As Ukraine enters the second month of standing up to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s so-called “special military operations,” Kiev’s Western friends continue to escalate their anti-Russian rhetoric, but with little impact. It is anyone’s guess how long Ukraine will be able to sustain itself in this manner.

So far, other than their fitful, late and limited military supplies, Ukraine’s Western friends have shown indulgences only in their repeated standing ovations to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s online speeches followed by one more bout of escalating frenzy about economic sanctions.

What explains the inability of the US and its Western allies to stand up to Putin’s military adventures one after another starting from Moldova, to Georgia, and Crimea to now? What does it mean to US global leadership, to its equations with its newfound friends like India and to its standing up to China in the Indo-Pacific region?

The reality is that the West has stood firm only in its refusal to give in to Zelensky’s requests to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, supply him with more potent defense equipment, or immediately stop purchasing of Russian oil and gas, let alone granting Ukraine membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or even the European Union, to which he has formally applied.

Doing any such thing, they say, would entail directly engaging Putin and facing prospects of a nuclear confrontation and World War III.

The reality is that even on its main weapon of economic sanctions, the West remains a divided house, with the European Union pushing complete cessation of Russian energy imports to the end of the year, hoping that the Ukraine crisis will be over by that time.

Indeed, in the first four weeks of the crisis, Europe paid US$18.7 billion for Russian gas and oil, thereby continuing as the world’s second-largest importer of Russia energy.

In fact, other than China as the largest buyer of Russia oil, the next five largest buyers – the Netherlands, Denmark, South Korea, Poland and Italy – are all close US allies. More than 40% of German gas is imported from Russia.

Upping the ante on India

It is against this backdrop that India’s decision this week to buy 3 million barrels of Russian oil seems to have tipped the balance for the US and its allies to attempt to tame India’s “divergent” behavior.

This has triggered a flurry of visits, starting with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and US Under Secretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, plus online conversations between the prime ministers of Australia and the United Kingdom and India’s prime minister, among others.

Having barely managed to ban its own oil imports from Russia and get its European allies to agree gradually to reduce and ban Russian imports by end of this year, the US feels threatened by the possibility of India becoming another large-scale buyer of Russian gas and oil.

After all, India is the world’s second-largest oil importer, and its oil imports account for more than 85% of its total oil consumption. Especially in the face of rising oil prices and its pandemic-hit economy, India is bound to be attracted by deep discounts on Russian oil, gas and other commodities.

Indeed, in the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, India’s repeated abstentions from UN resolutions had led the US to initiate private conversations to convey to New Delhi how its “stance of neutrality” placed it “in Russia’s camp,” which it saw as “the aggressor in this conflict.”

But Moscow has had similar expectations of India standing by its side. Staying non-aligned and steering clear from military alliances has been the central axis of India’s foreign policy, and New Delhi understands the costs of taking sides.

But India standing its ground against Western prodding has made European and North American governments increasingly impatient.

On Monday, for instance, US President Joe Biden publicly called out India’s stand as “somewhat shaky,” while State Department spokesman Ned Price went a step further, alluding to America’s inability to fathom India’s argument of its time-tested defense ties with Moscow when “the times have changed. They have changed in terms of our willingness and ability to be a strong defense and security partner of India.”

She also described the Ukraine crisis as a “major infection point in the autocratic-democratic struggle” and how the US and its European allies could help India overcome its dependence on Russian defense supplies.

Western experts repeatedly allude to the annualized value of India-US trade being $150 billion compared with $8 billion between India and Russia. But that again does not seem enough. Successive US leaders have repeatedly made it clear that they would like to replace Russia as India’s main defense supplier.

India’s proactive neutrality

Without doubt, the Ukraine crisis has impacted India in multiple ways beyond this increasing cost of Western displeasure. Indeed, neither Moscow nor Washington had anticipated India standing firm on its stance of proactive neutrality as shown by its abstentions from all UN resolutions on Ukraine, including this Wednesday’s resolution by Russia.

New Delhi’s expressed first priority was safely bring home home more than 22,500 Indian citizens, which it has done, along with 147 foreign nationals of 18 other countries. The next step for India is to explore a possible role in bringing an early cessation of the violence in Ukraine by urging talks.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spoken with Putin three times and to Zelensky twice and suggested that “a direct conversation between President Putin and President Zelensky may greatly assist in ongoing peace efforts.”

Showcasing its proactive neutrality, India has also already provided 90 metric tons of humanitarian assistance to Ukraine.

India has of course refrained from publicly condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine. This is attributed to India’s long-standing defense and strategic ties with Moscow.

Addressing the upper house of India’s Parliament on Thursday, Jaishankar explained what drives this proactive neutral posture of India.

He outlined this in terms of six principles: India’s call for the cessation of violence and hostilities, a return to diplomacy and dialogue, recognition that global order is anchored on international law and respect for territorial integrality and sovereignty of all states, a call for humanitarian access to conflict situations, India providing humanitarian assistance, and finally India being in touch with the leaderships of both Russia and Ukraine as well as with all other stakeholders.

He also responded to a question from a member of Parliament on Biden’s comment on India’s stand on Ukraine as being “somewhat shaky” and maintained that India’s stand in this matter has been “steadfast and consistent” and that it knows how to respond to changing geopolitical dynamics.

The China factor

Remember, India is not the only country exploring deeply discounted Russia oil in the middle of the Ukraine crisis. As noted above, China is the largest buyer of Russia oil, followed by European and Asian allies of the US that have also continued to buy Russian gas and oil.

In fact, unlike India’s state-run oil refineries following an open process of calling for tenders, Chinese companies have been discreetly purchasing cheap Russian oil and keeping their negations confidential.

China being the real and more enduring challenge for Western nations perhaps contributes to their expectations from and overreactions to India’s neutral posture on Ukraine, one that appears nearly identical to China’s posture.

Russia waving the nuclear threat to keep the US engaged in the European theater and Russia becoming all the more dependent on China (and India), leaving the Indo-Pacific region vulnerable to China’s adventures, explains the US upping the ante on India.

Or worse, it is the imagined Russia-China-India triangular partnership synergizing in the midst of the Ukraine crisis that explains Western paranoia about India’s neutrality on Ukraine crisis.

This Western skepticism of course gets especially reinforced by how, in the midst of India-China border tensions and the Ukraine crisis, Chinese Foreign minister Wang Yi visits New Delhi and the Chinese media begin, out of blue, to criticize US “hypocrisy” on India’s “refusal to follow the US lead in condemning and sanctioning Russia.”

asiatimes.com

The scheduling of the QUAD ministerial meeting in Canberra on February 9 right in the middle of the Ukraine crisis and cascading U.S.-Russia tensions served to highlight that China remains Washington’s top foreign policy priority.

Possibly, Washington also gave a nuanced message that it has the capability to simultaneously tackle China and Russia. Washington probably hoped that such messaging would resonate in the Asia-Pacific region, which largely refuses to take sides between the U.S. and China.

Conceivably, the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken set out for Canberra with a plan to persuade the QUAD to get on board its “dual containment” strategy. The QUAD ministerial was held just five days after the joint China-Russia statement issued in Beijing on February 4 heralding a new era in the world order. When China and Russia support and supplement each other, it is a game changer. Simply put, they pose a strategic defiance of the so-called “rules-based order” that QUAD notionally upholds.

Whether Blinken tried to insert “Russian aggression” into the agenda of the Canberra ministerial is a moot point. In all probability, he tried. Blinken’s deputy, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel J. Kritenbrink and the Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne who hosted the ministerial disclosed to the media beforehand that the grouping would discuss the “challenges” that China and Russia posed.

