Darini Rajasingham Senanayake

Ironically, Prime Minister Modi was in Saudi Arabia when the attacks happened in Pahalagam, Kashmir, and he cut short his visit to the Kingdom to return to Delhi.

In the wake of the attacks, the global corporate media echo chamber seemed taken with the prospect of a war between nuclear armed India and Pakistan. Although Pakistan had long been a ‘Garrison State’ with its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), being well oiled by the CIA and funded by Saudi Arabia, it was painted as a proxy of China in the media.

Soon after the British Partition of India in 1948 as part of its Exit Strategy to continue to dominate the South Asia region, Pakistan was turned into a CIA Garrison State while India allied with the Soviet Union/Russia. The region has been kept in turmoil ever since– as a Cold War proxy war site. This also explains the lack of progress in the SAARC in contrast with Southeast Asia’s ASEAN.

It is increasingly clear that under Trump, the US is now focusing on China and trying to isolate it from Russia (Ukraine Peace deal), and correct the mistake that Biden made of pushing Russia into China’s arms, while trying to break BRICS by courting India. After the Pahalgam attacks, there were Hollywood inspired dreams voiced on Social media of India’s Akand Barath, breaking up Pakistan, and partitioning Baluchistan given the new Chinese built Gwadar Port. The CIA had deemed the latter one of the String of Pearls” in the Indian Ocean, along with Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port which was hit by the Indian Ocean post-Christmas day Tsunami in 2004.

If the US, its European Union partners and their proxies in Asia and Africa succeed though a strategy of hybrid maritime and staged terror attacks in drawing India into its security architecture, this would challenge the rise of the BRICS. Global South cooperation threatens US dollar hegemony and the global financial system at this time. Fragmenting BRICS would also put an end to the Rise of Asia and the Asian Century.

At this time a new ‘Clash of Civilizations’ between the two dominant religions of Asia– Buddhism and Islam in order to crash the Asian Century seems to be in the making, amid the staging of Evangelical Christian End Times’ in Palestine.

The new Clash of Civilizations” between Islam and the polytheistic Hindu and Buddhist religious formations of Asia, was signaled back in 2001 when the Taliban destroyed the 6^th century giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan on the ancient Silk Route in Afghanistan, in time for the 9/11 attacks on the WTC. These events inaugurated and legitimized America’s ‘Global War on Islamist Terror’ and resonated in Myanmar. Rohingya refugee trafficking across the Indian Ocean Theravada Buddhist world has been ongoing to ferment tensions.

Whither India’s ‘Neighborhood First” policy?

Over the past three years there were US-backed regime change operations in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In 2022 when the popular democratically elected Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted and imprisoned and Pakistan de-stabilized, India, the South Asian regional hegemon, looked on. Khan accused Donald Lu then Secretary of South Asia of spearheading the regime change in collusion with elements in the Pakistani establishment.

The same year, India capitalized on the US National Endowment for Democracy and Soros Foundation-funded, social media coordinated Aragalaya protest chaos operation to stage regime change and Sovereign Default in Sri Lanka. As South Asia’s wealthiest country was implausibly declared Bankrupt’ overnight due to a purported lack of US dollars to enable the IMF to upend its economic sovereignty, India played the supporting role of good neighbor to the rescue.

However, last year in August India lost a close ally who had just won the national elections, in Prime Minister Sheik Hasina in Bangladesh to another US-back regime change in South Asia.

Indeed, the Modi government’s policy of self-interest sans principled Foreign Policy seem to belie proclamations of the ‘neighbourhood first”, and have paid diminishing returns in the face of America’s over the horizon (OTH), operations and aspiration for Full Spectrum Dominance in South Asia.

Is it becoming increasingly difficult for India to ‘run with the hare and hunt with the hounds’? The destabilization that OTH protests curated via remote social media platforms for regime change and staged economic crises have rendered South Asia including India poorer. The case of ASEAN shows clearly that countries develop only when their neighbors are stable and developing too.

Increasingly, India’s growth story hype is belied by the reality of poverty due to external destabilization and staged OTH crises across South Asia. It may be time to fully embrace the BRICS and Global South in the Asian 21^st Century. Otherwise, India may help normalize the Abraham Accords and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza that would legitimize a brutal new world order” across the Indian Ocean World, which is entirely contrary to Hindu-Buddhist-Jain traditions of Ahimsa and peace-making.

Finally, it is high time for a global movement to shut down the 750 environment-polluting US military bases around the world, particularly those in the Indian Ocean, which should be again declared a ‘Zone of Peace’ in keeping with Principles of Non-Alignment.