Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has wrapped up his first official state go to to america after spending a number of days being feted by Washington’s political and enterprise elite. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), together with Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Florida), have been the architects of the invitation to Modi to handle a joint session of the U.S. Congress on June 22. The identical night, President Joe Biden hosted a grand state dinner for Modi. This celebration got here at a time of escalating violence organized by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Celebration (BJP) towards India’s spiritual minorities.
Within the northeastern state of Manipur, as a substitute of halting interethnic violence, the BJP has used it as an event to assault Manipur’s Christians, resulting in the burning of 249 churches, in keeping with one supply. Within the northern state of Uttarakhand, the state’s BJP chief minister has run a campaign demonizing the state’s 1.4 million sturdy Muslim group, resulting in requires ethnic cleaning throughout a number of cities, with mobs demanding Muslims be expelled from their properties.
Why did Rep. Khanna, who positions himself as a progressive, select to ask Modi despite the prime minister and the BJP’s track record of violence and bigotry — particularly at a second when the Uttarakhand and Manipur violence was escalating? The reply lies within the U.S.-India protection partnership and the drive towards struggle.
Simply 15 years in the past, India’s commerce in arms with the U.S. stood at “close to zero,” in keeping with the U.S. State Division’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. By 2020, it had risen to $20 billion. On this go to alone, a flurry of protection offers have been signed, together with India’s buy of 31 Predator drones. Khanna has been championing the U.S.-India protection partnership since at the least 2022.
The Biden-Khanna celebration of Modi should due to this fact be seen, before everything, as a dramatic escalation of an already rising pattern — the transformation of India into one of many U.S.’s most vital army companions. Behind platitudes portray shared democracy as the idea of this “strategic partnership” is the hideous fact: the actual foundation is a defense-technology alignment driving towards struggle with China.
Khanna’s participation on this hawkish maneuver is a U-turn from his earlier said place. In 2019, Khanna spoke out towards Modi’s Hindu supremacist (Hindutva) ideology, saying “it’s the responsibility of each American politician of Hindu religion to face for pluralism, reject Hindutva, and communicate for equal rights for Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhist[s] and Christians.”
Defending his standing as a supporter of pluralism, and, on the similar time, rolling out the crimson carpet for Modi, one of many world’s most infamous perpetrators of mass violence, Khanna final week hid behind his position as chair of the India caucus and “protocol in the direction of an Indian PM.”
Clearly, that is only a fig leaf. The chairmanship of a caucus will not be a constitutionally mandated position, and if Rep. Khanna’s propriety as a senior Democrat was at stake, then all he wanted to do was reprise his statements towards white supremacy and former President Donald Trump; in that case he stayed throughout the applicable conduct of a accountable politician, however didn’t mince his phrases.
Khanna is taking part in a a lot grander try by the West to rearrange world politics. On Could 5, French President Emmanuel Macron invited Modi for the Bastille Day celebrations in France. On Could 20, on the Quadrilateral Safety Dialogue meeting in Japan, Biden instructed Modi, “I ought to take your autograph.” On Could 23, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese referred to as Modi a rockstar, referring to him as “the Boss.”
It’s clear that within the context of a rising chilly struggle with China and Russia, the West had determined that it’s time to draw India in, even when it means enjoying to the megalomania of an authoritarian chief. That China was on the menu was clarified by U.S. Nationwide Safety Council spokesperson John Kirby on June 24 when he mentioned, “The challenges introduced by the PRC [People’s Republic of China] to each our nations have been on the agenda yesterday, no query about that.”
The Biden-Khanna duo appears to have moved away from the autocracy vs. democracy framework, into a brand new area characterised by some segments of the neoliberal institution as a narrower liberal “realist” place: {that a} Hindu Proper authoritarian regime is a suitable associate to keep up American hegemony. That is an absurdly myopic and blinkered view caught in a mid-to-late twentieth century paradigm. The very first thing to notice is that China is the emergent capitalist superpower. The present battle between the U.S. and China is due to this fact much less about Chilly Warfare or submit–Chilly Warfare paradigms, and far more the equal of world historic transformations of capitalism — from the hegemony of Iberian capital to Dutch capital, Dutch to British, and from there to American capital. Change at this scale is resolvable solely via advanced diplomacy and the restructuring of the worldwide financial system, until in fact one is prepared for world struggle. Arming a Hindu supremacist India is not any resolution. It’s, merely, the lazy continuation of a post-World Warfare II imaginary, the place the U.S. repeatedly tried and did not resolve geopolitical and commerce crises via regional wars. The decision sought by the U.S. is not any much less phantasmagorical — arm a Hindu supremacist India to the enamel and foment struggle at a second when local weather change is hurtling down at us, throughout a Himalayan area which is as fragile an ecosystem as you may get between the 2 nuclear powers.
