Shadow Warrior by Rajeev Srinivasan

Vaccine diplomacy has brought out the best and the worst.

There are the usual small-minded intellectual property battles, which really do not show #BigPharma in a good light. See my piece on Chintan here: https://chintan.indiafoundation.in/articles/why-india-should-rely-on-its-domestically-produced-vaccines/ and its podcast version is above.

The US is reputedly hoarding 30 million doses of AstraZeneca (which is not approved for distribution in the US yet), and the UK is complaining that India is not giving it units, instead, how dare they deny it to the former imperial overlord!, India is using it for its own, much larger population! https://www.ft.com/content/d5a26194-9537-4b57-b35a-99236b67823b

There are claims and counter claims of hoarding by EU members.

Meanwhile, India has shipped out more units to other countries, quite a bit of it for free to neighbors and smaller developing countries, than it has used for ramping up its own vaccination.

But one thing is for sure: India has cracked vaccine manufacturing. Other industries should learn from this, and both should now go up the value chain to R&D and product design. Manufacturing savvy is a big leg up for innovation.

PS. Out of courtesy, here’s the article on vaccine imperialism from redflag.org.au. https://redflag.org.au/node/7542. I neither endorse not disagree with them, I am simply posting it here to thank them for their striking photography above, which I give them due credit for.

There is a vicious, long-term Plan for us. Every day we see instances of this in action.

Here’s what they did to use before when they had power.

Now things are no better. We have to heed the lessons of the past.

https://www.indiafacts.org.in/commentary/the-withering-attack-on-us-they-have-good-reasons-why-they-wish-us-harm/

Social media was once viewed as a breath of fresh air, with independent citizen-journalists providing unbiased content. Alas, those days are over. Today, social media is a powerful #BigTech force for thought control, and as such, it needs to be reined in. The GoI’s proposals in this regard are modest, and entirely reasonable.

See a version of this podcast in print at https://chintan.indiafoundation.in/articles/the-international-push-to-make-social-media-accountable/

The article is available at https://www.pgurus.com/the-lament-of-the-kulaks/

The positioning of the ongoing agitation, mostly in Punjab and Haryana, has been brilliant. Full marks for marketing, because we are programmed to be sentimental towards annadaatas. Food, after all, is pretty elemental. Farmers everywhere are a dour lot, prone to being glum -- often with justification -- about bad weather, subsidies and the antics of politicians.

But the sad fact of the matter is that this particular agitation is not a farmer agitation. It is a kulak revolt. Those who remember their Soviet history will recall how kulaks, landed farmers with a few acres, zamindars or janmi, were ruthless exploiters of the landless peasantry. They were liquidated remorselessly by Stalin and company. Lenin called them “bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who fatten on famine”.

If you see this as a kulak revolt, a lot of things fall into place, for example the deluxe arrangements for the protesters encamped in Delhi: electric leg-massagers, pizza delivery, stylish tents. A far cry from our image of the lone, skinny, hard-scrabble farmer, eking out a perilous, hand-to-mouth existence.

Professional agitators, andolanjeevi, have infiltrated the protests; so have separatists, and, fishing in troubled waters, nearby foes. There is a pattern of keeping India on the boil with internal agitations, while there is a state of war on the Tibetan border. Koodankulam, Sterlite, Pegatron, anti-CAA riots, Bangalore riots, now ‘farmer’ riots. You can connect the dots.

Worryingly, the agitation has metamorphosed into, first, a religious revolt, with overseas Sikhs in Canada leading the charge; and then into a caste cleavage, with the protesters being largely upper-caste Jats, with almost no representation by the landless peasants, mostly SC. Fault lines, very Chanakyan: create bhedam, exploit the animosities, introduce anarchy.

The alleged reason for the ‘farmer’ protests is that the small farmer will lose out to big, bad corporates. There is a grain of truth to this, but only if you extrapolate wildly. That has happened, for example, with the giant factory farms in the US, with thousands of acres under cultivation; just 2% of the population produces food-like substances for the entire country. (There is also $20 billion in annual subsidies for cotton, wheat, rice, corn and soy, but let’s ignore that for the moment.)