Blinken reportedly exhorted the QUAD partners to stand up for a rules-based system threatened by “Chinese aggression” and warned that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could happen any time now. The Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi told Blinken that Tokyo “shared grave concerns” over Russian military buildup while Payne went several steps ahead to say that the “Russian military build-up on Ukraine’s border has deeply concerned Australia and our allies and partners.”

Interestingly, India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar refused to be drawn into the topic of Russia. Curiously, Jaishankar also openly disagreed with the U.S.’ policy to sanction Myanmar, saying that as a neighbouring country, Delhi needs a working relationship with the military leadership in Nay Pyi Taw over security issues.

The Americans used to regard Jaishankar as something of a godfather to the QUAD in the good old times. But India, like most countries, is increasingly unsure about the consistency and dependability of U.S. policies and strategies. Above all, between now and the 2024 parliamentary elections, the government will be preoccupied with the post-pandemic recovery of the economy. Biden’s America First policy has nothing to offer India on that front. There is realisation that India’s tensions with China must be kept under check. Washington, on the contrary, thrives on — and even fuels — India China tensions.

All the same, the Biden Administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy document, which was released by the White House last week (coinciding with the QUAD ministerial), says effusively that “We (U.S.) recognise that India is a like-minded partner and leader in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, active in and connected to Southeast Asia, a driving force of the QUAD and other regional fora, and an engine for regional growth and development.” The Americans know that such a characterisation of India as a larger than life friend and ally would annoy Beijing. But it is a sound investment, given the Biden Administration’s stated plans to “strengthen the QUAD as a premier regional grouping and ensure it delivers on issues that matter to the Indo-Pacific.”

In the final analysis, the joint statement issued after the Canberra ministerial steered clear of the topic of Ukraine and/or Russia. The Australian media reports attributed this entirely to India’s reservations. At the joint press conference after the ministerial too, Jaishankar brusquely shrugged off a question on the topic, while his Australian counterpart Payne and Blinken gleefully condemned “Russian aggression”.

Suffice to say, the QUAD is a queer entity, as each of its four members has own expectations out of the grouping. The Indian officials saw the Canberra meeting as an opportunity to “review ongoing QUAD cooperation and build on the positive and constructive agenda… to address contemporary challenges such as the COVID pandemic, supply chains, critical technologies (and) climate change.” During the past year or two, signs began appearing that India hoped to “depoliticise” its QUAD membership, lest its optics as an anti-China clique needlessly antagonised Beijing and might only complicate the ongoing bilateral efforts to resolve the border tensions. But all the same, India continues to look for opportunities behind the closed door to push back China. It is a difficult manoeuvring since India is also loathe to subserving as a geopolitical tool for the U.S. against China.

Basically, the QUAD is yet to prove itself to be a capable mechanism that can yield concrete results in countering China’s deep and extensive ties all across the Indo-Pacific region. All hopes are now pinned on the unveiling of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) that U.S. President Joe Biden announced last October during the East Asia Summit. Biden indicated that the IPEF is expected to define shared objectives around trade facilitation, standards for the digital economy and technology, supply chain resiliency, decarbonisation and clean energy, infrastructure, worker standards, and other areas of common interest.

Basically, the hype notwithstanding, IPEF seems to be another geopolitical tool for the U.S. to energise the Indo-Pacific Strategy in the economic field focused on China’s exclusion from supply chains, access to high technology, infrastructure development, digital trade, etc. It is driven more by the unease over America’s glaring absence from any major regional trade agreements and the angst over China’s expanding influence in the region rather than offering a new platform to stimulate economic growth. The regional countries are unlikely to feel enthused.

The joint statement issued at Canberra lacks substance. But that doesn’t mean the QUAD’s time is up. Paradoxically, all four partners cannot do without the QUAD format. It provides an umbrella to huddle together behind closed doors and give vent to their grouse against China in hushed tone — a safety valve for pent-up frustrations. The attempts to create a “QUAD Plus” with the induction of countries like South Korea and Vietnam have failed.

The latest spin is that QUAD isn’t about “standing against anyone in particular,” as Blinken stated in an interview in Canberra. “It is about standing up for a rules-based order, making sure that we uphold those rules and principles if they’re being challenged,” he claimed. There is an apparent unwillingness to single out China by name while discussing the QUAD’s goals. This is intriguing. Thus, the Canberra meeting of QUAD ministers ended up discussing a range of issues, from coronavirus vaccine to maritime and cyber security to countering disinformation, climate change and so on. But it did not mention China.

For sure, the QUAD is running against time and tide. On the same day of the QUAD ministerial, reports appeared that the European Union and China are set to hold a virtual summit on 1st April in a high-stakes diplomatic effort to bring to the centre stage their partnership and economic competition for more attention, relegating to the back burner the U.S.-induced “systemic rivalry” with China. Both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang will join the meeting.

India and Pakistan share a long border and do not get along well, to put it mildly.  The main cause of disagreement is the divided territory of Kashmir which as long ago as 1948 necessitated UN Security Council attention, resulting in a Resolution determining, among other things, that there should be a “free and impartial plebiscite to decide whether the State of Jammu and Kashmir is to accede to India or Pakistan.”  This has not happened and the seemingly insoluble dispute could well lead to a fourth war between the countries, both of which are nuclear-armed.

It might be thought that in such circumstances the world’s “best-educated, best-prepared” nation that President Biden also declares has “unmatched strength” would apply at least some of its education, preparation and power to encouraging India and Pakistan to engage in meaningful negotiations and move towards rapprochement.

Not a hope.

US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman recently visited India and Pakistan, but rather than attempting to coax and persuade her host nations to reduce bilateral tension and confrontation she publicly insulted Pakistan and urged India to cooperate militarily even more closely with the US.  She widened the chasm of polarisation in a public speech in India’s commercial centre, Mumbai, by declaring “We don’t see ourselves building a broad relationship with Pakistan, and we have no interest in returning to the days of hyphenated India-Pakistan. That’s not where we are. That’s not where we’re going to be.” Not content with demonstrably taking sides and thus stoking fires in a tinder-box region, she said that when she went on to Pakistan next day her discussions there would be for “a very specific and narrow purpose”, and everything that was discussed would be passed on to India because “we share information back and forth between our governments”.

The reasons for this surge in US support for India in its face-off with Pakistan are not hard to detect, and the main one is that India and China are at loggerheads, and indeed in a state of aggressive military standoff.  Any country in disagreement with China is automatically regarded with approval by Washington, while any country that actively cooperates with China — like Pakistan — is equally automatically considered to be an enemy of freedom.

The US needed Pakistan during its 20-year military occupation of Afghanistan, and attempted to use successive governments in Islamabad to assist in its operations.  But now that it and the Nato military alliance and some 300,000 members of Afghanistan’s own military forces have been decisively routed by about 70,000 barbaric, bigoted, raggy-baggy Taliban savages, it is increasingly attractive for the Biden administration to blame anyone other than the Pentagon and the Washington establishment for the catastrophic debacle.  They claim that Pakistan helped the Taliban — and it cannot be denied that the government and its military in Islamabad maintained contact with the Afghan Taliban, for good reasons.

As I wrote some years ago, in 2007 the then head of the Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence, General Kayani (who became army chief), “told the author, in answer to a direct question, that ‘of course’ he maintained contact with some subversive groups, thereby not only holding doors ajar for negotiations but keeping track of various members of such organisations.  He stated that if he did not have some sort of contact with these people they would simply disappear and his directorate would lose what ever degree of influence it had that it might be able to bring to bear on them when the need arose.”

