Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | Will a year of global wars set off more 2025 churn?
The world was at war. The world was on the move. With crooks and conmen everywhere, Indians never knew when the telephone rang whether it was a genuine caller or a trickster threatening to disconnect the line or freeze your bank account unless paid off.
Committed to “Make America Great Again”, the century’s comeback kid was on the prowl. US President-elect Donald Trump threatened India with a trade war, and Panama with seizure of the Canal. Controlling Greenland was an “absolute necessity”, he declared.
Canada and Mexico should become US states if they want to continue enjoying lavish subsidies. Mr Trump advised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to make a deal with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and promised to pardon Republican rioters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to prevent US President Joe Biden being sworn in. He warned of sweeping changes in immigration rules, massive deportations and the end of the constitutionally guaranteed birthright citizenship in America.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi reiterated that he had told Mr Putin both “directly and publicly” that “this is not an era of war”. Mr Putin attacked fresh targets in Ukraine. Having pulverised Gaza, Israel began bombing Syria. The Houthi rebels targeting Tel Aviv didn’t get Mr Modi’s message either. Fighting continued in Sudan, Yemen and Myanmar. Dhaka demanded that India hand over former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed to Bangladeshi justice. The International Criminal Court sought the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as some Hamas leaders.
Amidst trade and tribal wars, civil and uncivil wars, cyber wars, wars to unite and to secede, India often seemed to be at war with Indians. Hostilities erupted in Parliament, the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus and Chhattisgarh’s jungles. Jammu and Kashmir was split and demoted. Manipur ran with blood. Ominous rumbles from distant Australia, the United States, and, most persistently, Canada, suggested that India was waging its domestic wars on foreign soil.
Britain’s National Investigation Agency arrested Inderpal Singh Gaba, claiming the Sikh had vandalised India’s flag. In contrast to the stalemate in investigating the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, allegedly a Khalistan Tiger Force militant, the UK NIA offered to share the Gaba case file with India.
Hindus challenged the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991, right, left and centre. Muslims would soon be the majority, predicted Kolkata’s mayor, Firhad Hakim. Mohan Bhagwat, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief, urged Hindus to be more inclusive. Mr Modi upheld his “One Nation, One Election” law as the formula for unity.
The rupee fell to its lowest ever against the almighty dollar. The United States narrowly escaped a total government shutdown. Rich Indians didn’t stop getting richer. As wealth inequality widened with one per cent of Indians owning 58 per cent of the nation’s wealth, while the richest 10 per cent owned 80 per cent, the former Reserve Bank governor, Raghuram Rajan, dismissed as a “pie in the sky” a proposal by Thomas Piketty, the French author of Capital in the Twenty-first Century, to levy an annual two per cent wealth tax on individuals with assets exceeding $1.18 million (Rs 100 million) and a 33 per cent inheritance tax on properties of similar value. The “wealthy always have a way around it (taxes)”, he said. Moreover, taxing penalises success: India needs to optimise resource allocation.
India protested when a now-deleted Facebook post by a key aide of Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, chief adviser to the Bangladesh government, demanded that it should recognise the uprising that forced Sheikh Hasina to flee to India. She and Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s accidental ruler who was hailed as “the hope of the masses”, when his older brother died in a car crash, are in similar boats. Lurking in the Kremlin, Mr Assad must be as much of an embarrassment for Mr Putin as Sheikh Hasina probably is for Mr Modi. A triumphant homecoming is unlikely for either. Even if Bangladesh holds elections, her Awami League may not be allowed to participate.
Mr Assad’s alleged misdeeds -- repression, prison brutality, chemical warfare -- were trumpeted worldwide by US publicists but the crimes that Sheikh Hasina apparently committed or condoned during two stints in office were unknown until the five-member commission of inquiry under a retired Supreme Court judge which Mr Yunus had appointed released its interim report, “Unfolding the Truth”. Reporting more than 3,500 enforced disappearances, it hinted at some Indian collusion.
The report charged several high-ranking former military and police officers in Sheikh Hasina’s entourage with authoritarianism, human rights abuse, rampant corruption, mass murder and crimes against humanity. The ousted regime denied all allegations. So did Sheikh Hasina’s niece, Tulip Siddiq, a Labour member of Britain’s Parliament and economic secretary to the Treasury, whose ministerial duties include tackling financial corruption. Backing her rejection of the charge of embezzling billions of dollars during Bangladesh’s 2013 purchase of a Russian nuclear power plant, Britain’s Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, expressed his full confidence in Ms Siddiq who continues to handle anti-corruption issues.
Donald Trump isn’t the only world leader anxious to pull up the drawbridge against the influx of (mainly Asian) immigrants. Anti-foreigner sentiment is hardening in Germany, where elections are due in February, after the Magdeburg tragedy when a Saudi-born psychiatrist who has lived in Germany for nearly two decades mowed down Christmas market shoppers, killing five persons, including a toddler, and injuring over 200 others. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden agreed to strengthen cooperation in deporting illegal migrants.
Although the Starmer government cancelled its predecessor’s plot to send immigrants to Rwanda for vetting, British public opinion was far from happy. A Facebook post complained that over 12 million immigrants have entered Britain since 1997, 80 per cent of whom are totally dependent on welfare. Their upkeep adds up to nearly “a staggering” £500 billion.
Britain’s Prince Andrew hurtled from one scandal to another when MI5 identified a friend of his as a Chinese spy and banished him from the UK. It was reported the prince might move to an opulent palace in West Asia. As Britain’s former trade envoy and patron of the Middle East Association, he knows the region well.
As Mr Biden commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 prisoners on death row, Mr Trump vowed to execute “rapists, murderers, and monsters”. The world is waiting now to see where he will strike next in the holy jubilee year that Pope Francis launched on Christmas Eve while Hindu sadhus squabbled over who owns India.
