Is India Copying Xi Jin Ping's Wolf Warrior Tactics?

Aakash Joshi in The Indian Express

For those familiar with American action films, there was nothing that remarkable — artistically and even as a propaganda device — about Wolf Warrior (2015) and its sequel, Wolf Warrior 2 (2017). But the impact of the films on foreign policy — or at least how it is discussed — has moved from China to the West and now, in a somewhat disturbing reflection of the former, to India.

In the Chinese blockbusters, Wu Jing, a sniper — kicked out of the PLA for being a moral renegade, a sort of John McClane and John Rambo combination — takes on smugglers, kidnappers and mercenaries with a Chinese special forces unit.

The films are not seminal for their slick action or predictable and plodding plot. In the contemporary foreign policy lexicon, “Wolf Warrior diplomacy” is the belligerent language used by Chinese diplomats since Xi Jinping’s authoritarian consolidation and centralisation of power. Any attack or criticism of China is met with strong words, often pointing out the history of western hypocrisy and imperialism. While extolling China’s foreign policy and political economy, the howl of the wolf warrior also tries to paint any questioning of China as interference in its internal affairs, an attack on its civilisational history and a plot by foreign powers unable to stomach the rise of a rival in Asia. Most often (and easily accessible to a lay reader), this insecurity is on display in the editorials and articles in state and party-controlled media such as Global Times and China Daily, which target not only foreign governments but also media houses and individuals for adverse comments and coverage.

Sample the following headlines from Global Times: “Facing Omicron, CNN shows sour grapes mentality as China’s Covid-19 control measures justified” (November 30, 2021); “BBC should show evidence [on Xinjiang human rights abuses] or admit to being a rumourmonger”; “’Defeating China’ is wishful thinking from Soros” (October 6, 2019).

Change the dates and a few words in the headlines for context, and they could be mistaken for recent statements by some of the most prominent members of the Indian government and spokespersons of the ruling party.

Take, for example, the Income Tax department’s “survey” of the BBC offices in Delhi and Mumbai. There are likely people who believe that the searches of journalists’ computers and phones were about irregularities in taxes and not a recent documentary. Even though India: The Modi Question wasn’t released in India, takedown orders were issued to social media companies.

As the offices were searched, the BBC was accused – with the BJP’s symbol proudly displayed in the back – by a party spokesperson of being “corrupt” and supporting “anti-national” forces. It is rare, even in an age of ED summons, IT surveys and NIA investigations, for the ruling party or government to comment on an ongoing investigation beyond the usual “let the law take its course” or “no one is above the Constitution and penal code” sort of statements. The BBC, remember, is the British state broadcaster, funded directly by the people and not the government per se. It is certainly not above bias. Equally, though, it is not a threat to the world’s largest and arguably most diverse democracy. The last time it was seen as such was during the Emergency: Ironically, the fact that Indira Gandhi’s government banned the BBC was used as a justification by the ruling party this time.

On the heels of the BBC controversy came the comments by George Soros, the hedge-fund billionaire-turned-liberal philanthropist. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference last week, the 92-year-old Soros brought up the Adani-Hindenburg controversy and stated that the report and its aftermath would “significantly weaken Modi’s stranglehold on India’s federal government and open the door to push for much-needed institutional reforms. I may be naïve, but I expect a democratic revival in India.”

The reaction from the government was swift and strong. Union Minister of Women and Child Development, Smriti Irani, said, “A foreign power at the centre of which is a man named George Soros has announced that he will hurt India’s democratic structure. He has announced that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be his main target.”

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar stated, “I could take the view that the individual in question, Mr Soros, is an old, rich, opinionated person, sitting in New York, who still thinks that his views should determine how the entire world works. Now if I could stop at old, rich and opinionated, I would put it away. But he is old, rich, opinionated and dangerous.”