So he kept contact — and there was indubitable need for Pakistan’s influence and assistance in Afghanistan.

In December 2018 even Voice of America reported that after US-Taliban negotiations in Abu Dhabi “Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan… reiterated his country “will do everything within its power” to further the Afghan peace process.”  Khan is quoted as saying “Pakistan has helped in the dialogue between Taliban and the U.S. in Abu Dhabi. Let us pray that this leads to peace and ends almost three decades of suffering of the brave Afghan people.” Washington downplayed the importance of Pakistan’s assistance, but VOA acknowledged that “The U.S. spokesperson also said a recent letter from U.S. President Donald Trump to Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan ‘emphasized that Pakistan’s assistance with the Afghan peace process is fundamental to building an enduring U.S.-Pakistan partnership’.”

The International Crisis Group is objective about Pakistan and noted recently that “As early as the 2001 Bonn conference that drew up a roadmap for post-invasion Afghanistan, Pakistan had asked for the Taliban’s inclusion in consultations on Afghanistan’s constitutional and political restructuring. A former senior Pakistani diplomat said Pakistan had ‘pleaded with the U.S. to include the Taliban in Bonn’. Pakistan’s consistent efforts to persuade the U.S. to bring the Taliban into the political mainstream appeared to bear fruit a decade later, when the Obama administration signalled its intention to leave Afghanistan and its openness to talking with the Taliban.”  And the numerous attempts to move to a peaceful solution staggered along, aided by Pakistan’s influence, which incurred the wrath of Washington on the grounds that Pakistan provided “safe havens to terrorist organisations”.

The fact that before the US invasion in 2001 Pakistan had suffered only one suicide bombing (by a nutty Egyptian trying to blow up his embassy) and that in the period January 2002 to October 10, 2021, as calculated by India’s South Asia Terrorism Portal, there were 594 suicide attacks, killing over 5,000 civilians, might seem at variance with allegations that Pakistan likes terrorists, as does the fact that 1231 members of the military have been killed as a result of the US war, including 24 who died in a particularly savage strafing attack by US strike aircraft on the Pakistan side of the border with Afghanistan.

Not only has Pakistan suffered enormously from terrorist barbarism, there are about 1.4 million registered Afghan refugees in the country along with a further 1.5 million unregistered — and more are flooding in following the recent debacle.  Social, economic and security problems arising from the presence of these exiles continue to be enormous, yet the US refuses to acknowledge that there could be great difficulty in identifying Taliban sympathisers or adherents among the millions.  And, as an Atlantic Council analyst points out, “US policymakers have turned a blind eye to the negative impact of an unstable Afghanistan on Pakistan . . .”

But Pakistan is on Washington’s back-burner and President Biden won’t speak with Prime Minister Imran Khan, which is regarded by Pakistan as a deliberate insult. On the other hand, the President warmly greeted Indian Prime Minister Modi to the White House in September and was effusive in declaring that he wanted “to welcome my friend — and we have known each other for some time — back to the White House.  And, Mr. Prime Minister, we’re going to continue to build on our strong partnership.”

Washington’s continuing bias regarding India versus Pakistan will serve no useful purpose for the US.  It will drive Pakistan closer to China, with which it already has most extensive and important economic ties, and bolster India’s determination to step up its dangerous face-off with Beijing.  Washington wants to conquer by dividing the sub-continent, but all it’s doing is increasing the probability of greater confrontation which will lead to conflict. Wendy Sherman’s declaration that “We don’t see ourselves building a broad relationship with Pakistan” was a major diplomatic blunder that fueled the fires of  hostility.

Biden and his hawks should pause to think where they’re trying to take the world, and consider an approach that could lead to negotiation and compromise rather than encouraging India and Pakistan on a course to war.

counterpunch.org

India and Pakistan share a long border and do not get along well, to put it mildly. The main cause of disagreement is the divided territory of Kashmir which as long ago as 1948 necessitated UN Security Council attention, resulting in a Resolution determining, among other things, that there should be a “free and impartial plebiscite to decide whether the State of Jammu and Kashmir is to accede to India or Pakistan.” This has not happened and the seemingly insoluble dispute could well lead to a fourth war between the countries, both of which are nuclear-armed.

It might be thought that in such circumstances the world’s “best-educated, best-prepared” nation that President Biden also declares has “unmatched strength” would apply at least some of its education, preparation and power to encouraging India and Pakistan to engage in meaningful negotiations and move towards rapprochement.

Not a hope.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman recently visited India and Pakistan, but rather than attempting to coax and persuade her host nations to reduce bilateral tension and confrontation she publicly insulted Pakistan and urged India to cooperate militarily even more closely with the U.S. She widened the chasm of polarisation in a public speech in India’s commercial centre, Mumbai, by declaring “We don’t see ourselves building a broad relationship with Pakistan, and we have no interest in returning to the days of hyphenated India-Pakistan. That’s not where we are. That’s not where we’re going to be.” Not content with demonstrably taking sides and thus stoking fires in a tinder-box region, she said that when she went on to Pakistan next day her discussions there would be for “a very specific and narrow purpose”, and everything that was discussed would be passed on to India because “we share information back and forth between our governments”.

The reasons for this surge in U.S. support for India in its face-off with Pakistan are not hard to detect, and the main one is that India and China are at loggerheads, and indeed in a state of aggressive military standoff. Any country in disagreement with China is automatically regarded with approval by Washington, while any country that actively cooperates with China — like Pakistan — is equally automatically considered to be an enemy of freedom.

The U.S. needed Pakistan during its 20-year military occupation of Afghanistan, and attempted to use successive governments in Islamabad to assist in its operations. But now that it and the Nato military alliance and some 300,000 members of Afghanistan’s own military forces have been decisively routed by about 70,000 barbaric, bigoted, raggy-baggy Taliban savages, it is increasingly attractive for the Biden administration to blame anyone other than the Pentagon and the Washington establishment for the catastrophic debacle. They claim that Pakistan helped the Taliban — and it cannot be denied that the government and its military in Islamabad maintained contact with the Afghan Taliban, for good reasons.

As I wrote some years ago, in 2007 the then head of the Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence, General Kayani (who became army chief), “told the author, in answer to a direct question, that ‘of course’ he maintained contact with some subversive groups, thereby not only holding doors ajar for negotiations but keeping track of various members of such organisations. He stated that if he did not have some sort of contact with these people they would simply disappear and his directorate would lose what ever degree of influence it had that it might be able to bring to bear on them when the need arose.”

So he kept contact — and there was indubitable need for Pakistan’s influence and assistance in Afghanistan.

In December 2018 even Voice of America reported that after U.S.-Taliban negotiations in Abu Dhabi “Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan . . . reiterated his country “will do everything within its power” to further the Afghan peace process.” Khan is quoted as saying “Pakistan has helped in the dialogue between Taliban and the U.S. in Abu Dhabi. Let us pray that this leads to peace and ends almost three decades of suffering of the brave Afghan people.” Washington downplayed the importance of Pakistan’s assistance, but VOA acknowledged that “The U.S. spokesperson also said a recent letter from U.S. President Donald Trump to Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan ‘emphasized that Pakistan’s assistance with the Afghan peace process is fundamental to building an enduring U.S.-Pakistan partnership’.”

