Shadow Warrior by Rajeev Srinivasan

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A version of this essay will be published by Chintan of the India Foundation.

The terrifying riots there have died down a bit, but not before causing significant damage. Not only the deaths, but the damage to the economy and to investor confidence must be substantial. A major oil refinery was shut down, highways were blocked, telecom towers and warehouses were torched. Thousands of small businesses as well as malls were looted, and in many cases, burnt to the ground.

From an Indian point of view, the plight of Indian-origin businesses, as well as of people of Indian origin, is of great concern. There is the naive belief in some circles that because of the Gandhi legacy (after all, he lived in that country for years) and the respect Nelson Mandela had for him, there must be some goodwill among South Africans for Indians.

That is far from the case, as a rule. It is just as risible as believing American blacks have some fellow-feeling for Indians just because Martin Luther King spoke glowingly of Gandhi. On the contrary, the average American black views all Asians as competing for the crumbs that non-whites get. 

I realized this long ago about South Africa while reading apartheid-era novels, wherein the Indian-origin people are members of the African National Congress, but they are distinctly second-class. Quite rightly, black South Africans dominate: it is their country, after all. A few whites, propelled by what we now call ‘social justice’ are also part of the inner circles. But the Indians are outsiders, tolerated at best, excluded at worst. 

We have seen this in many countries: Tamils in Sri Lanka, Chettiars in Burma, Gujaratis in Uganda and much of East Africa, and Tamil plantation workers in Malaysia. The list goes on. It mirrors the Jewish experience in much of Europe, and the Chinese experience in Southeast Asia: unloved immigrants who nevertheless are important for the economy.

Apartheid-era South Africa, if I am not mistaken, had clear divisions: whites, coloreds (mixed-race people), blacks and Indians. There was little mixing across the groups. I knew a white American in Boston who had worked in South Africa. He had interacted with hardly any Indians, and thought they were under the ‘colored’ rubric. In a Laurens van der Post novel, there’s a character named Miss Naidoo, an ANC member, and a cripple. I think the metaphor was not accidental. 

Indians have a history of being outsiders in the societies they immigrate to; and often the butt of both envy and disdain, as they are non-violent, and often affluent, and thus perfect victims. It is also known that the Indian government does very little even for its expatriate citizens, not to mention long-ago migrants. This could well be the reason that many Indian businesses were attacked. Durban, KwaZulu Natal, is where most Indians live.

The prevailing wisdom from the Western media is that the riots were political, instigated, and pre-planned. It is said that the goal was regime change, as the current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, is unwinding widespread corruption by the previous president, Jacob Zuma, whose arrest was the proximate cause for the troubles. Zuma’s children and foundation, as well as his ethnic group, the dominant Zulus, are accused of malfeasance. 

We in India should note those words: regime-change, instigated, pre-planned riots, ethnic-group, corruption. This is precisely what is going on here too: the ancien regime, corrupt to the core, manufactures reasons for riots, with the help of malign outsiders, and its vote-banks can create disturbances at the drop of a hat. The intent is a ‘color revolution’, a violent overthrow of the current regime. It is an exact match with what apparently went down in South Africa.

But there are dissenting voices. A friend who’s a professor at the University of Cape Town (he could well be a Zulu himself, I didn’t ask), said, and I quote his message verbatim, in its entirety: 

Looting and many forms  of violent public protests are very common in South Africa.  The current one has been very massive.  To a large extent, this has been a result of the covid-19 pandemic. Due to the lock down restrictions, unemployment has risen so much, people are struggling. Initially govt was providing a sort of social grant to cushion the effects, but that was stopped months ago.  So any trigger would get people into the streets.

The professor is painting a different picture. South Africa has long been infamous for violence, including against foreigners; car-jackings; murders; and general mayhem. Coincidentally, I was watching a film named ‘Chappie’ about robot cops set in Johannesburg: the crime is getting to be too much for human police to handle. 

So which is it? A pure political spectacle as we see in India, or is it the aakrosham of a people who were restive anyway, but have been devastated by the pandemic? It is important for us to know. South Africa is a beautiful country; it is the locomotive economy for the entire continent; and if it collapses into a failed state, it puts a big crimp into India’s own Indian-Ocean-Rim based economic prospects for the future.

A version of this essay was published by swarajyamag.com at https://swarajyamag.com/world/lessons-for-india-from-south-africa-beware-of-those-bearing-gifts. Please listen to the podcast (click the ‘play’ button above), and give me feedback. It takes a lot of work to put the podcast together, and I would like to hear what you guys think of it, and your suggestions on how it can be improved.

As I write this, there are riots in South Africa over a court order to jail former President Jacob Zuma on corruption charges. It may escalate to a quasi-civil war. It was startling to hear that model-minority Indian-origin South Africans are facing threats to their lives and livelihoods, and that some of them are defending themselves with firearms. 

As a teenager I read several novels by the Afrikaner author Laurens van der Post about the days of apartheid, and I was struck by the trisanku nature of the Indians there: disrespected by both blacks and whites, living a tenuous and uncertain existence. We saw what happened to Indians in Idi Amin’s Uganda, and we saw how the Chettiars were ejected from Burma. 

A big reason for the assaults is the certainty that Indians are soft targets: that they do not fight back and they often have assets because they are diligent and save whatever they can. Indian businesses are being torched, and their very lives are in jeopardy.

It is important to pay attention to this because India’s future is entwined with the Indian Ocean Rim, and with the fast-growing (at least till the pandemic struck) economies of that huge and relatively empty continent. The Chinese have made massive inroads there, but there is also a backlash. India needs to have an Africa strategy. India, meanwhile, merely gets second-hand information about Africa from the Anglosphere. 

This has to change. There are serious commercial opportunities. For example, Indian digitization and payment options may be attractive to African nations: UPI, RuPay, Aadhar, Cowin, India Stack etc., along with a bridge between UPI and Kenya’s mPESA. 

More to the point, there are lessons for us from the African encounter with the West. The net result has been the impoverishment and suffering of the African, including arbitrary lines drawn across the continent tearing apart traditional ethnic identities, leading to endless wars and displacement and ethnic cleansing. That must sound familiar to subcontinentals: the legacy of European empire.

I shall confine myself to three examples: Rwanda, Ethiopia and South Sudan. 

Rwanda

There are two ethnic groups in Rwanda, the ‘tall, fair’ Tutsis and the ‘short, dark’ Hutus. Well, that’s the theory, but to the impartial observer, they seem identical: they are very close genetically, and they had generally lived peacefully with each other for centuries. 

