The Duran Podcast - India; Justin Trudeau and diamonds

Episode Date: October 1, 2023

India; Justin Trudeau and diamonds

All right, Alexander, let's talk about what is going on in India. India is making news. But you know, the interesting part about what's going on in India is that India is on the receiving end of this. This is not something that they've asked for. It's come to them. So you have this row with Canada and with Trudeau. and now you have the sanctions on diamonds that I imagine the EU is going to announce fairly soon in their I think it's their 12th sanctions package. So, you know, it's really interesting to watch all of this go down because once again,

India hasn't really started any controversy, but all of a sudden they're embroiled in two. I don't want to say the diamond issue is a controversy, but it's a problem that's coming to them. They didn't ask for it. It's been hoisted onto them by the European Union. Indeed. I'm going to say straight away what I think is going on. The United States has made a big effort to win over India and to make friends with India.

This goes all the way back to George W. Bush and the time, you know, the time when he was president at the start of the century. but it has taken an extra big extra dimension under Biden because of course the Biden administration has been trying to enlist India as in effect a kind of de facto ally against China and they've invited they had Modi round to Washington a few months ago he was back in June he was given an enormous reception there they pulled out all the stops to have him you know, well received.

He was in the White House. I believe he visited Congress as well. Anyway, they've courted India as a counterweight towards against China and they've also looked to India to obstruct the development of the bricks because India is known to have a difficult relationship, a complicated relationship with China.

And I think that they were quite happy, or at least back in June, they were quite happy in the US about the way things appeared to be going, or at least they thought they were going. And by the way, there was a big article in the Financial Times, which I think gave the game away. You talked about India moving slowly into the US orbit. You see, you know, we're talking about India, the most populous country in the world. a rising great power, but they were seeing India as a country that they could pull into the American orbit, in other words, make some kind of a satellite. And of course there were all those reports just before the BRIC summit meeting about how Modi wasn't going to attend the BRIC summit meeting. And it now looks clearly as if these were signals that the West were sending to Modi that they didn't. didn't want him to go to the BRIC summit meeting and they wanted it to slow down the whole process of what was happening there.

Well, Modi did go to the BRIC summit and at the BRIC summit he had a good meeting with Xi Jinping. He went along with all the proposals. In fact, he played a central role in developing the proposals for BRIC's expansion and for the setting up of the BRIC's financial and global system that we're starting to see. And then of course he hosted the G20 and to the intense anger of the West. He again did what he has consistently done up to this point. Instead of accepting Western talking points over Ukraine, he actually resisted it. He didn't invite Zelensky to the G20. And when the G20 statement appeared, it was neutral.

It was generally neutral on the conflict in Ukraine. So what happens, what's been happening, is that the West has, firstly, I think, started to turn increasingly threatening. So at the G20 meeting itself, Modi had apparently, firstly, this very difficult meeting with Trudeau. Well, we've discussed this already. But I think that Trudeau raised this issue of this Sikh who was assassinated in Canada. But I think he did it in a way that was intended to convey a warning to Modi, and which I think Modi himself saw as a threat, and we know that Modi pushed back very angrily.

So this meeting didn't go very well. But what we've now since learned, and we've know this from an article in the Financial Times, which, by the way, is entitled, the West's Modi problem. What then happened is that the Western powers, all the Western leaders apparently ganged up against Modi and also brought up all this issue of the Sikh militant in Canada and the problems between India and Canada. In other words, they backed Trudeau.

And it looks to me as if this was a concerted attempt to impose to pressure Modi, which of course would have made him even more angry. And then after the G20, we had Trudeau, going to the Canadian Parliament, raising a big issue over the Sikh militant. We've had lots of articles now appearing in the Western media. There's a new one, by the way, in today's telegraph, which is about, you know, India is drifting away from the West. It's turning out not to be the democracy we all thought it was. talk about Modi's authoritarian streak, all of those things. And now we've had the sanctions on the diamonds.

Now, we did a program about this, or rather we discussed this over the course of one of our recent programs, about the fact that the sanctions on the Russian diamond trade isn't going to affect the Russian economy in any meaningful way. It is going to obliterate Antwerp as a diamond trading centre. But, and it's also going to anger India, where most diamonds today are cut and polished. Most of them are cut and polished. And what has been, what I hadn't realised is that the place where most of these diamonds in India are cut and polished. are cut and polished is the town in India, in Gujarat,

which apparently Modi more than any other considers home. It is his own domestic political base. And these sanctions, when you look at it this way, apparently a lot of people in India are very upset and angry about this, about the diamonds, and it's going to affect the business, many people's business in India,

in this particular town over the diamonds. Again, it looks like an attempt to really get back at Modi in a way that will hurt people who are politically and electorally and maybe socially close to him. So there's a big Western push against Modi and against India. And it's clearly connected to what happened at these two big summit meetings the BRIC summit in Johannesburg and the G20 summit in Delhi. That's my analysis, and I'm sure that's right.

Right, so they're going after India. How badly is this going to the backfire on the collective west? Well, it is going to backfire. It is going to backfire catastrophically. To be absolutely clear, there is no more pro-Western leader or party in India than Modi's party. I mean, there is no,

every Indian political party is fundamentally patriotic about India. You only have to spend time with Indian people to know the enormous pride they feel in their country and their deep connection

with their own country. Now, some Indians lean more to the West, some Indians lean more to good relations with Russia. Every Indian, even though those that want to lean more to the West,

no Indian wants to end this long, deep, friendly, historic relationship with Russia. Even pro-Western Indians don't. What you're going to do is you're going to incense them. You're going to make them say to themselves, well, this West that we wanted to make our friend isn't really a friend. It's a bully. And that's the feeling that's going to start to gain traction in India itself. Modi, I should add, is a very popular leader.