The International Crisis Group is objective about Pakistan and noted recently that “As early as the 2001 Bonn conference that drew up a roadmap for post-invasion Afghanistan, Pakistan had asked for the Taliban’s inclusion in consultations on Afghanistan’s constitutional and political restructuring. A former senior Pakistani diplomat said Pakistan had ‘pleaded with the U.S. to include the Taliban in Bonn’. Pakistan’s consistent efforts to persuade the U.S. to bring the Taliban into the political mainstream appeared to bear fruit a decade later, when the Obama administration signalled its intention to leave Afghanistan and its openness to talking with the Taliban.” And the numerous attempts to move to a peaceful solution staggered along, aided by Pakistan’s influence, which incurred the wrath of Washington on the grounds that Pakistan provided “safe havens to terrorist organisations”.

The fact that before the U.S. invasion in 2001 Pakistan had suffered only one suicide bombing (by a nutty Egyptian trying to blow up his embassy) and that in the period January 2002 to October 10, 2021, as calculated by India’s South Asia Terrorism Portal, there were 594 suicide attacks, killing over 5,000 civilians, might seem at variance with allegations that Pakistan likes terrorists, as does the fact that 1231 members of the military have been killed as a result of the U.S. war, including 24 who died in a particularly savage strafing attack by U.S. strike aircraft on the Pakistan side of the border with Afghanistan.

Not only has Pakistan suffered enormously from terrorist barbarism, there are about 1.4 million registered Afghan refugees in the country along with a further 1.5 million unregistered — and more are flooding in following the recent debacle. Social, economic and security problems arising from the presence of these exiles continue to be enormous, yet the U.S. refuses to acknowledge that there could be great difficulty in identifying Taliban sympathisers or adherents among the millions. And, as an Atlantic Council analyst points out, “U.S. policymakers have turned a blind eye to the negative impact of an unstable Afghanistan on Pakistan . . .”

But Pakistan is on Washington’s back-burner and President Biden won’t speak with Prime Minister Imran Khan, which is regarded by Pakistan as a deliberate insult. On the other hand, the President warmly greeted Indian Prime Minister Modi to the White House in September and was effusive in declaring that he wanted “to welcome my friend — and we have known each other for some time — back to the White House. And, Mr. Prime Minister, we’re going to continue to build on our strong partnership.”

Washington’s continuing bias regarding India versus Pakistan will serve no useful purpose for the U.S. It will drive Pakistan closer to China, with which it already has most extensive and important economic ties, and bolster India’s determination to step up its dangerous face-off with Beijing. Washington wants to conquer by dividing the sub-continent, but all it’s doing is increasing the probability of greater confrontation which will lead to conflict. Wendy Sherman’s declaration that “We don’t see ourselves building a broad relationship with Pakistan” was a major diplomatic blunder that fuelled the fires of hostility.

Biden and his hawks should pause to think where they’re trying to take the world, and consider an approach that could lead to negotiation and compromise rather than encouraging India and Pakistan on a course to war.

By Prabir PURKAYASTHA

The Quadrilateral group’s leaders’ meeting in the White House on Sept. 24 appears to have shifted focus away from its original framing as a security dialogue among four countries: the United States, India, Japan and Australia.

Instead, the United States seems to be moving much closer to Australia as a strategic partner and providing it with nuclear-powered submarines.

Supplying Australia with U.S. nuclear submarines that use bomb-grade uranium can violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) protocols. Considering that the United States wants Iran not to enrich uranium beyond 3.67 percent, this is blowing a big hole in its so-called rule-based international order — unless we all agree that the rule-based international order is essentially the United States and its allies making up all the rules.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had initiated the idea of the Quad in 2007 as a security dialogue. In the March 12 statement issued after the first formal meeting of the Quad countries, “security” was used in the sense of strategic security.

Before the recent meeting of the Quad, both the United States and the Indian sides denied that it was a military alliance, even though the Quad countries conduct joint naval exercises — the Malabar exercises — and have signed various military agreements. The Sept. 24 Quad joint statement focuses more on other “security” issues: health security, supply chain and cybersecurity.

Has India decided that it still needs to retain strategic autonomy even if it has serious differences with China on its northern borders and therefore stepped away from the Quad as an Asian NATO? Or has the United States itself downgraded the Quad now that Australia has joined its geostrategic game of containing China?

AUKUS

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on video with U.S. President Joe Biden during Sept. 15 announcement of the AUKUS pact. (C-Span clip)

Before the Quad meeting in Washington, the United States and the U.K. signed an agreement with Australia to supply eight nuclear submarines — the AUKUS agreement.

Earlier, the United States had transferred nuclear submarine technology to the U.K., and it may have some subcontracting role here. Nuclear submarines, unlike diesel-powered submarines, are not meant for defensive purposes. They are for force projection far away from home. Their ability to travel large distances and remain submerged for long periods makes them effective strike weapons against other countries.

The AUKUS agreement means that Australia is canceling its earlier French contract to supply 12 diesel-powered submarines. The French are livid that they, one of NATO’s lynchpins, have been treated this way with no consultation by the United States or Australia on the cancellation.

The U.S. administration has followed it up with “discreet disclosures” to the media and U.S. think tanks that the agreement to supply nuclear submarines also includes Australia providing naval and air bases to the United States. In other words, Australia is joining the United States and the U.K. in a military alliance in the “Indo-Pacific.”

Earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron had been fully on board with the U.S. policy of containing China and participated in Freedom of Navigation exercises in the South China Sea.

France had even offered its Pacific Island colonies — and yes, France still has colonies — and its navy for the U.S. project of containing China in the Indo-Pacific.

France has two sets of island chains in the Pacific Ocean that the United Nations terms as non-self-governing territories — read colonies — giving France a vast exclusive economic zone, larger even than that of the United States.

The United States considers these islands less strategically valuable than Australia, which explains its willingness to face France’s anger. In the U.S. worldview, NATO and the Quad are both being downgraded for a new military strategy of a naval thrust against China.

Australia has very little manufacturing capacity. If the eight nuclear submarines are to be manufactured partially in Australia, the infrastructure required for manufacturing nuclear submarines and producing/handling of highly enriched uranium that the U.S. submarines use will probably require a minimum time of 20 years. That is the reason behind the talk of U.S. naval and air bases in Australia, with the United States providing the nuclear submarines and fighter-bomber aircraft either on lease, or simply locating them in Australia.

Maritime Powers

Ships from the navies of the U.S., Australia, India and Japan participate in Malabar exercises in the North Arabian Sea on Nov. 17, 2020. (U.S. Navy, Elliot Schaudt)

I have previously argued that the term Indo-Pacific may make sense to the United States, the U.K. or even Australia, which are essentially maritime nations.

The optics of three maritime powers, two of which are settler-colonial, while the other, the erstwhile largest colonial power, talking about a rule-based international order do not appeal to most of the world. Oceans are important to maritime powers, which have used naval dominance to create colonies. This was the basis of the dominance of British, French and later U.S. imperial powers. That is why they all have large aircraft carriers: they are naval powers that believe that the gunboat diplomacy through which they built their empires still works. The United States has 700-800 military bases spread worldwide; Russia has about 10; and China has only one base in Djibouti, Africa.

Behind the rhetoric about the Indo-Pacific and open seas is the U.S. play in Southeast Asia. Here, the talk of the Indo-Pacific has little resonance for most people. Its main interest is in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which was spearheaded by the ASEAN countries. Even with the United States and India walking out of the RCEP negotiations, the 15-member trading bloc is the largest trading bloc in the world, with nearly 30 percent of the world’s GDP and population. Two of the Quad partners — Japan and Australia — are in the RCEP.

