Rachel and Bill discuss Agnes Smedley, an American journalist and activist who helped the Indian independence movement, Soviet intelligence, and the Chinese Communist forces.
Links and notes for Ep. 409 (PDF): http://arsenalfordemocracy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/AFD-Ep-409-Links-and-Notes-Agnes-Smedley.pdf
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Description: Nate, Rachel, and Bill discuss the Modi government’s exclusionary citizenship law, internet blackouts, and Kashmir occupation, and how the people of India have responded, including a general strike.
Links and Notes Ep 21 (PDF): http://arsenalfordemocracy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Lend-Lease-21-India-Jan-26-2020.pdf
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Posted by Bill on behalf of the team.
Topics: Voter registration reform and mandatory voting; China and India in a Multipolar World; 21st century Colbertism and political cliches. People: Bill and Nate. Produced: June 15th, 2015.
– Voting Reform: Should voter registration be automatic? Should voting be mandatory?
– Multipolarism: What does the military rise of China, India, and other “poles” mean for the United States?
– Cultural Austerity: Why is it now commonplace to assert there’s less money to go around, when it’s really just more concentrated than before?
Episode 131 (54 min):
AFD 131
– ThinkProgress: Congressman Asks, Why Aren’t People Automatically Registered To Vote?
– Bill’s new op-ed: India’s Zero Dark Thirty Moment
– Wikipedia: Colbertism
RSS Feed: Arsenal for Democracy Feedburner
iTunes Store Link: “Arsenal for Democracy by Bill Humphrey”
And don’t forget to check out The Digitized Ramblings of an 8-Bit Animal, the video blog of our announcer, Justin.
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The following op-ed originally appeared in The Globalist.
After the raid into Myanmar: Beware of boundless missions, India.
Indian Paratroopers on parade. (Credit: Wikimedia)
This week, India’s military staged a covert operation into neighboring Myanmar (Burma) to target two camps of ethnic separatist militants. The action was taken in order to eliminate the source of recent unprovoked attacks that killed 30 Indian troops near the border.
Assertive or jingoistic Indians are happy that the military action had shades of the U.S. Seal Team Six raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan to kill Bin Laden. The broadly enthusiastic public reaction in India seemed to be almost comparable.
In U.S. style, Indian Air Force drones monitored the operation, which lasted 13 hours and involved helicopters dropping in special forces commandos. To avoid detection, they crawled along the ground a significant distance toward two camps, which they destroyed along with dozens of combatants. India reportedly suffered no casualties.
India’s government elected not to notify Myanmar’s government until the operation was nearly complete. On paper, the two countries have a mutual security agreement. This is meant to allow for coordination on cross-border defensive operations precisely like this one.
Instead, Prime Minister Narendra Modi opted for a unilateral approach. It is in line with a more muscular and assertive approach, to differentiate his defense posture for India from what is generally seen, depending on one’s political leanings, as the more timid (or circumspect) mode of his predecessor in such matters.
Myanmar aside, the Indian government – once again led by the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – has also escalated military responses to incidents in disputed Kashmir.
At first blush, this looks like a revival of the tit-for-tat antagonism that led India and Pakistan to war in 1999. And India has also worried about rebels in Myanmar for some time. But there is a difference: today, India has a much larger role on the global security stage than ever before.
India has become the world’s top-ranking purchaser of major arms by volume. India imported 15% of arms sold worldwide from 2010-2014 – the largest buyer by a wide margin.
Sushma Swaraj, India’s External Affairs Minister recently hailed rescue operations by India’s military in Ukraine, Iraq, Libya and Yemen. It’s an important point of prestige, as Ms. Swaraj explained: “India’s image has emerged out to be a strong nation in one year so much that even the developed nations like Germany, France and even US sought our assistance…”
The Myanmar operation suggests India is no longer solely focused on rivalries with Pakistan or China and envisions a broader role for itself. One minister announced: “This is a message to neighbors who harbor terrorists,” a category in which he included countries as far afield as Iraq and Yemen. The military echoed this warning to “perpetrators of terror wherever they are.”
Countries like India have long been very opposed to a muscular, borderless and unilateral U.S. military path. Given these recent policy shifts and rhetoric from India’s current government, it would seem some Indian policymakers are actually now keen to emulate that model.
