Welcome to this week's edition of the Geopolitics thread. Even as the coronavirus pandemic rages on, many major events are happening around the world. Discussion does not have to be related to India. Share and discuss stories in the comments. Here are some stories to get the discussion started:
Top Stories
After a property dispute in East Jerusalem exploded into rioting and rocket attacks by Hamas terrorists from the Gaza strip, Israel launched a series of air strikes as well as an unconventional technique to flush out terrorists. Last week, even as air strikes continued, a cryptic tweet was sent out by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), stating that a ground-based invasion was underway. This was swiftly reported by all major news outlets, and a large group of terrorists moved into an underground series of tunnels in Gaza for safety. The air force then struck those tunnels, killing many terrorists - there was no ground invasion, it was an elaborate ruse that nonetheless worked. The US govt has called for peace and condemned Hamas, while leftists US politicians have condemned Israel. Arab countries have also called for peace.
A ransomware attack on the company that runs the Colonial Pipeline, an 8,000 km long pipeline network that supplies about half the fuel needed on the populous eastern coast of the US, led to emergency declarations, hoarding, and shutdowns of several pumps, affecting millions of consumers. The attack was by DarkSide, an alleged Russian cyber group that has a history of such attacks but has so far proven elusive to law enforcement agencies in the West. The attack shut down the pipeline until the company paid a ransom of $5 million in Bitcoin, but even then supplies remained tight as the system takes time to get back to full capacity.
The Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), which advocates for Scotland leaving the United Kingdom, won a narrow victory in elections to the devolved Scottish parliament. Aside from managing the COVID-19 pandemic, which is on the wane in the country, the SNP has promised to hold another referendum to leave the UK. The last such referendum was defeated, and PM Boris Johnson has opposed another for for at least a generation. The SNP claims that Brexit changed the equation, with a majority in Scotland having voted to remain even as a majority in England voted to leave. Meanwhile, the mayor of London Sadiq Khan won a second term with a turnout of about 45%.
In a development that has left epidemiologists baffled, the island country of Seychelles, which has a large Indian-origin population, saw an alarming surge of patients that tested positive for COVID-19. This is peculiar because nearly 80% of the country's 97,000 people have received at least one dose of a vaccine, and 60% have received a full two doses. About 60% of the vaccines used in the country were made by China-based Sinopharm, although 40% are Covishield from SII in India. Most of the severe new cases are in people who received just one dose or were unvaccinated, but in general high vaccination is expected to decrease transmission, which has not been the case here. The WHO is investigating.
In keeping with US President Joe Biden's order to withdraw all US troops in Afghanistan by September 11 this year, soldiers have begun to hand over bases to the Afghan military. This week, the Kandahar Air Force base - a key installation for the former Taliban regime that international forces have controlled since 2001 - was handed over to the Afghans as all US personnel left. However, just last month, the Taliban launched an unsuccessful rocket attack on this very base. Meanwhile, a girl's school was also attacked this week in Afghanistan, although the Taliban has denied responsibility.
Geopolitical History: The Legacy of Annie Besant
This week, I thought I'd stay closer to home to explore an interesting character in Indian history, who is remembered only in passing in our history textbooks but who had a profound effect on Indian and Irish nationalism. If you live in Mumbai or Chennai, you would have heard of Annie Besant, either from Annie Besant Road in the former or Besant Nagar in the latter. If you happen to have studied in BHU, you may know her as one of its founders. For the Indian-Americans in California, you may have heard of the private Besant Hill School of Happy Valley in Ojai. Who was this woman, with a clearly European name, who seems to be regarded so highly in India today?
Annie Wood was born in 1847 in London to an aristocratic family on her father's side but a poor Irish one on her mother's side. However, tragedy struck the family early: when Annie turned five, her father died, leaving her mother to make ends meet in a society where women were excluded from most political and economic activities. Nonetheless, through help from friends, she received a good education while also becoming sympathetic to the plight of the British working class as well as the cause of Irish nationalism (Ireland by then had been a British colony for hundreds of years). She married Frank Besant at age 20, a Anglican priest: it was a disaster. She wanted to earn money as a writer and became hostile to the Church for its shabby treatment of women: stands that her husband vehemently opposed. They eventually separated.
As a single woman in England, she perhaps had little choice but to be a radical. She pushed for causes such as secularism, women's right, and freedom of thought, all of which were quite alien to societal norms at the time, through her writings as well as public lectures. Eventually, the Church (which, in Britain, is state-sponsored to this day) got wind of her for publishing a book advocating birth control and small families, and she was arrested. Although the charges were eventually dropped, she became a household name, growing as a speaker about socialism and Marxism at a time when workers' rights were non-existent. She also continued to push two causes that were close to her heart: Irish home rule, as well as a new religious movement that was born in San Diego but established itself in Adyar, Madras (now Tamil Nadu) - this was the Theosophical Movement. In this sort-of-religion, Besant found many of the spiritual answers that she was looking for. She went on to represent Theosophy at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, where she also met Swami Vivekanand.
Her work on the Theosophical Movement finally brought her to India, then under British rule, where she eventually rose to be the president of the Theosophical Society. To spread the message of Theosophy and cultivate Indian leadership, she founded the Central Hindu College through donations from Indian princes, and then joined hands with Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya to form the Benares Hindu University, both of which exist to this day. At the same time, she adopted a boy, J Krishnamurthi, whom she declared a "messiah" who would spread enlightenment as a modern day Buddha, in keeping with Theosophical teachings. Krishnamurthi, as an adult, rejected these claims, but helped establish a school in his adopted mother's name in California.
But Besant bloomed into her most charismatic form when she joined the movement for Indian nationalism, seeing in it parallels with her own Irish nationalism and the same brutality of British rule. She joined the Indian National Congress (then mostly a debating society with no political base) and edited the newspaper New India to promote Indian home rule. In 1916, she joined hands with Tilak to create the Indian Home Rule League, on the lines of a similar Irish organization, thus finally making the plunge into active politics. Naturally, she was arrested by the colonial government. This created a storm of protests, with the British Indian government receiving two particularly forceful letters in her favour: one from a lawyer who had recently returned from South Africa, MK Gandhi, and the other from a man who had been educated by a Theosophist tutor, Jawaharlal Nehru. She was freed in 1917 and duly elected President of the Congress. But most importantly, the activism around her arrest transformed the organization into a political one - the rest, as they say, is history.
Over time, Besant became disenchanted with Gandhi, who had become the undisputed mass leader of the Congress, although they both shared the cause of Indian freedom through non-violent means. Besant was opposed to Gandhi's law-breaking (albeit peaceful) means, opposing his 1920 Satyagraha, and highly suspicious of his socialist philosophy, despite her early work on British workers' rights. She felt that freedom must be established simultaneously with the rule of law, and even drafted a "Commonwealth of India Bill" to present to the British Parliament, although it went nowhere. On socialism, while she favoured workers' rights, she also supported property rights and the importance of large-scale industry as opposed to Gandhi's views on village-level micro-industry. Her views did not gain favour with the masses, and she eventually fell to the wayside, though remained committed to Indian freedom.
Annie Besant died in 1933 in Adyar, where, as per her wishes, she was cremated. She remains an enigma to this day: a British woman who did not adhere to the norms of her time, either as British or as a woman. Her religious ideals, though iconoclastic through modern eyes, played a significant role in her philosophy towards Indian and Irish freedom. And of course, she was instrumental in turning the INC from a debating club into a vehicle for activism, and eventually independence.
What stories caught your attention? Share them in the comments.
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