The U.S. strategic vision is to project its maritime power against China and contest for control over even Chinese waters and economic zones. This is the 2018 U.S. Pacific strategy doctrine that it has itself put forward, which it de-classified recently.

The doctrine states that the U.S. naval strategy is to deny China sustained air and sea dominance even inside the first island chain and dominate all domains outside the first island chain. For those interested in how the U.S. views the Quad and India’s role in it, this document is a good education.

A virtual Quadrilateral group summit with Australia, India and Japan at the White House on March 12. (White House, Adam Schultz)

As India found to its cost in Lakshadweep, the U.S. definition of the freedom of navigation does not square with India’s either. For all its talk about rule-based world order, the United States has not signed the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) either.The United States wants to use the disputes that Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia have with China over the boundaries of their respective exclusive economic zones. While some of them may look to the United States for support against China, none of these Southeast Asian countries supports the U.S. interpretation of the Freedom of Navigation, under which it carries out its Freedom of Navigation Operations, or FONOPS.

So, when India and other partners of the United States sign on to Freedom of Navigation statements of the United States, they are signing on to the U.S. understanding of the freedom of navigation, which is at variance with theirs.

The 1973 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty created two classes of countries, ones that would be allowed to use a set of technologies that could lead to bomb-grade uranium or plutonium, and others that would be denied them.

There was, however, a submarine loophole in the NPT and its complementary IAEA Safeguards for the peaceful use of atomic energy. Under the NPT, non-nuclear-weapon-state parties must place all nuclear materials under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards, except nuclear materials for nonexplosive military purposes.

No country until now has utilized this submarine loophole to withdraw weapon-grade uranium from safeguards. If this exception is utilized by Australia, how will the United States continue to argue against Iran’s right to enrich uranium, say for nuclear submarines, which is within its right to develop under the NPT?

India was never a signatory to the NPT, and therefore is a different case from that of Australia. If Australia, a signatory, is allowed to use the submarine loophole, what prevents other countries from doing so as well?

Australia did not have to travel this route if it wanted nuclear submarines. The French submarines that they were buying were originally nuclear submarines but using low-enriched uranium. It is the retrofitting of diesel engines that has created delays in their supplies to Australia. It appears that under the current Australian leadership of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Australia wants to flex its muscles in the neighborhood, therefore tying up with Big Brother, the United States.

For the United States, if Southeast Asia is the terrain of struggle against China, Australia is a very useful springboard. It also substantiates what has been apparent for some time now — that the Indo-Pacific is only cover for a geostrategic competition between the United States and China over Southeast Asia.

And unfortunately for the United States, East Asia and Southeast Asia have reciprocal economic interests that bring them closer to each other. And Australia, with its brutal settler-colonial past of genocide and neocolonial interventions in Southeast Asia, is not seen as a natural partner by countries there.

India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to have lost the plot completely. Does it want strategic autonomy, as was its policy post-independence? Or does it want to tie itself to a waning imperial power, the United States? The first gave it respect well beyond its economic or military clout. The current path seems more and more a path toward losing its stature as an independent player.

consortiumnews.com

By MK BHADRAKUMAR

A full week after External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar’s extended four-day visit to the United States, India is still in the dark as to the Biden administration’s generosity to spare some of America’s surplus stockpiles of Covid-19 vaccines.

We leap out of the famous Samuel Beckett play Waiting for Godot – of two tramps who waited by the roadside for Godot to come and set life right, but only to realize as dusk falls that He wasn’t coming after all. The tramps leave in disappointment as the curtain comes down on the stage.

Jaishankar probably tied up the scheduling of the next Quad summit. But the Serum Institute of India (SII) has been quick to draw conclusions. It has sought the approval of the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) to tackle the vaccine crisis by taking up mass production of the Russian Covid-19 vaccine Sputnik V in India.

The SII, of course, has a massive production base for making vaccines and is already selling Covishield based on the so-called AstraZeneca vaccine (“Oxford Vaccine”), which is now the mainstay of immunization for Indians.

This comes amid reports that Britain is once again asking AstraZeneca to meet new emergencies. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is a tough leader and once he sets his eye on something, he ruthlessly pursues it even if it draws the blood of Europeans or Indians.

He bluntly admitted during a Zoom meeting with Conservative members of Parliament in March, “the reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed, my friends.”

The US and UK will never agree on a waiver of intellectual property (IP) rights. Whoever put this idea into the Indian calculus played tricks with the naivete of the country’s leadership.

Russia could be the key

Taking into account President Joe Biden’s timidity and rapacity and Johnson’s self-centered attitude, it is good that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is showing signs of taking India’s vaccine strategy out of the Anglo-American basket and turning to Russia.

But all this didn’t have to happen in this haphazard way. After all, India is well aware of the great Soviet legacy in vaccine research and development. An alert government in New Delhi should have begun government-to-government discussions with Moscow the moment it came to know that the Russians were developing a vaccine. That is to say, almost a year’s time has been lost.

All the pin-pricking today by Indian states that the central government should procure the vaccine from abroad, that it should be freely supplied, blah, blah, would have been avoidable. The Russians do not have a problem dealing directly with the Indian end-user, either.

Going one step further, New Delhi could have encouraged the state governments to act boldly to set up their own manufacturing base for Sputnik V.

New Delhi could have even promoted such initiatives by providing funds. Indeed, this is not a matter of self-sufficiency alone. India also could have realized its dream to be the “world’s pharmacy.” But all this needed commitment and vision both at the central and state levels.

On the contrary, India’s elite, besotted with America and Britain, instead had their eyes cast on the vaccines developed in those two countries. That is, despite the gory past of the Western pharmaceutical companies as bloodsuckers and predators in their propensity to make fortunes out of human disease, the Indian government put all its eggs in the Anglo-American basket.

This mishap is emblematic of the Indian elite’s pro-Western mindset.

Come to think of it, even if Biden shares with India some of his extra vaccines, what does it add up to? Some 20 million doses? Jaishankar made this trans-Atlantic journey to arrange 10 million doses of vaccine for his country of 1.4 billion.

A partnership?

India could have taken to mass production of Sputnik V at least six months ago when the vaccine’s financial backers and developers announced in Moscow that they were keen to win global market share and touted the international price for Sputnik V as competitive.

Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), a sovereign wealth fund, disclosed at a November briefing that Russia (which has a limited production base) was keen to collaborate with foreign partners; that more than 50 countries had made requests for more than 1.2 billion doses; and, importantly, that the supplies for the global market would be produced by foreign partners.

He mentioned India among potential partners.

Some enterprising Indian companies indeed made a beeline to Moscow and negotiated collaboration agreements. Production of Sputnik V may soon start, which is a good thing. But precious time has been lost even as India is racing to prepare for the third wave of the Covid-19 epidemic, which is already at the gates.

Indeed, since Sputnik V was developed by the renowned state institution Gamaleya National Center and marketed by the RDIF (which comes directly under the Kremlin’s supervision), this topic should and could have been prioritized by Modi in a call with President Vladimir Putin.

What all this shows is the absence of a well-thought-out holistic strategy. Resources were never the problem; a lack of political will is. The Supreme Court has touched the core issue by demanding to know what the government has done with the 350 billion rupees (US$4.8 billion) earmarked for vaccines in the budget.

In strategic terms, the government is being exceedingly foolish in not having the big picture. The pandemic is not only a matter of public health but also threatens to destroy the Indian economy, with unthinkable consequences for future generations.