Christian missionaries arriving in Rwanda ‘discovered’ that the minority Tutsi were lording it over the Hutu. I don’t remember if they ‘discovered’ that the Tutsi were also migrants who had defeated and now oppressed the Hutus. In any case, under the missionaries, cleavages in society were manufactured or at least dramatically magnified. In the end, there was a horrific genocide. The Hutus attempted to wipe out the Tutsis, with the collusion of the church. 

If you get away from the gruesome killings, this might sound vaguely familiar to Indians: yes, it is the ‘Aryan’ Invasion Fairytale in a slightly different form. But the intent was the same: divide et impera. The goal was to maintain white control by fomenting fratricide and civil war.

It was the late N S Rajaram who had the insight that what happened in Rwanda was the template for the ‘Aryan’-‘Dravidian’ divide that missionaries created in India. One Bishop Caldwell, and later, his ideological descendants such as EV Ramaswamy Naicker, created exactly the same kind of unscientific and unsubstantiated division between the allegedly ‘Aryan’ Tamil Brahmins and the allegedly ‘Dravidian’ middle castes.

We have to assume that the intent in India was also (in addition to divide and rule) continuous fratricidal warfare, bhedam, and thus easy pickings for the imperialists. The funny thing is that Tamil Brahmins are genetically identical to the allegedly ‘Dravidian’ middle castes, but then, there is no reason to let science stand in the way of a good narrative. 

The fact that this whole thing didn’t lead to genocide in India, a la Rwanda, is miraculous, because it could easily have done so. Perhaps some vestige of civilizational tolerance meant only exile, not physical liquidation.

In Rwanda, after the horrific genocide, Tutsis led by Robert Kagame, who had honed fighting skills in neighboring countries, came to power. They have maintained the peace, and led to some level of development, although there are murmurs about autocracy. Interestingly enough, a deep dive into Kagame’s Rwanda brings up a lot of not-so-flattering comparisons to everybody’s poster-child du jour, Bangladesh, but that’s a story for another time. 

Ethiopia

This is an ancient Christian country with roots going back to the days around the Council of Nicae, 325 CE, that codified Christian dogma. Some seafaring European adventurers who ended up in India were looking for the fabled lost kingdom of ‘Prester John’, supposedly the king of Ethiopia. 

That didn’t save the country from going through a brutal civil war in the 20th century. The province of Eritrea rebelled, and after a 20-year-long war, which took the lives of an estimated 100,000 people on both sides put together, Eritrea formally became a new nation. 

In the past year, another rebellion in the province of Tigray has become a serious military problem. It appears as though the Tigrayans, whose fighters had earlier allied with different factions in the Ethiopia-Eritrea war, are now on the verge of defeating combined Ethiopian and Eritrean forces, and are now threatening to take the war into neighboring states. Just like Yugoslavia a while ago, Ethiopia has fallen apart.

Why is this relevant to India? Because the West is pushing for the balkanization of India, under the new and sexy name of “sub-national diplomacy”. Thanks to Abhinav Agarwal for pointing out the following article and a pithy quote from it: “Subnational diplomacy should be a crucial tool of Biden’s India strategy... "

And, putting their money where their mouth is, Americans are following up by ‘canceling’ the word ‘India’. It is either ‘South Asia’ (which, to quote that war-criminal Churchill, is “about as tangible as the equator”), or it is sub-national. It appears the West is reaching out to West Bengal and also to Tamil Nadu (see the ecstasy with which they received the appointment of Esther Duflo and Jean Dreze to an economic affairs panel there).

So it’s never “Indian-American”, but “Bengali-American”, or “South Asian American”, as far as US communiques are concerned. It took them 48 hours, and a lot of noise on social media, to issue a half-hearted retraction to the following. The funny thing is that Samir Banerjee’s father is not even Bengali, he’s Assamese! But hey, anything in the cause of bhedam. Chanakya, I am sure, would approve. Creating divisions where they don’t exist: now where have we seen this before?

South Sudan

This country was created exactly ten years ago, as a refuge for Christians who, it seems, were being oppressed by North Sudan’s Muslim majority. That is also a story we have heard elsewhere: partition on ideological or especially on religious grounds, courtesy the West. East Timor, for instance. Intriguingly, though, when a European country was divided (Germany) it was quickly reunited. I doubt the same will be true for other countries divided by the West. 

In 2011, there were hopeful predictions about an egalitarian and prosperous South Sudan, especially because it has oil. But the reality is far from it: the country is desperately poor, and there are accusations of gross human rights violations and oppression based on ethnicity. Child marriage is rife, child soldiers are common, and rape is used widely as a war tactic.

The creation of South Sudan has not led to any great improvement in the lives of the people.

Of the various ‘splittist’ (to use Chinese vocabulary for a minute) groups in India, the most virulent are the ‘Dravidian’ parties of Tamil Nadu, which nurse fond hopes for something they call ‘United States of South India’. India has also seen that widespread Christian conversion leads to secession and demands for separate homelands: as in much of the Northeast. As conversion increases in Andhra, Telangana and Tamil Nadu (there are already substantial numbers in Kerala), the urge to secede will likely increase. 

South Sudan’s case is salutary: creating a new nation based on religion is not exactly the most sensible course of action. Fortunately, in India’s case, apart from a few hard-core Tamils, most people in South India have no particular interest in anything ‘Dravidian’. But the ‘subnational diplomacy’ specialists from the Biden administration will likely create trouble. As an example, the closure of the Sterlite copper plant -- precisely when copper prices and demand are set to go through the roof -- must rank as one of the most brain-dead, malicious acts of recent times. 

It is quite likely that the famed sub-national diplomacy spoken of by CSIS is being applied to the cause of ‘Dravida Nadu’. In this, there will be other eager partners: Pakistan, China and various busybodies such as the Scandinavians who like to fish in troubled waters.

African Lessons

Interestingly, I have been seeing at least on social media that ordinary Africans are far more cognizant of the malfeasance of ex-colonials than Indians are. Their leaders are aware, too. Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, who died recently, was one. So was whoever it is who said, pithily, “When the missionaries came, they had the book and we had the land. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes, they had the land, and we had the book”. 

Indians, and our leaders, are still bedazzled, and mouth platitudes such as vasudhaiva kutumbakam and athithi devo bhava out of context. It is time we learned something from the Africans. 

1600 words, 14 Jul 2021

A version of this essay was published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rajeev-srinivasan-pakistan-will-soon-control-all-of-afghanistan/20210714.htm

Indian geo-strategists are rightly worrying about the fallout on India from the Afghan situation and America’s comprehensive defeat there. The specter of Saigon 1975, with the last helicopter leaving from the Embassy, and desperate people hanging on to it, haunts those Afghans who will be seen as collaborators with the Americans.