He has a lot of support in India himself. There's not to say that there aren't a lot of people who are very critical of him in India. He has many detractors there. But attacking him over these particular issues because he has acted in a way that he's fully consistent. with Indian traditions and India's own deeply held philosophy of non-alignment, that is not going to go down well in India at all. It is going to lose the West friends then. Do you think there's any chance of some sort of regime change

or something being stirred up in India from various NGOs or from the collective West governments? Or is Modi fairly secure in his position? I think, one, I think Modi's very secure. in his position. And by the way, I should say that he runs an extremely tough and very savvy political machine. Taking it on would be extremely difficult. But you cannot carry out the kind of regime change operation in India that you can in some other places. India is huge, I mean, it's the most populous country in the world. It is enormously complex. It is very, very sophisticated. There simply isn't enough money even in the United States to buy enough people in India to make the kind of change,

to make the kind of regime change operations succeed there that you can achieve in other places. And Indian people are far too proud. Indian political system is far too sophisticated. India's security services are far too well organized. The diplomatic service, as we've discussed many times, is amongst the best in the world. any attempt to meddle in Indian affairs in that kind of way, all that it's going to do is going to discredit any Indian politician who appears to be connected with these sort of moves and isolated, isolate them and marginalise them. And it is going to unite the critical mass of Indian opinion, political opinion, against the United States. They're very proud of their country, which of course fought hard to achieve its independence.

Never forget this. It's a long story about India gaining independence from Britain. They're not going to subordinate it to any other country and certainly not to the United States. Why are they going forward with this? The US, the EU, why are they pushing? Because they don't know any better. I mean, this is what they do now. I mean, this is the trouble.

I mean, once upon the time, you know, in JFK's day, I mean, John Kennedy had extremely good relations with Nero, the Prime Minister of India, who, of course, was the architect of India's non-aligned policies. He had outstanding ambassador in India at the time. Forget his name, but he's one of the big names. In those days, the United States, understood had the feel for the sentiments in a country like India.

And they understood also that it is too big and too complex to manipulate in the kind of way that... in the kind of way that the United States has manipulated other countries. But today they've lost that skill. They're much less powerful than they were in, JFK's day, certainly far less powerful relative to India than they were in JFK's day. But they've become even more aggressive and even more bullying, because that is what they do. That is the only playbook they have.

So, you know, when they run into obstacles, when they find that, you know, Modi is not quite the subservient ally, stroke, you know, satellite that they imagined him to be. Their first instinct is to come up and say to themselves, so what are the pressure points we can exert against him? Let's stir up some trouble with the Sikhs. Let's impose sanctions on the diamonds. And let's also have all sorts of hit pieces appearing about him in the media in the West. One thing it's going to also do, by the way, is it going to annoy it.

anger, an awful lot of people in the Indian diaspora who live in Western countries, who are also deeply proud of their country, as I should know, living in London, where of course, the Indian diaspora is very large. Yeah, you know, one final thought, the U.S., they've given up on diplomacy because it's, they don't have a system in place anymore. No, no. You know, they've, they've ceded all of that, of that entire process to the think tanks and the NGOs. That is exactly true. And now they're diplomats. Yeah, now their diplomats are just kind of appointed business people or donors or something like that. You know,

they just don't have a system in place more. It's almost like a football club. You know, why is the English League so good? Why is the Spanish League so good? Because they have a system from, they get the kids when they're very young, they have the academies, and they bring them up through the ranks, and eventually they'll end up playing for Liverpool or Manchester or Chelsea,

something like that. But, I mean, the U.S. doesn't have that anymore. Well, it doesn't have a system. It doesn't have a system. In a functioning way. I mean, the U.S. has plenty of institutions that educate people who eventually end up. in the State Department and who IR studies, as I know for a fact, are a big thing in the United States.

Except, of course, they are terrible. I mean, I've actually worked closely with somebody who's fighting her way through an IR degree. And, of course, it is absolute neocon thinking. It's not about diplomacy at all. I mean, international relations is it taught. It's not about diplomacy. It's all about indoctrinated. you in the value systems

that only blink and cause them that are part of the handbook that you find in NGOs and in the State Department as well I mean the barrier between the NGOs or the State Department no longer exists to all intents and purposes. They're all part of

the same ecosystem. So that's the problem. They don't do diplomacy anymore. One person did diplomacy. I mean, American diplomacy basically collapsed during the Bill Clinton era. I mean, with Madeline Albright and people of that kind.

And it's basically stopped since then. No president since Bill Clinton has done any serious diplomacy except one. One president did believe in diplomacy. He wasn't trained in it.

He had no background in it, but he actually does believe that doing deals with people and meeting them halfway, and negotiating with them and trying to get on with them and to understand them is the way forward. And that, of course, is Donald Trump. But of course, he, we have to cast into the out of darkness. He's behaving in that kind of way. It's more like Neville Chamber, apparently, than it is about conducting the business of the United States properly and effectively and successfully around the world.

How dare he engaged diplomacy with Korea, right? Absolutely. dare he. Absolutely. So Bolton had to make sure that he sabotaged that whole thing. Absolutely, exactly. Okay, we'll leave it there. The durand.com.

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