The record daily infection cases and fatalities and lockdowns combine with an exasperatingly slow vaccination drive to disrupt industrial supply chains and undermine the country’s goal of becoming a manufacturing power.

Until the beginning of this year, economists and international financial institutions still generally believed that India would become one of the fastest-growing economies in the post-pandemic era. But these projections are now up in the air.

asiatimes.com

While the incompetence of the Indian government is starkly visible in its handling of the second wave of the COVID-19 crisis, its performance has been far worse on the vaccine front. The BJP-led government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which seems to believe in the ideology of free-market capitalism, thinks that the market will magically produce the number of vaccines the country needs. This would explain why it has starved seven public sector vaccine manufacturing units—according to an April 17 article in Down to Earth—of any support instead of ramping up much-needed vaccine production.

The rights to produce the public sector vaccine, Covaxin, which has been developed by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and National Institute of Virology (NIV), in collaboration with Bharat Biotech, have been given to the private company partner on an exclusive basis. The Indian government also believed that Serum Institute of India, another private sector company and the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, which has tied up with AstraZeneca for producing Covishield, would make vaccines according to the country’s requirements without any prior orders or capital support. The government did not even see the necessity to intervene and prevent India’s new Quad ally, the U.S., from stopping sending India supplies of the required raw materials needed by India for manufacturing vaccines.

The sheer negligence by the government is further highlighted by the fact that even though India has about 20 licensed manufacturing facilities for vaccines and 30 biologic manufacturers, all of which could have been harnessed for vaccine manufacturing, only two companies are presently producing vaccines. That too is at a pace completely inadequate for India’s needs.

India has a long history of vaccine development, which can be traced back to the Haffkine Institute for Training, Research and Testing, in Mumbai, in the 1920s. With the Patents Act, 1970 and the reverse engineering of drugs by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) laboratories, the country also broke the monopoly of global multinationals. It is this change, fought for by the Left, that led to India emerging as the largest generic supplier of drugs and vaccines in the world and becoming the global pharmacy of the poor.

Bill Gates recently spoke to Sky News in the UK regarding India and South Africa’s proposal to the World Trade Organization on the need to lift intellectual property (IP) protection for COVID-19 vaccines and medicines during the pandemic. Gates claimed that IP is not the issue and that “moving a vaccine… into a factory in India… It’s only because of our grants and our expertise that can happen at all.” In other words, without the white man coming in to tell India and other middle-income countries how to make vaccines and provide them with his money, these countries would not be able to make vaccines on their own.

This is a rehash of the AIDS debate, where the Western governments and Big Pharma argued that developing generic AIDS drugs would lead to the manufacturing of poor-quality drugs and theft of Western intellectual property. Bill Gates, who built his fortune on Microsoft’s IP, is the leading defender of IP in the world. With his newfound halo as a great philanthropist, he is leading Big Pharma’s charge against the weakening of patents on the global stage. The role of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a major funder of the World Health Organization, is also to dilute any move by the WHO to share patents and knowledge during the pandemic.

Indian companies are the largest manufacturers of existing vaccines by volume in the world, according to the WHO’s Global Vaccine Market Report 2020. When it comes to measuring vaccine manufacturing by value, however, the global share held by multinational corporations or Big Pharma is much bigger than that of India. For example, as per the WHO report, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), with 11 percent of the global market by volume, generates 40 percent of the market by value, while Serum Institute with 28 percent of the market by volume has only 3 percent of the market by value. This shows that the patent-protected vaccines with monopoly pricing get much higher prices. This is the model that Bill Gates and his ilk are selling. Let Big Pharma make the big bucks even if it bankrupts the poorer countries. The Western philanthropic money of Gates and Warren Buffett will ‘help’ the poor Third World to get some vaccines, albeit slowly. As long as they get to call the shots.

The Modi government’s approach to vaccines is based on the central pillar of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ideology—which serves as the ideological parent of the ruling BJP—that the task of the state is only to help big capital. Anything else including planning is seen by the right wing as socialism. In the case of vaccines, it means not to make any attempt to get the companies, both in the public and private sectors, to make necessary preparations for a quick vaccination program: to put in the money and provide the necessary supply chain. Instead, the government believed that India’s private pharmaceutical industry would do all of this on its own.

It forgot that the Indian pharmaceutical industry was the product of public domain science—the CSIR institutions—the public sector and nationalist companies like Cipla. They all came out of the national movement and built India’s pharmaceutical industry. It is institutions like the Haffkine Institute under Sahib Sokhey’s leadership and the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) built under the leadership of Dr. Pushpa Bhargava that led to India’s vaccine and biologics capacity. It is on this base that India’s vaccine manufacturing capacity rests.

It is not niji (private) companies that built the vaccine capacity in India, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi claims. The private sector companies rode on the back of public sector science and technology that was built in the country between the 1950s and the 1990s.

The Indian government recently opened up vaccinations for all adults in the country on May 1. To vaccinate all the eligible population—above 18 years of age—India would require about 2 billion doses of the vaccine in order to give the required two shots per person. To plan for the production of an order of this size, apart from technology and capital support, India also needs to plan for the complex supply chain that is required for production. This includes raw materials and intermediate supplies such as filters and special bags. There are at least 37 “critical items” that are currently embargoed by the U.S. from exports under the Defense Production Act, 1950, a relic of the U.S.’s Korean War.

On April 16, Adar Poonawalla, head of the Serum Institute of India, had taken to Twitter to ask U.S. President Joe Biden “to lift the embargo of raw material exports out of the U.S. so that vaccine production can ramp up.”

If India puts together the production capacity of the Serum Institute, Bharat Biotech, Biological E, and Haffkine Bio-Pharmaceutical Corporation Limited, and the five other companies that have signed up to manufacture Sputnik V, developed by the Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology, India could have planned for an annual production capacity of more than 3 billion doses. If it also included the public sector units idling under the Modi government, India could have easily boosted its vaccine manufacturing capacity to 4 billion doses and produced the necessary 2 billion doses and more in 2021. It would then have made it possible for India to completely vaccinate its target population and yet have enough left to meet its export commitments including for the WHO’s Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT)-Accelerator program and its vaccines pillar of COVAX. What is missing is a planning commission that could plan this exercise and create the political will to carry it forward. Not a vacuous Niti Ayog—the public policy think tank of the Indian government—and an incompetent government.

Instead, the Modi government did not even bother to place an order with the Serum Institute until January 11, and that too for a measly 11 million doses. The next order of 120 million Covishield and Covaxin doses was placed only in the third week of March when the number of cases had reached a daily caseload of nearly 40,000, and India was well into its deadly second wave. The government seemed to bank on its belief in the magic of the capitalist market, which it thought would solve all its problems, without any real effort on the center’s part.

India and South Africa have asked the WTO to consider waiving the rules relating to intellectual property during the pandemic, and further sought that knowledge, including patents and know-how, should be shared without restrictions. This proposal has been backed by the WHO and has huge support among most countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The holdouts predictably are from the rich countries that want to protect the global vaccine market for their Big Pharma companies. Under pressure from the global community and the bad optics of the U.S. hoarding vaccines, the Biden administration has finally just decided to accept South Africa and India’s initiative of a temporary patent waiver, after stonewalling it in the WTO until now. But this waiver is restricted to vaccine patents only and does not extend to other patents or associated intellectual property as South Africa and India’s proposal had suggested. This is still a victory for the global public health community, though only a first step.

