As the world watches a court proceeding as never before, closer to home, South Asia’s smallest nation, The Maldives, and its biggest, India, are embroiled in a diplomatic confrontation with serious geopolitical implications. India is upset that tiny Maldives is ignoring it in favour of other Islamic powers and, worse, its arch rival, China.
Meanwhile, in Bangladesh last week incumbent Premier Sheikh Hasina Wazed and her Awami League party predictably romped home in General Election which most major Opposition parties, including the main rival Bangladesh Nationalist Party of ailing former Premier Khaleda Zia, all boycotted. With a threadbare 40 percent voter turn-out, the victory for five-times Premier Hasina cannot be that sweet, however.
Premier Hasina’s political triumph actually portends a future of instability in Bangladesh. Most analysts expect bitter, possibly violent, contestation between her regime and the Opposition parties, most of which now find their leaders and activists jailed.
A leading Bangladeshi newspaper has sharply criticised the Prime Minister herself for having built a personality cult tied to a massive web of corruption. Polls monitors attribute the low vote to the boycott strategy of the much-harassed and systematically victimised Bangladeshi Opposition. It gives the lie to the ‘popularity’ claims of the regime.
While far across the ocean, the Red Sea has begun to simmer with pinprick ship harassments by the Houthi rebel Yemeni regime and typically over-sized counter strikes by the Western powers, the Maldivian Islands has got embroiled in a tiff with India.
Once more, electoral rivalry and voter mobilisation has played a role. New Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu won his maiden election late last year by whipping up anti-Indian themes in Maldivian nationalism. It is a tactic that is not new. Previous Maldivian politicians have resorted to such ant-Indian tropes.
On coming to power, Muizzu, however, perhaps because he was new to the game of political grandstanding, went a step further by quickly acting on his anti-Indian promises. Having made a hue and cry, during campaigning, about a small unit of less than 100 Indian troops posted in an island guarding an Indian air transport unit (of benefit to both countries), President Muizzu actually demanded the immediate withdrawal of those troops.
Ignoring
Worse, ignoring the past tradition of newly elected national leaders making their first foreign visit to Delhi (logical recognition of Indian regional power status), Muizzu instead went to Turkey. At the same time, Muizzu began cultivating China. That was the last straw for Delhi, especially after junior members of Muizzu’s Cabinet began badmouthing India and Indian politicians in political speeches.
Last month, by design or default, Indian Premier Narendra Modi made a high profile visit to India’s own Indian Ocean archipelago, the Lakshadweep Islands and called for tourism development there. Modi was joined by various pro-BJP business and cinema personalities who sang praises of Indian tourism potential.
The din of anti-Maldivian public expressions by Indian leaders became loud enough for China to warn against Delhi meddling too closely in The Maldives’ internal affairs.
Already Maldivian Opposition leaders have begun criticising the new President for his precipitous anti-Indian stances he has taken that could easily endanger Indian trade and tourism in The Maldives.
For at least the past decade, Indian electoral politics and national political discourses have become immersed in ethnic and religion-based dynamics. And not merely ‘dynamics’ but dynamics of hard contestation, severely affecting human life and social peace.
On the one hand, there is the rise of what its own advocates call “Hindu cultural nationalism”, a nomenclature which this writer finds more accurate than the simplistic “Hindu fundamentalism” that some liberal and Left analysts tend to deploy. Hindu nationalism and overt supremacism has already caused instability inside India, although it is arguable the sheer strength and size of the state system and sophisticated political culture yet preserves its overall integrity.
The biggest negative outcome is the strident atmosphere prevailing in India of anti-Islamism and, to a lesser degree, anti-Christianity. Anti Muslim violence is now a daily occurrence. There is also northern Hindi linguistic majoritarianism that ignores the very large and distinctively different languages especially of the southern and north eastern regions of India.
