(Text of the speech delivered by the AIPSG representative at a Political Forum organized in Toronto, Canada on September 29, 2002 in conjunction with the 4th Annual Gadhri Mela)

I would like to thank the organizers of this forum for placing this topic for discussion.  At this time, the geopolitical map of Asia is being rapidly reshaped, and in a manner that will make their effects felt globally, including here in North America. The danger of a third world war to re-divide the region and decide which of the big powers will control Asia is very real, and such a war has repercussions not just for Asia, but for people around the world. 

The pace with which war clouds are rising on the horizon show that the big powers are becoming desperate to establish a new equilibrium in the post cold war period so that people of the world do not turn the situation in their favour. It is very important for the people to seize the opportunity to converge their struggles for rights and against globalization with the struggle against war and war preparations.  The time is now to wage the biggest battle for peace all over the globe.

As you all know, the US has put forth the doctrine of pre-emptive military strikes against other sovereign countries and is reorganizing its military force for rapid deployment in more than one theatre of war at a given time. Just last week, the NATO defense ministers informally endorsed a plan put forth by the US to create a 21,000 strong rapid deployment force for intervening in countries outside the NATO area.  The Canadian government has already signed onto this proposal and it is no open secret that the force is being readied primarily for the Asian theatre. The European Union is creating its own security force with a mandate to intervene outside Europe. These developments have a direct bearing on the geopolitical developments anywhere on the globe and are bound to affect the way South Asian geopolitics will develop in the near future.

Already, some 60,000 US troops are stationed on land and sea bases across Asia.  Over 8,000 of them are inside Afghanistan, at the intersection of Central Asia, the Middle East and South Asia.  Forces stationed in the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia are digging in for the long haul, while a substantial buildup is taking place in the Persian Gulf region around Iraq.  There are special forces operating inside Pakistan, and an active military presence in the Philippines. Nepal and Sri Lanka have military advisors from the US. Other powers like the UK, Canada, Germany, France and Russia are also very active in these regions. Putting these things together, the only conclusion one can draw is that the big powers led by the US are looking for military intervention in more than one of the countries of the region.

Alongside the stepped up military interference, political interference has also grown. With the doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, the US has declared the entire globe as its legitimate “sphere of influence” in the same manner that the Monroe Doctrine set the stage for US domination over the entire western hemisphere.  The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was directed against the expansionist European powers of the time who nurtured colonial and neo-colonial ambitions in the Americas, but its most direct victims were the popular insurgencies in the Americas.  This new doctrine is directed against all the rising powers who want a multi-polar world to replace the post Cold War disequilibrium, but its target will similarly be the insurgencies anywhere around the globe. 

Notwithstanding the threat the US has issued to other aspiring powers through this doctrine, the US is at this time quite willing to unite with other big powers and anti-people regimes around the world who also dread insurgencies, and on that basis perpetuate the fraud of international coalitions as it takes on countries from Iraq to Afghanistan, Indonesia or the Philippines.  But as history has shown, this is bound to lead to a situation of disunity among the big powers, and some will certainly oppose direct intervention by the US. That will be the surest sign that the current period of retrogression is over, and it will happen as soon as the people take the initiative to oppose war. We may be on the threshold of such a turning point right now and the worldwide opposition to the US bellicosity against Iraq are symptomatic of this turn. It is extremely important that we take our initiatives against war right now.

The geopolitics of South Asia today is best characterized as one of fierce contention between India and the US to control South Asia. In the early post Cold War period, India toyed with the idea of projecting itself as a big Asian power by allying itself with the US.  This calculation was based on the perception that US patronage of Pakistan was on the wane after the collapse of the Soviet Union and that the US was leaning towards a “containment” policy towards China.  India misread the intent of the Pressler Amendment to curb the rise of a nuclear Pakistan as a sign that India would be given a free hand in South Asia and in return, act as junior partner to police the south and south-eastern Asia.  But these calculations have been erroneous. 

