Revisiting Cold War lessons through “A World Adrift”
We owe a lot to Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States of America (1981-1989), for making this world a peaceful place. It is another thing that Islamic terrorism took the world back to square one, dominated by barbarians, jihadis, and zealots. The world, which was divided into two before President Reagan stepped in ( till he arrived, it was a bipolar world split between “capitalist and imperialist” Yankees and the “friends of the people” led by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). There was another entity masquerading by the name Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), in which our own India, Egypt, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and some other innocuous countries were the members. The NAM was nothing other than a conclave of pro-Soviet Union countries, but maintained some kind of neutrality by maintaining equidistance from the two power blocs.
The NAM countries, which claimed themselves as equidistant, never supported the USA in its “misadventure” but always stood by the Soviet Union, whatever the latter did in the name of world peace. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, these angels of peace, which included Jawaharlal Nehru, Marshal Tito, Col Nasser, and Fidel Castro among others, had only one responsibility- to sing peans to their Soviet Masters! India was careful while criticizing the US because of the over-dependence of the country on the “Yankees” for feeding the crores of poor. There was a PL-480 (Public Law-480) with which India was manipulated by Uncle Sam. Those were the days of ship-to-plate (some called to ship to mouth) existence because of the poor agricultural production, especially rice and wheat. It was the wheat and rice imported to India from the US under the PL-480 scheme that fed the poor.
Once Reagan entered the scene, geopolitics underwent a major change. President Reagan, true to the cowboy character he portrayed in Hollywood films, understood that the threat of Communism and resultant anarchy could be wiped out only with the disintegration of the USSR. That was how he launched the concept of Star Wars, with which the US claimed it had the potential to destruct/ deactivate all nuclear weapons stored in the Soviet Union as well as in its satellite countries. The USSR, too, launched a Star Wars programme in retaliation, and this destabilized the already ruined Soviet economy. The entry of Mikhail Gorbachev to the Kremlin hastened the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The Communist fortress fell like a pack of cards as prophesied by Subramanian Swamy in 1977 during a lecture tour to Kerala.
The collapse of the Soviet Union did not result in the formation of a unipolar world headed by the US. Islamic terrorism raised its head from the ruins of Afghanistan, which was attacked and plundered by the USSR in 1978. The Afghan siege by the USSR lasted for a decade and saw the emergence of Mujahedin and other terrorist groups promoted and armed by the USA. The Soviets learnt a hard lesson- one cannot beat the Afghan winter, however powerful one may be. But it was too late, and the world saw the last of the USSR.
The terrorists trained by the USA with Pakistani support turned out to be a Frankenstein’s Monster for both the USA and Pakistan once their Afghan campaign was over. That was how the Islamic terrorists were sent to Kashmir to fight for the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. I am not wasting the readers’ time by quoting the names of Prime Ministers and Presidents of Afghanistan who fell to the bullets and swords of the terrorists. There was this Bollywood queen who visited Kabul as a guest of the then President Najibullah and praised him to the hilt after coming back to India. This one-time heart throb of the Leftists and Jihadis did not utter a word when Najibullah was slaughtered by the terrorists, and his dead body was hung from a lamp post. That much for the democracy and civil rights practiced by the likes of this lady!
These were the reminiscences that came to mind after reading A World Adrift, authored by Manish Tewari, Congress leader and former minister in Manmohan Singh’s council of ministers. I was fortunate enough to attend a press meet addressed by him at Chennai while he was the president of the Indian Youth Congress. It has to be accepted that Tewari is one of the very few Congress leaders capable of leading the party and has the potential to be the Prime Minister of India. He definitely would have made a lot of difference to the fortunes of the Congress, much better than the 57-year-old Shehzada/ Yuvaraj, whose world is limited to his political guru from Kerala. Tewari belongs to the stature of Congress leaders like Vasanth Sathe, NKP Salve, and former chief minister of Punjab, Captain Amarinder Singh. What I liked about him during his tenure as the party spokesman was his virulent hatred for Narendra Modi. I saw him on some TV channels immediately after the Islamic terrorists unleashed an attack on the Swaminarayan Akshardham Hindu Temple in September 2002, killing 35 devotees. “We will not allow Narendra Modi to exploit this incident to his political advantage”, declared Tewari Baba, much to the glee of the First Family of the Congress. It is young leaders like Tewari who sustain Congress as a political entity, and he is a promising leader compared to the bonded labourers like the octogenarian mountain Thatha.
