airspace invites death trap orchestrated by J-10Cs, PL-15s, and Pakistani resolve…” Then comes the doggerel: “So, they stay back. Grounded by fear. Blinded by radar. And humiliated by silence… At that speed the Indian pilot had 9 seconds. Not enough to react. Not enough to survive. You don’t see the Indian Air Force over Kashmir anymore.  Because every time a fighter lifts off, Pakistani radars pick it up… India’s Pain, Pakistan’s Message.”

Predictably, 'pain' and 'message' had P and M in capital letters. It ought to have been published in a Pakistani newspaper because it was Pakistani propaganda at its worst. Well, when Elizabeth Windsor took her coronation oath in 1953 she had counted Pakistan as her territory; however, this time, her son Charles skipped mentioning the favourite colony. Why else would any newspaper not see the damage inflicted on the terror training facilities in Muridke and Bahawalpur? How could these two have been bombed deep inside Pakistan territory without Indian aircraft or missiles targeting them? Or do western war poets believe that only Rafale would get “blinded” by the radar while all the other Indian projectiles would hit the Pak targets precisely? Soon, there was a newer version of the same story with a disclaimer that the earlier effort was fabricated.

This was worse than Indian TV journalists’ monkey tricks. They are used to embarrassing themselves, and keep doing them for Television Rating Points. But there is no TRP war to be won by writing bad poetry for Pakistanis. Or was the “fabricator” trying to make Churchill proud? It was as if Churchillian hatred for India as British foreign policy was written, exhibited and hung on a brilliantly-lit billboard on the London bridge for all to see. Not just the British, other Western media too peddled Pakistani lies.

That brings us to the question: did India lose out as the Western media would want us to believe? Not one bit. Donald Trump has zero credibility at home and abroad. Nobody, least of all himself, takes Trump seriously. If at all Trump has achieved anything, he has only blown up the possibility of QUAD ever becoming operational in the Indo-Pacific. After US’s attempt to play the Pakistani nuclear bluff, re-hyphenate India and Pakistan, inviting the two to a neutral territory, and talking cheap trade, Trump has no friends left atop Raisina Hill. India categorically rejected all his claims. In an emphatic assertion of India’s independent foreign policy, the Prime Minister called the Western bluff --- the nuclear threat won’t work any longer.

It is indeed a Western bluff because the West never exhibited any nervousness about Pakistan’s nuclear programme as it has about the Iranian and Iraqi programmes. For Iran, a N-bomb is a guarantor of its sovereignty, but for Pakistan it is only a deterrent against India’s prosperity. Without Western “sanction”, Pakistan would never have built its nuclear arsenal and without the Western patronage Pakistan’s nuclear weapon programme would never have become a blackmail facilitator for terror attacks against India.

Yes, that is exactly what it is. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are only meant to guarantee continued covert operations against India without counter action.

If Israel can bomb the Parchin nuclear research facility 30 kms east of Teheran (and about 40 years ago the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq), why didn’t the West ever get the Pakistani bomb dismantled? Why isn’t Isreal threatened by the Pak N-bomb? The aerial distance between New Gwadar International Airport and Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv is only 2800 kms and that is roughly the range of Pakistan’s Shaheen – III missile. If the Pak army launches the missile from Taftan on the Iranian border, the distance will only be about 2500 km. But the Israelis have never sweated over Pakistani bombs or missiles. For, the Pakistani bomb is not an Islamic Bomb aimed at the Western world, but mere leg irons to keep India down.

Modi has scripted a doctrine to break these Western-made Pakistani nuclear shackles and this may get counted as his greatest achievement. Whether India hit the Kirana Hills nuclear storage facility or not is too sensitive for loose talk, but India did exhibit that it won’t shy away from responding to grave provocation simply because Pakistan has nuclear weapons. This time the escalation was so effective that 11 Pak airfields were rendered useless. There are Indians who doubt the efficacy of this doctrine wondering whether India can afford to kinetically respond every time a few terrorists open fire at innocent civilians. Unfortunately, the answer ought to be yes.

For, these are not stray terrorists opening fire at their free will, but Pakistani military-intelligence establishment’s foot soldiers. They are unleashed for tactical reasons by the Pakistan Army. That realisation, as enunciated by the PM in his address on May 12, is the bedrock of the new doctrine. Pakistanis cannot launch mini, micro or major operations using its semi-state actors with the generals hiding behind them. Pakistan Army, unlike most other armies, exists only for itself. So, India cannot continue to bleed from a thousand cuts simply because a Quran-spouting Mullah in battle fatigues wants a promotion and a baton.

