Several generations back, India was under British dominion and the British monarch – Queen Victoria – was even crowned Empress of India. We need to understand that India up to the end of the Second World War comprised today’s India along with today’s Pakistan and Bangladesh. The monarch of a lilliputian country – UK – became a ruler of a subcontinent. Then came World War One and World War Two, which resulted at first in the weakening, and then in the disintegration of the British Empire. The world came to be dominated by the United States of America, which was on the one hand a change, but on the other it was not a very great change as the United States is historically the offspring of the United Kingdom or Great Britain. Though the pound sterling has been supplanted by the dollar as the currency of international exchange, the language of the world’s hegemon has remained the same: English.
As the Suez Crisis of 1956 eventually broke the backbone of both France and Great Britain along with their fast shrinking empires and disappearing colonies, the United States emerged as a hegemon which had only the Soviet Union to reckon with. In 1991, the Soviet rival ceased to exist and so – by God’s grace as President Bush senior framed it – America reported a global victory. It seemed the Land of the Free was destined to lord it over for a good couple of decades. If older standards were to be restored, American presidents could be crowned emperors of China and India or viceroys of Russia and Europe. It turned however out, soon enough, that the Middle Kingdom with huge American infusions into its economy gradually emerged as a potentate, and so did India. The mental or psychological inertia lingered, though. Both the Chinese and the Indians are rather prone to looking up to the former powers as something better than they are: English still plays such a role around the globe that Latin did in medieval Europe, while British and American culture is still craved by many Chinese and Indians. One might say that though the economic and political influence has somewhat flagged, the spell still holds. Or does it?
Today Beijing and Delhi are in control of their own countries and pursue an international policy that serves their respective interests. The time when the both capitals would occasionally turn to Washington for advice, aid or approval is gone. The mental or psychological inertia persists… but more on the part of the Western world. In his proxy war against Russia the American president has made an attempt to isolate Russia economically in that he threatened those that continued to purchase Russian gas and oil with exorbitant tariffs. President Donald Trump’s favourite tactics may have had some effect in the case of some governments, but when it came to India, the American president met with a decisive resistance. As soon as India was threatened with retaliatory steps for exports from Russia, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi immediately turned to Moscow and Beijing for help, and had the commercial deal with the American Boeing annulled. In an effort to put things to rights, President Donald Trump decided to quickly call India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi… to no avail. Political rumour has it that Trump made as many as four calls and none was answered. The rumour is spread by the respected Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung and confirmed by other unnamed sources.
Be that as it may, the very idea that a leader of a country that used to be another country’s colony and used to rely on international aid for nourishing its citizens, plus the fact that one can spread news – rumour or no rumour – about any one leader refusing to respond to an American president’s phone four times is a telling mark of the change that is sweeping the whole globe. Narendra Modi’s sudden and decisive political swing towards China is a fact, a disturbing fact. The Moscow-Delhi-Beijing trio is to the United States an unpalatable event. Historically speaking, it was not so long ago when both China and India were under the West’s political and economic control. Today they have both thrown down the gauntlet to their former colonizers. Their ostentatious cooperation makes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s rumour look like fact. Trump’s remark on TruthSocial that we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest China substantiates this rumour even further. While Queen Victoria was India’s Empress, Donald Trump is not even India’s respected partner.