Today, far from being given a free hand in South Asia, India finds itself encircled on all sides, the latest being in Sri Lanka where the US is the key foreign power behind the December 2001 cease-fire and negotiations between the government and LTTE.  India finds itself desperate to gain a toehold with either the government or LTTE, and even that attempt is being complicated by Tamil Nadu politics, where a cabinet member of the ruling NDA governing coalition was arrested on charges of being an LTTE sympathiser.  Already, in the name of counter-insurgency in Nepal, the US has gained an upper hand and India finds itself sidelined. In Bangladesh, anti-Indian feelings are running high and the US-Bangladesh cooperation in military field is on the rise.  The India-Pakistan-Afghanistan relationship vis-à-vis Kashmir is all in the front pages and it is clear that India does not have an upper hand in setting the agenda.  Even on internal Kashmir matters, India has lost ground to the extent that it is on the defensive to prove how fair its election process there is. The joint Indo-US military exercises of last year and the continuing US-India naval exercises coupled with the sale of US weapons systems to India are ways in which the US is seeking to tie the hands of the Indian military and to diminish their capacity to act unilaterally and independently in the coming years.

While these developments point towards the rising contention between India and the US to control South Asia, the developments in Kashmir and between India and Pakistan point towards open contradiction between India’s aim to reorder the security architecture of its neighborhood and the US aim to control the land and sea-routes in Central Asia and the Indian Ocean respectively and the lucrative oil and gas resources of Central and West Asia. Control over Pakistan is central to the realization of the US aim in this region while the main aim of the Indian state is the destruction of the Pakistani state.  Afghanistan and Kashmir are caught in the geopolitical squeeze of this contradiction in a very direct way. Afghanistan has already been devastated and if the US has its way, Kashmir will be devastated as well.  This is the road map the US is following to conquer South Asia and it most likely will involve the destruction of the current Indian Union. The US will stop at nothing to weaken New Delhi’s authority over the region. As I already mentioned, the latest developments in Sri Lanka have arisen due to an escalation in US involvement there, and US involvement is rife in Nepal, Bangladesh and the North-East. As far as the connection between the US and India’s north-west goes, it is now becoming commonplace for some terrible outrage to be organised every time an official of the US government visits India. The latest such attack took place just this week in the temple in Gandhinagar in Gujarat when US Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca was in Delhi. 

Just the week before, Mr. Vajpayee had declared in New York that the situation in Gujarat had returned to normalcy. On his part, General Musharraf had termed the Gujarat violence as one of Hindu extremists attacking helpless Muslims in his speech to the UN. Now the entire discourse on Gujarat has been turned upside down – the political and security situation in Gujarat was clearly not very normal, the victims in this case were not Muslims.  Who has benefited from this?  

I would suggest that it is the US that has benefited. Recently, the US found a reason to place its special forces in Karachi.  Going by such trends, it will not be long before that the US finds similar cause to make its presence felt on the other side of the Gujarat-Sindh border. This Gandhinagar temple was the very one that former President Bill Clinton visited in March 2000 when he was President of the US.  I think one has to be very careful in placing blame for the Gandhinagar attacks on anyone, so that a repeat of the Chittisinghpora tragedy during Bill Clinton’s visit does not occur.

What is no more a secret is the calling off of the US-India rapprochement that characterized the Jaswant Singh-Strobe Talbott parleys of 1998-2000, and that culminated with President Bill Clinton’s visit to India in March 2000 and Prime Minister Vajpayee’s visit to the US in September 2000.  In the past few months, Jaswant Singh was replaced as the foreign minister – and in a very demonstrative way, India told the US that it was cooling off its relationship. While in New York, Mr. Vajpayee highlighted the good work that the new foreign minister has done with respect to India’s neighbours since taking office – with no mention made of recent exploits in Indo-US relations. 

During his last trip to the region, US Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that the Kashmir question is firmly in the agenda of the international community. In spite of the uproar it caused and the clarifications the US made, Mr. Powell was only stating a fact.  Just two weeks ago, Mr. Vajpayee’s public complaint of Pakistan’s nuclear blackmail only aggravated this situation by giving the US further ammunition to meddle in Kashmir by invoking the threat of “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. Already the entire debate on weapons of mass destruction and the axis-of-evil that the Bush administration has ratcheted up looks suspiciously applicable to India or Pakistan.  In other words, all those arguments can be used to justify intervention by the US into the region. The way India has been pressed to defend the legitimacy of its current election exercise in Jammu and Kashmir suggests that India has sunk deep in the pit that the US has dug for it.  At a different level, Mr. Vajpayee was forced to deny in New York that India is willing to accept the Line of Control in Kashmir as the permanent international border – a position that the US has started advocating recently. 

