We're 3/4 of the way through the year of 2024. The year 2024 was considered the biggest year for democratic elections in the world. Not all elections are free and fair societies, so the real questions were/are how the elections of India, France, UK, European Union Parliament, and the US would shake out. Needless to say, what happens in the US election matters a lot, since Trump is the Republican candidate again, and Kamala Harris for the Democrats will take forward Biden's policies. The difference in the impact on the world should be well aware to anyone who isn't comatose for the past few years. What will happen? What does India's election mean? What about Sri Lanka's presidential election, where the winner was not a member of any long-time ruling family or original political party of Sri Lanka? And now that Parliament was immediately dissolved to set up November general elections, what will the result imply, and how much will it matter?
This year of 2024 is pivotal, not just for elections. We're into year 3 of the war by Russia against Ukraine and we're reaching the first full year of a war that Israel is prosecuting in Palestine and elsewhere. Even though elections are happening in Russia, Russia's society is not free, so the results of the election are not in doubt, nor will they impact the ongoing war. The war in Israel appears largely a war caused and prolonged by Israel, and it has spread to Lebanon despite strong warnings not to by Biden's administration in the US. Regardless of what the details are, most reasonable people can agree on the end result: Israel has exhausted all of its international political capital. A country that provides refuge to the survivor-victims of the Holocaust, and supporter of the mantra "Never Again" about genocides in the world, it is seen by many as aggressively doing the opposite. And since September 11, there is a seat in the UN General Assembly for "State of Palestine", just like the full fledged members of the UN. Why was this status change made on September 11, a date with strong connections to the region? Is that not inauspicious, or does it mean something?
Scary Illiberal Countries, Unite
What do Russia and Israel have to do with India and Sri Lanka? A lot. They cooperate on the same wavelength in geopolitics. Reportedly, Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine has been causing massive losses of assets and soldiers. It certainly has stalled for at least a year. Facing a shortage of Russian citizens, Russia has already conscripted people from its minority ethnicities, and it still needs recruits. So India and Sri Lanka send naive poor people to fight on Russia's front lines. This German documentary shows the tragedy of India's poor getting deceived, thinking they are going to study or visit or work, and getting trapped into being canon fodder.
This is happening in Sri Lanka too. Particularly, it's from Southern Lanka, of course. Thanks to the militarised society, the military being an unaffordable welfare programme, and the inevitable total bankruptcy of the country in 2022 that still prevails in the country, the soldiers in the military have no transferrable skills to help their family. So they have decided to volunteer fighting for Russia to get the larger compensation from Russia. Remember that the military is 99% Sinhalese. And the Sinhalese military commanders have been congratulated by Russia for their contributions. It's bad.
It doesn't have to be this way. Russia didn't need to start a war that it had no chance of winning, and Southern Lanka didn't need to be such a disaster of a place that it's allowing its young able-bodied men and women to become canon fodder. If Southern Lanka were not so militarised, maybe they wouldn't be bankrupt, and thus making its people prone to this tragedy. But that would require Sinhalese to not be so genocidally racist that it could finally make major cuts to its severely bloated under-skilled military. Then the military wouldn't need to be an occupation force, despite no actual threats to Sinhalese dominance.
So why is this happening? Well, it's something that connects all 4 of these illiberal, militarised, anti-democratic countries together. Both Russia and Israel have timed their wars to prolong the current rulers in power. Voters prefer not changing their leader during wartime, and once war is over, they prefer a clear change in leader. The Russian domestic propaganda of temporary progress in the first year of Putin's war has propelled him to an easy victory in his reelection earlier this year. In Israel, Netanyahu has been in power in some way or another almost continuously since 1997, but his power grab that threatened to take over one of the three branches of government led to large sustained civilian protests in the streets happening daily, for weeks and months prior to the beginning of the war. Russia started the war in Ukraine two years before their 2024 elections. There seems to be serious turmoil in Russia now, with Ukraine's military occupying territory in Russia, and launching drone attacks deep into the territory on fuel and ammo stores. We don't know for sure the truth of what is or isn't happening, but the war holds the society still in fear.
