Newsletter: Week 12, 2023
Newsletter: Week 12, 2023
The reemergence of Khalistani sentiment and the fading promise of India, overcoming institutional misogyny, and the decline of Australia's Liberal Party
Sikh Strife
The past few weeks have seen an enormous manhunt in the Indian state of Punjab for a man called Amritpal Singh. In February, the group Singh leads, Waris Punjab De (the heirs of Punjab) stormed a local police station with guns and swords demanding the release of one of their members. Waris Punjab De gained prominence during the farmers protests of 2020 – which were dominated by Sikh farmers from Punjab and Haryana. The group have attached themselves to the idea of a separate Sikh country called Khalistan (or at very least they are Khalistan-adjacent).
In response to the manhunt there have been protest outside Indian diplomatic missions in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada by Sikh groups. In London, the Indian flag was torn down outside the High Commission and was replaced with a Khalistan symbol. Due to this the Indian government lowered security outside the UK’s High Commission in New Delhi.
Khalistani sentiment has come in waves in India, but at present it is being fuelled by a reaction to the Hindu nationalism of the BJP. The more the BJP captures the Indian state and uses it to advance its ideas of Hindu majoritarianism, the more groups like Sikhs feel threatened and resort to their own forms of agitated nationalism.
These sentiments are driven by the long scars of the partition of India. Sikhs were the third nation overlooked in the uniquely grammared "Two-Nation Theory" – which was driven by the Muslim League and led to the creation of Pakistan in 1947. This theory was one that believed that Muslims wouldn’t be able to have their interests protected in a Hindu majority India – even if the state itself was secular, or religiously plural. Although the BJP only started to gain prominence from the late-1980s, its ideas about India are the other side of the same coin as the Muslim League – both sharing the belief that India could not – or should not – function as a religiously plural state.
The partition of India created as astonishing difficult choice for Sikhs. Understanding that the forces that drove the creation of Pakistan would create an religiously myopic state – even if Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder, claimed otherwise – Sikhs instead overwhelmingly chose the religiously plural India as the state that would best protect their interests. As a result, although Punjab itself was divided between India and Pakistan there are currently around 22 million Sikhs in India, compared to 50,000 in Pakistan.
Yet in making this choice Sikhs left behind three of their holiest sites – including the birthplace and final place of resting of Guru Nanak Dev, the religion’s founder – as well as their cultural capital in Lahore (which was also the political capital of the Sikh Empire (1799-1849). This remains a massive cultural trauma which tears at the heart of the Sikh community.
Yet the idea of Khalistan is incredibly unlikely to be realised. It has far more traction within the diaspora than it does within Sikhs in India, and it would further complicate India's already highly complex north-west region, where Kashmir remains in dispute and China launches occasional incursions into Indian territory. The reality also is that Sikhs simply do not have the power to challenge the central Indian government.
However, it needs to be acknowledged that the BJP are pushing India into this environment of heightened animosity between groups. The party are dismantling the kind of state Sikhs (and other minority groups) were promised in 1947. For India to work it needs to regain the ideals of pluralism that drove its independence movement. Although at present this seems unlikely.
Challenging the Inevitability of Institutional Misogyny
This week in the UK an extensive report into the conduct and attitudes of the Metropolitan Police was released, detailing grave institutional misogyny, racism and homophobia. It is a report that strikes at the core of one of the basic functions of government – can those people whose jobs it is to provide security be trusted to do so?
Over the past few years I have been chiefly concerned with how justice systems treat women, and especially women trying to protect their children. Regardless of which country, there is a common theme that women are simply unable to trust the police, the courts, and even the social services that feed into these institutions. Women far too often suffer not just betrayal at the hands of these institutions, but are subject to stark institutional failures.
Acts of violence like rape are effectively decriminalised as almost no man will ever face any consequences for their actions, and as a result most women simply don’t report rape or sexual assault (or even other forms of violence). Knowing from the police on upwards their plight will never be taken seriously.
This is something that should keep governments and senior institutional leaders awake at night, but I suspect it doesn’t. Either we simply do not care enough about the treatment of women, or we are resigned to believe that male violence is inevitable and something that we all simply must live with.
