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The Great Western Establishment Lie
As long as imperialism exists, it
will, by definition, exert its domination over other
countries. Today that domination is called neo-colonialism.
- Ernesto Che Guevara
Last month, I ran into an American
friend from a Washington university who had just decided to
cancel her long-planned study tour of India due to a US
State Department Public Announcement that was prominently
relayed by CNN and BBC. Her destination was Gandhinagar,
capital of Gujarat, where rare fin de siecle fashion
photographs of erstwhile royal families were open to
researchers of art history.
The warning that deterred her read
as follows: Nonessential US Government-sponsored travel
to Gujarat, including the region of Kutch, is being
postponed. Private American citizens should also defer
travel to Gujarat. US citizens who decide to travel to
Gujarat should register with the US Consulate General in
Mumbai and request an update on the situation. Tensions also
remain high in the area of Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh. Due to
the high risk of violence, US citizens are strongly urged to
avoid travel to Ayodhya or the surrounding areas.
Gandhinagar is approximately 32 km
away from the epicentre of the communal violence, Ahmedabad,
and reported to have been one of the most peaceful and
tension-free cities during the religious flare up of
March-April. While it is conceivable that American
travellers could have courted danger setting foot in
Ahmedabad, Panchmahal and Vadodara districts, the blanket
prescription not to travel to all of Gujarat’s 25 districts
as well as distant Ayodhya which was completely peaceful,
was either a reflection of supreme ignorance or of ulterior
motives in the American establishment.
How would the US have liked it if
the Indian Ministry of External Affairs issued a public
announcement in April 2001, when race riots swept
Cincinnati, that Indian travellers to and residents of Ohio
state and other Black-predominated areas, defer travel or
evacuate? How would the British government have liked it if
the Indian Ministry of External Affairs issued a directive
to all its nationals to immediately leave Manchester, Leeds
and Birmingham when the UK’s worst ever race riots erupted
in Bradford in July 2001?
Chaos theory, a major western tool
for understanding and undermining the Third World as a
teeming slum full of primordial tensions and bloody
primitive identity clashes, was the psychological
underpinning of Foggy Bottom’s exaggerated warnings on
Gujarat. But that was simply the tip of the iceberg, because
as India-Pakistan tensions arose in early June, (US
Secretary of State) Colin Powell’s South Asia "experts"
decided to release a war-scare Travel Advisory (one notch
above Public Announcement in American bureaucratese), which
read:
The Department strongly urges
that American citizens in India depart the country. The
Department of State warns Americans to defer travel to
India, particularly to all border areas between India and
Pakistan, including the Indian states of Gujarat, Rajasthan,
and Punjab, and to the state of Jammu & Kashmir.
The sweeping and misleading
extension of chaos and imminent war to Gujarat, Rajasthan
and Punjab, when the armed shelling was taking place only
across the Kashmir border, coupled with daily CNN headlines
about "nuclear armed" sub-continental rivals being on the
verge of hostilities, beg the question why China and the US
were not similarly painted as nuclear bulls when the
spy-plane ruckus exploded in May 2001. How would have George
Bush reacted if Indian intelligence came up with a corollary
to the CIA’s recent propaganda that India and Pakistan are
"closer to war than ever before" by announcing that China
and America came closest to war in May 2001 since the Taiwan
Straits crisis of 1996? The "dangerous spiral" that Donald
Rumsfeld keeps referring to in his vaunted bid to "defuse
tensions" in South Asia is more applicable and much more
dangerous in the context of the simmering state of China-US
conflict since the Bush administration came to office.
But then, China and the US are in a
different league as far as western governments and media are
concerned. They are not ‘irresponsible’ and 'trigger-happy'
like India. They are not led by "Hindu fundamentalists" like
India. They do not have fanatic 'war-mongers' in their
governmental ranks. They will not foolhardily engage in
nuclear war. They are the keepers of regional and world
security, the 'moderators' and 'crisis managers' who
together share the burden of preventing Third World
disasters. They represent the rational forces of modern
world politics which massage and smother the 'irrationality'
and preposterousness of fractious countries like India. They
work as global policemen bringing 'order' and 'sanity' to
parts of the world like South Asia, Africa and the West Asia
where fighting, warfare and hotheadedness are endemic. They
are the physicians who, to use Robert Kaplan’s influential
language, cure madhouses like India from 'societal
breakdown'.