Would Southern Lanka or India start wars to deviously increase the chances of their leaders staying in power? Of course! We've been over that with Southern Lanka. We knew that Gotabaya caused the April 2019 Easter attacks as soon as they happened. It was the only logical conclusion to draw from the facts. The fact that the church that was bombed was a Tamil Christian church is further evidence that it was Sinhalese of Southern Lanka who planned it, not a random Muslim group. It took 3-4 years for independent press (outside of Southern Lanka, of course) to collect the evidence and gather the courage to write the articles that point the finger at Gotabaya, and that too only after Gotabaya and his family was deposed from power. What about India? Is there a chance that India did the same thing, just 2 months earlier in February 2019, to revive Modi's flagging support due to criticisms of the poor economy under his terrible monetary decisions, ahead of the May 2019 elections in India? There's no doubt that the narrative changed drastically, and then Modi's BJP used it to ride to its first outright majority in parliament ever. And sure enough, there's smoke. A TV reporter's text messages indicate prior knowledge of the attacks before they happened. And there are reports of intelligence warnings that were ignored. Sound familiar? Give it time for us to find out the full details of how the Oct 7 2023 attacks happened by Hamas on the border of Gaza, given that we know from Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Bibi funded Hamas.
Because of the war in Gaza (which has now spread to Lebanon in the recent few days, and now Iran is firing at Israel in the last 24 hours), there has been a shortage of labour in Israel in sectors like construction and housing because Palestinians made up a large percentage of the workforce. In order to fill those slots, India has sent labourers to fill the difference. And more recently, now Southern Lanka is sending its labourers to Israel too. These illiberal countries are thick as thieves. And who knows, maybe they also form their own secret society where the password is "We hate Muslims just like you!"
But the winds of change are blowing in 2024. Rumours are that Russia's economy is teetering, and society is upset by the heavy Russian soldier casualties and bombing on Russia soil. Rumours are that Israel's economy is more precarious than we think. The mob networks supported by these countries that fuel the various hostile influence operations in Western countries are starting to get broken up and their leaders are getting arrested. Over in India, Modi's BJP could not win an outright majority in May 2024, and it was far short of the 330 out of 543 seats they claimed they would get. Their coalition got to 291 or so, far short of the false bravado of 400 that was claimed during the campaign. Modi's coalition is still moving along because they're not weak, but they're not strong. It only takes one dissatisfied coalition partner to leave in unison for the coalition to lose its majority. And in Southern Lanka, the country is bankrupt, and it just elected yet another racist Sinhalese leader, and he campaigned on changing the IMF deal. The IMF deal is the only thing preventing the country from backsliding into unchecked inflation and misery.
Another Sinhalese Wins, Southern Lanka Loses
In the recent presidential elections, Anura Kumara Dissanayake from the "leftist" JVP party won. In this way, there were several superficial shifts in Lankan politics. The original two Sinhalese parties, the UNP and SLFP, were not represented by the major candidates. The winner is not related to any previous leader, not being among the 3 or 4 major Sinhalese political families. The JVP was once a Marxist Communist party, but it long ago dropped commitment to genuine social equality in favor of Sinhalese Buddhist racism, just as any other party that wants staying power in Southern Lankan politics.
Why are they branding him as "AKD", rather than calling him simply Dissanayake? Yes, half of the Westerners trip up over the name in their journalistic laziness. But is AKD making him sound like "AOC" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), a charismatic "leftist" progressive Congresswoman in the US, whose 3 letter acronym was copied by rightwing airhead Marjorie Green who rebranded as "MTG" (Marjorie Taylor Green)? Whatever.
We know who Dissanayake is. He is destined to fail, just as every other Sinhalese supremacist in Southern Lanka. We've been over this, time and time again. The cycle repeats so often these days that it makes you dizzy. Dissanayake campaigned as a "leftist", as a Sinhalese Buddhist supremacist as befits the JVP, and as a "younger generation" person espousing change. If he attempts to renegotiate the terms of the IMF loan to alleviate the austerity measures, he will likely lose the IMF money, causing the already high inflation rate to runaway to new heights again like in 2022. He would then need to cut social programmes again in the face of such inflation, and if instead he tries to print money to fund the government, it will increase the money supply so much as to devaluate the currency and worsen the inflation problem. If he wants to save the social programmes, he will need to severely reduce the size of the military and the militarisation of the Tamil homeland that is Tamil Eelam. But as a strident Sinhala "populist" (racist), reducing the military is a red line that cannot be crossed. And doing nothing is not an acceptable option because it certainly would disappoint the expectations of the voters who believe the brand that he has built in his campaign.
