Shadow Warrior by Rajeev Srinivasan

This essay was originally published in ‘Hinduism Today’ in 1994 at https://www.hinduismtoday.com/magazine/june-1994/1994-06-my-turn/

India has suddenly become a fashionable investment destination. Is this a flash in the pan? I think not. There is a fundamental Hindu work ethic, and India will be a major player in the coming "Asian Century." Americans invoke the thrifty Yankee farmer's "Protestant work ethic" to embody the spirit that conquered a continent. In contrast, Western scholars presume that India's pervasive poverty is due to a Hindu ethic of self-abnegation, fatalism and other-worldliness. Hardly. Hindus are notably successful worldwide.

It is instructive to analyze historical Western attitudes towards East Asians. After the Opium Wars and World War II, the accepted wisdom was that Mongoloid peoples were inherently inferior-dull-witted, slothful, treacherous, imitative. Of course, the economic miracles in Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Singapore have emphatically repudiated that notion. Pundits give full marks to a "Confucian work ethic."

Similarly, there is a "Hindu work ethic." In ages past, India was a major producer of textiles, high-value agricultural products, steel and gems. Further, Hindus were good traders. Phoenicians and Romans came to Malabar for black pepper—worth its weight in gold. Maritime Cholas and Pallavas dominated South East Asian trade.

India has suffered over the last millennium from inevitable cyclical decline, invasions and outright looting, especially by the British. What are the fundamental features of this Hindu ethic? They are: thrift, hard work, sense of duty, respect for the family and education, mathematical and entrepreneurial skills.

For a poor nation, Indians are remarkably thrifty. Those who have lived overseas can testify to the industriousness of Indian small-business owners. And several of California's high-technology millionaires are workaholic Hindus. The Hindu paradigm of dharma-of doing one's duty-is quite the opposite of fatalism. If one's dharma is to be a trader, to amass wealth, there is scriptural authorization to do so.

Hindus have been castigated for being clannish and stand-offish. But the Hindu, like the Japanese or the Jew, is loyal to a unit—the extended family or community. This "tribal" consciousness is crucial in a rapidly shrinking world (note the success of the overseas Chinese).

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Indians revere knowledge. Hindu science and mathematics were among the most advanced in the ancient world. Thus, the Hindu's notable predilection for science and technology despite the racist Western stereotype of Hindus as superstitious and primitive. Indians have shown tremendous entrepreneurial skills in the UK, East Africa, Silicon Valley (California, USA) and even in India.

Will all this result in prosperity? The term "the Hindu rate of growth" has been used disparagingly for India's recent history of 2-3% annual growth in GDP. But when the ravaged industrial base, poor infrastructure and stultifying bureaucracy are ameliorated, I believe the true "Hindu rate of growth" is a healthy and sustainable 6-8% a year.

There are limits to growth: environmental degradation, overpopulation, AIDS and cultural homogenization. Imported American television preaching violence, indiscipline and immorality is deleterious. There is also frightening speculation that AIDS might become a pandemic in India. If India can avoid most of these traps, the Hindu work ethic will transform the country in a single lifetime, lifting untold millions from poverty.

Srinivasan, a strategic marketing manager in the Silicon Valley, CA, with an MBA from Stanford, is a devout Hindu who pilgrimages to India as often as possible.

A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/india/the-indian-american-paradox-indians-expect-them-to-be-indians-but-they-are-not-10185071.html so please read it there. The podcast can be heard above by clicking the ‘Play’ button.

The promotion of Parag Agarwal to the position of CEO of Twitter created a bit of a commotion online. Many celebrated the fact that several Indian-origin people now head large technology companies such as Alphabet, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM and now Twitter. Elon Musk said something to the effect that he appreciated talented people from India.

Others bemoaned the fact that many Indians apparently had to leave the country to do well. The usual reasons were trotted out: reservations prevent the meritorious from rising; the bureaucrats and the system mess everything up; there is no room for independent thought, and you must kowtow to the Big Men on Campus; and so on. There is a little truth in all of them.

In this narrative, the US is the place where they reward merit; there is opportunity for all; and if you keep your nose clean and work hard and produce results, why, they will let you rise to the top. There is a little truth in all these claims as well. But that’s not the whole story, either.

The fact is that there is a brutal selection process. Among a billion people, surely there are some who are exceptional, and some more who are outstanding. So the fact that a few Indian-Americans do well may also be attributed to the fact that they are not 1%ers, but 0.001%ers. They might truly stand out in any crowd. But that doesn’t mean the average Indian-American is doing amazingly well.

Having been one of said average Indian-Americans before returning to India, I have seen the beast from the inside. We saw an opportunity and took full advantage of it. Those fortunate enough to get through the IIT JEE got a world-class engineering education for peanuts, subsidized heavily by the taxpayer.

Then we managed to get into good US universities because of good test-taking skills, GRE scores, and grades. They gave us financial aid for graduate school; we got jobs, and at least in my day, got the coveted Green Card in a year or two. Then we raised families, and lived middle-class lives (or better, if we managed to join the right startups). We began enjoying a kind of American Dream.

We made annual trips to India, though the kids rebelled against the heat and dust. We forced the kids to attend Indian classical music or dance classes, and the Tiger Mothers amongst us groomed them to win Spelling Bees and get perfect 4.0s and perfect 800s in the SATs, and get into Ivy League schools and onwards to med and law school.

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Somewhere along the line, especially after our parents died, we realized that we had almost nothing that connected us back to the old country, especially now that we, finally, caved in and acquired our US citizenship. It’s just easier to travel with, we’d console ourselves, and in any case, just like Jews did about Jerusalem, we could always toast each other: “Next year in Mumbai” when we got together for a Christmas party.

Imperceptibly, as Vikram Seth, who knew a thing or two about the California of the 1980s, wrote in ‘Diwali’, America rose, and India sank in their hearts:

… Kalidas, Shankaracharya,

Panini, Bhaskar, Kabir,

Surdas sank, and we welcomed

The reign of Shakespeare….

This is not to blame anybody’s life choices. It is a dilemma: should you immerse yourself in the culture of where you live, or should you hang on to an identity that you once had? Bharati Mukherjee, who best chronicled immigrant angst (Jhumpa Lahiri is second-generation), felt that one had to abandon, in fact cremate, the old identity; and immerse oneself in the melting pot.

Let me note in passing that this is the life of upwardly mobile Indians, some of whom have become fabulously wealthy, and the rest are solidly middle-class or upper-middle class. They are at ease in American society, contribute to National Public Radio, read the New York Times, go to the Opera, the Symphony, and Lake Tahoe, to be simpatico with their native peers, even if they don’t enjoy it very much. They may also have married Americans.

There is another whole class of bluish-collar Indians, and they tend to carry a cocoon of Indian-ness with them. They mostly socialize with the local Malayali Association, the Tamil Manram, the Bengali group, etc. They live in America, but they are not of America. That, too, is a reasonable choice, and some of them end up wintering in India as they get older. There is a small connection left.

What is the point in all this? It is to emphasize that it is futile to expect Indian-American CEOs to suddenly swing their companies in directions that help India, or Hindus. They have other compulsions, and they don’t find it advantageous to wear their Indian origin on their sleeves. They have assimilated, and probably acquired native prejudices about India.