If male violence is natural and unavoidable then of course the attitudes and psychology that drive it are deeply embedded in every institution. This is demoralising. Yet if we accept that this violence is inescapable it gives us no motivation to challenge and improve these systems. Instead we have to believe that men are able to actually like women, and men are actually able to do the job of policing – or be judges – in ethical ways. This is a capability that men have and it needs to be an expectation we should all have of them.
The Decline of Australia’s Liberal Party
Here in Australia, this weekend a state election was held in New South Wales, producing a solid victory for the Labor Party. The result ended 12 years of a coalition government of the Liberal and National parties. The victory now establishes an extraordinary situation in Australia where Labor governs every jurisdiction bar Tasmania, a state of just 550,000 people.
I’ve been slowing writing an essay about the 2022 federal election and the emerging force of a group of loosely aligned independent candidates who won many of the Liberal Party’s traditional stronghold seats. My broader argument is that the Liberal Party may now be in terminal decline. Australians tend to not murder political parties the way Canadians do, but we may be witnessing the party in a state of prolonged illness, heading towards a slow natural death.
Formed in 1944, the Liberal Party have always been a weird party. An uneasy alliance of ideas and interest groups that had a common purpose during the Cold War, but whose contradictions and internal tensions are less able to be managed under new global conditions. Australians are also very keen on their political and social stability, and see the radicalism and chaos of the Republican Party seeping into conservative politics in Australia and want nothing to do with it.
Next weekend there is a by-election for the federal seat of Aston in outer suburban Melbourne. The seat is currently held by the Liberal Party, and governments tend to not win by-elections unless it is a safe seat. So conventional wisdom suggests the Liberal Party should hold it. However, the seat swung by 7.3% to Labor at last year’s federal election, making it now a marginal seat held with just a 2.8% margin. Were Labor to win it would be an ominous sign for the future of the Liberal Party.
This Week’s Reading:
Another Way To Look At AUKUS: Keeping The US Engaged In The Indo-Pacific
Grant Wyeth - The Diplomat
“AUKUS can therefore be deemed a calculated – but risky – bet that Trump won’t find his way back to the White House. But it is also a bet that someone like DeSantis can be restrained by systematic norms that Australia can contribute to. Australia may not have the weight to influence the United States at scale, but in a relatively normal political environment it does have the ability to contribute to the complex web of interests and pressures that drive Washington’s decision-making.
A major agreement like AUKUS gets enough actors in the United States invested in continued Indo-Pacific engagement in a way that can place upward pressure on the White House and Congress. As I have written previously, the open seas lanes within Northeast Asia are a critical national interest for Australia. Three of Australia’s four largest trading partners are in the region, and the overwhelming majority of this trade travels by ship. An invasion of Taiwan would be catastrophic for this trade, but even if this isn’t imminent, Beijing cannot be trusted to be the region’s security provider given its fondness for economic coercion as a diplomatic tool.”
Ralph Regenvanu and Seve Paeniu - The Guardian
“Transitioning away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy is crucial to mitigating the impacts of climate change and ensuring a sustainable future for Pacific island countries and the world. This requires ambitious collective effort from governments, businesses and individuals around the globe to transition towards renewable energy systems that centre the needs of communities and avoid replicating the harms of fossil fuel systems, while supporting those most affected by the transition.
Transitioning to clean energy and battling climate change is also a human rights and justice issue. This is why our countries will soon be asking the UN general assembly to request an advisory opinion from the international court of justice on the obligations of states under international law to protect the environment and the climate. We urge all countries to support us in that endeavour.”
ASEAN's Myanmar Paralysis Underlines Its Illiberal Skew
Charles Dunst – Nikkei Asia
“The growing influence of illiberal powers like Beijing, coupled with the domestic struggles of the richest democracies, will see the further solidification of an international order centred around the authoritarians' brute power. This order will simply accept violent domestic crackdowns and semi-free, politicised trade absent of meaningful protections for human rights.
This order will be one in which democratic governments, their people and their values will get the short end of the stick over and over again. The strengthening of such an order at both regional and global levels would see more bodies operate like ASEAN and the Arab League -- whose members now seem to be preparing to re-embrace brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad -- and would see fewer governments stand up for victims of autocracy in places like Myanmar.”