Like the many Sinhalese leaders before him, Dissanayake has split the island once again into Tamil Eelam and Southern Lanka:
See, if you try to ask Tamil speaking peoples in the island, whether TE or Southern Lanka, they will hesitate to tell you what they really think. There are undercover intelligence operatives everywhere, even 15 years after the war, given the level of militarisation and occupation still there. But these elections, as you can see, are where the higher level patterns emerge, and they emerged so clearly this time. Tamil Eelam is fully visible, from Puttalam to Amparai, minus a couple of border districts. In addition, you can see the districts where Upcountry Tamils, who are still the slave labour picking tea, are largely represented. Tamil speaking Muslims are present as well in all these areas.
Like a test for colour blindness, there are those who can see the full depth of what that map implies in full clarity, and there are those who just see a jumble of similar colours.
All Guns, No Butter: Southern Lankan Racism
In economics, the guns and butter model describes an economy during wartime. There is a limited production capacity for a country. If it produces more wartime material ("guns"), then it means that it has to produce less civilian domestic consumption goods ("butter"). How much it chooses of one or the other is a choice. Furthermore, the Production Possibilities Frontier (PPF) is a curve that depicts the theoretical maximum rate of productivity it can reach at every possible combination of guns and butter. But various factors in reality can cause the country to not achieve its maximum output rate (ex: fuel shortages being a bottleneck for getting work done, people starving due to hyper inflated food prices). The model also tells us that in a very productive society, increases in technology or infrastructure (ex: new factories, better public transit) can expand the entire PPF further than it used to be. This expansion of the PPF is what is happening in Tamil Nadu and the rest of South India, to the chagrin of Modi and to the awe of the rest of India.
When Southern Lanka went bankrupt in 2022, we reminded everyone why Southern Lanka went bankrupt, which is militarisation. Tamils have been well aware of this fact for more than a decade. How could they not? This is what it looks like when a country like Southern Lanka commits heavily to the "guns" side of the PPF curve. There's no money for "butter". As one MP said in Parliament last year, "We are among the top 10 countries with the highest number of soldiers per 100 civilians."
But Southern Lanka will never move towards "butter", not on its own. Why? The genocidal racism that crescendoed in 2009 is still quite strong. It will not allow change. Some people won't change unless they hit rock bottom and have no other choice. Countries are similar. Germany was destroyed in World War 2 and has endeavoured to reject its past as much as possible. Japan was bombed with atomic bombs twice in World War 2 and thus surrendered, even while still close to its peak strength. The anime industry continues to wrestle with themes of apocalypse, large bombs, Christian foreigners, etc from the point of view of victimhood. Has Southern Lanka learned its lesson?
- In most developed nations, the percentage of the population in the military is in the range 0.2-0.6%, such as US (0.63%), France (0.56%), UK (0.42%), Germany (0.29%)
- 2021: military was an absurd 1.5% of the population
- 2022: military was 15% of budget when country went bankrupt
- 2023: military budget of $1.45B, which is almost the same as it was in 2008-2009 at the genocidal crescendo end of the war
- 2024: the military has 346,000 people currently with a total population of 22.2 million in the island. The percent of the population in the military = 1.56%.
- Remember: We should always treat the military percentage numbers higher because 99% of the military is Sinhalese. So if we divide the 346 thousand soldiers by the 16.6 million Sinhalese, we get 2.1% of the Sinhalese in the military.
Judging by Southern Lanka's continual insistence on maintaining its military's budget and size, it has its head buried in the sand. Can we replace the lion with an ostrich as the national animal?
More Racism in a Progressive Disguise?
Let's not get too enamoured with Harini Amarasuriya as the next Prime Minister. Yes, she has said the right progressive things, and she's a credentialed women who has worked and studied in fields that might contribute to social change. But she's still a part of the JVP. And the JVP has been a Sinhala Buddhist racist party for at least a few decades, which the media described as the JVP's turn to "becoming mainstream". The Southern Lankan mainstream is Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism. The JVP overturned the PTOMS tsunami aid sharing structure in 2005 by taking it to the Supreme Court, as soon as it was finalised. It had no regard to the Tamils of Tamil Eelam in their time of most need, in order to preserve Sinhala Buddhist hegemony.
