{"id":65538,"date":"2017-04-25T23:33:17","date_gmt":"2017-04-26T05:33:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=65538"},"modified":"2017-04-25T16:16:07","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T23:16:07","slug":"hegemony-through-destabilization-the-new-indian-political-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2017\/04\/25\/hegemony-through-destabilization-the-new-indian-political-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"Hegemony through Destabilization \u2013 the New Indian Political Strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"

R Chandrasoma<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

Large and powerful countries live in fear of neighbours \u00a0– not because the latter pose a serious threat to their stability and dominance in military terms \u00a0but because of an atavistic fear that distant World Powers that do pose a challenge may enlist the support of the weak neighbours \u00a0to overthrow the local Hegemon. \u00a0Indeed, \u00a0this \u00a0fear has been the root cause of the global political turmoil that followed the defeat of Hitler in World War II. The fear of Communism led to the ravaging and destruction of large parts of the world that were mere bystanders in the conflict between the Soviet Union and the West. In the classic case of Cuba, a World War was narrowly averted \u2013 the casus belli <\/em>was the fear that Soviet Rockets might be stationed in Cuba.<\/p>\n

Let us turn to our Local Hegemon \u2013 India. It is a country with over a billion people. \u00a0It has nuclear weapons and vast armies – and it has all the markings of a potential superpower – but is a poor player in the complex game of global politics. Its foreign policy is based on fear of both external and internal foes. \u00a0This is partly due to encirclement – with a Northern and Western Arc constituted of militant Islamic states and an Eastern Frontier dominated by that arch-rival China. \u00a0What might be called \u00a0the \u2018Indian Ocean Exodus\u2019 is the best bet for Indian strategists seeking ways of bolstering the overall defense posture of their country. That the Indian Ocean Region \u00a0is the new strategic frontier for India is unquestioned but the Island of Sri Lanka is a problem \u2013 indeed a problem very badly handled by Indian strategists – who believed that backing (and arming) the militant Tamil minority was the best way of making Sri Lanka a politically \u2018neutered\u2019 state and the Indian Ocean truly Indian. It is well known to strategists that when a frontal assault on a problem fails, less ostentatious routes to destabilize the enemy may be successful. It might seem piffling at first but notice the pertinacity with which the Indians prevent the settling of a plain and straight -forward issue – the illegal entry and destructive fishing by Indians in Sri Lankan coastal waters. The fishing problem involves more than mere fishing \u2013 it is part of a grander strategy (on the part of the Indians) of weakening the Sri Lanka State by creating challenges that are non-existent but for their pertinacity in acting as spoilers\u2019<\/p>\n

The old-fashioned word \u00a0\u2018destabilization\u2019 \u00a0is most fitting to denote \u00a0an astute political mode of defeating a country that cannot be openly attacked \u2013 a mode successfully used by the Western Powers to \u2018rid the world\u2019 of its supposed enemies. The ensuing global chaos is too well known to be commented on here. It is this \u2018destabilizing strategy\u2019 that the Indians unleashed in the successful overthrow of a stable and victorious administration presided over by a fearless patriot. The Indians engineered a regime-change that may mark the return to subservience – with the Indian dream of our Island being a mere footstool in future oceanic adventures of the kind befitting a nation of one billion or more hungry people. Let us conclude be referring to a correlated matter. \u00a0\u00a0This grand design \u2013 to make Sri Lanka a footstool \u2013 will not succeed unless recent history is reversed – and \u00a0the \u2018kalu-suddhas\u2019 and their fawning entourage \u00a0of political opportunists win the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

R Chandrasoma Large and powerful countries live in fear of neighbours \u00a0– not because the latter pose a serious threat to their stability and dominance in military terms \u00a0but because of an atavistic fear that distant World Powers that do pose a challenge may enlist the support of the weak neighbours \u00a0to overthrow the local […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-r-chandrasoma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65538\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}