After consecutive defeats of two superpowers -- the Soviet Union and the US -- the Afghan Taliban and their sponsors the Pakistanis must be feeling their oats. Pakistan now has the ‘strategic depth’ they have long craved; and they will redirect their pious holy warriors (after all, many Taliban have been ISI in beards and baggy pants) towards India. We can expect a long hot summer of discontent.

Even the Economist magazine, a known cheer-leader for the Deep State, and which I recall was enthusiastic when the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, is now backpedaling furiously.

The US, in general, acts like a gigantic baby. It latches on to a shiny new toy, spends a lot of time and energy on it, then tires of it, and discards it. That’s what’s happened to Afghanistan: the US basically got tired of spending time and money on ‘democratizing’ the country, so they just took their ball and went home, leaving Afghans worse off than they were before 2001. Vietnam recovered from the US dhritarashtra alinganam, but it took them 40 years. 

Therein lies a lesson for India: you depend on American attention, and friendship, at your peril. Kissinger once said memorably, “it is dangerous to be America’s enemy, but it is fatal to be America’s friend”. This is why India has long been suspicious of close ties with the US (although clearly Pakistan, a US ‘ally’, has successfully navigated these turbulent waters).

Nevertheless, India has come around to the idea that the Quad is beneficial. Certainly, Japan is as committed as India, because they too face an existential threat from China. India is the only one that has a land border with Chinese-occupied Tibet and Chinese-occupied Xinjiang. Australia and the US, separated by oceans from China, are only mildly involved.

There is an amusing metaphor about a ham and eggs breakfast to show the difference between ‘involvement’ and ‘commitment’. The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. India, and Japan, are committed. 

The siege of Kunduz in 2001 was a point of inflexion 

The real problem is that the US Deep State has, for unfathomable reasons, been enamored of Pakistan. They have encouraged Pakistan to play a clever game of running with the hares and hunting with the hounds. This has enriched the ruling class in that country, which consists of the Army and the infamous 24 families that run the show. It has done little for the public.

There is some version of the Great Game between Russia and the British Indian empire that the US Deep State has been playing since independence. The Anglosphere wanted to have a foothold in the region to keep an eye on the Soviet Union and to deny it access to the warm water ports of the Indian Ocean. In addition, there were some absurd ideas about accessing the mineral wealth, especially oil, of the Central Asian ‘stans. This made Pakistan seem strategic to the Deep State, and they made them a treaty ally in the old CENTO days.

The sad fact is that any utility Pakistan may have had for US strategic interests has long been superseded by its nuisance value as a nation that uses terror as an instrument of state policy. There is a Pakistani manual of war (The Quranic Concept of War by Brig Gen S K Malik) that offers a pithy definition: “Terror is not a means of imposing [a] decision on the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose [on the enemy].” They have practised precisely this. 

Yet the Deep State’s fascination with the Pakistani Army persists, even after Osama bin Laden was discovered comfortably ensconced in a garrison town. Observers have long pointed out that this would not end well. The point of inflexion was the siege of Kunduz in November 2001. The Northern Alliance had surrounded most of the Taliban top brass (which were basically mid-level Pak Army and ISI officers) and was on the verge of massacring them. 

But the CIA colluded with the ISI  to airlift hundreds of them out to Pakistan. I noted then (The Siege of Kunduz https://in.rediff.com/news/2001/nov/30rajeev.htm) that it was a peculiar and unfathomable thing for the US to do, when the Taliban were about to be wiped out. The Northern Alliance, which later formed the core of the Afghan national government, was never able to gain the same leverage over the Taliban again. 

Graveyard of empires?

The British were never really able to control Afghan tribes. And now the tribes have defeated both the Soviets and the Americans. So a certain mythology has grown up around the invincibility of the lawless Afghans. Perhaps the US Deep State has a secret plan? Can they quietly turn the fierce Afghans against the Chinese, by supporting the Taliban to foment civil war in Chinese-occupied Xinjiang (CoX)? The oppression of Muslim Uyghurs there continues. 

This is a good theory, but there are flaws on both counts. One, the Afghans are not superhuman. Maharaja Ranjit Singh did defeat the Afghans and keep them under his control for some years. Two, unless they are doing taqiya, both the Taliban and Pakistan, despite avowed support for Muslims, have been deathly silent about the Uyghurs. 

A more likely scenario is that China will have untrammeled access to $3 trillion worth of Afghan minerals. 

That part is speculative, but there are real losers. India is one: the billions India invested in dams, schools, etc. will be gone. The Hindu and Sikh population of Afghanistan has already shrunk from some 200,000 to about 500 (CAA, anyone?). The Durand Line has been erased, but instead of Pashtuns uniting on both sides, Pakistan will soon control all of Afghanistan. Of course, the biggest loser is the Afghan population. For them, and for us, it is an unmitigated disaster. 

1056 words, 12 Jul 2021

A version of this article was published by Chintan on 7/7/2021: please read it at https://chintan.indiafoundation.in/articles/bidens-america/

I heard this, almost exactly in those words, from two different Indian-Americans: one, a spiritually-inclined female cousin, and two, an apolitical old friend. 

I was startled, and reminded of the old rock ballad from Crosby, Still, Nash and Young (Our House, from the album Deja Vu, 1970):

Our house is a very, very, very fine house with two cats in the yard

Life used to be so hard

Now everything is easy 'cause of you…

If only it were that simple! If only! 

I asked my friend to elaborate. Said he, “Even when the virus situation was getting worse, [Trump] was the most dividing factor... ”

… deleted

Is that true, or is it an illusion? I once wrote https://www.rediff.com/news/column/the-great-indian-rope-trick-and-other-illusions-of-progress/20130716.htm about how Indians have been conditioned to seek the illusion of progress, Potemkin-style, rather than actual progress. I wonder if Americans have been gaslighted similarly with something that looks like normalcy, but isn’t quite. 

… deleted

Social media is turning out to be positively evil. Belying fond hopes about the democratization of information flows, Big Tech are providing platforms only for pamphleteers and propagandists, with narratives to spin. (They defenestrate those who do not adhere to the approved narrative).

I am reminded of Hermann Hesse’s Nobel-prize-winning masterpiece The Glass Bead Game (1943). He called our time ‘the Age of the feuilleton’: the word translates to ‘gossipy newspaper supplement’, which is arguably the nature of social media. The reference comes from the point of a view of a more enlightened future century, that looks askance at the present as a time of primitive, superficial political cultures and narratives, 

Hesse predicted the discourse would be manipulated: he wrote when fascism and propaganda were rife; but he didn’t imagine the nexus between government, Big Tech, and a pseudo-academic nihilistic movement of ‘wokeness’ that worships ‘critical race theory’, and ‘cancels’ things.