The essential point of the above analysis is that the interests of India and the US have come into collision.  But the interests of the Indian people similarly collide with both the interests of the US and the Indian state.  The Indian people are under great pressure today to line up behind the Indian state vis-à-vis the US.  This is a very new situation that the Indian people face and it also offers great opportunities.  As everyone knows, during the Cold War, India presented itself to the rest of the world as an anti-imperialist force, fighting oppression. The conditions of the Indian people and their struggle against oppression did not draw the sympathy of the world’s people.  It is matter of record that Indira Gandhi was being hailed as a progressive leader outside India at the same time in the mid-1970s when her government imposed the most brutal suppression of fundamental rights under the national emergency.  

But in the past decade, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the mask of anti-imperialism has been slipped off in the eyes of the world.  When the nuclear test blasts, and the latest stand-off with Pakistan made headlines around the world, people outside India saw for themselves that India was not an anti-imperialist force.  India was not a factor for peace but a factor for war. Now the fighting people of the world want to know more about the struggle of the Indian people against the Indian state and they want to support the people’s efforts to stop a war between India and Pakistan from breaking out.

This weekend, in Washington DC, there have been mass actions against the IMF and World Bank policies and also against Bush administration’s war-mongering.  The Lok Raj Sangathan had a small delegation in Washington with the banner against Indo-Pak war and it caught the attention of various activists who wanted to know about the anti-war movement in India and the stands of the LRS against war, against globalization/privatization etc. They want to also oppose the US interference in the Indo-Pak region and they want to oppose the war there where they know from their own experience that the US is a party.  So here there is space to raise the Indo-Pak conflict and develop opposition to an Indo-Pak war which the anti-war, anti-globalization forces are very willing to support.  It was a very positive development that the LRS was able to join the mass action and place the struggles of the Indian people on the agenda. It gave the LRS space to present its work for democratic renewal of the political process, and the demand for an anti-war government, which would reject war as a means to sort out problem between countries. It is this kind of work that can isolate the Indian state and the US state as the source of the problem rather than being factors for solution of the problems in India and Pakistan.

People must organize agitations to have anti-war governments in each and every country. According to the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, four geographic areas – Kashmir, Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories and Iraq - are flashpoints for the outbreak of war.  But it is not just these areas where the demand for an anti-war government is appropriate. It is as appropriate here in Canada as it was shown to be appropriate in Germany which held elections last week or in Italy, the UK and the US where large anti-war demonstrations are taking place as we speak. It is a stand that people want their governments not to take up war as a tool for sorting out conflicts between countries. This is not a policy objective but a movement.  For example, take the case of the recent German elections where the candidates were forced to promise that they would not participate in a US-led war on Iraq.  Now that he is elected, if Mr. Schroeder dares to renege on his promise to stay away from a US-led war in Iraq, the people of Germany will have to develop their anti-war movement further to enforce their will, forcing his government out of power. The point here is that the German people cannot hand over their initiative to Mr. Schroeder but push their anti-war movement so that the movement brings the people of Germany to be their own decision-makers.  It means that the anti-war movement with the demand for a no-war government is a converging point for the people’s movements to become decision-makers. 

The demand for an anti-war government is not a policy objective but a program of a movement that is in the making.  In contrast, Prime Minister Vajpayee’s statement to the UN General Assembly two weeks ago that his government does not want war with Pakistan was a policy objective – and clearly one that was not considered credible either inside or outside the UN. The more the people develop their anti-war movement, the less will be the danger that those movements could be hijacked by anti-war demagogues and turned into a policy objective.

So, in conclusion, an analysis of the fast changing geopolitics is showing that the threat of war hangs heavy over the peoples of the whole world and there is a need to step up the anti-war movements right away. When the aspirations and activities of the peoples are analysed, it becomes clear that the anti-war movements must inscribe in their banner the creation of anti-war governments as a prelude to creating a new world where governments will pursue cooperation among countries and nations rather than predatory war aims for the mighty to rule over the weak. 

The current government in India is not a factor for peace but a factor for war, violence and mayhem. It looks at war and violence both as the means and the medium through which it can accomplish its aim of becoming the pre-eminent power in Asia vis-à-vis the US as well as other powers. The Indian government and state must not be permitted to hijack the struggles of the Indian people against the US policies and turn them to its own advantage in its contention against the US. It is the merging of the anti-war movement, anti-globalization movement and the movement for rights that will ensure that people will create an alternate world. Thank you.