The narrative about India, assiduously cultivated by the Deep State and its organs, is that it is a benighted place, should be balkanized, is full of “beastly natives with their beastly religion”, as infamously said by war criminal Winston Churchill. The ‘caste, curry and cows’ narrative, in Rajiv Malhotra’s words. Indian Americans over time begin to believe that narrative.

The other thing that I find odd is the cult-like obsession many Indian Americans have with the Democratic Party. I used to identify myself as a Democrat, but over time I began to believe that their world view and narrative are fundamentally in conflict with both India’s interests and the US’s own long-term survival. So I became a Republican, although that I am aware of their (many) faults. But I believe they are better for the US and for India in the medium term.

I am in a WhatsApp group of former IIT classmates, and I am astonished at their groupthink about Biden, Fauci, far-left Democratic politicians, and so on. They swallow as the truth and the whole truth anything that is pushed by their favorite media. An Indian leftist piles on to this love-fest despite knowing virtually nothing about the US. Similarly, most of my old acquaintances in Silicon Valley are staunch Democrats, anti-Modi and pro-Congress. It seems to be a package deal.

Let us be very clear. Indian-Americans may do well in America. Good for them! That has nothing to do with India, except that they may urge their companies to invest in India, if it makes financial sense for the company. I did this: with a colleague named Deepak B, I got my former Silicon Valley employer to invest in India. I chose to stay on in India; Deepak, bless him, must still be in California.

1130 words, 2 December 2021

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This essay has been published by Firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/india/there-is-another-crisis-in-education-can-india-turn-this-to-its-advantage-10153231.html and a few excerpts are provided below. Please read it at the link. The podcast can be heard by clicking the ‘Play’ button above.

There has long been concern about a couple of issues related to education in India: the poor quality of the humanities curriculum, and the concern that English medium is becoming an albatross rather than an enabler. On average, it is assumed that STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is in fine shape in the country, and this is a source of pride.

Therefore, it was startling to see the results of the Kerala state entrance examinations and the uptake in engineering. According to KEAM statistics, less than 10 students all over Kerala opted for Civil Engineering. But 5000+ rushed into Computer Science, and 2500+ into Electronics. There were relatively few takers for Mechanical, Electrical (Power) and so forth: only in the hundreds each (Times of India, 12 Nov 2021, “2 engg branches get less than 10 candidates each”).

This, one could argue, is the free market at work, as there are more job opportunities these days for Computer Science graduates. However, it is an enormously skewed result: doesn’t India as a country need a large number of civil engineers to help build out infrastructure, which is a priority: roads, railways, ports, power plants, bridges, and so on?

…. most of the text deleted, see https://www.firstpost.com/india/there-is-another-crisis-in-education-can-india-turn-this-to-its-advantage-10153231.html for more

….

This sounds good, but there might be bigger forces at play. The traditional university may be on its way out. Going back to the Kerala example, a number of departments may close for lack of students; some engineering colleges have already shut down. This has also happened to business schools already. The age of campus placements may be over. 

In a world where excellent content is available to anybody everywhere, often free, on the internet, and where I hope machine translation will soon make the content available in the mother tongue (in real-time), the preponderance of English as well as the Anglosphere model of universities may both be under siege. 

Can India come up with an alternative model and do a leapfrog? As Dharampal’s work shows, traditional knowledge systems used to produce well rounded citizens long ago.

1097 words, 14 November 2021

A version of this essay has been published by Firstpost.com at Opinion | Diwali, the powers that be, and civil disobedience (firstpost.com) and you can read it there. You can listen to the podcast by clicking the ‘play’ button above.

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I have personally noticed an odd phenomenon. At 6am, there is the chanting of the Venkatesa Suprabhatham from a nearby temple that I can hear for about 15 minutes. But lately, I can hardly hear it, because the state government has imposed a maximum of 45 decibels on all Hindu temple loudspeakers.

On the other hand, a new mosque issues its call at 5am. This is recent: earlier the calls were less loud and more distant. On Sundays, a nearby church used to have its singing, clapping, and sermons till about 11am. Now they have hiked up the sound levels and the program goes on the entire day. 

This is symptomatic of state-sanctioned discrimination against Hindu culture, religion and rituals. Indeed, during Navaratri, the CM of Kerala said (I paraphrase): “Temples are public, but churches and mosques are private”. This appears violative of the Constitutional guarantee of equal treatment irrespective of religion. At around the same time, the Kerala government forcibly captured a Shiva temple in Kannur, against the strenuous objections of protesting Hindus whom they physically ejected.

… deleted

The fact that ordinary Hindus performed civil disobedience, in what can only be termed Salt Satyagraha 2.0, by peacefully asserting their right to burst Deepavali firecrackers as they wished, is a sign that the days of passive acquiescence to motivated nonsense are over.

6 Nov 2021

A version of this essay was published by Chintan at https://chintan.indiafoundation.in/articles/poor-optics-retreat-from-the-quad-and-proliferation-make-aukus-a-bad-pact/

The AUKUS strategic alliance among Australia, the US and the UK was an unexpected bombshell. Among the unpleasantly surprised were India and Japan, partners of the US and Australia in the Quad quasi-alliance. France (and the rest of the European Union) were also upset. (France also had a reasonable commercial peeve: its diesel-submarine order worth $40 billion with Australia was cancelled without notice).

AUKUS has been spun by American and especially British commentators as a wonderful new initiative to contain China, this time with some military might. Meanwhile China continues to rampage in the South China Sea and the East China Sea, and threatens to capture the continental shelves of nations like Indonesia and Vietnam via ‘research’ ships.

However, there are serious concerns, especially from the point of view of India, which obviously has its own military issues relating to China, based on the latter’s nibbling away at the Indo-Tibetan Himalayan border, leading of course to June clashes in Galwan. Reports about a huge build up of infrastructure and war materiel in Tibet, incursions deep into Indian territory, and the setting up of villages inside Bhutan point to a ‘salami slicing’ approach.

In the context of the looming Chinese threat to the prevailing international order, it is only natural that the US should take steps to preserve its primacy. Thus the Quad, which was first mooted by Prime Minister Abe of Japan: a coalition of democracies in the Indo-Pacific, with a common interest in containing a rampaging China, and the muscle to enforce their will. They will never say “contain China”, but that’s the intent.

Former US President Obama allegedly made a “pivot to Asia”, but it was on his watch that China captured the South China Sea, suffering no consequences therefrom. Former US President Trump at least made noises about decoupling from China and attempted to bring in a consensus about lakshmana rekhas around China.

In this context, three things current US President Biden has done appear to be counter-productive: one, the humiliating exit from Afghanistan; two, the AUKUS announcement, and three, the acceptance of Chinese hostage-taking tactics in the case of the CFO of Huawei.

All three instances created doubts about American credibility, dependability, and will/ability to stand up for its partners. In the aftermath of the withdrawal from Kabul and the announcement about AUKUS, China has redoubled its intimidation of Taiwan; it will likely do the same to Japan re the Senkakus; and generally do the same all over Asia.

It is true that the US needed to exit Afghanistan, but surely not like this. The headlong retreat implied that America’s friendship is hostage to expediency, and can be withdrawn any moment based on domestic compulsions. Henry Kissinger’s quip that “it is dangerous to be America's enemy, but fatal to be its friend” leaps to mind.

