Ahead of G20 Summit, politics of foreign subversion and ensuring security for Narendra Modi biggest challenges for India

Interference in the affairs of other rival communities or states is as old as organised society itself and long predates the seventeenth-century Westphalian formalisation of modern statehood. The current novelty in the forms of interference and attempts to subvert other sovereignties is buttressed by globalisation and the transformative impact of technological change that barely dates back a generation. The interpenetration created by the globalisation of economies and societies and the prodigious increase in the movement of people across national boundaries has opened up truly huge vistas for meddling in the affairs of others. To this needs to be added, the communications revolution, some of it hardly a couple of decades old, has increased points of contact and opportunities for the subverter to reach and influence entire populations elsewhere. This is what even American politicians have complained of vociferously of late though the US itself is truly the fount of every type of interference in other countries, in addition to the infliction of violence and invasions. The forms of subversion include intelligence gathering and that is the oldest manifestation of external interference, outlined in some of the ancient manuals of governance, like Kautilya’s third-century Arthashastra and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War on psychological warfare. Virtually every modern state nowadays has dedicated organisations that operate abroad to gather information from public sources as well as unlawful covert means. It often entails the suborning of locals with varied inducements and blackmail for their faux pas, often sexual indiscretions. This essential human interaction is accompanied by massive surveillance from space that captures developments on the ground in extraordinary detail including prying with relative ease on the most supposedly confidential private communications. Similar information-gathering activities are of course routine between domestic rivals for political power in all countries as well. This is the external kind of interference described as the ‘foreign hand’ by Indira Gandhi, before she was cut down by her own security detail, almost certainly directly or indirectly incited exactly such infiltration. The installation or removal of regimes, often by assassinating foreign leaders judged unacceptable, has long been an imperialist stratagem. Dominant powers like the US, the former Soviet Union and the Britain and France have routinely deployed such methods to consolidate their influence in countries important for strategic reasons or possessors of valuable resources like oil. During the past century, the entire Middle East and the very borders of its sovereign states were the product of arbitrary Anglo-French imperialist goals though in bitter competition with each other. Both were eventually replaced unceremoniously in the region by the US after the Anglo-French Suez invasion fiasco of 1956. Earlier, the Anglo-Americans also successfully removed the democratic and modernising Iranian government of prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953. Innumerable other episodes of regime change occurred in subsequent decades including Guatemala in 1954, the Congo in 1960, Dominican Republic in 1961, Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973 and the Bangladesh coup of 1975. It had only taken the CIA, in conjunction with remaining Pakistani loyalists of independent Bangladesh’s armed forces, a mere four years to topple Bangladesh’s elected sovereign government. One of the accused coup leaders was later appointed by the BBC World Service to head its Bengali section, much to the chagrin of Sheikh Hasina. The revelations about George Soros and the meetings in a foreign embassy to plot against Narendra Modi, with some PIOs in tow, is unsurprising. The blatantly slanderous BBC documentary against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the assault on Adani enterprises, which had been allowed to become vulnerable by inadequate regulatory supervision, were timed to coincide with the wider strategy of discrediting Narendra Modi and undermining the Indian economy, in order to jeopardize his electoral prospects in 2024. The idea that the Soros intervention was an entirely solo venture is being propagated by embedded US assets in India who understandably flaunt bogus nationalist credentials to garner credibility. George Soros and his Open Society Foundation are no different from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, long known as arms-length instruments of US government policy and its intelligence agencies. Soros’s involvement in every other recent US subversive project is a matter of record and it would be incredible if India was the exception. It might be noted that major foreign universities have also long been engaged in intellectual and political subversion of India, brainwashing Indian students and recruiting some for their national intelligence services. India has long been the principal target of the Anglo-Americans and prodigious sums of money have been spent to create and nurture assets within it. India was regarded as a truculent Soviet pawn and its successive governments found uncooperative if only because Indian society was too vast and its decision-making apparatus difficult to seize in entirety by simply suborning individual politicians. However, virtually all sections of Indian politics and its civil society are indeed infiltrated, many of them quite openly. It might be recalled that former prime minister Morarji Desai was identified by the respected US journalist, Seymour Hersh, as a CIA asset and Morarji Desai lost the defamation suit in a New York court that he initiated against him. WikiLeaks has also identified a host of names in India as US agents, including one prominent journalist, who continues to prosper in the corridors of influence     . A few years ago a bright young student from Nagpur, with alleged RSS associations, complained to me of the difficult time she was having in one of London’s major universities because of her social and political antecedents. She also made the shocking revelation that two Indian Joint Secretaries on her graduate course, funded by the Indian government, the wife of one the Consul General in Edinburgh, were declaring in seminars she attended with them that India was being run by a RSS-RAW cabal. When I conveyed this information to the relevant minister at the Indian High Commission in London his amusing reaction was that the accusation exaggerated RAW’s influence! India is an extraordinarily subverted society, a situation made infinitely worse today, because major opposition political parties have become active collaborators with foreign powers, because being out of office for a third time could prove fatal for their very survival. The signing of the 2008 MoU between the CCP and the Congress Party, which remains undisclosed, is the most blatant illustration