While India is spearheading the need to share know-how with all companies capable of manufacturing vaccines, it still has explaining to do as to why it has given an exclusive license to Bharat Biotech to manufacture a vaccine developed with public money and in public institutions like ICMR and NIV. Why is it not being shared under a nonexclusive license with both Indian companies and those companies outside India? Instead, ICMR is receiving royalties from Bharat Biotech from sharing its know-how exclusively with Bharat Biotech. Under public pressure, ICMR is now sharing its know-how with the government of the Indian state of Maharashtra’s public sector Haffkine Bio-Pharmaceutical Corporation Limited, while giving Bharat Biotech six months’ lead time with financial support money from the central government.

Modi had dreamed that India would be the vaccine arm of the Quad. He forgot that in order to compete with China, India needs a vaccine production base that not only takes care of its vaccination needs but also fulfills all its external commitments. China can do this because it has developed at least three vaccines already—from Sinopharm, Sinovac, and CanSino—that have been licensed to others. Their production is now being ramped up, and China is the largest supplier of vaccines to countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And it has also managed to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus, unlike India.

This is where the Modi government has failed and failed badly. An incompetent, vainglorious leadership, combined with the RSS belief in magical capitalism, has led to the disaster that we are now facing.

counterpunch.org

India is currently witnessing a COVID-19 surge of unprecedented proportions, with an allegedly triple-mutant strain stretching the nation’s healthcare infrastructure to the limits.  The uncertainty hanging over the nation is compounded by viral despatches of dead bodies piling up in morgues; of people dropping dead in the streets; of despondent souls jumping off their balconies; and of funeral pyres all over the country. There will be no public service-minded Big Tech censorship in this instance.

This is supposedly Wuhan 2.0. Any social media addict would be forgiven for thinking that India’s population of 1.3 billion might suffer a dip before the year is out.

Amidst the toxic miasma of fear-mongering, coherent explanations over this surge are hard to come by. Therefore, one needs to resort to correlations and proxies in order to gauge causations and effects. For starters, one should compare the yearly death tolls (from all causes) before and after the advent of COVID-19 in India, particularly for the year 2021. But relevant data will only be available a year from now. Many will die as a result of continued lockdowns which generally weaken the immune system. Essential medical procedures will be deferred as hospitals are compelled to focus on COVID-19.  Rising socioeconomic despair will naturally lead to a surge in suicides. In the end, not all coronavirus deaths can be directly attributed to the virus no matter how “experts” add them up.

Other correlations must also be explored in the Indian context. India was rather late in joining the mass vaccination bandwagon. Throughout 2020, its COVID-19 mortality figures were moderate by global standards due to the efficacy of low-cost treatment protocols. Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was sanctioned for early stage treatment from March 2020 onwards; while a few months later, India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh (population 231 million) replaced HCQ with ivermectin (an anti-parasitic drug).

The results were highly encouraging. As the TrialSiteNews (TSN) reported on Jan 9 2021:

By the end of 2020, Uttar Pradesh — which distributed free ivermectin for home care — had the second-lowest fatality rate in India at 0.26 per 100,000 residents in December. Only the state of Bihar, with 128 million residents, was lower, and it, too, recommends ivermectin.

Despite having the coronavirus situation under control, New Delhi was under immense pressure from various international lobbies and their local proxies to roll out a mass vaccination campaign. It can be argued that India’s ongoing oxygen shortages are the direct result of prioritizing foreign-curated experimental vaccines over local necessities.

While the initial mass vaccination launch was pencilled for Jan 16, the campaign effectively took off only in late February. With uncanny timing, the New York Times hailed India as an “unmatched vaccine manufacturing power” that could counter China in the area of vaccine diplomacy.

As the goal of vaccinating 300 million people by August 2021 neared the midway mark, however, the number of COVID-19 cases surged accordingly. The graph below broadly charts this anomaly.

Not only has India’s COVID-19 cases surged in tandem with increased vaccination, the trajectory of infections and inoculations can be neatly superimposed as the following graph suggests.

Can one infer that there may be a correlation between increased vaccinations and infections? This is not the first time that gene-based therapies ended up creating new viral chimeras. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recently admitted that a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF)-backed vaccine program was responsible for a new polio outbreak in Africa.  The usual suspects were also behind a vaccination-linked polio surge in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Vaccines causing deadly outbreaks of the very diseases they are supposed to eradicate happen to be a 21^st century phenomenon – brought to you by an unholy alliance of Big Tech and Big Pharma. In the process, new mutant strains or “vaccine-derived viruses” emerge, necessitating even more potent vaccines which deliver greater profits and levers of global control to Big Tech. This is how the Davos cabal tries to stay relevant in a century that should otherwise be dominated by Asia. India may end up being the first Asian victim of Big Tech’s Great Reset against the East.

A recent study by Tel Aviv University may shed further light on India’s bizarre surge. It seems those who have been vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine are 8 times more likely to contract the new South African variant of COVID-19 than the unvaccinated.

The Covishield (Oxford University-AstraZeneca) and Covaxin (Bharat Biotech) vaccines used in India may have produced a similar effect. Dr. Harvey Risch, a professor of epidemiology at Yale University, has estimated that over 60 percent of all new COVID-19 cases seem to occur among the “vaccinated.” Dr Michael Yeadon, former vice president and chief science officer for Pfizer, fears a more alarming outcome which includes the possibility of “massive-scale depopulation”. These are not your average basement-dwelling conspiratorial kooks!

“The vaccine,” to paraphrase Francis Bacon, “is now appearing to be the worse than the disease itself.” Gene-based vaccines open up a Pandora’s Box of what systems theorists call “emergence”. The human body is a complex system that may react unpredictably to interferences at its most substrate (or genetic) levels. As a result, mutant virus strains may emerge alongside unforeseen side effects. This is what we are witnessing worldwide.

But as the virus mutates, so does the official narrative. The Indian Medical Association (IMA) now claims that mass vaccinations in densely-packed stadiums and halls are “superspreader” events. Is the IMA suggesting that new vaccine delivery systems, as lobbied by Big Tech, will solve this problem? Let us wait and see. Furthermore, is close proximity the prime culprit behind the super-surge in India? India is a nation where trains, buses and all forms of public spaces teem with human bodies. Yet, it did not lead to mass casualties in 2020 as many had feared.

In the absence of a watertight scientific explanation from mainstream gatekeepers, a more plausible narrative may be sought from peripheral sources. The Daily Expose offers one such graphic-laden narrative to explain the correlation between mass vaccinations and the rising death toll in India.

Image Source: Daily Expose

While the Daily Expose concedes that correlation does not always equal causation, a similar pattern was noticed in other nations. The vaccination-mortality graph for Mongolia, for example, is particularly eye-popping.

Image Source: Daily Expose

Did Mongolia witness a near-zero to mutant COVID-19 surge just when mass vaccinations rolled out? How coincidental can that be?

The Case of America: Red vs Blue States

One may scientifically argue that India’s surge had nothing to do with ramped-up vaccinations. A new mutant virus may also somehow explain the vaccination-mortality correlations in Mongolia.

Therefore one should resort to another layman-friendly proxy to see whether similar correlations exist elsewhere. How about a comparison within the most coronavirus-affected nation on earth – the United States of America?

Reports thus far suggest that US states which have been resisting mass vaccinations and/or mandatory masking, at least in relative terms, are generally faring better than those adhering to draconian COVID-19 guidelines. Just weeks after Texas lifted its public mask mandate – featuring full crowds at bars, restaurants and concerts  no less – COVID-19 cases as well as hospitalizations dropped to its lowest levels since October 2020. The current White House occupant, who continues to make a buzz over his mental acuity, nonetheless panned the move as a symptom of “Neanderthal thinking”.  In the meantime, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a prominent opponent of mandatory masking, is using COVID-19 restrictions elsewhere to lure businesses to her state. Other red states such as Florida and Arizona have moved to ban the so-called vaccine passports.