The downside is that industrial agriculture has devastated the land, plundered groundwater, introduced poisonous chemicals, and generally wrought havoc, including with CO2 emissions and water pollution from animal husbandry. There have been horror stories such as the cultivation of water-loving rice in arid California, leading, for example, to selenium poisoning.

In a new book, “Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal”, NYTimes food writer Mark Bittman lays out how factory farming has led to low-nutrition, high-calorie junk food being the norm in the US. The result is an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Moreover, the land is degraded: Bittman talks about how you cannot even find earthworms in factory-farm land, a clear indication of dead top-soil.

So excessive corporatization is not healthy either. The key is moderation. Today, small farms are under-productive: records show that in ancient Tamil Nadu, it was possible to produce more than 15 tons of paddy per hectare, but today, our productivity is in the low single digits, and it is among the lowest in the world. So consolidation, larger farms, mechanization, and investment in technology can improve agricultural output and outcomes.

So can the opportunity for farmers to sell to anybody, without being constrained to sell to the monopoly mandis or APMCs and thus the arhatiyas or commission agents. Part of the solution is to shorten the supply chain: today, there are five or six go-betweens separating farm and consumer. A single vertically integrated buyer (such as ITC with its e-choupals and factories making value-added products, or a Reliance which also has retail outlets) wil be much more efficient, and both the actual farmer and the consumer will benefit from disintermediation.

Such producers will have an incentive to add silos, cold chains and value-added processing plants (eg. ketchup instead of tomatoes), all of which the government failed to do, because it ignored agriculture in the go-go “temples of modern India are dams and factories” Nehruvian era. Not that agribusiness is benign, but they know where there is profit to be made. In an era of uncertainty among the big producers (US, Canada, Australia) due to global warming, India’s heat-tolerant crop varieties may well be a precious asset in the medium term.

In the long run, India can and should become one of the world’s agricultural superpowers.

But obviously the intermediaries will lose out in the short term. A good number of the kulaks are also commission agents. The Farm Acts will require non-farmers in the supply chain to register their PAN numbers, thus becoming subjected to income tax (instead of masquerading as farmers and gaining the benefits of free water, free electricity, and tax-free incomes while enjoying above-market guaranteed procurement prices) and this surely will hurt the kulaks.

It has been a gigantic subsidy, estimated by Balbir Punj in “Protest of the Privileged” (Feb 9, Indian Express) to be at Rs. 2 lakh crores in unnecessary, excess inventory held in FCI warehouses, not to mention farm loan waivers of Rs. 2.34 lakh crores over several years. And this is not going to the poverty-stricken marginal tenant farmer or landless laborer, but to the kulaks. The Farm Acts 2020 will reduce the transfer of taxpayer money to wealthy kulaks in Punjab and Haryana.

This is the real reason behind the protests, if you strip away all the rhetoric.

941 words, 9 Feb 2021

Of course it’s too soon to make any authoritative pronouncements about the effect of the Biden presidency, but the first signs for Asia are none too good. There were anodyne noises about Asia from Biden though he seems allergic to the term ‘Indo-Pacific’, but the memory of Obama’s feckless “pivot to Asia” is emboldening China. 

To be succinct, China is rampaging, and having a field day. It cannot hide its disdain for Biden. 

The first thing China did, on the very day that Biden took over, was to sanction 28 Trump-era appointees, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. 

Then it gave its Coast Guard orders to open hostile fire on anybody passing through its claimed maritime territory. Considering their expansive claims on others’ waters, this is dangerous.

To make it clear what they meant, the Chinese then did a mock drill on how to attack an American aircraft carrier in the South China Sea. 

Chinese aircraft began to violate Taiwanese airspace in larger numbers and more frequently.

Myanmarese generals met Chinese diplomats, and then there was the coup d’etat in Burma. The net result is that China gets to build a deep-water port at Kyaukpyu, another entry into the Bay of Bengal; also the earlier regime had entered into large military procurements from India to the tune of $100 million, and India had gifted them their first submarine. 

Sri Lanka, which had agreed to let its Colombo East Container Terminal be developed with Japanese and Indian support, did a U-turn. It appears it will be a Chinese firm in charge now.

There is a ‘glacier bomb’ in India’s Uttarakhand, bordering Tibet, and there is a fair chance China triggered the flash flood that led to dozens of casualties downstream. 