Truth and reconciliation

nous indica 

The Tribune, August 31, 2018

Khalistan agenda is not a freedom of speech issue as UK tried to make out


Rajesh Ramachandran


Last year, around this time, a convicted rapist and a murderer, Gurmeet Ram Rahim, managed to get about 36 of his own followers killed to prove his clout. Recently, a bishop brought in busloads of his flock of faithful sheep to show his strength when he was getting questioned in a rape case. We, as a society, are so blind, ignorant and greedy that any felon could get a few truckloads of supporters to defend him. Religious and social organisations have copied the depraved politicians so well that the charlatans have all become one indistinguishable vile whole. What fuels these tricksters is money. The pro-Khalistan sloganeers among the Punjabi diaspora are no different. When a poor Punjabi is offered asylum in the name of religious persecution, he is forever obliged to shout the slogans of those who made him a citizen of the first world. The logic is so simple and compelling that the Khalistan 2020 rally in London was merely a rerun of many things past.

Why just blame the asylum-seeker? Even a well-heeled columnist while seeking foreign hospitality recently snarled at The Tribune for this very same reason. The Tribune has been taking on foreign governments in its editorials and news pages for supporting, sponsoring and sheltering religious secessionists. So, like one of those faithful in the bus (business class for sure), this columnist too shouted slogans against The Tribune. Ideally, such people ought to be writing for The Civil and Military Gazette (the pro-British newspaper which was The Tribune’s competitor in Lahore) or its contemporary Internet versions. The Khalistan agenda is not an issue of freedom of speech as the UK government recently tried to make out. The Khalistan religious secessionist movement has claimed the lives of a Prime Minister, a Chief Minister and thousands of innocent Punjabis, mostly Sikhs. So, a Khalistani flag symbolises two decades of terror, deprivation and death. And that was unfurled early this month at Trafalgar Square because the UK government seems to be completely unaware of all those years of murder and mayhem in Punjab and thought it was the secessionists’ right to “gather together and demonstrate their views, provided that they do so within the law”.

Whose law? The imperial law obviously, which did not apply to the colonies. The religious secessionist militancy is truly dead and buried in Punjab. All the attempts to revive it are only being made abroad, primarily in Canada and the UK. In fact, the religious fanatics seeking a separate Islamic state of Kashmir, too, made common cause with the Khalistanis in London. Well, the British policy on J&K was explicit from the days of the initial trouble in October 1947. “It would have been natural for Kashmir to eventually accede to Pakistan on agreed terms,” Narendra Singh Sarila quotes the then British secretary of state for Commonwealth relations in his brilliantly researched book, The Shadow of the Great Game.

The creation of Pakistan, this former ADC to the last Viceroy Mountbatten argues quoting chiefs of staff, was a British strategic requirement. General Leslie Hollis even predicted an India-Pak war as early as May 1947: “Our link with Pakistan might have a stabilising effect on India as a whole, since an attack by Hindustan on Pakistan would involve Hindustan in war, not with Pakistan alone, but also with the British Commonwealth.” The Partition was done not out of love for Jinnah but for strategic facilities like the Karachi port and the north western air bases. The Muslim League was routed in the 1937 elections, winning just 108 out of the 408 seats reserved for Muslims. Even the North West Frontier Province, with 95 per cent Muslims, had overwhelmingly voted for the Congress, thus proving beyond doubt that the separate electorates did not automatically endorse the two-nation theory. Yet, the British nourished and nurtured Jinnah to the eventual strategic objective of India’s Partition. General Hollis had explained it plainly: “Quite apart from the positive arguments in favour of this course we would draw your attention to the sorry result of refusing an application by Mr Jinnah — which would, in effect, amount to ejecting a numerous and loyal people from the British Commonwealth. We should probably have lost all chances of ever getting strategic facilities anywhere in India (the subcontinent); we should have shattered our reputation in the rest of the Muslim world and could not look for the continued cooperation of Middle Eastern countries. From the military point of view such results would be extremely bad.”

It was the British military goal of containing a rising Soviet Union and manipulating the oil-rich Muslim world that led to the holocaust and the forced migration of millions of people. But why should the UK host the Khalistan 2020 meet now, particularly when the Indian agencies are shouting from the rooftop that they have proof of ISI involvement in the entire enterprise? Now that Pakistan and China are staunch allies and Russia is supplying hardware and training the Pakistanis, does it really serve the Anglo-Saxon purpose to keep mutilating the Indian soul? The assault on the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee head in the US and the heckling of Congress president Rahul Gandhi in the UK by Khalistanis are proof of the hospitality offered to them.

No people have loved their old colonisers as much as Indians. Our national movement was a strange combination of admiration for colonial institutions like the judiciary and hatred for foreign rule. Shakespeare is more important for us than Bhasa. But as a society we need to rethink whether it is a good idea to invest in countries that promote religious secessionism in India. You can always get a few people in your bus to call us names, but that only underscores our integrity.