However, it is anti-Islamism that has had the principal impact at the South Asian level and beyond. Indo-Pakistani relations are barely existent. That alone has led to a SAARC that barely functions, with no Summit for years. South Asia is too diverse a region to be able to live with an ethos that tries to demonise a sizeable segment of its population, a segment that possesses significant economic, cultural and, indeed, military power.
If New Delhi has long been worried about Islamist Maldives (one of the more liberal Muslim societies), more recently, Bangladesh’s big-time economic co-operation with China, has come as an equally significant geopolitical ‘threat’. Bangladesh is the world’s third largest Muslim majority nation.
China’s ‘Southern Economic Corridor’ (SEC) of road and rail links is now being built from China’s southernmost Yunnan Province, through Laos and Myanmar to reach a massive brand new port on Myanmar’s Bay of Bengal coastline. China leads the world in large-scale engineering that simply cuts through swathes of hitherto un-exploited topography.
China’s new land corridor will enable swift and intensive road and rail logistics which would be much faster in reaching major markets. It will shorten the shipment route by avoiding the slower and longer sea route from China, through the geopolitically contested South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca. The Strait is a choke point closely monitored by the Indian naval base in the Indian-owned Andaman Islands adjacent to the exit from the Strait.
Bangladesh has its biggest port, Chittagong, also on the Bay of Bengal coast, immediately north of Myanmar’s new port at Kyaukpyu being built by China which adjoins a major Myanmar naval base. India has actually completed development of an old existing port at Sittwe further up the coast, closer to Bangladesh. India is currently pushing for its own ‘Nepal-India-Bangladesh’ economic “corridor”.
Last week’s two days of hearings on Israel’s ‘genocide’ (yet to be legally proven) by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Netherlands, were perhaps the world’s most viewed Court case in human history, thanks to the Web media. Most analysts concede that the sheer strength of fact-based arguments made by plaintiff South Africa carried the moral argument against Israel. Analysts also point out Israel’s own, brilliantly technical defence, that drew out weaknesses in the South African plaint.
Even as thousands more die in Palestine, the world must await the Judges’ deliberations to see whether the World Court, as it is popularly known, will issue some ‘provisional measures’ (i.e. interim injunctions). South Africa has called on the ICJ to compel Israel and its Western backers to halt military assaults on that dense mass of suffering humanity.
Backers
Whether Israel and its Western backers will actually obey that interim order or pretend to obey and elusively side track the order or, outright ignore the Court, as they have so far ignored both the United Nations (UN) and world opinion, remains to be seen. The merits of the actual ‘genocide’ plaint will be argued over more sittings in the months and possibly years to come.
On Friday, Germany announced that it intended to enter in the genocide case in defence of accused perpetrator, Israel. This move by the most notorious genocide-perpetrator of all time, Germany, albeit under the Nazi regime, could be interpreted in many ways, especially from the perspective of a critical identification that genocide is already actually being perpetrated – which is the current common perspective of much of global humanity.
If there is already a moral conclusion, based on known information and most authoritative conclusions – by the UN system itself, no less – then we have an alleged genocide perpetrator State being defended in a world-level judicial proceedings, by another State that has already been found to be a perpetrator not only by a similar (previous) international judicial process but also by certain national-level judicial proceedings.
Nazi Germany’s biggest infamy – apart from its continental scale of military expansionism and repressive internal political system, was its industrial scale genocidal enterprise. A ‘Fordist’ death production system, no less, which slaughtered millions of people, mostly European Jews, but possibly two million other Europeans (aged, disabled, Roma, homosexuals). Historians have indeed noted the industrial nature of the killing and disposal system invented and implemented by the Nazis.
Germany was a great industrial and military power at that time (as it is today) and the genocidal killing system of the Nazis terrifyingly embodied that industrial and militarist ethos. The bizarre twist in today’s action by Germany is that it is the creator of that twisted system of genocide (under the Nazis) that now comes to the aid of another State that has been accused of perpetrating a similar – if ‘pocket’ scale – system of genocide. Several other Western nations have indicated that they would back Israel, setting the stage for a long-haul Court battle, but for now, they are mostly watching from the sidelines.