In the case of the Wuhan virus, the feuilletons demonstrated the extent to which this nexus can do suppressio veri expressio falsi: they shut down any discussion of the possible lab origin of the pandemic. 

The feuilletonistas, which now include once-upon-a-time respectable entities like the Lancet, the WHO, the US CDC and FDA, have shown that they dance to agendas that are plainly visible. They have little credibility left. The mainstream media have long lost any integrity, especially those in the Anglosphere such as the NYTimes, WaPo, the Economist, the Financial Times, et al.

… deleted

In Afghanistan, the headlong rush for the exit means that Pakistan, through its proxy the Taliban, has now beaten both the Soviet Union and the US, and will deliver the region on a platter to China. 

The race problem hasn’t gone away: a young black man was shot to death by police again last week. More horrendously, a Puerto Rican couple were dragged out of their car and shot dead in Chicago. But there were no #BLM riots, nor anything about #LatinoLivesMatter. There was total radio silence from the media.

I wonder if all this is indeed the ‘New Normal’. If it is, we should adjust. But if it’s only an illusion, then beware of the gaslighters. 

1025 words, 22 June 2021

A version of this article has been published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/news/column/india-blundered-along-like-others-did/20210623.htm

There is a loud chorus of voices blaming India for somehow messing up its response to the massive wave of Wuhan virus (Covid-19) infections that have devastated the country. Many articles and editorials have come out in both the Indian media and western media suggesting that the Government of India was negligent, indifferent, or both; in effect that it criminally abdicated its responsibility to the people of India. 

It is normal to expect these cavils from political parties and from the mainstream media. In India the MSM is highly compromised and infiltrated by vested interests, both from local political parties and from foreign powers set on propagating a narrative that leads, inevitably, to regime change, and, preferably, balkanization. 

One of these outbursts was an editorial in the Lancet, a British medical journal, that puts the blame squarely on the GoI (with no blame attributed to the State governments, despite the fact that health is a State responsibility). I used to be impressed by the Lancet as essentially the paper of record in medicine, but a massive screw-up last year in regards to HCQ made me change my mind, and realize that politics takes precedence over science.

I wrote a long essay, Pious Frauds, https://openthemagazine.com/essay/pious-frauds/ about how credentialism rather than scientific truth is the hallmark of some of these storied institutions. The Lancet has been in the middle of several serious frauds, and it is astonishing that they still have a sterling reputation. So I would take their opinions with a large grain of salt, unless supported by impeccable data/evidence, which it is not in this case. Even purportedly neutral scientists and labs labor under agendas.

Here’s more on bad faith from the Lancet.

Much the same happened with another cheap, off-patent drug, Ivermectin. 

In both these cases, it was not at all convenient for Big Pharma that cheap, generic drugs made mostly in India would eat into their windfall profits. Let us note that Pfizer made a profit of $15 billion in 2020. Moderna made a profit for the first time in its history in Q1 2021. Also, Gilead Pharma’s Remdesivir, that was pushed as some sort of panacea, but in the event it proved mostly useless.

Another case in point is the increasingly vocal allegation that the US government in effect colluded with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to do gain-of-function research in bat coronaviruses, which made them far more potent as well as transmissible to humans. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, and others look like they concealed conflicts of interest and deliberately propagated the narrative that the Wuhanvirus must have evolved naturally. 

Nicholas Wade’s seminal essay, republished by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, is a scathing indictment of the media and its omerta in burying an important story that somehow didn’t fit their narrative: the lab-origin hypothesis, and in particular the conflicts of interests. See https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038 and a video version at https://unherd.com/thepost/nicholas-wade-the-case-for-the-covid-lab-leak-theory/

It looks increasingly likely that the Wuhanvirus was developed in a lab and was either leaked because of poor security in BSL-2 and BSL-3 labs, or, more alarmingly, that it was deliberately released as a bio-weapon. That is significant, for a variety of reasons: of most concern, the possibility of bio-warfare, which would be considered a crime against humanity, considering almost every country has signed treaties against it.

On a more mundane level, it means that the Wuhanvirus outbreaks are in effect, force majeure, by definition things that cannot be defended against or predicted, as they are unpredictable and out of the expected set of possible scenarios. 

All of us, individuals and societies alike, make plans based on events with a non-trivial probability. When an extremely improbable event hits -- Nassim Taleb famously called these Black Swan events -- it is beyond the scope of our normal strategic planning. 

This goes hand-in-hand with the sensible engineering principle of built-in safety factors. For instance, an engineer designing anything, a bridge, an aircraft, or a circuit, will assume a certain level of uncertainty, and build in some slack say 30-50% over the designed load. This enables the system to be resilient in the face of a sudden surge or stress on the system. 

But there are practical limits to how much safety you can build in, because there is a cost to it. You can design in 100% or 200% margins of error, or more, but these start to get expensive. There is a tradeoff: so you take an informed decision about the expected value of the maximum stress. That is what you engineer the system for.

A good example is the Fukushima reactor in Japan. It was (I may be a little bit off on the numbers, but bear with me for the principle) built to withstand an 8.5 earthquake on the Richter scale. There have been no quakes greater than 8.2 for 500 years, or since accurate records started being maintained. So that seems like a fair tradeoff on cost and risk. In fact, no project manager will approve the budget for reinforcing it to withstand an 8.8 quake.

But what happens if you get hit with a 9.0 earthquake? The system is overloaded, and all bets are off. There is catastrophic failure.

This is more of less what happened to every health system in the world when the Wuhavirus struck. India is no exception. Neither was the US when it was going through its peak: a year later, there are still hundreds of unclaimed bodies stored in refrigerated trucks; and there were mass graves with tens of bodies buried on an island near New York City. Nor was Italy, when people were dying in droves on ventilators. Nor was Osaka, more recently.

There is more: Thailand, Vietnam and several other countries, which had escaped the calamity earlier, are now showing signs of new outbreaks. The virus continues to ravage the world. So the first point is that it was not humanly possible to fend off the lethal virus, in particular the 617 or Delta variant, which was far more infectious in the second wave: its R0 was greater than 3 or even touching 4 in many places, which implies a combinatorial explosion in terms of infections. 

The second point is that India was complacent about how it had escaped catastrophe, and ‘boasted’ about how it was “vaccine supplier to the world”. There is some quote from PM Modi at the World Economic Forum that India had defeated the virus; this is trotted out by all and sundry to show hubris on the part of the Indian government. 

