Staging A New Clash Of Civilizations: Trump’s Pivot To Asia To Make America Great Again
This essay is dedicated to the victims of the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings staged in Sri Lanka and claimed by the Islamic State (ISIL), and also explores religious tensions being stoked by the Covid 19 narrative.India’s capital New Delhi burned in the last week of February 2020 as US President Donald Trump pivoted to India. Visiting the world’s largest and increasingly tattered ‘democracy’, Trump sold among other things, over USD 3 billion worth of weaponry to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The ‘partnership of the century’ between India and the US announced by Modi seemed designed to put China and its Belt and Road initiative (BRI), already besieged by the mysterious Novel Corona virus on notice.
During Mr. Trump’s two-day visit to India, 43 people were killed and many more injured as Hindu-Muslim riots rocked northeast New Delhi with protests against the Indian Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), widely perceived to be discriminatory to Muslims escalated.
The week after Trump departed India, South Asia was hit by the Covid-19 bug. The Indian sub-continent lies between China and Iran, which were besieged months earlier by the coronavirus but had escaped the virus up to the time of Mr. Trump’s visit.
Religious tensions in South Asia stoked by external parties?
The US president’s visit to India, come exactly a year after Hindu-Muslim tensions in India were stoked by mysterious external parties with the near-war between nuclear armed rivals, India and Pakistan, staged in Pulwama District, Jammu and Kashmir in February 2019, just before General Elections in India
Events in Pulwama stoked Hindu nationalism and ensured return of saffron tinted Narendra Modi, President Trump’s preferred partner and buddy, to power with a large majority. Tensions had been simmering since last October’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) came into effect amidst heightened national security consciousness in the Indian intelligence establishment that appears to be in thrall of the US military business industrial, intelligence complex, which has 800 military and ‘lily pad’ bases all over the world after events in Pulwama.
Prashant Bhusan’s 12 questions on the Pulwama near-war raise questions about the role of external parties, outside South Asia, in staging this near-war[1]. Two months before passage of CAA in August 2019, Kashmir was stripped of its Special Status after revoking Article 370, and divided it into Buddhist Ladakh, Hindu Jammu and Muslim Kashmir with the state in virtual lock down for months.
These acts by the saffron tinged Modi government was justified in the name of “national security” and in the aftermath of events in Pulwama at a time when Muslims within and outside India are increasingly constructed as a threat by many western intelligence agencies.
Religious identity politics in South Asia is increasingly weaponized with narratives about Islamist terrorism being unleashed now against Buddhists and Hindus in a region of the world with long-standing and complex patterns of religious diversity and co-existence.
Two months after India and Pakistan teetered on the brink of war, mysterious Easter Sunday attacks were staged against sea-front Churches and luxury tourist hotels on April 21, 2019 in Buddhist dominated Sri Lanka., which were even more mysteriously claimed by the Islamic State (IS), while various intelligence experts claimed that ISIS planned to set up its Caliphate in the Eastern Province of strategically located Sri Lanka where the coveted deep sea Indian Ocean port Trincomalee Habour is located[2]
Saeed Naqvi, a well-known scholar and journalist based in Delhi, has termed Islamic terror, a “diplomatic asset”, while Sri Lanka’s Cardinal Malcom Ranjith noted that powerful nations sell arms after such attacks.
Days after the Easter Sunday carnage in Sri Lanka, post-election riots erupted in Indonesia, Asia’s third most populous country and the largest economy of Southeast Asia, after President Joko Widodo’s comprehensive election victory. Riots in Jakarta targeted ethnic minority, mainly Buddhist, Chinese in multi-religious, Muslim-majority Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, which burned for two nights.
Covid 19 and Religious Tension
More recently, as the Covid 19 narrative has unfolded a remarkably curious spread pattern has emerged in many countries in South and East Asia, with religious networks and conferences emerging as coronavirus dissemination networks and venues: Muslim and Christian minority religious communities appear to have been particularly targeted by Covid 19 narrative in South and East Asia. While in the US and EU the virus spread initially though celebrity networks, Hollywood stars, Ministers and heads of states and even Prince Charles with lots of media hype, in Asia, the Covid 19 narrative spread pattern seemed designed for other purposes – to elicit a backlash from religious majorities and to sow inter-religious conflict during a period of intense social and economic disruption and Corona virus fear and panic in Buddhist and Hindu majority countries in Asia – from Korea, to India and Sri Lanka.
For instance, the Tablighi Jamaat event became India’s worst coronavirus vector in the first week of April 2020, when a brutal country-wide lockdown crippled the India economy was imposed by Prime Minister Modi with 4 hours-notice. Nearly a third of cases in India were linked to its New Delhi gathering[3].
Meanwhile in Sri Lanka after an economically destructive curfew was imposed on the urging and “advice” of the World Health Organization (WHO) also with 4 hours-notice, police said that they had arrested thousands, including many who were praying in a mosque, for violating a countrywide curfew imposed to contain the spread of coronavirus. Media attention also fell on a Switzerland-based Christian Pastor who conducted a service at the Philadelphia Church in Sri Lanka’s the Jaffna District.In South Korea, attention fell on new Christian church networks as vectors of Coronvirus when health officials confirmed more than 1,000 cases with about half those cases linked to the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, a group the government describes as a cult, prompting officials to test all 200,000 of its followers. Authorities linked another cluster of cases to a church in the southern city of Busan, and yet another to a group of Catholic pilgrims returning from Israel. The virus also infected a number of people at the Myeongseong megachurch in Seoul, which has 80,000 congregants. Curiously there have been few reports of Buddhist or Hindu religious gatherings spreading Covid 19.
Shifting Center of Global Power and how the Indian Ocean was Lost
Over the past decade the centre of world power and wealth has been quietly shifting away from Euro-America and the Trans-Atlantic, back to Asia and the Indian Ocean region led by the rise of China and other East and Southeast Asia countries. Thus in a sweeping diplomatic speech in August 2019 French President, Macron said “we are living the end of Western hegemony” in the world, in part as a result of Western “errors” over past centuries.
SRI LANKA 