Similarly, maybe the US needed to bring Australia under its wing, but surely not like this. By sneaking the AUKUS announcement in a few days before the Quad summit, Biden deemed the Quad a lame duck. All the flowery language in the Quad declaration couldn’t conceal the fact that it had been downgraded. That the two non-white members of the Quad, India and Japan, were kept in the dark about AUKUS suggests certain agendas. 

Besides, AUKUS does not seem to have troubled the Chinese very much: that, in and of itself, is ominous. The Chinese, as part of their ‘wolf-warrior’ diplomacy, habitually fly into a rage at the slightest of provocations: this is an intimidation tactic. But the official Chinese reaction to the AUKUS announcement was muted. Here’s what they said: “extremely irresponsible” and “seriously undermines regional peace and intensifies the arms race.” 

Even the excitable Global Times only said, “Washington is losing its mind by trying to rally its allies against China”, “The US intends to turn the Quad and AUKUS into ‘sinister gangs’ containing China,” and “[we] warn solemnly Japan, India and Australia not to follow the US too far in confronting China. Once they step on the red line of China’s core interests, China will not care about their relations with the US, and China will not hesitate to punish them.” 

That is very restrained by Chinese standards: the only conclusion we can draw is that they agree with Napoleon’s epigram: “Never interrupt the enemy when he’s making a mistake“. They think AUKUS is a win for them. 

The Chinese are probably right. Despite the spin doctoring, this marks a historic retreat by America. The Biden team are laboring under an atavistic Atlanticist illusion of a white Anglophone alliance to dominate the world. Those days are long gone. The UK in particular is on a downward spiral after Brexit, and may soon be shorn of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

If the US wanted to proliferate nuclear submarine propulsion technology to Australia, they could have done so. Why choose an intermediary like the UK that doesn’t add value? I am reminded of the classic scene from Catch-22, where Yossarian wonders why the comatose patient needs to be an intermediary between the drip feed bag and the waste removal bag. Why not just connect the two?, he asks.

That also brings up the nuclear question. Why is the US proliferating nuclear technology to Australia, a non-nuclear power and a fierce NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) adherent which refused to sell uranium to India citing the NPT? Maybe I am missing something, but doesn’t this US act eviscerate the NPT? If India were to transfer nuclear tech to Taiwan, would everybody be so quiet? Of course not: there are serious double standards in play.

Besides, Australia is pretty far away from China, and in any case the first submarines under the AUKUS deal will not (according to plan) appear till the 2040s. Too little, too late. The spurned parties, France, Japan and India, should perhaps form a triad. France has nuclear propulsion technology; surely it can do a technology transfer to India (forget the NPT); and France has a lot of interests in the Indo-Pacific, far more than the UK. 

On the whole, AUKUS seems like a very bad deal, despite the PR storm that shows it in a good light.

1030 words, 4 Oct 2021

A version of this essay was published by Swarajya magazine at https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/all-those-anniversaries-but-they-all-may-boil-down-to-the-powerful-screwing-the-meek

Is this a particularly momentous year? 2021 has important anniversaries, and everyone has heard about at least that of the 9/11/2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York. 

But there are other anniversaries too, and when I started looking at them, what struck me is a theme: so many of them end up with the strong taking advantage of the weak to loot or persecute the latter! That may be a coincidence, but it is intriguing.

For instance, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Moplah Riot in Malabar, in which Muslims attacked, slaughtered, raped and forcibly converted thousands of their Hindu neighbors for no fault of theirs, but simply because Turkey had abolished its caliphate. 

This year is also the 30th anniversary of India’s economic reforms, wherein then-Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao began to dismantle the stifling dirigiste state that had condemned hundreds of millions of Indians to poverty. At least this case is positive: it marked the beginning of the end of the pauperization of India’s masses by malign forces. 

This is also the 20th anniversary of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, which event has done so much for the Chinese economy, essentially helping it become the hub of global manufacturing, although a remarkable technological innovation helped it too, and more on that later.

2021 is also the 50th anniversary of the US going off the gold standard under Richard Nixon. This led to the dollar becoming the unofficial reserve currency of the world, and that brought great economic clout, because the US could now print dollars at will, without having to hold an equivalent amount of the precious metal. 

Undoubtedly there are other anniversaries I am unaware of, but let’s just go with these. What is intriguing is the connections between them.

On the anniversary of 9/11, we saw Biden’s debacle in Afghanistan. The question is why it took the US twenty long years to discover that they were in a no-win situation and that they were being led by the nose by Pakistan into things that were not in their interest.

It was evident to observers that things were going wrong as early as the 2001 November siege of Kunduz. I wrote at the time What happened in Kunduz | Rediff.com that the US allowing Pakistan to airlift its soldiers to safety (quite a few brigadiers etc were masquerading as Taliban) was an unfathomable act. But the US Deep State apparently had other ideas. Even when the CIA station chief was blown up Khost massacre: A point of inflexion in Obama’s War | Rediff.com in 2009, and bin Laden captured in 2011, the Deep State maintained its steadfast romance with the ISI. 

Why? There are many possible reasons. One is that it was hubris leading  to stupidity. Second, the $2-$3 trillion dollars spent was a windfall for the military industrial complex, so why would they stop the gravy train?

Chances are that it was hubris and stupidity in play. The Deep State simply couldn’t imagine a situation in which the US was no longer the only game in town. They were sticking with an old playbook that had outlived its usefulness, wherein American money and overwhelming military power could solve all problems, but that world is long gone. If it ever existed. 

What they didn’t realize was that China’s accession to the WTO, and its insidious and steady deindustrialization of the US, had created a situation where it is essentially impossible to go back to a status quo ante where, as in the dialog from Top Gun, it was only “rubber dog-s**t from Hong Kong” that America needed to import, nothing of consequence. 

This is where the retreat from the gold standard becomes relevant. By printing dollars by the boatload, the US has now become the world’s biggest debtor, as Chinese savings flowed in and allowed the US to live beyond its means, by selling $3 trillion in treasury securities to the Chinese. 

That makes China and the US co-dependent in an uncomfortable way. If the Chinese were to dump US treasuries, the dollar would fall, and the value of their investments would collapse as well. On the other hand, if the US were to confiscate Chinese assets (as they have done to Afghan assets), they would have a war on their hands. Stalemate!

But that’s not all. The dollar was a powerful weapon in the hands of US elites, especially their investment bankers, a few  years ago. They were able to fend off the Japanese challenge in the 1980s via the magic of the Plaza Accord of 1985, which caused the dollar to depreciate, and eventually forced the Japanese economy into its lost decades of malaise.

Unfortunately, that weapon is no longer available, because the investment bankers are now China’s best friends in the US China Has One Powerful Friend Left in the U.S.: Wall Street - WSJ. This is partly because investment banks have invested a lot there; they are not particularly tied to geography, and their clients, the big corporates, are also vested there. These clients are finding it difficult to extricate themselves from China, even if you assume that they wish to do so.

There is one other aspect of the supply chain vassaldom that the US is facing now: the role of the humble shipping container. The standardization of the 20 foot or 40 foot container and the concomitant dramatic fall in the cost and elapsed time for trans-Pacific shipping were the initial impetus for the migration of manufacturing to then low-cost Asia. 

