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By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with [2]
The editor-in-chief of The Sunday Guardian, Joyeeta Basu, asks the questions which the BRICS summit meetings over the weekend will answer in a consensus communiqué; in photo displays of smiles and handholding; and in bilateral meetings whose substance will be a combination of smokescreen and confidences to defend against Private Enemy No. 1 – President Donald Trump.
To understand the political context of this discussion, and the directions from which the wind is blowing for Indian voters and Delhi policymakers at which the podcast is directed, look carefully at the planks in the media platform:
The Sunday Guardian is owned by Information TV Private Ltd Ltd. (ITV) whose controlling shareholder is Kartikeya Sharma [3]. An English university-educated “entrepreneur with deep pockets [4]”, Sharma is an independent MP in the upper house of the Indian parliament, and is backed politically by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP party. Sharma’s constituency is Haryana state; his cashflow comes from sugar refining, hotels, and real estate construction concentrated in the north of India – Delhi as well as Haryana and Punjab states. The sensitivity to Russia of the cost and profitability of these Sharma lines of business are to be found in Russian exports of agricultural fertilizers, fuels, and construction steel.
This was Sharma’s media strategy [5] when he took over iTV.
In Indian political terms, the Uttar Pradesh (UP) state election, due in five or six months’ time, is the priority for news media like the Sunday Guardian and for the political futures of Sharma, the BJP, and the state’s chief minister Yogi Adityanath, a potential successor to Modi when he decides to retire. UP is Haryana’s and Delhi’s geographic and political neighbour.
The themes of China’s hostility towards India and of Russia’s unreliability as a strategic ally of India are important to hear in the questioning of this podcast.
So is the downplaying, relatively speaking, of US hostility towards India, its support of Pakistan as India’s enemy to the west, and the damage to India which has been caused by the US-Israeli war against Iran. In response, US threats to India’s gateways at the straits of Malacca in the west, Hormuz and Bab el Mandeb in the east, are emphasized from the Russian point of view.
Right now these are not the pressing issues of the Indian audience and Indian voters — their priorities are education, employment and social mobility – unobstructed by oligarchy and corruption [6]. They don’t see the connection, not yet, between their future and the wars the Trump Administration is waging outside India’s borders, the influence operations it is running inside India, and the punitive threats Trump has been making against Modi on tariffs against Indian exports and visas for Indian expatriate employment.
Modi’s performance at the BRICS summit, and the roles to be played by Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping in Delhi, are the focus of the discussion, which was recorded just before the official announcement [7]was issued in Beijing of Xi’s participation.
Click for the hour-long discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPceNde0_E4 [8]