A WHO team, which went to China, a full year after the Wuhan virus epidemic began, declared that the Level 4 virology lab isn’t the origin of the virus, but suggested it came from bats, and that too quite vaguely from somewhere in the region, not necessarily China. A year is a long time to scrub all incriminating data, and of course WHO boss Tedros is a China protege. 

China unilaterally announced a pull-back by its troops and Indian troops from positions they occupy around the Pangong Tso lake in Ladakh. This would be suicidal for the Indian side, because they occupy the strategic heights there. Therefore this is likely to be a trial balloon. 

Chinese Coast Guard vessels have entered the territorial waters around Japan’s Senkaku Islands in a provocative move. Chinese have unilaterally claimed these islands. 

The sum and substance of this is that China believes they have nothing to fear from the Biden Administration. According to the Chinese Communist Party, they won. They got rid of the tiresome Trump, and imposed a giant health and financial catastrophe on the world, and are getting away with it.

Hubris before nemesis. And another step in the drastic decline of US power.

i said india-china border. pardon me, i meant “india-tibet” border.

and quite honestly, i am not a big fan of sun-tzu.

but there is the very interesting manual of warfare, “Unrestricted warfare” that is more or less what they follow: use all sorts of leverage; wage economic, cyber, biological, chemical, warfare; use strategic resource capture (eg lithium); use tons of fifth columnists and embedded assets to cause mayhem.

first there was kishore mehbubani, an indian-origin singaporean diplomat, long known as a chinese shill. https://www.nus.edu.sg/alumnet/thealumnus/issue-124/perspectives/panorama/biden-and-china-friends-or-foes

then there was kevin rudd, a solid sinophile former aus PM saying “resistance is futile” and that you MUSTN’T contain china. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-02-05/kevin-rudd-usa-chinese-confrontation-short-of-war#author-info

then the FT’s martin wolf told us you CANNOT fend off china, quoting mehbubani. https://www.ft.com/content/83a521c0-6abb-4efa-be48-89ecb52c8d01

then the chinese propaganda entity global times tells us this is true, china is the supreme power, center of the universe. exhibit A: martin wolf’s article. https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1154379.shtml (h/t to @SCS_Disputes)

so who’s left now in this coronation of china? india (ok indian-origin kishore, tho i’m sure there are several actual indian resident fifth-columnists who are dying to say the same thing), australia, britain.

ok, so japan is missing, and the US. i have a candidate for the US: susan shirk, former obamista aide, now at the university of california at san diego. she’ll be happy to let us know how it’s time to kowtow abjectly to china.

honestly, i don’t know if they’ll be able to find a japanese to toe this line. they are a people, on average, with dignity.

but do you see how this works? you keep piling up those quotes, and lo! it has become “truth by repeated assertion”.

in less polite circles, this is known as a “circle-j**k”.

something i recorded but forgot to upload.

oh, i also forgot about mia khalifa’s glasses. that’s also her trademark, apart from the gigantic mammaries.

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_term=politics_2020-election&linkId=110711695

remarkable stuff, an anarchist manifesto of sorts?

on a different topic, who are the most embarrassing First Relatives you remember? i can think of jimmy cartuh’s brother, joe biden’s son, and now, introducing (drum roll!!!!!) meena harris, the to-be-president comma-la harris’s niece.

meena is trying to impress SOMEBODY, i am not sure if it’s the church, or the lefties. or does she just have commercial interests to push her books and fashion line?

and why her opinion matters to us is a mystery to me. who IS she, anyway? had anybody heard of her at all until recently? the words ‘astroturfed’ and ‘sock puppet’ leap to mind.

the fact that she has a hindu name is immaterial. so does rukmini callimachi, the recently disgraced NYT writer whose very interesting ‘caliphate’ series seems to be based on fantasies fed to her by some guy in canada. sigh. i did like ‘caliphate’.

rukmini is a white woman of romanian origin.

similarly meena is a random faux-black christian woman of part indian origin. that’s it. nothing more. we don’t need to pay any attention to her.

In contrast to the outgoing Trump Administration, there are disturbing signs that the new Biden Administration in the US will revert to the unsuccessful appeasement strategy of eight years of the earlier Obama presidency.

