My Take | India – the democratic economic giant that disappoints
- America may want to use India as part of the Asian bulwark against China, but in the process, it is inadvertently exposing its atrocities, past and present
Part of this containment strategy is to air incessantly the dirty laundry of China, and to sanitise that of America and of its ally. In any case, India, usually billed as the world’s largest democracy (in terms of population), has always been given a free pass by the Western media when it comes to atrocious behaviour, whether domestically or internationally.
Now it’s especially important for Washington to keep India happy. After all, the “pivot to Asia” means expanding from Asia-Pacific to “Indo-Pacific”, with the Indian Ocean being India’s front yard.
New Delhi’s crackdowns against farmers’ protests, and some of their supporters and journalists who report on them, have a greater subtext. Justified or not, the farmers are against reform laws that aim to liberalise the agricultural sector. Many of them are Punjabi Sikhs, and they never forget state-sponsored atrocities committed against their parents and grandparents in the mid-1980s, when they were also agitating to protect their own farming interests, along with demands for autonomy.
Exactly five years before Tiananmen, during the first week of June in 1984, the Indian military raided the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) in Amritsar, Punjab, where top Sikh leaders were holed up. The operation resulted in deaths that ranged in estimates from hundreds to many thousands.