Soros and his Open Society Foundations, across countries, do arguably engage in political work. Yet, the public and personal attack — from some of the most prominent and articulate faces of the government — against the perceived “foreign hand” indicates a prickliness about criticism that is reminiscent of Wolf Warriors rather than the secure, understated confidence of seasoned diplomats and leaders. It was seen earlier when Jaishankar refused to meet with a US Congressional Committee in 2019 because Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal had introduced a resolution about Kashmir in the US legislature.

Unfortunately, this mode of engagement with foreign actors — or journalists and media houses — is of a piece with the image of New India, just as it is a hallmark of Xi’s China. The latter, under its current leader, has abandoned Deng Xiaoping’s dictum of “hide your strength, bide your time”. Xi’s China is confident about its military prowess and economic might and believes that it is now its turn to lead the world. The insecurity about criticism and the strident diplomatic language is about saying to the international community that China now sits at the head of the table and that a “rules-based order” that doesn’t account for Beijing’s exceptionalism — as it does for the US — will not stand.

India is far behind China in economic terms. Yet, the size of its market and a growing economy does give it bargaining power: There was little to no official criticism of the actions of the BJP from Western capitals. Strategically, the West and Japan see India as an important bulwark against an aggressive and expansionist China. All of this, perhaps, makes it easy to deploy our very own Wolf Warriors without consequences.

Just two factors to consider: First, at least part of the reason the West and others are enamoured with India is its democratic credentials and openness. The Chinese model of engaging in a constant battle of narratives about every little documentary or stray comment may do more harm than good in this regard.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, the decency and openness to criticism of a confident society and polity should not be a matter of weakness or compulsion. That a ruling party acts as though criticism is an attack on the country is disturbing. After all, the difference between authoritarianism and democracy is about more than just GDP numbers and what each can get away with as a result. Or at least it should be.

Xi Jinping copying Modi?

 

Under cover of coronavirus, the world's bad guys are wreaking havoc

The pandemic has allowed strongmen and tyrants to get away with murder and mayhem while we look the other way writes Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian 

 

‘Viktor Orbán has long sought to rule Hungary as an autocrat, but the pandemic gave him his chance, allowing him to brand anyone standing in his way as unwilling to help the leader fight a mortal threat.’ Photograph: Tamás Kovács/AFP via Getty Images


Under the cover of coronavirus, all kinds of wickedness are happening. Where you and I see a global health crisis, the world’s leading authoritarians, fearmongers and populist strongmen have spotted an opportunity – and they are seizing it.

Of course, neither left nor right has a monopoly on the truism that one should never let a good crisis go to waste. Plenty of progressives share that conviction, firm that the pandemic offers a rare chance to reset the way we organise our unequal societies, our clogged cities, our warped relationship to the natural world. But there are others – and they tend to be in power – who see this opening very differently. For them, the virus suddenly makes possible action that in normal times would exact a heavy cost. Now they can strike while the world looks the other way.

For some, Covid-19 itself is the weapon of choice. Witness the emerging evidence that Bashar al-Assad in Damascus and Xi Jinping in Beijing are allowing the disease to wreak havoc among those groups whom the rulers have deemed to be unpersons, their lives unworthy of basic protection. Assad is deliberately leaving Syrians in opposition-held areas more vulnerable to the pandemic, according to Will Todman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. As he puts it: “Covid-19 has provided Assad a new opportunity to instrumentalize suffering.”

Meanwhile, China continues to hold 1 million Uighur Muslims in internment camps, where they contend now not only with inhuman conditions but also a coronavirus outbreak. Those camps are cramped, lack adequate sanitation and have poor medical facilities: the virus couldn’t ask for a better breeding ground. What’s more, Uighur Muslims are reportedly being forced to work as labourers, filling in for non-Muslims who are allowed to stay home and protect themselves. That, according to one observer, “is reflective of how the Republic of China views [Uighur Muslims] as nothing but disposable commodities”.