It is natural for the reader to expect a great work from a parliamentarian like Tewari when he sits down to write a sequel to The End of History and the Last Man (Francis Fukuyama) and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World (Author-Samuel Huntington). Tewari has conveniently ignored Huntington’s equally powerful work, “Who Are We”.
When one authors a book on the prevailing world order, it should reflect the ground realities. Communism is dead and gone from Russia and China, and our comrades are wailing over the disappearance of their “only fatherland”. The CPI-M and the CPI are on a life support system provided by the Congress. It is at this juncture that Tewari has hit bookshelves with his magnum opus. A work like this should have found mention in debates on global order, but it has to be said with pain that even Tewari’s boss and the latter’s mother and sister would never read this work. (The clan is not known for their intelligence or knowledge except in amassing treasures looted from India. There are glaring discrepancies in A World Adrift, the most important one being on page 92, where he has said Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by Dhanu. Gandhi had lost the 1989 election and was in the Opposition benches when he was killed by the LTTE bombers. His claim that Tamils in Sri Lanka, especially those in Jaffna and the eastern province, were harassed and victimized by the Sinhalese is far from the truth. In a sovereign republic where Buddhists constitute 70 percent of the population, it is natural for the majority to demand that Sinhala should be declared the national language.
“The beginning of the discontent of the Tamil community was the passing of the ‘Sinhala Only’ Act in 1956 by the SWRD Bandaranaike government, making Sinhala the sole official language of the country. Then the introduction of the Sinhala lettering “Sri” for the registration of vehicles sparked off island-wide communal problems. This became a cause for the underground protest movement in the North. This Eelam movement remained underground till Alfred Duraiappah, the mayor of Jaffna, was killed in 1975 by Velupillai Prabhakaran of the nascent LTTE,” writes Siri Fernando, a widely respected corporate executive and chronicler of Sri Lanka’s ethnic crisis.
Siri, unfortunately, is no more with us, but he was kind enough to leave behind his thrilling autobiography, “We-Recollections of a Lifetime,” for future generations. Hiranthi, Siri’s beautiful and elegant spouse, encouraged and pestered him to write the book, which became a landmark document in Sri Lanka’s post-independent history.
The only bold point Tewari has made in this book is his anguish and displeasure over the Rajapaksa family’s hold over the island nation from 2005 to 2015. But Tewari is silent about a family that literally owns India’s biggest and oldest political party. “The clan believes that the chair of Prime Minister belongs to them by birth,” said Prime Minister Modi while replying to the motion of thanks to the President’s address to both Houses of Parliament. Tewari is not bold enough to highlight the weakness of the clan in question, even as he expresses his opposition to dynasty politics in Sri Lanka. He is also silent about the arms training and weapons provided to the LTTE terrorists by the governments led by Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi. The responsibility of mitigating the situation in Punjab and the Sri Lankan Tamil provinces lies with the Congress regimes.
Geopolitics is a topic that undergoes changes similar to the images we see in a kaleidoscope. Islamic terrorists bent upon building an Ummah is the only unchanging factor in global politics since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Hijab, wearing of Purdah, and Love Jihad are all the fallouts of the disintegration of the USSR. Before that, this writer had never seen Muslim girls or women wearing a Purdah or hijab in Kerala. The major threat faced by humanity in the post-USSR era is Islamic terrorism. But sadly enough, political outfits like the Congress are solidly behind the Islamic terrorists and Jihadis.
Each time Congress extends support to the anti-CAA forces and against the Uniform Civil Code, it is knowingly or unknowingly strengthening the religious fundamentalist elements who are described in modern parlance as stateless actors. Terrorists and fundamentalists understand only the language of bullets. The present scenario substantiates and strengthens the conviction that India practices real diplomacy now.
When one writes about geopolitical issues, please bear in mind that the same will undergo the test of scrutiny with whatever is authored by Huntington, Fukuyama, and the like. Manish Tewari disappoints readers with his foray into the global arena.
Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
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