There was also a remarkable unintended consequence of the Vietnam war. The US Navy containerized early, according to a fascinating podcast titled Thinking inside the box—the story of the shipping container | The Economist. They were sending so many containers to the war front, it made no sense to return them empty, and so they started picking up shiploads of electronics goods from Japan, and that’s how the shift to importing manufactured goods from Asia began.

It’s too soon to tell what the unintended consequences of the Afghan war will be. There is indeed the possibility that it will be China’s Waterloo, as it was for the Soviets and the Americans. It may well lead to the collapse of the Chinese empire, a desirable outcome.

Let us now revisit the question of the Deep State benefiting from the Afghan war (at the expense of the US taxpayer). It was clearly a transfer of wealth from the public purse to private interests. There are other examples of extortion subtly presented as something noble, or at least something in which a player was helpless. An excellent recent example is the 1973 oil price shock. OPEC suddenly tripled oil prices, and it was extortionate, because all economies had become addicted to cheap oil.

Thus it was impossible for most nations to reduce their oil consumption overnight, however much they tightened the belt. The result was a dramatic transfer of wealth from sovereign nations to OPEC’s coffers. Of course, rich countries including the US were affected, but they could afford it. The real burden fell on poor, emerging nations, and what they should have been spending on their people was instead transferred to OPEC.

That was grand theft. Immoral too, as it literally took food from the mouths of the starving.

But there was an interesting twist. Much of the money that OPEC grabbed from all of us ended up in the US by dint of massive arms purchases by Saudi Arabia et al. The Deep State won. The US had enough clout and enough weapons that they could probably have forced OPEC to reduce the price shock, but they didn’t. OPEC looked like nasty, mean, inhumane monsters, but the US looked like a victim, too.

The US thus neatly covered up its role in the crime.

There is another fascinating example of clever extortion, this time from India, in the case of Tipu Sultan’s attacks on Malabar in the 1780s, which were a combined religious war and a war for loot. He captured the Samoothiri’s kingdom of Kozhikode, and principalities such as Valluvanad, Ernad, and parts of Kochi. Until Travancore repulsed him in 1790 at its Nedumkotta fortification with the aid of a ‘river bomb’, he was successful in both his goals. 

Tipu was clear that temples were his target, along with religious conversion. He knew that, enriched by over two millennia of the spice trade, Kerala’s temples were storehouses of wealth -- and the reason is that temples were the centers of social activity, disaster relief, public works and culture, and so people donated generously to them.

The British were also keenly aware of this, and so they devised a diabolical plan. They would allow, or even secretly encourage, Tipu to prosecute his jihad on Kerala. And once he had hauled all the wealth to Srirangapatnam, they would attack, and take all the loot in one go. Very efficient, and they would get none of the blame of desecrating temples, but be lionized as the saviors of southern India.

And that is exactly what they did. 

In fact, it was worse. The Brits were allegedly treaty allies of Travancore, but stood by and did nothing when Tipu attacked; but they charged Travancore the entire cost of the Third Anglo-Mysore war, on the theory that their attack on Srirangapatnam forced Tipu to retreat. 

This paupered Travancore, and a powerful British Resident was installed, who dictated policy. One of the policies forced upon the kingdom was the commingling of temple properties and State properties, which in effect made most smaller temples unviable; furthermore, one Munro, a Resident, forced the reigning Queen to donate Rs. 10,000 to the church in 1819, a huge fortune then, which led to massive conversion drives. Within 100 years, according to the Travancore Manual, Christians went from 6% to 33% in the kingdom.

But the newspapers then and historians now give full marks to the Brits for their compassion and wisdom; meanwhile they enjoy their ill-gotten gains.

Tipu destroyed and desecrated scores of temples big and small, and converted thousands at the point of the sword. That is how there is a large Muslim population in Malabar. And it was these local Muslims who went on a jihad in 1921 on the flimsy excuse of the ban on the caliphate in distant Turkey.

The story put about by communists is that this was either a) a ‘peasant revolt’ against rich Hindu landlords, or b) a ‘freedom struggle’ against the British. We can easily eliminate (b) because not a single Briton was attacked, but thousands of Hindus were. As for (a), it turns out that the vast majority of those killed, converted, raped etc. were lower-caste Hindu agricultural laborers and so that explanation is also a little wanting.

In a new book, Beyond Rampage: West Asian Contacts of Malabar and the Khilafat, Dr Hari Shankar, an archaeologist and scholar, argues that the riot was instigated by wealthy Muslim traders looking to expand their monopoly over the sea-borne timber trade to the Middle East and Turkey from the Nilambur forests, where the lands were owned by the temples. This is an intriguing hypothesis: and once again economics may explain hidden motives.

There is yet another anniversary that is not spoken of very much: Brahma Chellaney pointed out that September 19th is the 61st anniversary of the unbelievably one-sided Indus Water Treaty. Said he on Twitter:

Thus the various anniversaries we have seen this year may be connected in subtle ways. Going forward, we may also see in the new AUKUS pact the genesis of a new white Anglosphere alliance, with the Quad being downgraded, and non-white, non-Anglo partners such as India, Japan and Indonesia being dumped by the West. And the EU as well, as France indicated with its furious reaction.

Twenty years later, we might look back on 2021 as the time the West retreated into an atavistic shell. Alternatively, perhaps we will see it as the beginning of the dissolution of the Chinese empire, and its retreat back into its Han homeland on the eastern coast. It is too soon to tell now. But I do suspect 2021 will turn out to be the year of living dangerously. 

2000 words, Sept 21, 2021. Updated Sept 28, 2021.

A version of this essay has been published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rajeev-srinivasan-what-did-modis-washington-visit-achieve/20210925.htm

This autumn has been cruel to India. Not only is the instantaneous collapse of the Afghan government a grave concern for India, based on entirely likely new terrorism threats, but then there is the obvious downgrading of the Quad partnership in the wake of the brand-new AUKUS grouping. The Financial Times believes that the Quad will become non-military. 

In a sense, this is not news for India, as it was clear nobody from the Quad would send boots on the ground to help India in case the Chinese invade. But it was tone-deaf for the Biden administration to announce the AUKUS deal just days before the first in-person Quad summit during his term. 

The other two Quad partners, Japan and India, were apparently left in the dark by the Americans. So was France, which was furious at the sudden cancellation of its own $40 billion submarine deal with Australia.

At the UN General Assembly, President Biden delivered soaring rhetoric about global unity (which was contrasted with former President Trump’s anti-globalist message): “We are not seeking a new Cold War or the world divided into rigid blocs”. That would have gone over a lot better if he hadn’t just abandoned his Afghan allies, or created a new AUKUS bloc. 

Antonio Gutierrez, the UN Secretary General, said pointedly, and perhaps as a direct rebuke to Biden: “A breakdown in trust is leading to a breakdown in values. Promises, after all, are worthless if people don’t see results in their daily lives. Failure to deliver creates space for some of the darkest impulses of humanity. It provides oxygen for easy-fixes, pseudo-solutions and conspiracy theories. It is kindling to stoke ancient grievances.  Cultural  supremacy.  Ideological dominance.  Violent misogyny.  The targeting of the most vulnerable including refugees and migrants.”