This reminds me of the ritual in Silicon Valley companies called “the massacre of the innocent”. After every failed project, there is a meeting to apportion blame. Some suitable bystander is anointed as the scapegoat, and the entire thing is blamed on him (it’s usually a man). The actual culprits who messed up are given a pass, and are sometimes promoted. 

The point is that if somebody made a reasonable decision, one that was appropriate given the information on hand at the time, cannot be blamed for the circumstances changing later. Hindsight does not count. Yes, one should anticipate, even war-game, for various scenarios, but you cannot be expected to be omniscient. 

By finding a scapegoat (which, historically, comes from a Middle Eastern custom of actually blaming a goat for all the ills that befall the village, and forcing it to wander off into the desert) you allow the real culprits to escape. This is what happens all the time in business, and surely elsewhere too.

Given the circumstances after the first wave subsided around the end of the year, it really did look like the strict lockdown had taken the wind out of the sails of the virus, and India was expecting to produce large volumes of Covishield and Covaxin over the first few months of 2021. So much so that India would give away some doses to small developing countries, and sell a lot more to the Covax alliance that would in turn distribute to the developing world.

Production levels at least for Covishield were seriously affected by a February 2021 (yes, Biden era) ban on exports of critical components under the US Defense Production Act. Belatedly, on June 4th, these restrictions were lifted. Here’s the New Indian Express’ coverage:

India was being a good global citizen in providing free vaccine to small countries; the contrast with big developed nations could not be more dramatic -- the latter were ordering 3 or 4 times the total doses they needed. In addition, the US was hoarding 45 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine which isn’t approved for use in that country. Classic dog in the manger syndrome. 

There are loud commitments from the G7 to provide a billion doses of vaccine free of cost to poor countries. This is good, but as Ronald Reagan once said, “Trust but verify”. I’d like to read the fine print. Does this mean a billion doses of mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna? What about the sovereign guarantees required by Pfizer as well as indemnity against any claims of side-effects? Who is going to provide that?

To sum it up, I have to fall back upon something from the Christian Bible: “let he who hath not sinned cast the first stone”. Not to say that India couldn’t have handled the situation better, but on average, it didn’t do anywhere near as badly as the naysayers make it out. It blundered along, exactly as every other country did. 

1592 words, June 12th, 2021

[PLEASE NOTE: THE FIRST 30 SECONDS OF THE AUDIO ARE MESSED UP. PLEASE BEAR WITH ME AND IGNORE THAT, THE REST OF THE AUDIO IS FINE. I DON’T HAVE ACCESS TO AUDACITY TO FIX IT UP AS MY PC IS BROKEN RIGHT NOW.]

There was an outstanding Doonesbury cartoon from 1980 lampooning then-POTUS candidate Ted Kennedy for making high-flown statements with nothing actionable: the punch-line was, “A Verb, Senator, We Need a Verb!”. 

I was struck by deja vu when PM Modi made a bold announcement on 7th June that the GoI was (re)assuming full control of vaccine procurement. I think Indians elected PM Modi to take decisive steps, but he has seemingly vacillated recently, so this was a welcome return to form. 

The decision was also a reiteration of a sound business principle: size matters. Large customer orders always get better terms than smaller ones. It was evident all along that there was no way a motley crew of States would ever get the attention of pharma majors when there is a large supply shortfall.

It was apparent that the grandstanding opposition CMs were hoping to do the following:

* Order the famous Pfizer vaccine at 10-20x the price of Covshield and Covaxin

* Get supply commitments from Pfizer (and presumably commissions)

* Then force the GoI through a public outcry to pay for the vaccine anyway

Obviously, that would have been a win-win for them. But this was doomed from the start, because Pfizer demands sovereign guarantees of indemnity. They asked Argentina to surrender its embassies and warships as guarantees of indemnity in case there were side effects/deaths and legal obligations. “Sub-national diplomacy” is all very well for Biden, but BigPharma is more hard nosed, and they know States have no assets they can seize, and so they will only deal with the GoI.

The opposition leaders are not really interested in vaccination, except as a stick to beat PM Modi with. Their support of the super-spreader ‘farmer’ agitation is clear proof of that. They flip-flopped, too. First, they wanted the GoI to allow States to procure vaccines. To their surprise, the GoI agreed. They were caught in a bind: and they had to backpedal furiously, because hardly any Big Pharma bothered to respond to their global tenders, except highly dubious Chinese vaccine makers.

So the PM has temporarily shut the politicians down, and they have been shown up. I am reminded of a poem by Oliver Goldsmith, “Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog”, which says, among other things:

But soon a wonder came to light,

That shew'd the rogues they lied;

The man recover'd of the bite–

The dog it was that dy’d.

That, of course, is what politicians do: and we price it into our calculations about them. Not that they don’t need some discipline. It would be highly instructive to, say, Mamata Banerjee, who runs a medieval fiefdom, to charge her for culpability in the killings and ethnic cleansings of Hindus in West Bengal by illegal Bangladeshi aliens and/or her party cadres. So would it be to indict the Nehru dynasty scion on his dicey citizenship (British? Italian?) and other sins such as the National Herald kumbhakonam. 

But there are, in my opinion, three other ‘institutions’ in India that are even more dastardly than politicians, and that need some decisive action. 

Bureaucracy

First, babudom. I have lost count of the number of ‘open letters’ from retired babus with suggestions for the GoI about how to go about various things. Wonder of wonders, none of these things occurred to them when they were in power and could actually have done something useful. No, then they were too busy applying their lips to the ample mammaries of the welfare state and milking it for all it was worth. 

IAS/IPS/IFS babus are excruciatingly sensitive to two things: their pension benefits and post-retirement sinecures. I remember a famous Nehruvian babu who joined an evangelical ‘aid’ group at 3x his salary, after going on leave and thus ensuring that his pension benefits would remain intact. It took a lot of shouting to force him to resign from the service and forgo his juicy pension/medical benefits.

There have been several other IAS/IPS officers in the limelight recently for all the wrong reasons: one barged into a Hindu wedding in Tripura (I think), slapped the priest, terrorized the attendees, ripped up the permit that allowed them to hold the ceremony at the muhurtam at midnight (as an exception to Wuhanvirus lockdown norms). 

Another slapped a young man who was stopped on police while proceeding to buy medicines, and slammed his phone to the ground. 

A third ordered a firing on a Hindu religious procession in Munger, and caused young Anurag Poddar to be shot in the head, and he died in his stricken mother’s arms. 