Rahul Gandhi's Disqualification Constitutes An Abuse of Power
Gilles Verniers - The Wire
“Critiques against the Prime Minister are conflated as attacks against India as a whole, giving a new lease of life to a political trope that was used four decades ago to quash opposition to Indira Gandhi. It is ironic that some of those using these tropes today belong to the same political party that suffered from it in the past. This intolerance for dissent is consonant with the hyper-personalisation of power that we have seen growing in India, both at the state level and at the centre, over the past decade.
In many democracies, including India, the right to criticise those who govern is constitutionally guaranteed. In democratic theory, it is posited that citizens, including members of the opposition, have a right to contest, to critique those who govern precisely because they themselves do not have power. What we see here is the gradual instauration of ‘crime de lèse-majesté’, a form of offence that has no place in democratic regimes.”
A Coup Would Put Pakistan Squarely in China’s Bloc
Azeem Ibrahim – Foreign Policy
“Elections in Pakistan have in the past been contests in which patronage often carried great weight. In most elections, powerful and wealthy candidates, called “electables,” are put up by any and all parties. These are often landlords or powerful local businessmen. Perhaps they have a useful tribal, clan, or caste affiliation, or have done a favour for the army or a ministry; they can be safely placed before the electorate, who can be counted upon to signal assent to the individual regardless of party. Thus goes the stereotype.
The electables are notorious floating voters within the legislative branch, switching loyalty and party after cutting deals to get good positions in office. There are some who have been candidates for all the major parties without breaking step.
This system re-emerges at every Pakistani election; it is a consistent theme. But now, it is being challenged. If polling is accurate, the public is increasingly interested not in individuals, or their betters, but in party politics, especially those represented by Khan. The PTI endorsement is a hot ticket. Those who get it are likely to win against the electables sporting the banners of political convenience.
All of this is a challenge not only to the ordinary nature of Pakistani politics, but also to the military, whose hand can be felt behind all votes and government formations.”
Joel Wuthnow - Foreign Affairs
“China has worked to make a U.S. intervention less likely through an approach it calls “strategic deterrence,” which relies on, among other things, using nuclear signals to dissuade a potential adversary from entering the fray. China’s deterrence efforts are intensifying even as the Biden administration moves ahead with its own plans for the “integrated deterrence” of Chinese aggression, which involves threatening military and economic penalties in concert with a coalition of allies to convince China of the tremendous costs of war. These two competing models of deterrence are at odds with each other in ways that could destabilise the Taiwan Strait and the region at large. China, spurred by its perception of U.S. decline, emboldened by its rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal, and inspired by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s apparent success in using nuclear threats to limit U.S. support for Ukraine, could become overly confident and spark a conflict in the belief that Washington will stay out of the way.
Washington must avoid this kind of escalatory spiral by undermining Chinese optimism in its own capabilities; in other words, by out-deterring China. This requires delivering an unequivocal message to Beijing that any conflict between the two nuclear-armed powers could quickly become calamitous, far outweighing the potential benefits of an armed “reunification” with Taiwan. If deterrence fails—if China grows more convinced of its military superiority and underestimates the U.S. commitment to the island—both countries could end up embroiled in a war between great powers armed with nuclear weapons.”
Andrea Kendall-Taylor & Erica Frantz – Foreign Affairs
The reason that Zelensky and his country keep fighting is clear: if they do not, Ukraine as it is will cease to exist. That sentiment has been repeatedly articulated by Western leaders. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it in stark terms in September, stating, “If Russia stops fighting, the war ends. If Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends.” Even if Zelensky pursued a negotiated settlement that ceded territory to Russia, it would carry the risk that Moscow, having learned that might makes right, could attack again in the future. Zelensky faces what political scientists call a “credible commitment” problem: he cannot be confident that Putin will not merely agree to a settlement today but then simply regroup and attack again tomorrow. By agreeing to a settled peace now, Ukraine could find itself in a worse position later.
Putin’s calculus is less straightforward. He remains committed to the idea that Russia and Ukraine are one country. In his speech to Russia’s parliament in February, Putin again declared that Ukraine is part of Russia’s “historical lands.” Raising the stakes further is his view that the war is part of a larger confrontation between Russia and the West. And even as the Russian military struggles to make gains on the battlefield, he is confident that the West will eventually tire of its support for Ukraine or that political changes in the United States and Europe will result in less military assistance for Kyiv.
