HUMBLE confession, with duly abject apologies. My knowledge of Chinese martial arts is most deplorably restricted to the cute skills of Kung Fu Panda on children’s television. And the occasional glimpse of Uncle Google’s Omnipotent Dictionary in pursuit of a crossword clue. This frivolity must stop. Serious geostrategic developments in our subcontinental region demand a radical rethink.
President Mohamed Muizzu of Maldives has just signed – or inked, as the professionals put it – a military pact with China to draw an impregnable security line around his multi-island nation, after demanding the removal of less than a hundred Indian personnel manning a couple of helicopters largely for humanitarian deployment. President Muizzu disclosed details of this historic alliance with China on March 6, after meeting the august VIPs Major General Zhang Baoqun, Deputy Director of the Office for International Military Cooperation, and President of the Export-Import Bank of China Ren Shengjun. The Chinese will provide, to quote Muizzu, “nonlethal arms and training” to strengthen Maldives’ “independence and autonomy” and we had better believe him.
Acknowledging deficiency
This is no time for complacency. And time for acknowledgment of deficiency. If Maldives had signed such a non-lethal arms deal with India, all we would have been able to provide would be expertise in lathi combat, and I am not totally sure that even this would have been permissible under international treaty law. A lathi blow can be pretty lethal if aimed at the cranium. Of course, we could also have tried Kerala’s Kalaripayattu, but that includes the use of a short sword and broad shield, so that’s that then.
The Chinese are going to give the Maldives armed forces world-class expertise in Knoshu, Wushu, Gung Fu in addition to hundreds of other art forms developed across millennia. Some experts point out that while the Japanese Karate is offensive, Kung Fu is defensive, but that is not the way Kung Fu Panda does it.
So there we are. When a hostile enemy attacks with evil drones, wicked missiles, and monstrous ships, the Maldives armed forces will be ready with Kung fu. A tribute to Chinese diplomatic sophistication. They understand their friends even better than they understand their enemies.
Emergence of ‘populist’
If, as St John asserted in the first verse of his Gospel, in the beginning was the word and the word was God, then the rest of philology is human, catering to the complications of continuous experience. Language is a byproduct of unprecedented events or new knowledge to make them part of communication.
A word at the centre of the idea of democracy, ‘populist’, emerged in the turbulent America of the 1880s when an alliance of farmers was formed to challenge the domination of corporations in an age when industrialisation sought to define progress. The farmers wanted better prices for their products through collective bargaining and lower interest rates, but prices and usury were controlled by the gleaming new temples of mammon, corporate boardrooms.
James Weaver, their candidate in the American presidential elections of 1892, did better in retrospect than seemed at the time, but a sectional cause rarely reaches its objective until it finds the mantra of alliances. Weaver did well in four states, Idaho, Kansas, Colorado, and Nevada, but was lost after defeat. His vote shifted to the Democrats in 1896, and American democracy found other avenues for momentum.
No innovative strategy
Has any popular movement in democratic India given us a new word? On quick recall I can only think of ‘Naxaliya’ or ‘Naxalite’, preserving the memory of a violent Maoist-Marxist upsurge that sent a shudder down our collective spine in the 1960s and 1970s. The various farmers’ movements in our country have not yet created a new term or phrase, perhaps because they have not found an innovative indigenous strategy. Their demands are as old as the conflicts of the marketplace in the battlefields of economic evolution. This does not make them irrelevant. But they do need to introspect about one fact: Where are the allies even across the sweep of agricultural India?
