India Should Not Follow The Policy Of Savarkar Or Kissinger But Of Buddhism's Middle Path
By
New Age Islam Staff Writer
30 October
2023
The West
Has Approved Aggression And Even Genocide For Geo-Political Interests
Main
Points:
1. The US has
always been exploited the weakness of nations for its own interests.
1. 2.The US
supported Pakistan's genocide of Bengalis diplomatically and militarily.
2. The West
supported Indonesia's genocide in East Timor to occupy oilfields.
3. The West has
supported Israel's genocide of Palestinians militarily and diplomatically.
4. Savarkar and
Kissinger were influenced by mythologised historiography of Hindu and, Muslim
India.
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(Picture, left) V.D. Savarkar; (Picture, right) Henry Kissinger.
Sourced by The Telegraph
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Asim Ali
analyses the role of the United States and, the West in general in the
subordination and suppression of Asia and Africa after the second world war.
The US
emerged as a world power after the war and established its military and
diplomatic superiority over the developing and poor countries. It pursued a
policy of ruthless suppression of political opponents and exploitation of poor
but resource rich countries. It followed the principle of 'the end justifies
the means' while India followed the principle that the means should be noble
like the end.
Savarkar
and Kissinger however, held the view that Buddhism's passivity was not the
right policy in the fast changing world. Their world view was influenced by the
mythologised colonial historiography of Hindu and Muslim India.
The West
exploited the racial, communal and linguistic diversity of South Asia,
particularly India to further its geopolitical interests. It supported militant
jihadism and genocide for its own political benefits.
In 1971,
the US not only refused to intervene in the genocide in East Pakistan by the
Pakistan army but also helped it militarily because India, Russia's close ally,
was supporting the revolutionaries.
More than
5,00,000 Bengalis were massacres in the genocide. In 1975, Australia and the
West got involved in the East Timor genocide to occupy oil fields. In this
genocide, 2,00,000 people were killed.
Currently
Gaza is witnessing ethnic cleansing by Israel. The conflict between Israel and
Palestinian resistance forces have continued since Israel's birth in Palestinian
land. Laila Khalid and Yasser Arafat led the resistance movement.
The ongoing
hostility between Hamas and Israel has led to 9000 deaths on both sides. Israel
has continually bombarded civilians in schools, hospitals and shelters and has
defied even UN resolution on ceasefire.
The US, the
UK, Germany, France and Italy have expressed their overt support to Israel's
genocidal intent in Gaza. The US bolstered Israel's defence by sending its air
craft carriers while threatening Iran not to intervene in the genocide. The
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described Israel's bombardment of civilians
as its self defence exercise. The whole world has called Israel's mindless
attacks on civilians a genocide. Even genocide and holocaust scholars Omer
Bartov, Marion Kaplan and Raz Segal have called it genocide. It bombed the
Baptist Hospital in Gaza killing more than 500 innocent people. It has also
warned other hospitals to evacuate. Israel has not also cared for protests in
Israel and across the world.
Asim Ali,
therefore, says that India should not be carried away by what the US and the
world do to fulfil its geopolitical interests. India should follow the Middle
Path of Buddhism and the principle of non-violence followed by Mahatma Gandhi.
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By
Asim Ali
28.10.23
“The
horror! The horror!”: these were the memorable last words of Kurtz, an enigmatic
ivory trader, in Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness. Kurtz had gone
rogue (‘gone native’) and lorded ruthlessly over a “devilish” fiefdom of
Africans in King Leopold’s Congo. The young narrator, Marlow, a captain in
Kurtz’s former trading company, witnessed first-hand the brutal savagery of
Belgian colonial domination and became entranced with Kurtz’s ambiguous
rebellion against it.
Marlow
confesses to being faced with a terrible “choice of nightmares” as he is drawn
to submit his loyalty to the more ‘honest’, but nightmarish, savagery of Kurtz
rather than the naked hypocrisy of European imperialism, an imperialism based
on systematic exploitation, steeped in the darkest of horrors, bearing the
mantle of Enlightenment.
The Heart
of Darkness is remembered by many Western intellectuals as the “epitaph of the
entire 20th century and the West’s uneasy and exploitative relationship with
Africa.” Yet, as we see in the near-apocalyptic bombing of defenceless
Palestinians in Gaza as well as in the blood-curdling, indiscriminate slaughter
of 1,400 Israelis that preceded it, the horrors of the 20th century are hardly
behind us. Neither are the structural causes that precipitated them. The
difference is that we now see it in images and videos in high definition,
superimposed with running commentary. Moreover, we find that this fine-grained,
troubling public consumption of televised massacres does not seem to rouse any
shared human capacity for empathy. Often, the visceral experience of violence
only serves to harden stereotypes and reinforce divisions.
For two
weeks, Israel’s defence forces have rained down righteous fire on a tiny,
besieged Mediterranean strip sheltering several generations of occupied
non-citizens. Israeli analysts have long compared bombing blockaded Gaza to
“shooting fish in a barrel”. Over 7,000 Gazans have perished so far; over a
million have been displaced (roughly half of the population). Almost half of
Gazans are children born into, as per the descriptions of the former British
prime minister, David Cameron, an “open prison” or “prison camp”. Unicef has
called the deaths of nearly 3,000 children a “stain on our conscience”.