The US has a massive credibility gap today, because its rhetoric simply does not match its actions on the ground. In many ways, the US is ceding ground to China, for instance in its reluctance to push for an understanding of the possible lab origins of the Wuhan coronavirus. Open-source intelligence from the DRASTIC group found that Peter Daszak of Ecohealth had sought to cooperate with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in creating an unusual feature, a ‘furin cleavage site’, in bat coronaviruses, that would make them infectious to humans. 

Furthermore, the US is under a Democratic presidency. We remember how badly the Democratic Clinton and Obama administrations treated India: with disdain and disrespect. Not to say that Republicans are wonderful, but these days the Democratic party has been taken over by their fringe leftists, and is remarkably ‘woke’. Thus there is no chance that anything of substance can come out of Modi-Biden meetings. 

The only thing that the US is seeking is weapons sales. Brahma Chellaney has pointed out that all that was actually accomplished by the high-voltage sales program called the Indo-US nuclear deal is that India bought a lot of US weapons. According to India Today, there is a lot on the table today as well. If it were up to me, I’d focus on the submarine hunter-killer P8i Poseidons, and would have nothing to do with the Norwegian-developed NASAMS system, as the Scandinavians are known busybodies.

But the problem, as always, is that India opens its checkbook in return for no diplomatic or military leverage. The US sells technology to India that is obsolete or second-rate. For instance, despite much negotiation from India, the US refuses to sell its strategic nuclear submarine (SSN) propulsion technology to India: the very same stuff it is now selling to Australia. And there is also the threat of sanctions if India deploys its Russian S-400 anti-missile technology, which incidentally China also has. 

The fact is that Biden has now created a new military alliance, which consists only of white, Anglosphere nations. He has either thoughtlessly or deliberately snubbed the two non-white members of the Quad, that is India and Japan. And perhaps other Indo-Pacific players such as Indonesia. The involvement of Britain, increasingly a marginal power even in Europe, and practically non-existent in the Indo-Pacific, is pure Atlanticism. 

There are two possible explanations: one is that Biden believes the way to deal with China is to surrender the Indo-Pacific to them, and to retreat to being an Atlantic power. Australia is not much of a factor in the Indo-Pacific (will the US revert to the old term ‘Asia-Pacific’?) being far away and sparsely populated. The powers that matter in the Indo-Pacific are indeed Japan, India, and Indonesia. Even France is more of a factor in the Indo-Pacific than Britain is.

The second explanation is that the agenda of “climate, conflict and corona” is uppermost in the minds of the Americans. The many visits of the climate czar John Kerry (an unrepentant Atlanticist, and a disaster earlier as foreign secretary) to India, especially when India is doing much better than many others in moving towards renewables and Paris agreement commitments, suggest that Biden is seeking to hector and bully India into things that are not in its interest.

Yet another example of Biden’s pusillanimity with China is the fact that his Justice Department has dropped charges against the Huawei CFO (and daughter of its founder) who was held for a long time in Canada on charges of criminal activity. In return, China released two Canadians they held on spying charges. Lesson? China learns that hostage-taking and brazenness pays dividends.

As far as the Wuhan coronavirus is concerned, Biden’s approach of hoarding far more vaccine than is strictly necessary for the US has created vaccine haves and have-nots, the majority of whom are in developing nations that have been starved of vaccines, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. 

The AUKUS move is a definite indication that the Quad has been downgraded. What it suggests is atavism: Biden’s America is retreating to a white Anglo-Saxon view of the world. It has even decided to ditch the European Union. This is a Huntingtonian view, in which Biden has ceded Asia to China, and will attempt to rally the white Anglosphere as his last stand against the rampaging Chinese. Alas, this is a chimera.

Robert Gates, former foreign secretary, once remarked that Biden had been wrong on every single major foreign policy initiative in 40 years. Did you notice that China, which is usually quick to fly into a rage, was utterly quiet when Biden made two blunders: fleeing Afghan in disorderly retreat, and humiliating allies with the AUKUS pact? That signifies that China is a votary of Napoleon’s epigram: “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake”. 

The only thing that may salvage Narendra Modi’s trip to the US is his meetings with CEOs, such as those of Blackstone, First Solar, Qualcomm, Adobe, and General Atomics. These firms may recognize India’s steady growth, especially in comparison to the current chaos in China due to Evergrande’s imminent collapse. 

That, and a meeting with lame-duck Japanese PM Suga, may be the only things for Narendra Modi to write home about. 

1130 words

Sept 24, 2021, updated Sept 25, 2021.

A version of this essay was published by swarajya magazine at https://swarajyamag.com/technology/has-apple-peaked

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently celebrated 10 years at its helm. It is the most valuable company in history, at about $2.5 trillion -- an unimaginably stratospheric number -- and Cook has steered it to its massive valuation. That is a surprise to many who thought Cook, basically an operations man, would never be able to fill the shoes of the flamboyant and dashing Steve Jobs. 

Cook has indeed done a remarkable job of steering Apple. But what next? The last real innovation Apple produced is the iPhone, and that was a while ago: 2007, to be precise. It is still a huge money-spinner, but where exactly has Apple innovated since then, except in minor, supporting products like the Apple Watch and the Apple Airpods? 

There is an interesting claim by management theorist Simon Sinek that what distinguishes Apple is the ‘why?’ question. Why does Apple exist? Well, in Steve Jobs’ terminology, it was to make “insanely great products”. As Sinek would say, “Want to buy one?”. Jobs saw a lot of wonderful new technologies at Xerox PARC and intuitively understood how these were transformative, and so he adapted them. In stark contrast, other technology companies have mundane goals: profit margins, market penetration, etc. 

But that differentiation -- design excellence -- may well have walked out the door with the exits of Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, the chief designer. And brilliant design doesn’t always succeed, unless you are able to respond to the unarticulated needs of the people who will buy the products (which is the gospel of the discipline of ‘design thinking’, which, confusingly, is not about design per se but about solving problems the way a designer would).

Apple did have its share of fiascos: for instance the hand-held computer (personal digital assistant) named the Newton. Its demise almost brought the company down, and led to the exit of Jobs. On the other hand, the original Macintosh was a thing of beauty, and it was vastly superior to the competition. But my question remains, where is the innovation today? I hear there’s an Apple Car coming, or Apple Glasses, but they are not really “wow!”. Apple always shows up at the top of the list of innovative companies, but that is mostly resting on its laurels.

I must make a disclaimer: I have a love-hate relationship with Apple. The very first computer that I personally owned was a Macintosh Plus that I bought for a princely sum even though I got a university student discount. It was the obvious choice at the time: along with a dot-matrix printer it enabled me to produce presentable reports, graphs and term papers. The alternative on offer was DOS-based PCs, which, although they had Lotus 1-2-3, were distinctly user-unfriendly and far less appealing. 

Source: Macintosh Plus, Photo by Thomas Millot on Unsplash

That Mac lasted me a long time: robust, rugged and reliable, in an all-in-one, portable chassis. Later, while working in Silicon Valley, I bought my second Mac, a Macintosh 2. This was a more conventional device with a separate monitor and CPU box. I bought it at a sale when the company Go went under: it was developing an OS for handheld devices, but it ran out of runway. To be honest, I didn’t like that Mac as much as the earlier one. 