Elsewhere, the pandemic has allowed would-be dictators an excuse to seize yet more power. Enter Viktor Orbán of Hungary, whose response to coronavirus was immediate: he persuaded his pliant parliament to grant him the right to rule by decree. Orbán said he needed emergency powers to fight the dreaded disease, but there is no time limit on them; they will remain his even once the threat has passed. They include the power to jail those who “spread false information”. Naturally, that’s already led to a crackdown on individuals guilty of nothing more than posting criticism of the government on Facebook. Orbán has long sought to rule Hungary as an autocrat, but the pandemic gave him his chance, allowing him to brand anyone standing in his way as unwilling to help the leader fight a mortal threat.

Xi has not missed that same trick, using coronavirus to intensify his imposition of China’s Orwellian “social credit” system, whereby citizens are tracked, monitored and rated for their compliance. Now that system can include health and, thanks to the virus, much of the public ambivalence that previously existed towards it is likely to melt away. After all, runs the logic, good citizens are surely obliged to give up even more of their autonomy if it helps save lives.

For many of the world’s strongmen, though, coronavirus doesn’t even need to be an excuse. Its chief value is the global distraction it has created, allowing unprincipled rulers to make mischief when natural critics at home and abroad are preoccupied with the urgent business of life and death.

Donald Trump gets plenty of criticism for his botched handling of the virus, but while everyone is staring at the mayhem he’s creating with one hand, the other is free to commit acts of vandalism that go all but undetected. This week the Guardian reported how the pandemic has not slowed the Trump administration’s steady and deliberate erosion of environmental protections. During the lockdown, Trump has eased fuel-efficiency standards for new cars, frozen rules for soot air pollution, continued to lease public property to oil and gas companies, and advanced a proposal on mercury pollution from power plants that could make that easier too. Oh, and he’s also relaxed reporting rules for polluters.
Trump’s Brazilian mini-me, Jair Bolsonaro, has outstripped his mentor. Not content with mere changes to the rulebook, he’s pushed aside the expert environmental agencies and sent in the military to “protect” the Amazon rainforest. I say “protect” because, as NBC News reported this week, satellite imagery shows “deforestation of the Amazon has soared under cover of the coronavirus”. Destruction in April was up by 64% from the same month a year ago. The images reveal an area of land equivalent to 448 football fields, stripped bare of trees – this in the place that serves as the lungs of the earth. If the world were not consumed with fighting coronavirus, there would have been an outcry. Instead, and in our distraction, those trees have fallen without making a sound.

Another Trump admirer, India’s Narendra Modi, has seen the same opportunity identified by his fellow ultra-nationalists. Indian police have been using the lockdown to crack down on Muslim citizens and their leaders “indiscriminately”, according to activists. Those arrested or detained struggle to get access to a lawyer, given the restrictions on movement. Modi calculates that majority opinion will back him, as rightist Hindu politicians brand the virus a “Muslim disease” and pro-Modi TV stations declare the nation to be facing a “corona jihad”.

In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu – who can claim to have been Trumpist before Trump – has been handed a political lifeline by the virus, luring part of the main opposition party into a government of national unity that will keep him in power and, he hopes, out of the dock on corruption charges. His new coalition is committed to a programme that would see Israel annex major parts of the West Bank, permanently absorbing into itself territory that should belong to a future Palestinian state, with the process starting in early July. Now, the smart money suggests we should be cautious: that it suits Netanyahu to promise/threaten annexation more than it does for him to actually do it. Even so, in normal times the mere prospect of such an indefensible move would represent an epochal shift, high on the global diplomatic agenda. In these abnormal times, it barely makes the news.

Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, argues that many of the global bad guys are, in fact, “demonstrating their weakness rather than strength” – that they are all too aware that if they fail to keep their citizens alive, their authority will be shot. He notes Vladimir Putin’s forced postponement of the referendum that would have kept him in power in Russia at least until 2036. When that vote eventually comes, says Niblett, Putin will go into it diminished by his failure to smother the virus.

Still, for now, the pandemic has been a boon to the world’s authoritarians, tyrants and bigots. It has given them what they crave most: fear and the cover of darkness.