While Barack Obama pontificated, looked professorial and twiddled his thumbs, China essentially captured the South China Sea. Given a Biden administration full of rehabilitated Obama-era relics, it is likely China will feel emboldened.

A signal indication of this likely U-turn was the fact that the very word “Indo-Pacific” was omitted by Biden in a major policy speech, reverting to the old and tired “Asia Pacific”. This was duly noted by the Chinese mouthpiece Global Times, and surely seen as a dog-whistle by Beijing’s America-watchers.

The consequences of abetting Chinese hubris are unclear at the moment, but a forced annexation of Taiwan is certainly not off the table. Nor is a physical invasion of Japan’s Senkaku islands. And a massive Himalayan attack on India in Ladakh or anywhere along the Line of Actual Control is entirely possible. It is in this context that a series of moves by incumbent Foreign Secretary Mike Pompeo needs to be evaluated. The fact is that, despite what the usual suspects say, there have been significant wins in Trump’s foreign policy. Just three: unlike his predecessors, he didn’t go to war; Israel has signed peace agreements with several neighbors; and he pushed back, hard, against China.

One could legitimately question the downsides of exiting the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris accord on climate change, or the Iran nuclear treaty; but none of them is an unequivocal error. And one could suggest that by pushing back on European allies, Trump has forced them to be more responsible.

The hard line against China, however, is the most important, and it is tempting to think that there is a bipartisan consensus in the US that China has become Enemy No. 1, no ifs, thens and buts. But if you consider the Obama legacy (for example, an ex-aide at UC San Diego is practically a spokesperson for China), and how many of them are in the Biden Administration, there is reason to worry.

There is, for example, with John Kerry back in the Cabinet, the possibility that, in the zeal to get back in the good graces of the global-warming mafiosi, Biden will bend over backwards to appease China. I would be saddened, but not amazed if he even accepts the 9-dash line in the South China Sea as China’s territorial waters!

The 9-dash line, for which China makes highly dubious ‘historical’ claims using some old maps, in effect suggests that the entire South China Sea belongs to China. In reality, there has been no time in history when China dominated that sea, and it is a major economic lifeline, as a great deal of gloabal trade passes through it via the Straits of Malacca. The rest of the world cannot sit by and allow China to deny FON (freedom of navigation) in these open seas.

Thus the importance of the single-minded steps taken by Pompeo. For instance, he recently said the following regarding the Wuhan Virus (aka COVID-19):

Wuhan Virus: CCP covered it up. CCP disappeared the doctors who knew. CCP still refuses to let the world in to see what it wrought. CCP lied about where the virus came from. CCP closed travel inside China and allowed the world to suffer. America invents vaccines for the world. Every human being can see this contrast.

This was followed up by a fact sheet from the US State Department that squarely puts the blame for the virus on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, brushing aside the usual obfuscation about the “wet market” and so on:(https://www.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/). It stops just short of directly accusing the lab of having engineered the virus.

The charade continues, however. A belated WHO fact-finding team found obstacles placed in its way, according to a January 5 report by CNN.

The World Health Organization said that China has blocked the arrival of a team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, in a rare rebuke from the UN agency.

On Taiwan, Pompeo, without necessarily violating the US’ long-standing “One China Policy”, eased restrictions on contacts between Taiwanese officials and American diplomats. That is only fair because China has a history of not abiding by the treaties or agreements it has signed, for instance the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS).

When the binding court of arbitration ruled in 2015 that China had violated the Philippines’ territorial integrity in the Scarborough Shoal, China simply ignored it. The arbitrator also found no merit to China’s ‘historical’ claim, based on some doubtful old maps, to the infamous “9-dash line” as its territorial boundary (which means almost the entire South China Sea). This too was ignored.

Unilateral adherence by other signatories to treaties China signed is pointless, because China does not live up to its obligations: another instance is India’s concession by Vajpayee on Tibet. A good case can be made for India to abandon its own “One China” policy, considering China has no obvious “One India” policy: the latter interferes in J&K, questions Sikkim, and of course squats on Aksai Chin.