So far as I can tell, none of these babus paid for their excesses with a dismissal from service, or even a suspension. They were merely transferred elsewhere. The ecosystem takes care of its own. 

The latest example is a man who was Chief Secretary, West Bengal. There was gross insubordination on his part when he was 30 minutes late to a meeting with the PM, and then walked out early (the same antics as his Chief Minister). Upon being recalled to the center (after all, the IAS is a central service), he demurred. Shortly after, he retired, and was absorbed into the West Bengal government as a ‘senior advisor’.

There is a simple solution: on any transgression, suspend them without pay, and revoke the extremely generous pension and medical benefits pending a judicial inquiry into wrong-doing. Furthermore, make it a service rule that no retired babu can get a new post without its being advertised openly, and inviting qualified applicants, especially from the private sector. 

If these steps are taken in the case of one, just one, high-handed bureaucrat, the whole lot of them (selected on the basis of a single mandarin exam, with the subjects being ludicrously out of touch with current realities) will think twice about lording it over the public. 

After all, their job is administration: they should be selected on the basis of the IIM Common Admission Test or the GMAT and trained in the IIMs, and all the rigmarole of the fancy IAS Academy should be dispensed with. The days of generalist babus are over: industry increasingly requires domain knowledge and lateral entrants with short-term contracts. 

The IPS needs specialized training in law and order; similarly the IFS needs training in diplomacy, trade and geopolitics. These can be add-ons to the basic IIM training. 

Here’s an appalling example of how those with domain knowledge, not generalist mandarins, are the need of the day. This person is a retired Health Secretary, I am told: 

Judiciary

It has been clear as day for some time that the Indian judiciary suffers from deep structural flaws. The most obvious issue is that it is extremely inefficient, and has allowed millions of cases to languish: the Supreme Court has a backlog of 68,000 cases; High Courts together have 58 lakh cases, and District Courts have 3.3 crore cases pending. This is appalling. 

Judicial overreach is an endemic problem. Instead of fixing itself and ensuring that the unconscionable backlog is cleared in a time-bound manner, judges are encroaching on the territory of the Executive Branch by issuing peremptory orders on things they have no business in, no expertise in, and no value-added to offer in. 

The solutions are also obvious: 

1. Defining the focus of the Supreme Court to be strictly on Constitutional cases, and nothing but: no grandstanding on cricket or other high-visibility but trivial issues, 

2. Ensuring that appointments to the high judiciary are vetted and approved by the Parliament and thus the elected will of the people, and also not left to an incestuous, unaccountable Collegium that specializes in nominating sons, nephews and other relatives, 

3. Canceling the singularly outrageous device of the Public Interest Litigation (PIL), which has been used by well-heeled and motivated NGOs with foreign paymasters to bypass every check and balance and make a mockery of the process of escalation and appeal. 

In a 2018 essay, https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/can-we-fix-the-deeply-troubled-judiciary I wrote at length about these issues, so I will not repeat myself.

However, there is something the government needs to do: impeach one, just one, of the most outrageous of the judges. I have a candidate in mind, but shall not name names, mindful of draconian contempt-of-court strictures. 

The same issue with post-retirement sinecures and extravagant pension and other benefits comes up in the case of the judiciary as in that of bureaucrats. I had a great-uncle who was a State Chief Justice, and he had any number of tribunals and other jobs after he retired. I have a friend who was a Justice in a State, and post-retirement somebody is assigned to meet her at airports, carry her bags, and escort her to her flight!

Media

This is quite possibly the very worst and most corrupt institution in the country. It is thoroughly compromised and infiltrated by various vested interests, top to bottom. At one end, there is reason to believe that one of the richest and most visible editors in India was recruited by a New York Times correspondent as an ‘embedded asset’ more than thirty years ago. At the other end, the jibes about ‘2BHK’ journalists strike a chord, given their abject slavishness.

Indira Nehru Ghandy demonstrated that India’s journalists, when asked to bend, will grovel. Today, they can clearly be counted on to carry the agendas of any anti-India power: they are for sale.

This, of course, is par for the course for journalists everywhere. Some hallowed names in journalism, including science journals, especially British titles, have demonstrated that they are for sale to the highest bidder. Which for all practical purposes these days means they are ‘friends of Xinhua and Xi Jinping’, as the latter have splashed out on information warfare in a big way. Stories that reflect poorly on China tend to be swept under the carpet. 

The Big Tech social media platforms give themselves airs these days for obvious reasons: they can defenestrate sitting presidents not only from their platforms, but from their seats of power, too. Sometimes there are unintended consequences, as in what happened in Nigeria: Twitter blocked the President, and Nigeria suspended Twitter indefinitely. 

The ongoing saga of Twitter’s defiance of Indian law would be comical, if it weren’t such black humor. Twitter has thumbed its nose more than once at India: the first incident was when Jack Dorsey, its boss, showed up in India, got himself photographed with a bunch of women brandishing a slogan about “Brahmin Patriarchy”, and was photographed with the PM with body language screaming “arrogance!”.

Among many other transgressions, Twitter India in November 2020 deplatformed the scholarly @TrueIndology on flimsy or nonexistent grounds, essentially because they didn’t like him using well-reasoned and well-sourced information to trash leftist mythologies. I said in a podcast at the time that it was a watershed event, and that India should suspend Twitter forthwith. https://rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/p/podcast-episode-9-trueindology-incident

Later, there was an incident in which Twitter showed Leh in China. Showing the borders of India incorrectly (especially out of malevolence) is a non-bailable offense, which attracts immediate arrest of the perpetrator, which in this case would be Twitter India’s honchos. That was strike two, enough to block Twitter’s IPs in India. I thought that by March 2021 India had enough reason to shut the platform down. https://rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/p/episode-16-is-india-reining-in-bigtechsocialmedi

It’s comically appalling after all this history, and the fact that much bigger fish, such as Facebook, Youtube, etc. have acceded to Indian law, Twitter still goes around acting as though it were a sovereign government ‘negotiating’ with the Government of India on behalf of the “freedom of expression” of Indians. Nobody elected Twitter, did they? Such delusions of grandeur, such megalomania!

Why, PM Modi, is this relatively trivial application being given so much importance? Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? In reality, Twitter is -- get this -- the world’s No. 16 social media by number of users! It really is the chicken that should be killed to scare the monkeys such as Facebook, YouTube and Whatsapp, who are all watching with interest.

And exactly what will happen if Twitter is kicked out of India? I’m not sure what happened in Nigeria, but I suspect not much. Yes, Twitter is a convenient news feed for many of us, but its utility is limited, and other platforms can easily step into the breach, say India’s own Koo. 