But the real surprise came when I decided I needed a laptop a few years later. I found out that Windows-based laptops had come a long way, and I could buy one for roughly $1000, which was significantly less than Apple’s laptops were going for. So I bought a Toshiba; I have never bought an Apple laptop, although I had one from work a few years ago. It was nice, but for an office worker, and not a media creator, it was not more appealing than a Windows laptop. These days I am happy with my Chromebook, using a Windows machine only to run specialized applications, or some like Audacity that don’t run on the Chromebook. 

That sticker shock was the turning point for me. Maybe I was wrong in turning down a better put-together product than the average Windows laptop, but I was not willing to pay a premium for a consumer item. I may have been wrong, because my average Windows laptop has had a lifetime of only 3-4 years while the Macs, I hear, do not get obsolescent so quickly. I hear this about iPhones vs. Android phones too. 

I didn’t realize it then, but the issue I was up against was Apple’s business model of detailed control over everything. That makes the Apple ecosystem both attractive and forbidding. On the one hand, if you are willing to cede control to Apple, then you have a smooth and pleasant experience. This is what has created legions of Apple fanboyz, who are totally happy with the walled garden, and have no wish to exit. Oddly enough, Apple has become the Big Brother (albeit more benign) that it lampooned in the famous 1984 ad. 

There is a nice contrast between Apple’s highly integrated model (which incidentally ensures fat margins) and the Wintel model. I would certainly not call Wintel an ‘open’ system, because it was zealously controlled by Microsoft and Intel, but it was (is?) a disintegrated model, because although the principals held the IP tightly and extracted monopoly rents, there were opportunities for third parties to exist, and even thrive, where the two were not present. And they were not ubiquitous, unlike Apple in its own stack. 

Source: Strategicmanagementinsight.com

Which is the better model? There is no straight answer. Today Apple’s model is incredibly successful. Earlier the Wintel model was incredibly successful too. One of the concerns about Apple going forward is that it may have reached the end of this business model. They are trying to reinvent themselves as a services+product firm, but we will have to wait and see. 

There are several other issues. The first is, simply, size. It’s hard to sell more iPhones than there are people in a country, I suppose, even if they can afford them and want them. So Apple as a matter of basic economics will slow down, and its juicy profit margins will erode. In fact, I am rather amazed that there aren’t passable Chinese clones of Apple products. Maybe it’s the deterrent effect of Apple’s fearsome lawyers.

Or maybe it is the symbiotic relationship between Apple and China. There is the famous story (it may be apocryphal) that the iPhone originally had a plastic screen, but Jobs found it scratched up easily, so at a late stage he insisted on a glass screen. The story goes that the only place where they could quickly ramp up and find enough people to cut and process the glass was in the factories of Apple’s Chinese partners.

Source: Photo by David Švihovec on Unsplash

So the supply chain relationship between Apple and Chinese OEM’s has been good for both. 

I’m not sure if this will be feasible going forward, as there is a general intent on the part of the US to decouple from China (although this is opposed by both Big Tech and Wall Street). So this happy state of affairs in supply chain management is under threat, which may either increase Apple’s costs, or end up in Chinese erecting barriers to market access, or both.

There are some clues in China’s recent clampdown on its own ‘high-tech’ companies like Alibaba, Didi Chuxing, etc. that China views these mostly e-commerce entities with disdain, preferring to direct investment towards the harder technologies such as, perhaps, quantum computing, biotechnology, energy, etc. They may well be right. Apple has more tangible products than Microsoft, Alphabet, Facebook, et al; still, when they all announced record earnings in July, investors were a little sceptical about future prospects.

My feeling is that these Big Tech firms are sort of moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic. Their core businesses are plateauing, and they will have to enter into each others’ areas to sustain their growth; thus Apple is rumored to be building its own search engine (though it gets some $10 billion dollars from Google to be the search engine of choice on iPhones) and even an advertising platform. 

But the problem is that they are all following a model of advertising-led revenue (although Apple protests that they do not sell, or have to sell, their users’ data, I suspect they will not let go of user data that easily) or what is known as ‘surveillance capitalism’. This is already raising hackles among consumers as well as regulators concerned about monopolies, which these Big Tech firms do have in their niches.

There is an increasing trend towards anonymity or even pseudonymity, and I suspect a business model will emerge where users keep their data to themselves, or demand payment for it. That may put a major crimp on their businesses, that is if the regulators don’t get to them first. There have been record fines imposed by the European Union, Russia, etc on these Big Tech companies, and the US competition authorities may weigh in as well.

Whatever goes up will come down. We just don’t know when that will happen. It is certain that Apple will fade, as other champions have, for instance IBM or Toshiba. The question is when. My belief is that the best days are behind Apple, but I have been wrong before, so don’t count them out. The structural and environmental changes we see now argue that Apple is past its best days. 

1600 words, Aug 30. 2021 

A version of this essay is published by swarajya.com at https://swarajyamag.com/world/chinas-clampdown-on-national-technology-champions-xis-new-industrial-statism-triumphalist-hubris-and-art-of-ju-jitsu

The world has been baffled by China’s sudden clampdown on its very successful, and giant, companies such as e-payments company Ant Financial, ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing, food-delivery firm Meituan, and several online education firms. Given the opacity of the Chinese communist party, commentators can only imagine what the reasons might be. 

Writing in Nikkei Asia, Richard McGregor suggested that “Xi’s tech crackdown preserves socialism with Chinese characteristics”. On the website unherd.com, Marshall Auerback suggested that “The West can learn from China”. The Economist’s current cover story is titled, “China’s attack on tech”. There is a plethora of other views on the topic, and it is worth exploring why this happened, and what we might take away, especially from an Indian point of view.

It seems to me that there are at least three plausible scenarios, and any of them may be in play, and maybe all three at once:

* Industrial policy, directing where investment and funding will go

* Triumphalist hubris, because of how successful China has been lately

* A cosmic form of ju-jitsu, using the very strengths of the West against it

Industrial policy

It may well be that China has decided (as in the Made in China 2025 plan) that there are certain technologies that have an outsize impact on the future, and they have decided to focus their attention therein. For example, Quantum Computing, Biotechnology, Materials Science, along with specific applications of AI and Machine Learning (a recent report suggests that China has overtaken the US in the citations of their papers in AI).

Such a direction would not be particularly surprising. A much-cited article by C K Prahalad (“The Core Competence of the Corporation”, Harvard Business Review, 1990) made a comparison between GTE and NEC, and concluded that the latter handily defeated the former by concentrating on the crucial technology of the then-future, semiconductors.

Others, for instance Scott Adams (cartoonists often have surprisingly sage perspectives), have suggested that China’s management model is engineering-driven and is thus focused, ruthless and unaffected by the legal hair-splitting that bedevils many other countries, including India. 

Thus, industrial policy could well be a sensible way of dealing with the uncertainties of the future. Japan’s MITI tried to guide industry in the 1980s and 1990s with mixed results, but China’s mandarins may well believe they have a better handle on reading the tea leaves. 