There have been several other strong indications of US displeasure with China on human rights issues and trade, including over human rights violations in Chinese-occupied Tibet (CoT). Sanctions have been slapped on exports of Chinese-occupied Xinjiang (CoX) products such as cotton, based on systematic allegations of slave labor, forced sterilization, and denial of religious freedoms to Uighurs.

The latest is the strong and unusually blunt statement on January 19th — that is, the very last day of the Trump administration — from the State Department accusing China of genocide.

“I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uighurs by the Chinese party-state,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement, adding that Chinese officials were “engaged in the forced assimilation and eventual erasure of a vulnerable ethnic and religious minority group.”

The January 5 crackdown on protesters in Hong Kong against Chinese usurpation of democratic rights in that territory had also attracted Pompeo’s wrath.

But the strategic South China Sea probably remains the most contentious issue, as Beijing builds up its military muscle and treats the sea as its inland lake, threatening freedom of navigation. It has long been obvious that China will attempt serious mischief. I said the following as far back as 1998 in “The Danger from China” https://www.rediff.com/news/1998/jun/15rajeev.htm:

China is attempting to establish the South China Sea (the name has 'China' in it and so it must be China's private lake, you see) and its potential mineral (natural gas and oil deposits) as its own private property. The activities around the Spratly Islands, Mischief Reef, the Paracel Islands etc are well-known -- China simply walked in and grabbed these, paying no attention to prior Vietnamese, Malaysian, Taiwanese and Filipino claims, for instance.

Thus the welcome decision by Pompeo on January 15th to impose travel bans and trade sanctions on violators. Says the report from the AP, reprinted in The Hindu:

In its waning days, the Trump administration put in place travel bans on an unspecified number of Chinese officials and their families for what it said were violations of international standards regarding the freedom of navigation in those waters.

The administration also said it was adding China’s state oil company, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, to a list of companies with which U.S. citizens are banned from doing business…

“The United States stands with Southeast Asian claimant states seeking to defend their sovereign rights and interests, consistent with international law,” Mr. Pompeo said.

“We will continue to act until we see Beijing cease its coercive behaviour in the South China Sea.” 

This is as much a warning to China to behave as it is to the Biden administration to not attempt grandstanding and appeasement. After all, we are still experiencing massive human suffering and economic loss wrought by the Chinese-origin virus. There is a limit to how much forbearance the rest of the world can muster.

I did go further in my 1998 predictions about Chinese misbehavior. Obviously I got the dates wrong, but my concerns may not be that far off the mark.

My forecast is that, if unchecked, there will be continued Chinese military adventurism in Asia. I predict that by 2003, the Chinese will cross the Ussuri River and attack Russian Siberia, citing flimsy historical claims; impoverished Russians will have no way of defending themselves.

Further, I suspect China will either threaten to, or actually conduct, an atmospheric nuclear blast over Japan by 2005, with the clear threat of frying all their transistors -- and thus infrastructure -- with an electromagnetic pulse. America will stand by, powerless, and its nuclear umbrella for Japan will turn out to be a fiction.

China will almost definitely attack Taiwan by 2002; I wonder if it makes sense for India to befriend Taiwan, and perhaps even offer it certain nuclear components, including blueprints and enriched uranium, returning China's favour vis a vis Pakistan. The chances of China attacking India over Arunachal Pradesh have perhaps receded a little after India's clear indication that it will deploy nuclear missiles. The Chinese understand belligerence -- they practice it and respect it.

I am no expert at global strategy, so I am quoting people who are: Caspar Weinberger, formerly US secretary of state, projected the Taiwan scenario to happen in 1998; the Economist suggests the Japan scenario. Well, okay, I made up the Siberia scenario myself: it stands to reason.

As a confirmed China-hawk, I predicted doom:

A couple of years ago, I read a review of a hugely successful Taiwanese book called Yellow Peril, in which a series of altercations between Taiwan and China end up in a few nuclear bombs being exchanged. I think the PRC attacks Taiwan, which retaliates with an atom bomb; Russian and American nukes enter the picture somehow. The final scene is yet another sorry exodus of Chinese -- by boat towards Australia, and by land over the Silk Road towards Central Asia. In the end, that is the issue, isn't it -- lebensraum?

I really hope that Chinese belligerence does not lead to such a scenario. Even though China has come a long way economically and militarily, it shouldn’t overplay its hand.