With Modi going through a tough normal election in 2024, a dramatic enlargement of army commerce with the U.S. would enable him to current himself because the prime minister who is able to tackle China. Modi might go so far as saber rattling earlier than the 2024 normal elections, an echo of his army strikes in Pakistan earlier than the 2019 elections. We may be seeing the start of 1 such escalation that might result in struggle between the world’s two most populous international locations, each of that are nuclear powers.
That is the adventurism that the Biden-Khanna crew is rolling out, and Modi, macho authoritarian that he’s — and nationalism being his most vital promoting level — is the proper associate. The truth is, arguably, a authorities run by an ultra-nationalist right-wing celebration is a extra handy consumer to promote U.S. arms to than a moderate-centrist one. Aggressive posturing and machismo have been a continuing with this authorities, together with Modi bragging about his “56-inch chest.” Modi has additionally made a number of unilateral, sweeping coverage selections, with penalties being damned. These are clearly meant as a show of power, and embrace the demonetization of India’s forex and a unexpectedly introduced COVID lockdown that left millions of migrants to stroll residence throughout hundreds of miles. Arming India and touting India’s armed power is intently aligned with how Modi imagines his politics. However opposition to Modi in america turned an increasing number of seen within the days main as much as the state dinner, together with a flurry of articles in mainstream media. What turned clear was that the opposition was not merely coming from a bit of the Indian diaspora — the ranks of these opposing Modi had expanded dramatically. And though overseas coverage points have tended to be removed from the consciousness of U.S. voters, it’s heartening that the Modi go to even impressed voices from the mainstream U.S. to boost notes of warning — together with former President Obama in an interview with CNN. In fact, Obama was the primary U.S. President to legitimize Modi.
Furthermore, plenty of U.S. liberal and left leaders, such because the Squad, who boycotted Modi’s speech to Congress, and New Jersey Senators Cory Booker and Bob Menendez, are starting to acknowledge the harms that Hindu supremacy is visiting in america itself. This contains the August 2022 parading of hate symbols by Hindu supremacists in Edison, New Jersey; the passage of a supremacist and bigoted resolution within the Illinois state legislature, which was reversed after a grassroots marketing campaign; and the submitting of a lawsuit towards the California Division of Civil Rights for its actions to guard caste-oppressed communities from discrimination on the idea of caste.
Most vital was that, by the point Modi drove into the White Home on June 22, more than 70 representatives and senators had signed a letter initiated by Rep. Pramila Jayapal and Sen. Chris Van Hollen, clearly articulating human rights issues across the Modi regime. In impact, each individual with whom Khanna has advocated towards white supremacy within the U.S. has taken a stance towards Modi. Sources near different progressive congresspeople who didn’t wish to be named instructed Truthout that Khanna’s colleagues are each puzzled and anxious about Khanna’s latest stances. Khanna might have been the sole dissenting vote on this yr’s army funds, however the passage of that invoice was already assured. How significantly can we take Khanna’s vote given his championing of the U.S.-India protection partnership?
In any case, Modi and his Hindu supremacist backers within the U.S. are additionally arduous at work radicalizing Hindu American communities, transferring them nearer to the far proper. In April, the Republican celebration formally absorbed the Republican Hindu Coalition into its group, which used to have Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon as its co-chair. Proper-wing tradition warrior and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was the keynote speaker at a gala for HinduPACT, which is a part of the same network of Hindu supremacist organizations that Modi belongs to.
Feeling the strain from the diaspora, Khanna has often invoked his grandfather, Amarnath Vidyalankar, who fought for freedom from the British, because the consultant of the model of pluralism he embodies. However whereas Vidyalankar began out as a progressive educator concerned within the Indian freedom motion, who even taught progressive firebrand Bhagat Singh, his political profession trailed off in ignominy when he voted in favor of the primary spherical of authoritarianism in India, the declaration of Emergency by Indira Gandhi, which suspended elementary rights, fully censored the press, and illegally imprisoned your complete opposition.
That’s the slippery slope we hope Ro Khanna can get off. The Ro Khanna we wish to have fun is the one who stands with the grandfather who was a revolutionary educator. Not the one that compromises himself by siding with the worldwide struggle machine.