There is the other side of the picture, which is quite relevant to India as well. What is considered the ‘tech industry’ in the US these days consists of a number of behemoths in what is loosely referred to as Silicon Valley, although several of them, such as Microsoft and Amazon are actually in Seattle. The usual suspects include, apart from the above, Google parent Alphabet, Facebook and Apple. 

In a sense, the Chinese are asking a very good question: what exactly is high-tech about these companies? It is true that they are extremely successful financially, in fact spewing out oodles of cash, and some are valued in trillions of dollars, but exactly what is their innovation? Take Apple, for instance. Yes, it is true that the iPhone, which debuted a decade ago, was revolutionary, but what have they designed lately? 

Not to be dismissive, but Facebook and Google do ‘surveillance capitalism’, basically selling their users to advertisers. Amazon and Microsoft are soaring on the basis of their cloud-computing infrastructure. But one could argue that they are merely milking their innovations of a decade ago, and don’t have much of a recent product line that creates a ‘moat’ for them, or in MBA-speak, a ‘blue ocean’. 

The same question can be asked of India’s lionized unicorns, of which here is a partial list as per the Economic Times a few days ago. Exactly what earth-shaking and life-changing innovations do they bring to the table? Yes, if they have managed to build big, loyal customer bases, sure, that can be of value. But just copying and indigenizing business models successful elsewhere is not exactly setting the stage for world-beating companies.

To put it bluntly, the Chinese may be calculating that Silicon Valley’s best brains are now engaged in minutely tweaking algorithms to capture the attention span of customers, and are not thinking of solving the world’s problems. For instance, Silicon Valley engineers have been notably less than successful in addressing climate change or even the Wuhanvirus/Covid-19 pandemic. 

The Chinese may have a point, and India’s policy makers should take note. There has long been disquiet about India’s very successful IT services companies based on the fact that they have, nevertheless, left little by way of a technology legacy the way early Silicon Valley pioneers such as Hewlett Packard and Fairchild Semiconductor did. 

Triumphalist hubris

China has good reason to believe they have won. They have, for all practical purposes, created a new world order dominated by them. Just think of what they have done lately in terms of riding roughshod over the world. Nobody would dare to demand reparations from them for what could be construed as the crime against humanity of 4 million dead from the virus that arose in their country (and could well be something they designed in a lab). 

Similarly, they have captured the South China Sea, used their debt-trap diplomacy to extort their way to strategic assets, and cavalierly sent up rockets that might fall on anybody’s head. One could also make a cogent argument that they were able to harness their media and social media assets to defenestrate an American president they didn’t like. Not to mention the pandemic narrative that, for long, completely exonerated them from any blame. 

I wouldn’t blame them for quietly celebrating a little, or for believing they have cracked the puzzle of how to, if not make friends, at least influence people and get them to do anything they want. In this context, they have also infiltrated institution after institution, insinuated their cadres into positions where they could capture data or inventions from others, often illegally.

Maybe they believe that they know so much about us that they, in effect, have incriminating evidence on us that they can use to intimidate us into doing their bidding. 

One example is the big super-apps from China: Tencent and Ant Financial, which have evolved into efficient ways of vacuuming up data from and about consumers. Unlike the American model of stand-alone apps that know a great deal about individuals, the super-apps offer a walled garden that has everything from payment to mutual funds to loans to travel agencies. These apps know so much about Chinese people that the government, using it,  is able to create the infamous social credit score for all residents. 

There have been overseas ventures as well. It is rumored that Chinese-branded smartphones and surveillance cameras may well be capturing and transmitting data to their servers back home. There is also the story of the African Union, whose building was constructed by China. It is said that every day at 5pm, all the confidential conversations in the building were transmitted back to China.

There is also the sinister story of the Chinese gene company BGI group. According to a Reuter’s story (“China’s gene giant harvests data from millions of pregnant women”) their prenatal tests were “developed in collaboration with the country’s military” and they are using them to “collect data from millions of women for sweeping research on the traits of populations”. Perfect information, one could imagine, for well-targeted biological weapons.

It may well be that the Chinese have decided they know enough from snooping; they don’t really need the super-apps any more, and so they are cut loose. In their triumphalist fantasies, there is nothing that prevents them from reclaiming their (mythical) ‘Middle Kingdom’ status, the center of the Universe.

The art of ju-jitsu

The very strengths of the West are being deployed against it by the Chinese, who also believe that their model of “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” ie. the private sector is ultimately subservient to the State, is the right model for the rest of the world, rather than the buccaneer capitalism exemplified by the US. That anyway is CCP dogma, and it appears that they are proving it too.

Consider the (erstwhile strengths of the West, especially the US, that China has usurped:

* Manufacturing: hollowed out, and China owns the supply chain now

* Innovation and R&D: now confined to tweaking social media applications. China also sends it bright students to learn at the best US universities and then bring the knowledge back home with them

* Education: while ‘woke’ dogma and the cancel culture are dumbing-down US students, China is deprecating its own online education companies because it doesn’t want rote learning and exam hell, but problem-solving skills and creativity/innovation in its children and college students. 

* Finance: Wall Street has been able to crush competitors in the past (for instance, they did something to Japan, I am not sure exactly what, to bring its meteoric rise to a halt), but now they are hand in glove with China. The Wall Street Journal wrote a year ago that “China has one powerful friend left in the US: Wall Street”

* Marketing: the narrative building that China does is world-class, and it has bought its way into media (for instance, it is alleged by nationalinterest.com that the WSJ got $6 million and the Washington Post $4.6 million from China). The obvious biases in social media and in mainstream media (apparently including science and medicine journals The Lancet and Nature) support this perspective

* Capitalism: Investors have made much money in the tech runup in the US, but they also lost a lot when China decided to make a policy change. According to the WSJ, “Investors lost hundreds of billions in July”, which means that the very ideas of capitalism are being deprecated in plain sight by China.

A case can be made that it is not any longer a single point attack by China, but “unrestricted warfare” as in the infamous book by two Chinese colonels. They are single-mindedly on the warpath, and they intend to do anything, I mean anything, to win. The skirmish over the technology companies should be seen in that light. 

From an Indian point of view, it would be foolish to surmise that China has actually won: the much better lesson would be to take the good part of their industrial policy and to figure out how India can leverage the exodus of investors and funds from Chinese firms to create long-term competitive advantage. 

1600 words, 13 Aug 2021 

A version of this essay was published by swarajaya.com at https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/a-tale-of-two-hacks-pegasus-and-chinas-microsoft-exchange-penetration

In the recent past, we have seen a lot of news stories. Massive riots in South Africa and Cuba. The uncertainty in Afghanistan. Floods in Germany and China. Surging Wuhan virus cases in hitherto relatively unscathed Southeast Asia. A ‘border clash’ between Assam and Mizoram. Bezos one-ups Branson in the space race. China was accused of large-scale hacking of Microsoft Exchange a few months ago.

So there are plenty of real, meaty stories to report on.

Yet the Indian media was full of stories about something dubious: the alleged Pegasus hacking expose. There are two problems with it. One: as a narrative, it makes no sense; in fact, the meta-narrative is far more interesting. Two: It is an outstanding example of how gaslighting works on Indians (but not on Chinese).