Also know that Southern Lankan politicians seem to have perfected the art of ignoring its responsibilities in the most creative ways. Prior to the PTOMS structure, Ranil Wickremasinghe used his tricks to slow down actual progress to peace during the Peace Process of 2002-2009. He created committees and infinite bureaucracy to pretend to negotiate and implement changes according to the ceasefire agreement. When their ineffectualness was pointed out, the committee members would point fingers at each other creating so much confusion that no one is held accountable. A few "joint committees" were created to implement the elements of the ceasefire agreement, and because Ranil's tricks caused the joint committees to accomplish nothing, the LTTE and GoSL agreed to focus on just the one subcommittee that directly would help the Tamil people, the Sub-Committee for Immediate Humanitarian and Rehabilitation Needs (SIHRN). When Ranil's tricks slowed down SIHRN into uselessness, the peace talks were stopped because the ruse was clear to anyone who was paying attention. Ever since 2009, and the United Nations' concern about the genocide and human rights violations that strongly requested Sri Lanka to investigate its own war crimes via OHCHR of the Human Rights Council, what did Sri Lanka do? More committees, more bureaucracy (ex: Office of Missing Persons), and ultimately, zero progress. When it comes to responsibility, accountability, and integrity to their own actions, Southern Lanka is repugnant.
Did we forget? As we mentioned, once upon a time, Mahinda Rajapaksa was described as an honourable human rights lawyer whom the United States defended against Southern Lankan persecution. Human rights lawyer Mahinda Rajapakse went on to commit the largest genocide of South Asia in the 21st century. Later on, Chandrika Kumaratunga became president in 1994 on the promise of implementing peace. After her husband was assassinated, presumably by Sinhalese hegemonists to stop the potential for peace, Chandrika Kumaratunga went on to launch the Orwellian "War for Peace" scorched earth campaign against the LTTE and the Tamils of the North, including an embargo on essential needs to the entire civilian populace like medicines, food, and fuel. Let's be real about Southern Lanka: it is an abusive place whose most notable industries are all extractive operations, mostly on the backs of women:
- Remittances from domestic workers in the Middle East (women)
- Textile factories (women)
- Tea (Tamil women)
- Tourism (2nd to Thailand in the world for sex tourism)
- Wages for Sinhala soldiers occupying Tamil Eelam
This Sinhala Buddhist hegemony is a systemic problem that abuses everyone. It is a deep systemic problem that a single token progressive person will naturally fail to solve. Unless you're a first time reader here, you already knew that, though.
Modi and India's Stature in the World
As we mentioned, Modi's BJP won the elections with the help of its coalition partners. Journalists dubbed it "Modi 3.0", glossing over the real dangerous fascist trend of Indian society under the BJP since 2014, and also glossing over the humbling downturn of BJP strength. What will happen to Modi and India, now? The Ukraine war has brought into focus on the world stage that India is not a reliable partner for Western liberal countries at all.
About the RSS/BJP's India being fascist and an unreliable actor on the global stage that likes to partner with other illiberal anti-democratic regimes, unless you understand the issues I've written above, this image will break your brain. You've been warned. Also know that the BJP is well known for having a large, well-oiled "IT cell" operation that runs disinformation and propaganda campaigns regularly on social media. In fact, you've probably already been a target of some of the propaganda from the BJP's IT cell in India and just didn't know it.
Well, do we remember the assassination of a Sikh leader in Canada in 2023, and how Canada suggested that India was behind it? And how in response, India went on a months-long gaslighting campaign of sharp insults against Canadian PM Justin Trudeau? India even made Southern Lanka take its side. But after those few months, the US made it clear that they gave the information to Canada, and they thwarted an attack of a Sikh American at the same time. Although not reported much, at the same time, a Sikh in the UK died under very mysterious circumstances, and the British police did not follow their usual procedures at all in the autopsy. Sikhs in Australia have been regularly threatened, too.