But Orientalist hallucinations do
not fully explain the psychological war that the western
establishment and media have unleashed on India. Two
calculated and selfish American motives come across as
important causes for the 'nuclear war' bogey. First, the
Pentagon is terrified at the prospect of Pakistan
'diverting' its armed forces from the Durand Line to the LoC,
thus leaving its so-called war on terrorism in the lurch.
By raising the pitch on nuclear war
and disaster in South Asia, the US plans to attract the
collective will of the international community (even the UN
was advised to withdraw non-essential staff from India three
weeks ago) and introduce diplomatic pressure on India to not
rightfully demand Pakistan’s disengagement from terrorism in
Kashmir. Secondly, thousands of US troops hunkering down for
a near-permanent presence in South and Central Asia could be
caught in the crossfire and forced to flee if an
India-Pakistan war broke out. Rumsfeld is pulling out all
stops to occlude this unintended harm to American soldiers,
whose lives are often overrated vis-à-vis non-American
civilian and military lives (remember Somalia?).
Cold-blooded mujahideen brutalising of two-month-old Indian
babies is not America’s typical nightmare. What Washington
dreads is body bags for its GIs. Chaos theory conveniently
dovetails with this instinct of military self-preservation.
The latest distorting artillery shot
by the western press at India concerns the selection of
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam for the post of President of the
Republic. Glossing over the fact that the President of India
is a titular office that wields no real power sans the
symbolic, a brouhaha has been worked up at how 'hawkish
India' has now chosen a 'nuclear scientist' (Kalam is
actually a missile scientist) to be the new head of state. A
typical wired press report has this to say:
Just when Indo-Pak tension is
making headlines raising the threat of a possible nuclear
conflict, political parties in India have nominated the
Missile Man, APJ Abdul Kalam, to become the country's 12th
president.
I ask, isn’t Colin Powell, the
putative moderate in the Bush cabinet, a four-star General
who fought several wars? Why wasn’t there a hue and cry in
the media when he was made US Secretary of State? Why aren’t
Rumsfeld’s Cold Warrior mentality and ruinous 'forward
planning' to expand the current American war to new regions
the subject of hard-hitting journalism (save, perhaps, in
The Guardian, from London)?
Abdul Kalam is an inspirational
scientist with a visionary development-oriented plan for
India’s economic growth. His personal and public life have
been exemplary testimonies to the genuine secular project in
India, and it is a crudity to label him as 'hardliner' and 'proliferationist'.
But with the overdose of 'nuclear war' gibberish having
already been fed into viewers of western television, the
elevation of Kalam is being construed as another chapter in
a long-established pattern of Indian 'brinkmanship'. Nothing
can be farther from the truth.
To conclude, the western powers who
have waged and continue to plan the most destructive wars in
history, dropped two nuclear bombs on innocent civilians,
and brought the world to the brink of atomic catastrophe
twice during the Cold War (in 1961, during the Cuban Missile
Crisis and in 1981, when the Reagan administration
considered pre-emptive strikes on Soviet Theatre Nuclear
Weapons), need to de-escalate their barrage of lies, instead
of loose-talking about ‘de-escalating India-Pakistan
tensions.’ Reductionism is a neo-colonial speciality that
the western governments and media have internalised and
perfected like an art form. It fulfils the psychological
necessity for America and its allies to feel superior and
responsible in contrast to a tottering and ‘Humpty Dumptyish’
Third World. I am not an apologist crying foul about
‘western interference in Indian internal affairs’, as some
Indian politicos have done. What is called for is objective
and fair coverage of Indian events, so that the western
public is not co-opted into their establishment’s malignant
alarmism and myopic aims in South Asia.
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