Prime Minister Narendra Modi has acted correctly in attending rather than in rejecting the invite of Canadian PM Mark Carney.
NEW DELHI: Under PM Mark Carney, thankfully very different from Justin Trudeau, the Canadian government has sent an invite to PM Narendra Modi to attend the G7 Summit at a picturesque mountain location in that scenic country. The invite, inter alia, underscores the importance of India, and PM Modi, in the present era. Other G7 leaders, including Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, would have found the absence of PM Modi at the seventh consecutive G7 summit he will be attending inexplicable. Possibly along with Carney, they recognize the importance of having India at the table, if their deliberations are to be taken seriously by the Global South in particular. Within the G7, apart from the US, Japan has broken with the other members in beginning to appreciate the futility of endlessly supporting Ukraine in an unwinnable war. PM Shigeru Ishiba has sought to repair the damage to his country and its economy by banning for more than three years the import of Russian crude oil, and has now resumed supplies. If Chancellor Friedrich Merz has any concern for the once-power packed German economy, he will follow Ishiba. Banning oil imports from Russia has tipped the economy onto a downward slope.
Following the example of Japan has become an imperative for him if he is to prevent irreversible damage to the German economy. Had these powers, and the US under President Joe Biden, followed the advice given then by PM Modi, the Ukraine war would have been over in April 2022 itself with an armistice that would have preserved the land Ukraine has lost to Russia since then. The UK under Boris Johnson and the US under Joe Biden offered a blank cheque to Volodymyr Zelenskyy were he to continue the war, which he did. While Starmer is still spending money on Ukraine that Labour voters think should go to them, Donald Trump has withdrawn the blank cheque and has made Ukraine pay cash on delivery instead. It is now up to the European leaders who remain cheerleaders of the war to continue on a ruinous path or to follow the example of Japan if not that of the US.
Messaging makes a difference. The situation facing the world has made the presence of India under PM Modi imperative. His has been a calming rather than hostile influence. A voice that needs to be heeded in the situation the world is presently in. Akin to rolling thunder approaching before a storm, the reverberations of a potential widening of a growing number of conflicts are sounding ever closer. Israel has launched an existential war on Iran. Should the country be under threat of kinetic defeat, the US would need to come on the side of Jerusalem to ensure that the only Jewish state in the world prevails.
There has been some inspired talk of the Pahlavi dynasty making a comeback in Iran should the clerical regime fall. Such a return would be certain to rekindle what is now the ebbing power of the Ayatollah regime. Only a democratic Iran in a presidential system where both the judiciary and the legislature have a veto over what either regards as a reckless act by the elected President would stabilise Iran. As for Ukraine, until the Zelenskyy regime falls as a result of public unrest or lack of outside support, an armistice will not take place in the conflict with Russia. Other hotspots actual and potential are too numerous to list, even as the mist of hate continues to overcome the path of mutual acceptance of the other. Leaders who profit from such hate need to have a reset. What results could affect even them, the way the Russian Empire entering World War I on the side of France and Germany cost the Romanovs their throne and their lives. Declaring war by the Tsarist empire cost the Romanovs the throne and their lives. War was declared because of erroneous messaging to the Tsar about the “need” for Tsarist Russia to join hands with France and Britain against Prussia. Small wonder, as French-speaking courtiers overwhelmingly outnumbered Russian-speaking servitors of the throne. The Romanov empire was a structure controlled from outside by infiltration on the inside. The lessons of history need to be heeded and not ignored.
A psychopathic mass murderer, Adolf Schicklgrueber alias Hitler, became the menace he became to humanity because of the level of hatred in the messaging he received and later on began to send himself. Hatred of the Jews in particular. Well researched work contains that of several historians that claim Klara Poelzl, mother of Hitler, had a Jewish lover who sometimes came home when he was very young. Such may be a false charge. What was clear, even if the suggestion of a Jewish lover of his mother, was false, is that a hatred of Jews fostered and grew within Hitler. It could be his belief, ingrained in messaging from the topmost level of the German army that sought to claim treachery and not their bungling in World War I caused the downfall of Germany at the hands of Britain and France. The messaging was that the 1919 armistice, signed by a patriotic German, was “a stab in the back when victory was within sight, an act of treachery caused by Jewish money and influence in Germany”. Friedrich Ebert, a German Jewish statesman, became the first Chancellor from 1919 until his death and gave the order to sign the armistice at the request, rather the command, of Field Marshals von Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who were defeated by the Allies in the war. The duo invented the untruth that a victorious German army lost because of “treachery from within” by the “November criminals”. Much later, in 1944, Hitler fell for the untruth that his generals and not Corporal Hitler’s own errors as Supremo of German Forces was responsible for the leak of war planning to the Allies. He hanged several of them for treason in the most gruesome way rather than realize that it was the coding device (unchanged throughout the war) used by the Wehrmacht whose code had been broken by Alan Turing in the UK in 1942. The consequences of the spell in which a psychopathic mass murderer cast on many Germans in the 1930s were disastrous for humanity, most of all for Germany itself, followed by the Soviet Union, which lost 25 million lives and demographically has not recovered still, despite it becoming the Russian Federation after the Soviet collapse in 1991
In the present, the risk of miscalculation vests highest with CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping, if the supremo of China seeks to take over Taiwan by force. Under President Trump, the US has largely extricated itself from the quagmire that the Ukraine war has become for the Europeans. In the Middle East, Israel seems on course to prevail, given that its limited objective is to defeat the clerical regime in Iran, thereby causing a process of inner disintegration that leads to its replacement with an elected civilian regime, and a smaller military under civilian control. In South Asia, GHQ Rawalpindi is on course towards another collision with India, but our country is getting better prepared to once again inflict defeat on the extremist generals who control the Pakistan civilian regime. If US Defense Secretary Mike Hegseth is right, as he appears to be, the US and its allies and partners have a high probability of getting into a kinetic conflict with China by 2027, should Xi decide to invade and occupy Taiwan by force. The error made by Johnson and Biden in April 2022 should not be repeated by Xi. He needs to understand that Taiwan is free, and will always be. When a thunderstorm approaches, the sensible course is to head for a shelter, in this case the shelter of peace. PM Modi has his work cut out for him at the G7 Summit, but he has acted correctly in attending rather than in rejecting the invite of Mark Carney. Who knows, perhaps the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) will get its wishes fulfilled, with a reset of India-Canada relations consequent to the Carney invite.
