What TV doesn't, print can't; we deliver.
What TV doesn't, print can't; we deliver.
India should strengthen its relations in South Asia, boost regional trade and connectivity, and get rid of mutual suspicions with China.
Justin Trudeau and his foreign minister outrageously accusing India of murder of a designated terrorist on the flimsiest of evidence and the self-righteous pretext of citizenship, is something that no seasoned politician or head-of-state of even a banana republic or tin-pot dictatorship would have done.
Perplexing, even dismaying, to observers of global politics, this is actually the tried-and-tested Neo-feudal method of ‘Woke Knows Best’ – cancelling and shaming, as analysed by The New Indian columnist Arindam Mukherje.
This is surreal stuff that won’t have happened ever either in Papa Doc’s Haiti, or in Anthony Hope’s fictional Ruritania.
It would have seemed an incongruous oddity even in Stroessner’s good old smuggling racket days in Asuncion, when Graham Greene described the Paraguayan capital as a ‘nexus of the exotic, the dangerous, and the Victorian’.
Taking a cue from the master storyteller and astute social observer, whose novelistic settings swept from Saigon to Mexico City, the grotesque canvas of Trudeau land can be described as the ‘unholy nexus between Khalistani apologists, unhinged Wokes, and irredeemable neo-colonialist snobs’.
Even more nauseatingly hypocritical is the selective and convenient invocation of ‘citizenship’ by someone who in 2015 proclaimed Canada to be the world’s first Post-National State, where all identities have dissolved into the thin air and all attachments transcended.
A professed ultra-rational believer in all hallowed post- modern credos and ‘Imagined Communities’ has overnight opportunistically morphed into someone preparing exam notes from Yarom Harzony’s ‘Virtues of Nationalism’.
Scrupulous adherence to ‘Rule of Law’ and security sounds like a cruel joke if one looks back to the tenure of Trudeau Senior who, in 1982, refused former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s request to extradite Talwinder Singh Parmar, a dreaded Khalistani terrorist.
Three years later, in 1985, Parmar masterminded the Air India Flight 182 ‘Kanishka’ bombing, the biggest terrorist attack on Canada’s soil, which claimed 329 innocent lives.
As if to add insult to the injury, all the perpetrators were acquitted. Human life is inviolably sacred in this former bastion of settler-colonialism, but with a stringently Orwellian caveat – some animals are more equal than others.
Carl Schmidt, the brilliant philosopher and legal jurist, associated with the Nazis, famously said: In law, exception is more important than the rule.
Trudeau is a half-baked Neo-Schmidtian in the sense that he believes in deploying legalese which he doesn’t himself believe in, and lets woke virtue signalling, screeching, and melodrama take precedence over norms in diplomacy and international relations.
One of the reasons for his egregious conduct is simply that India had not raised stakes high enough until now, because of the balance of power and asymmetry between a developed country, which is USA’s northern neighbour and a key trading partner, and a developing country in the Global South.
READ MORE: Great expectations, stark realism: Will India achieve its manifest destiny?
However, the rise of multipolarity, twilight of the West as a hegemon, Pax Americana being contested by the looming Pax Sinica, the prolonged War in Ukraine, series of coups in Francophone West Africa, reconfiguration in Middle East, among other things, have changed the geopolitical equation greatly.
Add to it Washington’s ‘Pivot to India’ as a counterweight to China, and the increasing tensions near Taiwan – the most critical node in world’s semiconductor supply – and the South China sea.
What the numbers say
India-Canada bilateral trade stands at $12 billion, which is twice less than South Korea, 4-5 times less than Russia and UAE, up to 10 times less than that with China, and 12 times lower than the USA.
To put things in perspective, New Delhi’s trade with Canada is almost equivalent to that with Mexico ($10 billion) and Oman.
India’s trade with Brazil and other Latin American countries, where we have cordial people-to-people ties and goodwill, is growing rapidly and stands at $50 billion.
Brazil and Paraguay are two countries that also grant visa-free travel to Indian passport holders.
Closer home, India-Vietnam trade stands at an impressive $14 billion, growing spectacularly from $200 million in the past two decades. India is also one of the few countries with which Hanoi has comprehensive strategic partnerships.
About 80 per cent of Canada’s trade is conducted with the USA, courtesy NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Apart from this, Canada is neither a strategic, tactical ally of New Delhi, nor do we have any ‘shared values and visions’, aligned outlooks, or policy convergence.
Neither does Ottawa enjoy any geopolitical heft other than being a nomenklatura NATO member, which Turkey is a far more crucial one.
Look homewards
New Delhi should strengthen its relations in the South Asian region, boost regional trade and connectivity through initiatives such as BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation), try to get rid of mutual suspicions and long history of scepticism with China, and look at formulating a modus vivendi in the Indo-Pacific region.
At the same time, it should equally prioritise Astrakhan-Mumbai North South Corridor, as well as the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor. Multilateralism and issue-based engagement should take precedence over any sort of idealistic affinity, cherry picking invocation to ‘rules & order’ bandwagon thinking, or rose-tinted view of the world.
Realpolitik, acknowledging hard realities, and negotiating from a position of strength should be the ‘India Way’, to borrow the title of the book by Foreign Minister S Jaishankar.
In a recent interview with the Economist, Henry Kissinger termed Indian diplomacy as a ‘Model of Pragmatism’, which focuses on issues at hand, rather than commitment to permanent, often unwieldy alliances.
In the worst case scenario, if push comes to shove, India can afford scrapping diplomatic relations with Canada to set-up a precedent that the days of Western supercilious sermonising and faux-aggressive show of derisive moral superiority are passé.
Keep the woke pennant high
Pre 1990, we did not have diplomatic relations with South Africa over principled solidarity with anti-racism and anti-imperialism. Wokism today is the worst form of racism and mental imperialism.
The ‘Captive Mind’ of Homo Wokicus, to borrow the satirical term Homo Sovieticus from Soviet dissident turned champion of the country, Alexander Zinoviev, is a perfect illustration of this complex.
It is not just deracination on steroids, but a compulsive mix of inferiority complex, pathological hatred, uncontrollable madness, and rampant destructiveness.
Noble Laureate Dorris Lessing termed the stifling culture of Political Correctness, which has now evolved into full-blown hysteria and zealotry epitomised as wokeness, as “the most powerful mental tyranny in what we call the free world, which is both immediately evident, and to be seen everywhere, and as invisible as a kind of poison gas, for its influences are often far from the source, manifesting as a general intolerance.”
‘The Last King of Scotland’ was one of Idi Amin’s many self-aggrandizing titles that fed his limitless megalomania and hubris. Uganda under him witnessed mass expulsion of Indians in the 1970s, which is also the fantasy of Trudeau’s Khalistani clients, as articulated by one of their leaders Gurpatwant Pannu, who threatened Hindu Indians to go back.
Novelist Shiva Naipaul wrote about Idi Amin that he “offered a release to pent up emotions and fantasies; transforming himself and his sinister buffoonery into an intensely experienced spectator sport”.
Burlesque antics of Trudeau also released repressed emotions and latent violent angst of Khalistanis, Islamists, and myriad fancy stakeholders of Woke Inc. So I think we are not too far away from the premier of the farcical ‘The Last King of Wokeland’.
(Aditya Chaturvedi is a communications professional with an amateur interest in politics, history, international affairs, ideologies, culture, and how their intersection shapes societies.)
Disclaimer: Views expressed above are the author’s own