of the dangerous level of foreign intervention in Indian politics. Poignantly, Soviet intervention in India, much of it now confirmed, was helpful in keeping at bay the infinitely more dangerous subversive activities of US agencies. It was the KGB that warned Indira Gandhi that Sant Bhindranwale was intending to declare independence from the Golden temple and the new state of Khalistan would gain immediate recognition from Pakistan and other countries. However, Soviet interference left behind the treasonous legacy of India’s communist movement, hell bent on India’s political demise, paralleling their active promotion of its partition in 1947. The involvement of wealthy Indian PIOs in a plot to overthrow the Modi government through surreptitious intervention and funding of domestic opposition to him should come as no surprise. In my prolonged experience of PIO politics in the UK and somewhat in the US, I have become mistrustful of most Indians active in political life abroad. It is perhaps not extraordinary that many of them, including some within nationalist groups of Indian origin, have been recruited by local intelligence services. I am personally sure that one of the most influential, with access to Delhi’s corridors of power, cannot be trusted. Another gentleman, with cordial ties to militant British Sikhs and a likely police informer, has become one of the most popular social media interlocutors from abroad in India and in the guise of a ‘Hindu activist’. My conclusion has long been to remain skeptical of Indian activists abroad because many of them face investigations for white collar crimes like financial fraud, and therefore vulnerable to blackmail by the authorities. In order to contextualise India’s predicament, it will be useful to revisit contemporary foreign intervention to achieve regime change. It is overwhelmingly a modus operandi of the US State, by sponsoring or hijacking local protest to replace incumbent governments. Such occasions of US intervention, assisted especially by its unctuous vassal, Britain, with colonial antecedents in the targeted countries, are utterly cynical and completely indifferent to the bloodshed entailed. This is how the American intelligence services, aided by local collaborators, commandeered the Arab Spring, abandoning their own loyal Egyptian puppet, Hosni Mubarak, when he appeared to be past his local sell by date. The heroic countenancing of the brutal regime response by thousands demanding change, from a corrupt and thoroughly incompetent regime, was finessed by US intervention though it was the Egyptian Brotherhood that gained power briefly. But it was paralyzed by the creation of barriers covertly that prevented it from embarking on urgent policy changes and was duly replaced by another loyal US military puppet. The Syrian public revolt over the admittedly disastrous unconcern of President Bashar-al Assad to the unprecedented drought failed to usher in imperative changes by a particularly brutal and isolated family. The US then proceeded to fund and sponsor armed rebellion by ISIS and allied fascistic Islamic forces against Assad, but it did not succeed because the Russians and Iranians sided with their incumbent ally, Assad. But in the process Syria has been destroyed as a society, polity and economy. Not dissimilar subversions of mass protests in Tunisia and Algeria, with, French involvement, no doubt, also occurred. They are all coming full circle, with the Tunisian economy now in tatters once again and with much of the Arab world in open-ended turmoil. There is also a determined ongoing US attempt to subvert Venezuela and install a neo colonial regime in it. Venezuela happens to have the world’s largest petroleum reserves, which would handy insurance against dependence on Middle Eastern suppliers. So-called Orange Revolutions of alleged democratic revolt, were instigated in Eastern Europe, capitalizing on local discontent, to install regimes that could be integrated into the European US imperial network under the umbrella of NATO. The relatively recent precursor to these were the mass public demonstrations against the communist General Jozef Pilsudski government by Lech Walesa in a fully coordinated campaign of the Vatican and the CIA. These interventions were preceded by CIA sponsorship of the events in Hungary in 1956 and the Prague revolt of 1968. But the most significant of the recent Orange Revolutions was the overthrow of the legally elected government of Ukraine in the effective coup d’état of 2014, openly fueled and patronized by the US. This was to be the prelude to ensnaring Russia in a war by posing intolerable threats to its national security at the border. It is apparently hoped that economic chaos within Russia owing to sanctions and casualties in the fighting would provoke regime change in Moscow and the installation, no doubt, of someone in the mould of the compliant drunken Boris Yeltsin. The outcome has been the comprehensive destruction of Ukraine and economic setback for the EU of as yet unknown long-term proportions. The indifference to the huge human cost of its imperialist policies for the people of Ukraine and its own NATO allies should be a somber warning to all others and especially India. The redoubtable George Soros has been involved in all the instances of fostering oversized public discontent and he has also been trying to undermine the Hungarian government of Viktor Orban, which has been unwilling to comply with diktats from Brussels and Washington. It should not be forgotten that the same George Soros, the supposed advocate of democracy and human rights, is yet to apologize or make amends for the 10,400 suicides owing to the devastating socioeconomic economic consequences of his 1998 speculative attacks on the currencies of Malaysia and Thailand. It seems unlikely that foreign intervention will have a significant impact on the Indian general elections of 2024, but troubles lie ahead for India and the Modi government. The most optimistic scenario for those who wish to overthrow his government is to make India ungovernable in the forthcoming months before the elections in order to befuddle the Indian public. It seems that causing trouble before the September 2023 G20 meeting in Delhi would be the ideal moment to prompt maximum embarrassment and demoralization. An infiltrated India offers many such opportunities, as the anti-CAA protests and farmer’s revolt have demonstrated, with the government exhibiting indecision on how to respond. But the greatest concern must remain the safety and security of prime minister, Narendra Modi and there have been three alarming lapses in the past eight years. Any incident involving him would surely provoke a destructive civil war in India, exactly as its neighbourhood and global adversaries wish. It would constitute an unmitigated historic tragedy for India. The writer taught international political economy for more than two decades at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Views expressed are personal. Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.