America’s Sepoys

YOU CAN COUNT on them. The West blows the whistle and brown sepoys, heads held high, keyboards at the ready, troop in obediently.

The masters have called. The West’s geopolitical interests must be defended, the narrative moulded into shape.

The drill is well-rehearsed. First, the West’s political leaders set the tone, determine the terms of engagement, and label right from wrong, moral from amoral. The embedded media checks in, twisting, kneading the narrative.

The cavalry is then sent forth. Leading the charge recently from the US was Daleep Singh, his adopted country’s deputy national security advisor. India needed to be pulled, first gently, then with a little bit of menace, away from the embrace of Russia.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the West has trained its diplomatic guns on India. New Delhi’s neutral stance at the United Nations on the conflict, its burgeoning rupee-rouble trade with Russia, and its purchase of oil and gas from Moscow at large price discounts incensed the West. Every other major country, except China, had cut off all commercial links with Russia. India was an important exception.

China was a lost cause. Western interlocutors tried unsuccessfully to change Beijing’s position. China instead lectured the European Union at the 23rd bilateral EU-China Summit on April 1 that US-led sanctions on Russia were illegal. The door was firmly closed on further discussion.

India, therefore, remained the big prize. In the Quad, Australia and Japan had fallen quickly into line. Europe was fully in step. Neutral Africa and Latin America were too small in trading terms for the West to expend diplomatic energy on. The Arabs were sitting on the fence but as oil exporters who didn’t matter. East Asia was keeping its head well down.

Not India. It continued trading with Russia, buying discounted oil and telling the West to look at Europe which, post-sanctions, was buying far more oil and gas from Russia than India.

India needed to be disciplined. And who better to do it than the charming, ever-smiling Indian-American Daleep Singh.

Singh is President Joe Biden’s sanctions Svengali. He created the crushing financial and economic sanctions on Moscow following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He persuaded, directly or indirectly, over 500 global firms ranging from Google, IBM and Amazon to Microsoft, Tesla and Intel to end their operations in Russia.

What exactly did Daleep Singh say? First, he turned on the charm with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval. Singh declared that he came “in a spirit of friendship”.

Then came the menace, delivered in impeccable sepoy style. Singh said: “No one should kid themselves—Russia is going to be the junior partner in this relationship with China. And the more leverage that China gains over Russia, the less favourable that is for India. I don’t think anyone would believe that if China once again breached the Line of Actual Control, Russia would come running in India’s defence.”

Jaishankar could have shared with Daleep Singh a fact that would have frozen Singh’s smile: sanctions have given Russia an extra $120 billion in oil and gas revenue since the war began by doubling the price of crude oil and gas. Russia continues to pump 10 million barrels of oil a day and is supplying increasing quantities of gas through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Germany and Central Europe.

US President Joe Biden has called Russian President Vladimir Putin “a war criminal”. Under Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Putin can indeed be tried as a war criminal. But Biden shouldn’t forget what former UN Secretary-General, the late Kofi Annan, called the US-led invasion of Iraq that killed nearly half-a-million Iraqi civilians: “I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN Charter. From our point of view and the UN Charter point of view, it [the war] was illegal.”

Is former US President George W Bush, therefore, a war criminal? Is former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who colluded with Bush in the illegal and brutal invasion of Iraq, a war criminal?

Author Peter Singer, writing for Project Syndicate on April 6, 2018, said: “Few Americans will take seriously the assertion that President George W. Bush is a war criminal. Nor will many Britons think of Prime Minister Tony Blair in that light. Yet the case for saying that they committed a [war] crime is surprisingly strong.”

Strong, yes. Surprising, no.

AmericaDaleep Singhdiplomacyeconomic sanctionRussia invades UkraineUS-India relations