Israeli Democracy Faces a Mortal Threat
David Grossman - The Atlantic
“Tectonic plates are shifting beneath our feet. I imagine that the people who are trying to hijack the country, who have the audacity to rewrite the Israeli legal system, were not expecting such widespread and zealous resistance. Even the protesters, those who object to the “reform”, seem surprised at their own founts of fervour, passion, and courage. Hundreds of corporations and organisations, individuals including current and former Shin Bet and Mossad officials, tech executives, El Al pilots, and many other public and private entities are joining the protesters’ ranks every day. Thousands of reservists, who constitute the army’s backbone, have announced that they will not report for duty. Even retirement-home residents in wheelchairs are out on the streets, protesting what they see as the destruction of the state they fought for.
For years, many of these activists—particularly the youngest among them—were accused of being selfish, cynical, spoiled, of having neither roots nor any sense of belonging to their country. And they were subjected to the worst possible accusation in Israel: being unpatriotic. But then came this great upheaval, and to everyone’s astonishment, it prompted hundreds of thousands of Israelis to uncover both new and old stores of identity, values, and belonging—even to confess their love of Israel, a sentiment previously considered distasteful in some circles.”
The World Will Regret Its Retreat From Globalisation
Eswar Prasad - Foreign Policy
“For emerging market economies not politically aligned with advanced economies, lower trade and financial flows will mean fewer technology and knowledge transfers, hindering their path to development. With countries pulling back from global integration, access to export markets could also become more constrained over time. This might matter less for countries such as China, India, and Brazil—which have grown large, more self-sufficient, and richer than many other emerging market economies—but could stifle those countries that are smaller and still at earlier stages of economic development.
These trends will hamper the economic development of low-income countries, many of which have the advantage of relatively young and expanding labor forces but remain bereft of financial and other resources. Low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, lack the financial capital and technological know-how to build basic manufacturing, let alone compete effectively in the industries of the future. Limited foreign investment, especially in manufacturing rather than just resource-extraction industries, and restrictions on access to global markets for their goods will make it even harder for these countries to attain economic progress and improved standards of living for their populations.”
The Real Reason South Koreans Aren’t Having Babies
Anna Louie Sussman - The Atlanitc
“I think the most fundamental issue at hand is that a lot of girls realise that they don’t really have to do this anymore,” Lee told me. “They can just opt out.”
Many women I interviewed said that their childhood had been marked by domestic violence and that they feared being hurt by men they might date, or filmed in an intimate moment.
Meera Choi, a Yale doctoral student, is researching gender inequality and changes in family formation in South Korea—what she calls a “crisis of heterosexuality.” When I expressed my surprise at how prevalent fears like Cho’s seemed to be, she estimated that 20 of the 40 women she had recently interviewed about these issues had experienced either familial or dating violence.
Many of the women I spoke with said that patriarchy and sexism haunted their earliest memories. Some had grown up waiting until all the men in their families had finished eating before sitting down to their cold leftovers. They’d watched their parents dote on their brothers. They’d been hit by fathers and sexually harassed at school. They’d grown up and gone to job interviews and promptly been asked about their marital status.”
Progressives Need To Embrace Progress
Noah Smith – Noahpinion
“I don’t think many people really care about living up to the letter of their movement’s name. If you ask conservatives why they don’t want to conserve nature, or pro-lifers why they favor the death penalty, it’s not going to force them to do a deep rethink of their value system. So I don’t expect progressives to lose sleep if I tell them that some of their cherished beliefs and policy approaches stand in the way of “progress”; they’ll just assume I’m using a different definition.
But the problems are deeper than semantics. Many current progressive approaches are detrimental to progress not as others would define it, but as many progressives themselves would. Whether it’s a social safety net, green energy, or affordable housing, progressives are often committed to a set of procedures and methods that end up being detrimental to their goals. And yet these procedures and methods are rarely questioned, because they weren’t planned but accumulated over time — sometimes in response to pressures from specific interest groups, sometimes as compromises with the political constraints of the past, sometimes for reasons unknown. But whatever the reason, it’s increasingly clear that many progressive approaches will simply not “get ‘er done”. And this puts the entire modern progressive project in danger of frustration and failure.”