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Modi’s India and the New World Order

The main points in this long but very good article

Gautam Adani “was not only a beneficiary of the new political and economic order devised by Modi to consolidate Hindu supremacism in India. The neglected details of his frictionless rise show that after their calamitous romance with Russia’s oligarchy, Western politicians, journalists and bankers facilitated the ascent of another hyper-nationalist elite with dubiously sourced wealth and an extreme aversion to the rule of law and civil liberties.”

“When Modi was barred from travelling to the United States and the European Union because of his suspected complicity in the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002, and many Indian businessmen recoiled from him, Adani worked hard to rehabilitate his associate. Since becoming prime minister in 2014, Modi has repaid the favour: he turned Adani into India’s biggest operator of private airports and ports, as well as its leading producer of power from coal-fired plants.

McKinsey’s global managing partner, Bob Sternfels, recently said that we may be living in ‘India’s century’. Praising Modi for ‘implementing policies that have modernised India and supported its growth’, the economist and consultant Nouriel Roubini described the country as a ‘vibrant democracy’.”

Meanwhile, “the number of Indians who go to sleep hungry rose from 190,000,000 in 2018 to 350,000,000 in 2022, and malnutrition and malnourishment killed more than two-thirds of the children who died under the age of five last year… According to a recent Oxfam report, India’s richest 1 per cent owned more than 40.5 per cent of its total wealth in 2021.”

There is nothing unique about the “amalgam of domestic repression, ideological messianism and state-pampered oligarchy, or its legitimation by Western political and financial institutions. In Russia, despotic rulers helped loyalists amass vast private fortunes by showering them with privatisation deals, banking privileges, government contracts, and tax and trade concessions. Western corporations and banks channelled tainted Russian money into the pool of global capital, and law firms and PR companies made New York and London safe for Russian oligarchs.

In 2001, Blair told the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who had been investigating Putin’s war crimes in Chechnya, that ‘it’s my job as prime minister to like Mr Putin’.”

And in the context of the new cold war “the Biden administration’s resolve, deepened by the war in Ukraine, to contain China. Adani’s lavish purchase of the port of Haifa came after the US put pressure on Israel to forbid his Chinese rival, the Shanghai International Port Group, from managing a port frequented by the Sixth Fleet of the US navy.”

“Rupert Murdoch [the media mogul] anointed Modi as India’s ‘best leader with the best policies since independence’… In 2019, Bill Gates ignored a letter from three Nobel Peace Prizewinners, including Iran’s Shirin Ebadi, protesting against his decision to ‘give a humanitarian award to a man whose nickname is the “Butcher of Gujarat”’. In January, Twitter and YouTube agreed to enforce the Indian government’s ban on the BBC documentary on Modi’s complicity in anti-Muslim violence.”

Barack Obama “described Modi as if he were a character in a Horatio Alger story: born in modest circumstances but now the leader of the ‘world’s largest democracy’, Modi reflected ‘the dynamism and potential of India’s rise’. Obama, the first Western leader to embrace Modi, became the only American president to visit India twice, once as chief guest at the Republic Day parade.”

India’s demographic advantages may “turn into a demographic disaster in the form of a massive unemployable labour force… as the country’s population overtakes China’s, the scope for labour-intensive jobs in Indian industry shrinks further, the large middle class long fantasised about by foreign corporations stubbornly fails to materialise, and private investment keeps falling despite lavish government spending on infrastructure.”

“While the West repeatedly sanctioned Russia, Modi turned the despoiler of Ukraine into India’s biggest supplier of oil as well as military hardware; his government has urged state-owned corporations to explore the possibility of buying stakes abandoned by Western companies in Russian energy concerns.”

“Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, described Modi as the ‘most loved of all world leaders’.”

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