Rather coincidentally, the annual flu has virtually disappeared in the United States since the onset of the pandemic. It must be a modern medical miracle!

How will India fare?

With the surge affecting the nation badly, the CEOs of Google, Microsoft and Apple, among others, have pledged heartfelt aid to India. With friends like these, one wonders why Indians cannot question the global COVID-19 narrative on Twitter, Facebook or YouTube without being summarily banned or censored. If India can concede the digital rights of its own citizens and the digital sovereignty of the nation to Big Tech, then how is it going to crowdsource solutions for COVID-19? Or deal with any other future crisis for that matter? An Indian scientific paper which tentatively explored a laboratory origin for COVID-19 can be summarily removed after concerted condemnation from Western academics but a similar claim made by the former head of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) appears relatively palatable. Isn’t this a textbook example of neoliberal racism?

Indians should also question why Africa has not been badly affected thus far, despite a South African variant hovering in the region. This is a continent mired in conflicts, poverty, serious healthcare deficits and other Third World-related woes. It lacks world-class scientists and institutions which India admittedly has. Is it because Africa does not pose an economic threat to the Western oligarchy the way Asia does? Or maybe, mass vaccinations haven’t yet taken off in Africa?

For the time being, India cannot reverse course on its vaccination drive and adopt measures similar to the one employed by the Eisenhower administration during the 1957-58 Asian Flu pandemic. The fear genie is already out of the bottle. Big Tech controls the digital narrative in India as it does elsewhere. Even if New Delhi manages to tame the COVID-19 crisis within the next few weeks or months, Big Tech will still be around to stifle India’s destiny.

Ultimately, this game is much bigger than COVID-19; it is about global domination through perennial mass-manufactured crises until a Great Reset is achieved.

activistpost.com

By Jayati GHOSH

The unfolding pandemic horror in India has many causes. These include the complacency, inaction and irresponsibility of government leaders, even when it was evident for several months that a fresh wave of infections of new mutant variants threatened the population. Continued massive election rallies, many addressed by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, brought large numbers to congested gatherings and lulled many into underplaying the threat of infection.

The incomprehensible decision to allow a major Hindu religious festival — the Mahakumbh Mela, held every 12 years — to be brought forward by a full year, on the advice of some astrologers, brought millions from across India to one small area along the Ganges River and contributed to ‘super-spreading’ the disease.

The exponential explosion of Covid-19 cases — and it is likely much worse than officially reported, because of inadequate testing and undercounting of cases and deaths — has revealed not just official hubris and incompetence but lack of planning and major deficiencies in the public health system. The shortage of medical oxygen, for instance, has effectively become a proximate cause of death for many patients.

Failing Vaccination Program

But one significant — and entirely avoidable — reason for the catastrophe is the failing vaccination programme. Even given the global constraints posed by rich-country vaccine-grabbing and the limits on domestic production set by the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement, this is unnecessary and unexpected.

India is home to the largest vaccine producer in the world and has several other companies capable of producing vaccines. Before the pandemic, 60 per cent of the vaccines used in the developing world for child immunisation were manufactured in India.

The country has a long tradition of successful vaccination campaigns, against polio and tuberculosis for infants and a range of other diseases. The available infrastructure for inoculation, urban and rural, could have been quickly mobilised.

In January, the government approved two candidates for domestic use: the Covishield (Oxford-AstraZeneca) vaccine, produced in India by the Serum Institute of India, and Covaxin, produced by Bharat Biotech under a manufacturing licence from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) — other producers could have been similarly licenced to enhance supply.

The vaccination program officially started on Jan. 16 , with the initial target of covering 30 million healthcare and frontline workers by the end of March and 250 million people by July. By April 17 , however, only 37 percent of frontline workers had received both doses (of either vaccine); an additional 30 percent had received only the first.

Low uptake even among this vulnerable group could have resulted from concerns about the rapid regulatory approval granted to Covaxin, which had not completed Phase III trials. The Indian government also encouraged exports, partly to fulfil commitments by the Serum Institute of India to AstraZeneca and the global COVAX facility — partly to enhance its own standing among developing countries.

But very quickly thereafter, as vaccinations were extended to the over-60s and then those over 45, the shortage was felt and the pace slowed accordingly. By  April 24, only 8.5 per cent of the population had received even one dose — nowhere near what would be required to contain the spread. Even this limited coverage reflected the fact that private facilities had been allowed to administer the vaccine, at a charge of 250 rupees, around €2.76 (or $3.33) per dose.

Modi’s Unrealistic Plan

The Modi government had obviously made the unrealistic call that that existing domestic production of vaccines would be adequate. In fact, it would have taken the two producers on their own three years to meet the required demand. While the ban on exports of some essential ingredients by the Unites States is affecting production of the AstraZeneca vaccine, Bharat Biotech is constrained by its own finite capacity.

Shockingly, the government did not issue compulsory licences to other producers to increase supply, even though Covaxin had been developed by the public ICMR. It had also allowed several public-sector manufacturing units to languish without adequate investment.

Only on April 16, after the pandemic had reached crisis proportions across India and showed no signs of abatement, did the central government finally move to allow three public enterprises to make the vaccine — though three other public-run units, with greater expertise and capacity, were inexplicably left out. Even these new units will now need several months to gear up for production.

In the interim, in a uniquely cynical strategy, the Modi government has passed the buck on vaccination to the states, without providing any funding — indeed making them pay higher prices. It has agreed with the private producers a pricing system whereby state governments already desperately short of finances and facing hard budget constraints will have to pay up to four times what the central government pays for the same vaccines. They are now also being allowed to import vaccines from abroad — they will have to bid on their own for that. To create such a Hunger Games among state governments, without central funding and procurement of vaccines for every resident, can only have disastrous outcomes.

Disaster Capitalism 

The latest sign of this active encouragement of disaster capitalism by the Indian state is even more egregious. In the proposed opening up of vaccination to the 18-45 age group from May 1, access is to be limited to private hospitals and clinics, and only on payment — with prices ranging from 1,200 rupees to 2,400 rupees (€13.25-€26.5) per dose! Obviously, the poor will be unable to afford the vaccines, and so the pandemic will rage on, the massive human suffering will continue and countless lives will be lost.

If a novel had been written along these lines, it would be dismissed as too unrealistic and improbable to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, it is only too true — and the strategy of the Indian government is just an extreme example of the privileging of corporate profits over human lives which marks our still-neoliberal world.

consortiumnews.com

During the first Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union injustice and human rights increasingly became a central issue. This ought to have been a positive development, but it was devalued by partisan use and the issue turned into an instrument of propaganda.

The essence of such propaganda is not lies or even exaggeration, but selectivity. To give one example, the focus was kept on very real Soviet oppression in Eastern Europe and away from the savage rule of Western-backed dictators in South America. The political weaponisation of human rights was crude and hypocritical, but it was extremely effective.

As we enter a second Cold War against China and Russia, there are lessons to be learned from the first, since much the same propaganda mechanisms are once again hard at work. Western governments and media unrelentingly criticise China for the persecution of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province, but there is scarcely a mention of the repression of Kashmiri Muslims in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Diplomatic and media outrage is expressed when Russia and the Syrian government bomb civilians in Idlib in Syria, but the bombing of civilians during the Western-backed, Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen, remains at the bottom of the news agenda.