India simply cannot be held to ransom by an app. If India could kick out Tiktok (ironically Biden is revoking the ban on Tiktok by Trump), CamScanner and other Chinese apps, what is the hold that Twitter has over the country? Is it some fear that the New York Times and its Seventh Fleet will suddenly appear in the Bay of Bengal? Oh, wait, the NYT doesn’t have a fleet. 

Just pull the plug on this whole sorry drama, Mr. Prime Minister. A verb, we need a verb from you: enough is enough. There is no reason to go around broadcasting that India is a Soft State. 

2194 words, June 9th, 2021

https://chintan.indiafoundation.in/articles/biden-afghanistan-and-relations-with-india/

It is up to every nation to pursue its interests; as has been said famously, there are no permanent friends, only permanent interests. India must accept this reality. The US will pursue its own interests, as defined by the current administration, although the question remains whether its short-term tactics will be counterproductive for long-term strategy. 

(paragraphs deleted)

The generals know what they are doing. The NYTimes reported that in 2014, Hamid Gul, the godfather of the ISI, said: “When history is written, it will be stated that the ISI defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan with the help of America. Then there will be another sentence. The ISI, with the help of America, defeated America”. Exactly. The only update is that “ISI, with the help of China, defeated America.”

(paragraphs deleted)

There is a trio of sinister events: one, the pointless provocation of a FONOP (freedom of navigation) operation in India’s exclusive economic zone in the Lakshadweep; two, the sheer cussedness of the embargo on vaccine raw materials (despite all the theatrics of a Quad vaccine initiative); three, the haranguing on climate change by John Kerry. 

(paragraphs deleted)

It was evident to America-watchers that a Biden presidency, especially with Kamala Harris and her loud niece Meena in the fray, would not be pleasant for India. Time to grit one’s teeth and ride out the next four years. The first 100 days have been bad. Things are likely to get much worse, alas. 

Note: Sorry for the silence for a couple of weeks, as I was busy. And computer problems: my Windows PC, where I normally use Audacity to record, has been messed up with boot problems. So this is recorded on a simple audio program on my Chromebook, and no chance of any post-processing editing.

I think western media has been less than honest in its ‘data analysis’ of Wuhan virus cases and deaths in India.

One newspaper said the numbers were an undercount by 30x. Several others have confidently assumed similar large undercounts. After all, India must be hiding the true numbers — for what exactly, they didn’t say.

I tried to understand how they concluded this, just as they confidently said there were ‘250 million “farmers” protesting’, ‘the largest protest ever in the world’, etc, when the actual numbers were probably 2500.

That is an overcount of 100,000x! This is ‘data journalism’?

Even if you assume 25,000 ‘farmers’ (in reality kulaks) were involved, this is a gross exaggeration by a factor of 10,000. This is Soviet-level or CCP-level propaganda. Slate and Foreign Policy ought to be tarred and feathered.

Here’s my hypothesis. The Wuhan virus ‘data analysis’ looked at the obituary pages of local newspapers, added up the deaths from all causes. They did not take the incremental death toll from the Wuhan virus. The base or normal death rate was not considered.

Is this innumeracy, or confirmation bias?

My local paper in Trivandrum has an entire page+ of obituaries every single day, year in and year out: that’s much bigger numbers than the Wuhan virus death toll. Here is the page from May 3: I count 64 obituaries (one is a relative of mine who died of a brain tumor). One person, it says, died of Wuhan virus.

There are three major local papers, so let’s say they will carry notices of 50x3 = 150 deaths, eliminating duplicates.

Now here’s news about deaths in Trivandrum district (population around 3.5 million) from the unquestionably leftist newspaper, The Hindu.

The actual number of Wuhan virus deaths in Trivandrum during the recent spike? Roughly 5 a day.

Ergo, by the impeccable logic of the ‘data journalists’, Trivandrum is under-reporting by a factor of 30, ie 150/5. There you go! Quad Erat Demonstrandum.

I bet this FT fellow (“I collated local news reports”) did precisely what I did above: took all deaths from all causes reported in the media, and pretended they were all from the Wuhan virus. Out of 1.3 billion, some number of people die every day from other causes: heart attacks, accidents, strokes, diabetes, asthma,….. but the Brit and his native informant simply added up all the deaths in the obituaries.

Anecdotally speaking, just think. How many people in your circle of acquaintances fell ill with the Wuhan virus? How many died? How many died of other causes? My hunch is that the all-causes deaths would dwarf the Wuhan virus deaths by a factor of 10-20x.

So much for ‘data journalism’. Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Pandemic porn narrative wins!

3 May 2021, updated 4 May 2021

There are three plausible reasons for the Biden Administration’s tone-deaf reaction to India’s humanitarian crisis in the #Wuhanvirus vaccine imbroglio:

* malign neglect

* a woke agenda

* a monstrous conspiracy.

As someone who lived half his adult life in the US, I have fond memories of the people and the country, and I have long been an advocate of closer India-US ties. The two are Estranged Democracies that share common values. I found the American reaction startling because of:

a) the optics regarding a quasi-ally,

b) the alleged Quad vaccine cooperation,

c) the fact India is the biggest supplier to the Covax initiative that provides the vaccine to developing countries.

Given the global pandemic, it would not do any good to America if pockets of the infection remained in some far off country. It has to be eradicated everywhere. We all have to be vaccinated.

If that’s not true, then there’s something truly sinister going on.

There are three possible scenarios, in decreasing order of probability:

Scenario One: Commercial considerations of Big Pharma

There has long been the suspicion that Western Big Pharma is in the vaccine game for the profits, and that it will brook no competition. For instance, the moment their mRNA vaccines went on the market, they began strong-arming customers. It is said that Pfizer demanded (and got!) total sovereign indemnity from any potential lawsuits; they also are rumored to have asked some countries to put up their embassies and military assets as collateral!

Estimates are that Pfizer made $15 billion in 2020. This data is a little old, but is shows the trend: Pfizer and Moderna are priced much higher than AstraZeneca (Covishield) and Bharat Biotech (Covaxin) products at Rs 150 ($2) in India. Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot vaccine is also cheaper. AstraZeneca and J&J promised to sell at cost, and not make a profit, for a while. Therefore, the hit job. QED.

No wonder, then, that there have been all these media horror stories about blood clots following AstraZeneca and J&J vaccinations, which have led the EU and the US to issue warnings. Meanwhile, there have been no major reports about any side effects of mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. That is distinctly odd.

