India is encountering a geopolitical pincer movement to corner it, prior to its eventual liquidation as a significant political entity. The principal instigator of this pincer movement is China, which has already garlanded India with a ring of hostile countries, itching to see it prostrate. The garland of thorns surrounding India begins with Bangladesh, Burma and Nepal and ends with the bleeding dagger of Pakistan already thrust deep into India’s body politic. Nepal’s unabashed participation in this campaign has been held back by India’s economic stranglehold over it, but its dominant elites are more than anxious to plunge a dagger of their own into India’s heart. Where Sri Lanka will fit into this equation barely requires much imagination, despite the apparent current honeymoon, because the Sinhalese have long harboured iridescent contempt for India.

The other arm of this pincer, threatening India’s very survival, is an array of Arab supporters of Pakistan now implanted deep inside Indian society and its polity. They apparently concur that the hiatus of British and post-colonial kafir ascendancy in India is poised to end. Sunni Islam is looking forward to the restoration of their rule in a vast swathe encompassing north and west Africa, reaching out towards the Black Sea coast and then stretching all the way eastward to obscure Chittagong port. And such is the Islamic self-confidence and influence within India itself that minor coastal Gulf statelets, with populations that would disappear in one Indian city suburb, finance and nonchalantly promote lethal bombing campaigns in its capital city. The Indian state, which could easily punish these vile Cantons militarily, utters not a whisper of protest as the evidence of their dastardly complicity piles ever higher.

Transnational ambitions of Islam and the Maoist revolt have combined to tie down the Indian state well and truly. The unfolding drama in which they are playing a pivotal role is a prelude to delivering a coup de grâce, at an appropriate time when the Indian state is besieged and stretched. At that climacteric moment of danger, India’s self-obsessed and morally neuter elites will be susceptible to blandishments to save their own skins in exchange for all sorts of acts of national betrayal. The outcome is likely to be the surrender of sovereign territory and grants of political autonomy to seditious regions that will make the provisions of Article 370 seem excessively centripetal.

The Islamic instrument of subversion is a remarkable, but entirely predictable hold over their sub-continental co-religionists. This far-reaching influence is maintained through doctrinal and financial stranglehold over India’s Islamic clergy and institutions. The clergy itself enjoys immense sway over the faithful through mosques and madrasas. In the eloquent testimony of Tehmina Durrani, the former spouse of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s close colleague, who laid bared the private vileness of Pakistan’s ruling elites, “The multitudes might be impoverished and illiterate, but invoke the name of Islam – no matter how erroneously - and they will rally.” As a result, India’s Islamic clergy is able to brazenly announce its loyalty to the wider ummah and the imperative of establishing a caliphate in the future, where non-Muslims, according to Jamaat leaders, will be suitably deferential.

The pincer movement against India distending ominously along its borders is combined with manifold domestic dissent and policy stasis, accentuating the impulse toward implosion. The selfsame foes, sitting animatedly along its borders, assiduously sponsor a great deal of this internal political discontent within India. Characteristically, the Left parties across the country are embarked on a truly insidious campaign of criminal sabotage of their own on all fronts. They have joined hands with China and jihadi Pakistan to ensure the failure of the Indo-US accord on nuclear energy. The Iran issue in the IAEA is merely an excuse since the real goal is to advance the interests of communist China, to which Pakistan happens to be joined at the proverbial hip.

Quire revealingly, India’s erstwhile foreign minister engaged in a disgraceful subterfuge by unilaterally stopping India from co-sponsoring a resolution to institutionalise the commemoration of the Holocaust at the UN. This was a pernicious and crude play for Leftist and Islamic sympathy to protect himself from the consequences of being named in the Volcker Report. But it is not a surprise that the Left and their Islamic co-conspirators refuse to commemorate the Holocaust because anti-Semitism has become their triumphant hallmark. The self-indulgent foreign minister himself gave no thought to India’s good name and its important relationship with Israel in perpetrating this shameful act of betrayal, which also happens to be contrary to avowed government policy. Yet, he remains a member of the Union Cabinet, with the zealous support of the political Left, and the honourable prime minister does not find the situation intolerable.

Of course, rotten governance and devilish economic mismanagement are also playing a diabolical role in undermining India’s advance. The government’s overweening presence in the economy constantly politicises economic disquiet and drags it into every contentious issue. In a largely impersonal private economy the political system would be more insulated from the daily ebb and flow of economic events that affect personal destinies. Economic setbacks would not rapidly translate into collective political discontent and revolt. But the collaborationist and criminal political class only has the short-term goal of securing political power and the spoils of office, with which reform has minimal connection. Yet, it is the Left’s impact on current economic policy that is proving extraordinarily damaging to India’s future, though the Nehruvian economic legacy has contaminated political parties right across the ideological spectrum.

Continued Part II

Dr Gautam Sen formerly taught at the London School of Economics & Political Science.