Quad hypocrisy

Anis-Chowdhury

Anis Chowdhury

The foreign ministers of Quad Alliance – the United States (US), Australia, Japan and India – met on Friday, 11 February in Melbourne in a show of solidarity against the growing influence of China and Russia. The Alliance was originally formed to present a unified front against China, initiated in 2007 by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, with the support of US Vice President Dick Cheney, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The US hypocrisy

The US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken said, “Principles like one country can’t simply change the borders of another by force; principles like one country can’t simply dictate to another its choices, its policies, with whom it will associate; principles like one country can’t exert a sphere of influence to subjugate its neighbours to its will” cannot be allowed “to be challenged with impunity”.

What can be more hypocritical than these words coming from a man representing a country whose history is littered with exactly the opposite to the principles he is professing to uphold?

Is it not the US which challenged these lofty principles with impunity? How would he describe President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 doctrine that the US had the right to intervene in a Latin American country’s internal affairs under the bogus pretext of “flagrant and chronic wrongdoing”?

Was it not the work of the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that organised coup after coup in countries around the world to depose democratically elected governments, such as that of Allende in Chile and of Mosaddeq in Iran to install authoritarian rulers to suppress the aspirations of the people of those countries?

How would Blinken justify the US’s two-decade indiscriminate bombing of napalm and orange agent in Vietnam to impose its wills on the people of Vietnam?

Was it not the Western imperialist powers – the allies of the US – that changed borders of other countries by force or arbitrarily drew lines between countries with impunity?

It was imperial Japan that brutally occupied China, Korea, and parts of Southeast Asia. People of these countries have not yet received an apology from Japan for its atrocities or forced prostitution known as “comfort women”.

Blinkered Blinken could not cite one single example of China in its thousands-year history violating the lofty principles that he has presented as so dear to the US and its allies. China is simply exerting its inannihilable right over the island that seceded from the mainland with the active support of the US and its allies. How could the US and its allies justify the British occupation since 1833 of Argentina’s Falkland Islands which Argentina calls to unify with the country?

As far as Russia is concerned, it is simply reacting to the threat to its security and sovereignty created by the US and its NATO allies by expanding their sphere to Russia’s border. Some of America’s most renowned foreign policy thinkers argued that NATO should be nowhere near Ukraine, a former Soviet republic. “That was a real mistake,” said Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 was ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton.

Russia’s western border is NATO’s eastern flank. American and British military advisors serve in Ukraine; U.S. missile defence systems sit in Poland and Romania; and NATO troops conduct exercises in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, once part of the Soviet Union.

Australia’s hypocrisy

The Australian government claims that Australia shares many common values with India but not China. This is a mockery of truth in the face of India’s alarming departures from democratic norms under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BharatiyaJanata Party (BJP).

Morrison says Australia’s values include support for “freedom from oppression and coercion”. But Morrison has not condemned Modi when he deployed an estimated 1 million troops to put Jammu and Kashmir’s entire Muslim population of 6 million under effective house arrest. Many thousands remain in jail without trial; some have reportedly been beaten and tortured while contentious Hindu migration grows.

The Indian army is granted impunity in Kashmir under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. “Indian soldiers have raped, tortured and killed people in Kashmir for in fake encounters without fear of being held accountable”, said Indian human rights activist Vrinda Grover.

Australia’s Foreign Minister Marise Payne said in a speech in New Delhi on 9 January, 2019, that one of the common values both countries hold is that they are “firm believers that ‘might is not right’.” She conveniently forgot that Australia joined the US and its British ally to invade Iraq in 2003 which the UN Secretary-General explicitly declared illegal, not sanctioned by the UN Security Council and also against the UN’s founding charter.

The Modi Government passed discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Bill. 

Pro-Hindu BJP activists are evicting thousands of Muslims from their houses, even though they were born, worked and voted there. The Citizens Register in Assam deprived 1.9 million Bengali Muslims of Indian citizenship. Modi Government remains silent when Hindu extremists openly call for Muslim genocide.

Well, religious intolerance may be one of the shared values when it is the Muslims under attack. But it is highly hypocritical for Morrison, a devout Christian, to find shared values with Modi when his dog-whistling and anti-conversion laws have encouraged Hindu zealots to attack Christians. Life for Christians in India is becoming suffocating by the day amidst the rise in attacks against them by Hindu extremists and vigilantes.

The New York Times (23 Dec. 2021) in an extensive report gave details of a number of incidents in which Hindu zealots tortured Christian priests, stormed churches, threatened Christian missionaries, attacked schools of the Christian community and burnt their religious literature. The Guardian (27 Dec. 2021) reported, festive celebrations were disrupted, Jesus statues were smashed and effigies of Santa Claus were burned in a spate of attacks on India’s Christian community over Christmas.

Graham Stuart Staines, an Australian Christian missionary, along with his two sons, Philip (aged 10) and Timothy (aged 6), was burnt to death in India by members of a Hindu fundamentalist group named Bajrang Dal on 23 January 1999.

The pretence of shared values

Micheal Kugleman of the Asia Programme at the Washington Wilson Centre commenting on the nature of relationship between US and India has rightly said “For all the rhetoric trumpeting the shared values that drive partnership, it really boils down to shared interests”.

Brian Toohey, the author of Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State, wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald (7 July, 2020), “Morrison and Payne should drop their pretence that India shares the same human rights values as we do”.

(Anis Chowdhury, Adjunct Professor, Western Sydney University and former senior United Nations official.)