I am reminded of Sherlock Holmes’ famous “curious incident of the dog in the night-time”. I am also reminded of the old saying “What’s good for General Motors is good for America”, only suitably updated for today.

So why was the Biden administration forced to back-pedal furiously and declare they will help India? First, the optics were really bad: India has exported 44% of its production, and America 0%.

There was broad support for India, even from groups such as crypto-enthusiasts.

Of course the usual suspect Cold Warriors weren’t very happy.

But it appears that American businesses (other than pharma) were a little concerned about India’s ‘buyer power’. After all, India buys a lot of stuff from Boeing, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, etc., and will probably buy even more going forward. Unless, of course, some unfortunate things happened. Like embargoes.

Scenario Two: Regime change and Balkanization in India, and ‘sub-national’ goals

The unrepentant East Coast Atlanticists and woke banshees who make up the Democratic ruling cabal have decided that two things must happen: the toppling of Narendra Modi, and the breakup of India into a bunch of squabbling state-lets.

In case it occurs to you that this is exactly what the Pakistani establishment wants, it is, and that is no coincidence.

It is quite possible that Biden’s Afghan exit is predicated on a deal with Pakistan’s ISI and its proxy the Taliban. Biden will (metaphorically) deliver Modi’s head on a platter, and in return the ISI will not severely harass and kill off American troops as they run for the exits.

But you can’t blame just Biden for this. It has been the general tenor of Democratic presidencies going way back to that charming rogue Clinton and the sainted Obama (who, if I remember right, also publicly granted China the ‘contract’ to manage ‘South Asia’).

The accepted narrative in the West (and this is reflected in their media’s breathless schadenfreude over India’s current Wuhanvirus wave, see for example, https://rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/p/ep-26-the-stunning-reaction-to-indias) is that Modi’s is a monstrous regime, that needs to be overturned in a ‘color revolution’, of which anti-CAA/anti-370 and ‘farmer’ [sic] protests are dress rehearsals that need American support and encouragement.

The Deep State definitely wants its old embedded assets, the Congress Party, back in power. They smell blood: they used the Wuhan virus and social media to do regime change and get rid of Donald Trump in the US. They think they can do the same in India. The 500,000 bots recruited by the Congress party (they advertised openly for it) can be counted upon to manufacture consent on social media.

The Congress party has a long history of giving away Indian land: starting with Partition and the gift of PoK by Nehru, then the gift of Cocos Islands to Myanmar, the tremendous efforts by Manmohan Singh to give away Siachen to Pakistan, and now the Congress’ support to Khalistani separatists aka ‘farmers’.

This fits right in with the Deep State’s balkanization efforts for India. “Subnational” is code for “let’s split India into many pieces”.

Incidentally, Biden’s graceless offer under duress to help India was intended to be through “partners” and “institutions”, read NGOs and embedded long-term assets including astroturfed activists. I hope India put its foot down and insisted that all transactions would be government-to-government.

John Mearsheimer, a well-known geostrategist, pointed out the fatal flaws in the Deep State’s assumptions about “Liberal Hegemony” and the huge bloodshed they have caused, but they march on, regardless. (Hat tip Megh Kalyanasundaram).

I can tell you this delusion isn’t going to end well for anybody concerned.

The narrative that Indians need to be ‘saved’ is so pervasive that no western media would ever run a story that shows we actually have agency, for example the story of 85 year old Narayan Dabhadkar, who voluntarily gave up his COVID bed in a hospital for a younger man, a stranger, “because I have lived my life, and he hasn’t”. He died 3 days later, at home.

Narayan Dabhadkar, an RSS man, will for that reason not be honored in Indian media or textbooks. Compare this to how Captain Oates in the ill-fated South Pole expedition of Robert Scott was lionized by the British as the ultimate in self-sacrifice, and we lap up the European sentiment vicariously.

Scenario Three: A large climate change initiative of depopulation

This is the doomsday scenario. We may be facing a perfect storm of several things: technological discontinuities, the possibly exaggerated fear of climate change, and ruthless power politics.

On the one hand, the AI revolution is making more and more people redundant. They are surplus workers who will never again find employment. What happened with factory jobs through automation is on the verge of happening to white collar jobs through GPT-3 and natural language processing neural networks.

Then the question arises: why should the Earth be burdened with over 8 billion people who are ravaging the environment? There’s COP-26 on climate change and COP-15 on biodiversity coming up later this year, and it is evident that the two are linked, and that both are severely affected by growing human populations.

We have seen utterly ruthless exterminations of various populations by big powers in the past: and today we see Chinese settlers doing it to Uighurs and Tibetans. Earlier, white settlers did this in North America and Australia, wiping out not only the natives, but also the passenger pigeon and the American bison. (I am not sure if it’s a European custom, or an Abrahamic custom, or both.)

In case you think I made up the scenario of depopulation, here’s The New York Times saying so just yesterday, hat tip to Sujeev Kommana. Since the NYT is to Biden as Global Times is to Xi Jinping, we should be concerned. Very concerned.

Here is a relevant screenshot:

“Perhaps some rogue technology…bioterror attacks… will kill enough people”. The question is, “which people"? The answer is obvious. And that is precisely what the Wuhan virus could well be: a bio-weapon. There are unanswered questions:

* How did the virus actually originate? Was it an accident or was it deliberately engineered?

* Since it first appeared in China, why has Chinese mortality been low, and why have new mutated variants not appeared there?

* Why have East Asians been notably less susceptible?

* How come new catastrophic variants appeared in the UK, Brazil and India? (Note: brown indigenous people in Brazil, and brown people in India)

* In India, the mutations appeared in Delhi and Mumbai, all of a sudden after the earlier wave had died out. (Note: not where election rallies took place)

What I’m driving at is that there seems to be a series of engineered variants that are quietly being introduced into different places. It doesn’t appear natural.

What’s even more remarkable is that high-ranking Americans (whom I dare not name) funded the Wuhan virology lab; others accurately predicted the trajectory of the pandemic; in fact, there were even films made that were startlingly accurate, such as Contagion.

It does sound like science fiction. If one were to feed the climate change data into an impersonal AI like HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey, it would definitely suggest depopulation using any means possible, just as it decided to kill its astronauts since it thought they might jeopardize its mission.

HAL would even suggest to the West an alliance with the Chinese to get rid of the pesky global South, all those useless black and brown people just occupying space and using up resources.

It could well be that bio-weapons are the most efficient and least damaging way of achieving the desired depopulation of brown and black people. Let us note that India is only about 10% vaccinated, and Africa is roughly 1% vaccinated. Deny them vaccines, and it’s mission accomplished.

Apr 28, 2021; updated Apr 29, 2021.