In Israel
and the War in the Balkans, Igor Primoratz studied the Israeli television
coverage and popular reception of the early 1990s conflict between Serbian nationalists
and Bosnian Muslims. Primoratz described how the Israeli media portrayed war
crimes, such as the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnians, based on the (correct)
assumption that its target audience would vicariously identify with the role of
the oppressive Serbs. “Collective repression and denial of these facts [of
Israel’s violent history of establishing a settler-colonial domination over the
Palestinians] help explain the unwillingness or inability of Israeli society
and its political establishment to condemn the Serbs’ war of expansion and
‘ethnic cleansing’”, wrote Primoratz. One leaves it to the judgement of the
reader as to whether the testosterone-fuelled fixation on Israeli mass
violence, on display on television and social media, and the freely-pressed
justifications for dehumanisation form some kind of a ‘premonition of a
nightmare’ that should fill one with dread. An increasing number of genocide
and Holocaust scholars, such as Omer Bartov, Marion Kaplan and Raz Segal, are
saying that we are indeed witnessing genocide taking place before our eyes.
The Western
response has been atrocious. The United States of America has unconditionally
backed its closest ally in the Middle East, not just bolstering the Israeli
Defense Forces’ weapon supplies but also shielding it diplomatically. This
included employing a crucial veto on a resolution in the United Nations
Security Council that called for a ceasefire. On Wednesday, Joe Biden informed
the world that he had lost confidence in the Palestinian-supplied death count.
This was perhaps a clumsy attempt to hold on to the last vestiges of shame or,
more cynically, an invitation to surrender to what Hannah Arendt called “animal
pity”.
One can
take some morbid relief in the fact that such Western behaviour is true to its
historical form, especially during episodes of conflict in arenas of
geopolitical interest. In 1975, the Australian ambassador to Jakarta, Richard
Woolcott, advised his government to go along with the Indonesian invasion of
East Timor, citing the compelling factor of exploitable oil reserves in the
Timor Gap. The Indonesian military invasion, supported by Western arms and
diplomacy, led to widespread bloodletting and, ultimately, turned genocidal,
wiping out an estimated 2,00,000 people, almost a quarter of East Timor’s
population. Woolcott had advocated his course as “a pragmatic rather than a
principled stand,” noting “that is what the national interest and foreign
policy is all about.” That statement, unfortunately, is still a fairly accurate
descriptor of the strategic thinking of the Western Establishment.
“The
well-being of the state justified whatever means” — Western Statecraft’s
deathly doyen, Henry Kissinger, distilled it down in his book, Diplomacy. In
The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, Gary J. Bass, a
professor of politics at Princeton, marshalled a wealth of sordid evidence
describing the complicity of Richard Nixon and his foreign policy czar, Henry
Kissinger, in the genocide of Bengalis that accompanied Bangladesh’s painful
birth. The Nixon administration ignored the repeated warnings of its diplomatic
officials and declined to intervene in the massacres committed by the Pakistani
military, while stepping up the supply of arms and ammunition.
The White
House’s decision-making in such an episode is, of course, theoretically
presented as a cold, rational calculation of neutral interest: a realist
approach towards maintaining the regional balance of power. But it was also
quite clearly based on a stunning level of neo-colonial racism and an absurdly
primitive view of South Asia. “Nixon and Henry Kissinger… were driven not just
by such Cold War calculations, but a starkly personal and emotional dislike of
India and Indians,” writes Bass. Both Nixon and Kissinger shared, to varying
extents, the colonial-era, racist view that “Bengalis are not fighters” and,
hence, “30,000 troops” of Pakistani military would eventually subdue the “75
million” people of East Bengal. Bass records Kissinger’s response to the news
of the murder of a Muslim Bengali professor, a former student of his — “Henry
Kissinger, seemingly referring to past Muslim rulers of India, replied, ‘They
didn’t dominate 400 million Indians all those years by being gentle.’”
In
Essentials of Hindutva, V.D. Savarkar launched a frontal attack on the “mumbos
and jumbos of universal brotherhood” that was supposedly found in the Indian
philosophy of history, especially relating to Buddhist passivity. “As long as
the whole world was red in tooth and claw and the national and racial
distinction so strong as to make men brutal, so long as India had a will to
live at all a life whether spiritual or political according to the right of her
soul, she must not lose the strength born of national and racial cohesion,” he
wrote.
We can
notice a striking similarity in the understanding of the human world in the two
thinkers cited above. On South Asia, both Kissinger and Savarkar were heavily
influenced by mythologised colonial historiography of Hindu and Muslim India.
This makes not just for an archaic, impoverished view of history but also bad
policy. The pro-Pakistan realist approach of the US, including sponsoring
militant jihadism in Pakistan in the 1980s as an instrument of the Cold War,
finally boomeranged in the 9/11 bombings, spurring further disastrous blunders.
Pakistan’s realist approach of centralised, military-based foreign policy led
to a resounding defeat, followed by the splitting up of territory.
Perhaps
India can demonstrate in the future a better approach to realism and global
conflicts. Of Gandhi’s romantic patriotism and Tagore’s humanist universalism,
rejecting the deterministic framework of the Western nation-state; of
peacefully carved linguistic states; of the ‘middle path’ of the ancient
philosopher, Nagarjun; of Madhyamaka Buddhism. India had shown the way in the
past, not entirely for moral reasons, of course. But its principled stands on
Vietnam and Bangladesh earned it enormous soft power and elevated its moral
place in historical memory. Even if there is no foreordained global order, in a
world of fast-increasing nuclear flashpoints, a socially constructed world of
empathy and mutual understanding might just present some hope of salvation.
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Asim
Ali is a political researcher and columnist
Source: A
Crooked Lens
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/india-policy-savarkar-kissinger-buddhism/d/131002
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