In the end, not only was this a huge blow to Modi & India's diplomatic stature in the world, but this is a downright brazen act. To think that India can extrajudicially kill people in other countries, in America, Canada, and the UK no less, is lawless, disrespectful to those countries, and dangerously out of control. You know that countries as powerful as those, that guard the primacy of their democratic institutions, will not let that go unpunished. It should be a matter of "when", not "if", but so far, nothing overt has been obvious.
It really makes you wonder about the recent timeline of events. Several things happened in a short 3 week time span. The Tamil Nadu Chief Minister recently went to the US and score huge contracts for TN manufacturing, expanding the jobs into other parts of the state. Then Modi comes to the US ahead of the UN General Assembly for the Quad meeting at Joe Biden's house. The Quad is the group of 4 countries allied in the Indian Ocean region: US, India, Australia, and Japan. During the Quad meeting, each country leader had separate 1-on-1 meetings with the others after their group meetings. What must have the US and Australian leaders said to Modi during their 1-on-1 meetings? Soon after the Quad meeting, the UN General Assembly lasts for 2-3 days, Modi arrives back in Delhi immediately afterwards, and within a day, the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister pays a visit to Modi and officially complains about all of the different ways in which the Indian Union government has been completely stiffing the Tamil Nadu government out of its rightful share of government programme funds. Surely, Modi would not desire to entertain such a meeting with Tamil Nadu when the topic of the Union government's refusal to pay Tamil Nadu has been discussed in Tamil Nadu for the prior several days. Tamil Nadu is accomplishing what Modi is not capable of. Is the United States starting to notice?
This excerpt of a Modi speech to Congress in the US, in the presence of Vice President Kamala Harris, is completely cringe. It's even worse when you realise that it happened in June 2023, and this is the US visit before which Modi wanted the worldwide assassinations of Sikhs in Western countries to be completed.
The foundation of America was inspired by the vision of a nation of equal people. Throughout your history, you embrace people from around the world. And, you have made them equal partners in the American Dream.
There are millions here who have roots in India. Some of them sit probably in this chambre. And, there is one behind me, who had made history. I'm told that the Samosa Caucus is now the flavour of the House. I hope it grows and brings the full diversity of Indian cuisine here.
What?? And doesn't his speaking cadence sound like Bane from The Dark Knight Rises?
Not every seemingly scripted moment with Modi's name on it works out to a fairy tale ending that Modi and the RSS/BJP want you to imagine. The 2023 Cricket World Cup final held in India in Narendra Modi Stadium stunned the cult-ish crowd into silence.
There is a such thing as overextending yourself beyond your means. Will comeuppance come for India, not just in sports, but in areas that matter much more in the real world, like justice and stability and democracy and security in the Indian Ocean?
Upcoming US elections in 2024
Most honest observers of the US election will tell you that Kamala Harris is the clear frontrunner for president over Trump. Her party just might retain control in the Senate, and there is a good chance of regaining a majority in the House of Representatives. What will that mean?
Don't expect Kamala Harris to know Tamil or be in touch with her Tamilness on that level. It's just not clear. Does she identify as Tamil or Indian? Most people have not had a chance to know more about who she is. At the same time, also don't expect her to be in touch with the Brahminness of her mother's family. Such hereditary lifelong discrimination as the caste system creates is exactly the experience of Black Americans, and the comparison is quite apt. And we know Kamala Harris's identity as a Black American woman, and we know the freedom and civil rights ethos of her mother's family, too.
As the top prosecutor for the state of California, and given the connection between public prosecutors and law enforcement, Kamala Harris was referred to as "Top Cop" for her hard stance on really dangerous criminals. We do know that Kamala Harris will be bringing people to justice as president by choosing such an Attorney General to lead the Department of Justice.
And we know that she is an American patriot, and will pursue America's interests throughout the world. The question still remains: will America see the larger strategy? Will it make long overdue moves in the region? If Tamil already has been a key link to the Indian Ocean over a decade ago, and if that is much more true today than it ever was, then Madame President can teach us to say "vanakkam", not "namaste" or "ayubowan", to a resurgent, progressive, healthy democratic trend in South Asia. If that future shall come to pass, then that future might be hard to see now because it is a tiny speck in our sightline on the Indian Ocean, far away and shrouded in the fog. But the winds of change are blowing in 2024.
No comments:
Post a Comment