India and Trump's Threats
News:
An American official and a European Union diplomat stated that US President Donald Trump urged the bloc's officials last Tuesday to impose tariffs on China up to 100% as part of a strategy to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The official, who requested anonymity to discuss these private conversations, said that Trump also encouraged the European Union to impose broad tariffs on India. (Al-Arabiya)
Comment:
First: Western newspapers confirmed that US President Donald Trump insulted and angered India, which prompted it to reconsider its relationship with his country and search for its own path and partners that it may find in China and Russia. The New York Times newspaper saw that Trump wasted what his predecessors had invested in building relations with India, and Bloomberg said: India has begun to strengthen its relations with China and Russia, defying Washington. The New York Times said: Successive American presidents have invested over three decades a huge diplomatic capital to build a friendship with India, Bill Clinton described the two democracies as "natural allies," George W. Bush described them as "brothers in the cause of human freedom," and Barack Obama and Joe Biden said: "The relationship between them is one of the most important global agreements of this century."
Second: India, despite its size and population, was and still is a client state. Initially, it was under British labor and Britain exploited it greatly in consolidating its influence in the world, so it fought with Indians. Britain colonized India for more than two centuries and remained within the British influence and labor even after the alleged independence, and Britain's feet were more firmly rooted in India and created clients and an ancient party in India, the Congress Party, which led India after the so-called independence, and India remained the jewel in the British crown.
When Britain weakened, the United States began to remove it from its colonies, including India, but it initially failed due to the strong ties with the British and the strength of British agents, so it resorted to exploiting the Buddhist faith and encouraging religious parties to reach power, so it supported Vajpayee (Prime Minister of India three times) of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which revived relations between New Delhi and Washington in an unprecedented way, but all of that changed when the Bharatiya Janata Party lost the general elections in 2004 and the Congress Party - loyal to Britain - took over the government. In 2010, the Indian Parliament issued the "Nuclear Liability" law, which placed excessive restrictions on suppliers of nuclear power plants; in order to deter the United States and its companies from entering the Indian market, and the implementation of the law made concluding the civil nuclear agreement with America in 2005 impossible.
After the fall of the Congress Party government and the success of the Modi party, he had to start improving America's image among the Indian people, and America's expectations were modest for any change at that time, given the heavy legacy that Modi inherited after the Congress Party.
America's support for Modi during the elections was remarkable, "Modi's polishing campaign was not only in India, but also extended to large formations of sympathetic Hindu organizations residing outside the country, especially in America, as it sought to promote him as a leader for all Hindus and wanting to work alongside small ethnicities without exception. Among the organizations that stood by him are the Indian American Foundation and the Indian American Political Action Committee. These organizations did not miss coordinating and cooperating with arms directly or indirectly affiliated with Bharatiya Janata, such as the Foreign Affairs Cell and Friends of Bharatiya Janata abroad, not to mention thousands of Indians residing in America and elsewhere. It would take too long to tell how the American administrations made tremendous efforts to remove the ancient Congress Party and bring America's agents to power with its support.
Former US Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill said, while giving a speech on US-India relations in the Modi era in New Delhi in January 2015: "Regarding the United States' strategy towards India over the next two years, in my opinion our expectations should be modest at best, unlike what they were at the beginning of the last decade, neither this prime minister nor this president will be able to make a strategic shift in relations between the United States and India, so in my opinion there will be no real strategic partnership between the two countries in the next two years."
The intent of the above is how America made maximum efforts to ensure the presence of its agents in power, but even went so far as to overthrow the government of Nawaz Sharif with a coup by Pervez Musharraf when he could not control the fighters and led to the loss of Vajpayee's government and the arrival of the Congress Party, and imposed humiliating concessions on Pakistan for India and cooperated with it in all military, nuclear, technological and commercial fields and brought it into its strategy to contain China, as the biggest obstacle to making India face China was the presence of the Congress Party in power, this obstacle has disappeared, and it has become easy for America to convince the Janata Party loyal to it to focus the Indian army on the borders of China instead of the borders with Pakistan, and it gave India a role in Afghanistan that it never dreamed of.
Third: Today, Trump comes to impose on India an increase in customs duties on goods coming from India to up to 50%. Here we pause a little, it is true that America's agents in India are humiliated and will not refuse a request from it, and it is true that America does not care about others or their interests, but does the Trump administration not fear the fall of its agents in power and the impact of this on them, as well as fear for its strategy to contain China?!
Written for the Radio of the Central Media Office of Hizb ut-Tahrir
Hassan Hamdan