“Might makes right” is the mantra of those activists. However, in the long run, even the U.S. military elite has found these unending little operations exhausting.
And this approach ultimately does little to change realities on the ground. As the United States has found out to its great frustration, such strikes only have a very momentary effect – however politically popular they may be.
At best, they are much like the (futile) effort of decapitating a hydra: the more you chop it off, the more (and faster) other heads of the hydra grow in. At worst, over-reach becomes one’s own death by a thousand cuts.
It is one thing to have a powerful and professional military. It is another to use it wisely. Beware of boundless missions, India.
The following text is adapted from a quiz I produced for The Globalist Research Center.
Remittances are cash payments that foreign workers transfer to their families or others back in their country of origin.
India received a total of $70 billion in remittances in 2013 from its overseas workers, according to the World Bank. While this amount represents just 3.7% of the country’s GDP, India is the largest recipient country of remittances worldwide when measured by the total amount of transfers.
An estimated 14.2 million Indians were living or working abroad as of 2013 – a greater number than any other country’s emigrant population.
The world’s largest source-country for remittances is the United States, whose $123 billion in 2013 accounted for a fifth of the global total of $577 billion. Almost three-quarters of that — $418 billion — flowed to developing countries.
Remittances from the United States in 2013 exceeded those of the next four countries combined: Saudi Arabia ($42 billion), United Arab Emirates ($28 billion), United Kingdom ($24 billion) and Russia ($23 billion).
Altogether, developing economies received $418 billion in remittances in 2013. By comparison, the amount of official development assistance (or foreign aid) from the OECD countries to the developing world totaled just $134.8 billion in 2013. That’s equal to just a third of remittance flows to developing nations.
It has become easier than ever, with the ubiquity of mobile technologies in the developing world, to send remittances fast and cheaply, even to those without access to banking. Remittances will therefore continue to be a crucial anti-poverty and development tool across the world.
A New York-based Indian civil rights activist questions Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “deafening silence on activist assassinations” in an op-ed for Al Jazeera America.
Modi has remained silent about the recent spate of assassinations, attacks and threats from an umbrella of far-right forces, including Sanatana Prabhat, Bajrang Dal, Abhinav Bharat and other paramilitary groups implicated in organized massacres or terrorist bombings. Attacks against Christians and Muslims have increased. Violence against Dalits [untouchables] and women is also on the rise, stoked by a political culture of cruel disregard for the marginalized. This alarming current of far-right fundamentalism has crept into India’s cultural and political spheres more quickly and dangerously than even its critics had feared.
[…]
These religious-right forces have been glorifying Nathuram Godse, Mohandas Gandhi’s killer and an RSS member, and even plan to build a temple in Godse’s name. If allowed to go unchallenged, this hateful ideology — manifested in assassinations, the desecration of churches and the intimidation of secular activists and minorities — will shatter the dream of a free, pluralistic and democratic India.
It is, of course, not terribly surprising that this non-response would come from the administration of Prime Minister Modi, whose international claim to fame before taking the helm of India’s government last year was his alleged role in genocidal incitement against Muslims during the February 2002 riots in the state of Gujarat, when he was Chief Minister there. Although investigations in India have never officially tied him to causing the fatal mass violence that followed, he certainly didn’t do much to prevent or stop it. His ruling BJP has long stoked tensions against non-Hindus (and neighboring Pakistan) to drive its voter turnout, although that was not the main factor in their decisive 2014 victory over the corrupt and incompetent Congress Party.
Here’s a good read. ForeignPolicy.com: “Will India’s Next Leader Be Banned From America?”
My Summary: In 2005, the US State Department banned a state-level Indian politician, Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, from coming to the United States due to his alleged role in genocidal activities against Muslims (though investigations in India have never officially tied him to them) during the February 2002 riots in Gujarat. State figured it would be a symbolic denunciation with few likely consequences down the road.
Fast forward to present and now he is a national leader of the main opposition party (the Hindu nationalist BJP) and is widely anticipated to cruise into the office of prime minister next year. Now, the State Department is on the fence about what to do, particularly since he hasn’t been elected yet. Lifting the ban now would be seen as an endorsement or interference. Lifting it after he wins (if indeed he does) would be embarrassing and make the State Department look like it was bending the rules.
