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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ggersh who wrote (201721)	9/27/2023 6:23:17 PM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217884

Re <<history>> Suspect Bloomberg pipes up United States should make clear it sides with India bloomberg.com China Is Benefiting From the Sikh Murder Fallout The West’s deliberateblindness to the authoritarianism that has taken root in India has presented Beijing with an opportunity. 27 September 2023 at 06:00 GMT+8 By Karishma Vaswani Karishma Vaswani is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia politics with a special focus on China. Previously, she was the BBC's lead Asia presenter and worked for the BBC across Asia and South Asia for two decades. Protestors burn a picture of Prime Minster Narendra Modi outside the Indian consulate in Toronto. Photographer: Arlyn McAdorey/Bloomberg The true test of character, as the saying goes, is what you’re doing when no one is watching. China is never off the global radar, but while the world’s headlines were focused on the very public fallout between India and Canada over the murder of a Sikh activist, Beijing has been busy. It constructed a floating barrier in the South China Sea that the Philippines says is an attempt to stop its fishermen from entering the area, it hostedSouth Korean Prime Minister Han Duck-soo and Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad as part of the Asian Games celebrations, and upgraded bilateral ties with Timor-Leste, giving Beijing more heft in the region. Extending influence through partnerships and brokering deals is business as usual for China. The West and its allies have tried to counter this impact through the Quad, an informal grouping that brings together the US, Japan, India, and Australia in a network of democracies, with shared economic and security interests that span the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Recently, though, all four members have been distractedby the growing fallout from the now radioactive relationship between Ottawa and New Delhi that risks damaging the ties binding the Quad together, and in turn handing Beijing a potential geopolitical victory — one that it didn’t need to orchestrate. After watching the group coalesce over the last few years, China had been hoping for relations between India and the West to deteriorate. Even as top diplomat Subrahmanyam Jaishankar makes the rounds at the United Nations, posting about who he has met — in an attempt, perhaps, to show New Delhi is still part of the global in-crowd — Beijing stands to gain the most from the current impasse. At first, the Quad was dismissed as a well-intentioned idea that was lacking in unity and execution. But just as India is now causing some soul-searching about the group’s values, it was New Delhi and Beijing’s border tensions in 2020 that prompted Indian officials to reassess just how important an alliance of democracies might be in its own backyard. That provided the impetus behind the Quad’s revival. Earlier this month, the Group of 20 meeting in New Delhi was widely considered to be a diplomatic success for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and a miss for Chinese President Xi Jinping, who skipped the summit. It was starting to look like the year of the Quad — and, more pointedly — the year of India Rising as a viable regional power versus China. But as is often the case, the best-laid plans are the ones that fail most dramatically. The alliance is now under huge strain because one key member, India, is at odds with the US over Canada. It is not yet clear who is behind the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, the Sikh activist who was shot dead in British Columbia in June. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused India of being involved in the murder, which New Delhi vehemently denies. But even so, India sees Nijjar as a terrorist, and some in the country are questioning why the US’s killing of Osama Bin Laden onPakistani soil was sanctioned and not viewed in the same light. Washington needs to iron these tensions out fast if it wants to maintain the importance and cohesion of the Quad. Beijing is watching the potential fracturing of this alliance closely. The reaction from China to the US-India-Canada debacle has been swift. The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times has said Western countries — and what it really means is the US — are hypocrites. “Western countries claim to be defenders of human rights and often criticize other nations for their human-rights issues,” the editorialnotes. “Their praise for India’s so-called ‘democracy’ is primarily driven by geopolitical interests and the desire to include India in their anti-China alliance.” The problem is, Beijing is right. The West’s deliberateblindness to the kind of authoritarianism that has taken root in India under Modiis a key reason why the US and its partners are in this position right now. Washington is at fault. It has put New Delhi and Modi on a democratic pedestal in an attempt to create a sort of super-hero unit of like-minded countries to help it ward off what it sees as the evil empire — China. But there are no good guys here. This is about realpolitik, writes Tunku Varadarajan, fellow at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute. “The new Cold War calls for a strategy not unlike the first one, requiring the West to deal with imperfect allies or partners,” he notes. “You hold your nose and shake hands with Prime Minister Narendra Modi because you need him in the trenches against Xi Jinping.” The lack of active engagement from Washington also risks losing New Delhi’s trust, as Michael Rubin, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute points out. “The Biden administration seeks to walk a tightrope between the two allies, hoping the crisis fades away before either can force Washington to choose sides,” he notes. “That is a cowardly approach. Both India and Canada may be close allies, but the United States should make clear it sides with India.” Even if it doesn’t go that far explicitly, the Biden administration must work towards repairing the damage with India fast, if it is serious about countering China’s influence in the region. The cohesion of the Quad lies in the balance.