The meta-narrative about Pegasus

There is a plethora of manufactured news stories about India. Everything from the Rafale accusations, rounds 1, 2 and 3, including fake news created by an Indian newspaper by judiciously cropping content; to the exaggerations about the Citizenship Amendment Act. Along with the constant low-level insurrections and mild rioting, this suggests that someone is pursuing an agenda.

The most obvious conclusion is that a time-honored tactic is in play: throw a whole lot of dirt, and hope some of it sticks. So far, almost nothing they have tried has worked, but that is not going to stop them. They will keep coming. The recent Rafale allegations were warmed-over allegations that an NGO named Sherpa and some dicey website had already made. The money trail as to who funds Sherpa and friends is quite instructive. (Hint: some white billionaires).

The Pegasus allegation is also not new: it is recycled from before, as seen in these screenshots from 2019 and 2020.

If you follow the trail on the ‘AdivasiLivesMatters’ post, you end up with one of their prime motivations: the whitewashing of the Bhima Koregaon Urban Naxals who have been hauled up for sedition and fomenting separatism. The breast-beating over one of them, Stanislaus Lourdusamy, Society of Jesus, happened just a week or so ago.

Here is more from 2020. Aha, 121 Indians then, only 33 now. Odd, isn’t it?

Incidentally, the very same Congress supporters and MPs who are on the warpath now were silent a few years ago when Manmohan Singh declared that “phone tapping is the  right of the government”. Which, to be candid, is true. All governments need to spy on their people: even the sainted Ashoka had a huge surveillance operation. Did we hear anybody shriek “treason” when Manmohan said this? Apparently not. 

In the US, there is widespread surveillance by the government. Under the sainted Obama in 2010, they even tapped the phone of their most important ally, Germany’s Angela Merkel: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/10407282/Barack-Obama-approved-tapping-Angela-Merkels-phone-3-years-ago.html

The US left are good at narratives. There is the salutary example of what happened to the Trump administration in 2020. It appears there was a concerted effort by various vested interests to gaslight the US electorate, leading to the (somewhat violent) overthrow of the incumbent. I am not making this up: TIME magazine billed it as the “inside story of the conspiracy to save democracy” https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ . 

For a dissenting opinion, please read the startling substack below that tells the story that has been suppressed.

If you know anything about computer security, it is evident that the purported story about Pegasus is not supported by the technical facts. Much has been written about it, so I shall not belabor the point. But the fact is that the narrative has changed from “50,000 phones hacked” to “50,000 phones may have been hacked” to “the 50,000 phone list is an indicative list of phones that someone might potentially want to hack” suggests that this is like “Aryan Invasion” becoming “Aryan Migration” and then “Aryan Tourist™” Theory. 

Or how “Kerala has slayed Corona” became “Kerala has 50% of Corona cases in India”. In Trump’s case it was “The Steele Dossier documents how Russian prostitutes peed on Trump” to “There is no evidence that the Russia narrative has any basis according to the special prosecutor”. But the narratives succeeded in misleading most everybody for a while.

And who are the alleged hack-ees in India? To be honest, they don’t appear particularly interesting, nor likely to be the bearers of state secrets. It’s quite a weak list. In general, these are not people any self-respecting government would want to snoop on. There are many other People of Interest in the country that a spy agency would want to phone-tap.

The meta-narrative, in fact, is far more interesting than the narrative. Just look at this headline story in The Guardian. Even though several other countries were alleged to have used Pegasus, that was sleight-of-hand and intended to obfuscate: the clear target is Modi. 

The ecosystem was already primed, and this dates back to 2019 as above. Here is a lurid story from a known Modi-baiter. It is not clear how he’s an ‘expert’ on hacking or security.

Similarly, Arundhati Susan Roy, a woman for all causes, launched into typical hyperbole.

And inevitably, the prolix Pratap Bhanu Mehta chimed in, too. Clearly, there was a toolkit, and the memos had gone out to rally the troops to all sing from the same hymn-book.

The American wing of the ecosystem also swung into action. Within 24 hours, 30 groups organized a protest against India, Hindus, and Modi. Notably, this included rabid Christian fundamentalists like this person below, various Muslim groups like CAIR, and radical leftists. Obviously, there was a plan, and surely a toolkit for the Americans as well.

The sum and substance of all this is that there is a concerted effort to paint India as a violator of freedom of speech, fascist, dictatorial, etc etc etc. All the usual suspects are involved. Diligent people who dug into the antecedents of various groups involved and followed the money trail arrived at the conclusion that there are a few sinister individuals and organizations behind this. The presumed goal: regime-change and preferably balkanization of India. No surprise, this.

Even though this particular effort was an abject failure -- nobody in India gave a damn, and within a day it had disappeared even from the NYTimes (so it is possible to embarrass Deep State bastions!) -- this is not the end of it. The ecosystem will, like Robert Bruce, try, try and try again. Two reasons: one is to give the Nehru dynasty scion some excuse to strut about; two is to prevent Parliament from conducting business, thus negating the BJP’s majority.

The reaction to Chinese hacking: softly, softly

Simultaneously, there was the case of the Microsoft Exchange hack from earlier in the year, which affected some 30,000 businesses.

As this magazine, a known cheerleader for the Deep State, points out, the US, its Five Eyes Anglo allies (the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), Japan, and the EU got together, and gave China a delicate slap on the wrist. The fact that all of them “admonished” China together means that they would not be able to agree on anything to “punish” China other than the most anodyne and soothing actions. 

There is ample evidence of Chinese mischief. Apart from large-scale hacking (Obama negotiated what was billed as a ceasefire, but apparently it wasn’t), it has been stealthily acquiring genetic data about millions of pregnant women from all over the world: all the better to create targeted biological weapons. 

That’s not the end of it: China is even stealing data from its client states like Cambodia.

Despite all this, there is extreme reluctance to call out China’s bad behavior. We are familiar with the year-long saga of how the origins of the Wuhan virus have been obscured by the Chinese, with the apparent active collaboration of US officials such as Anthony Fauci and intermediaries such as Peter Daszak. Yet, just this week comes the news that the WHO is, once again, well, helpless.

One might ask why. Why is the all-powerful West unwilling or unable to tackle cyber-mischief from China, when the evidence is all over the place? And why are they so quick to pounce on India when there is vanishingly small evidence of wrong-doing here?

There are several answers, and none of them is particularly appealing. 

The first is that the West, and especially the US, is so entangled with China that despite all the huffing and puffing by Biden, no decoupling is going to happen. 

The second is that China has frightened the US with its wolf-warrior diplomacy that we saw in Alaska and more recently just this week, where they intimidate the US side by listing all the unsavory things they do, including the dubious elections, racism, and so on; and the US really has no defense against this onslaught.

The third is that India is far easier to bully because we are easily gaslighted and shamed by Anglosphere narratives, we do not retaliate, and we are infiltrated by fifth columnists. India could easily have sent a message by putting the screws on Amazon, as Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post, which was active in the Pegasus fairy tale. It could have, as I have been saying ad nauseam, sued or defenestrated the pompous white migrant workers from The Economist, NYTimes, FT, BBC, WaPo, NPR and all the other hostile media, as Lee Kwan Yew used to do with such notable effect. 

Until India applies some pain to the perpetrators of fraud and their paymasters, this sort of thing will continue.