Indian lobby in America a threat to world peace

The tobacco industry in America used a variety of deceitful methods to convince the American people that smoking was not so much injurious to health and was actually quite a stylish activity to indulge in. Once it became impossible to hide the truth about the harmful effects on health, it continued to hide the fact that the nicotine, which is a key ingredient in cigarettes, changes the brain to where it becomes an addict to its continuous use. The fossil fuel industry used similar methods in its ambition for profits versus people. The oil corporations first sat on the knowledge discovered by their own scientists that the burning of the fossil fuel was creating climate change, which would have extremely dangerous consequences for the planet and its inhabitants, including animals and plants.

I am always reminded of how these two industries conned America in the biggest fraud humanity has ever seen, every time I think about the similarities between Israel and India. Many people like to make comparisons between Pakistan and Israel in that both the states were created in the name of a faith. Nothing could be further from the truth though because Pakistanis were not shipped from some other land to this place. The Israelis, however, were literally brought in from other places of this planet and forced upon the local inhabitants called the Palestinians.

Indian lobbying work is becoming more and more aggressive inside the US. There are unavoidable parallels between the works of the Israeli lobbies and the Indian lobbies today. However, there are some major differences as well. And I will get to that momentarily.

Israeli lobbies have spent their entire energies in creating, solidifying, and repeating this narrative that Israel is this victim state in the neighborhood of other hostile nations and that it needed American protection in order to survive. The history of the Holocaust and the Jewish tradition of repeating their own miseries even to themselves have successfully inculcated this image of the Jewish state being in perpetual trouble. The Israeli lobbies have advanced to the level of dangerous mafia that will scare any American politician, academic, media house, and so forth into absolute submission to their narrative or else they would be pushed into oblivion and misery by being labeled as antisemite.

The reasons why Indian lobbies would be more successful and dangerous for American democracy are broadly two. In Israel’s case, the American support that hurts American democracy is mainly due to the work of the lobbies. In India’s case, it would be the lobbies following the Israeli playbook and more importantly, the narrative about the American need for a cop on the beat in the Chinese neighborhood.

If you pay attention to the Indian news media nowadays, something interesting is heard on repeat. They always talk of India as some sort of a global power. They talk of Indian elections as the world’s largest. They talk of the Indian economy as the world’s fifth. The facts they talk about may be undisputed, the interesting part is how they like to label Indian things in bombastic ways where the significance of Indian-ness is broadcasted as globally supreme and extremely relevant. They are doing nothing different from the Israelis except that Israel convinced America that it was a victim state and India is convincing America that it is a powerhouse that can stand up to China. Both the states have been touting about themselves what they know would sell in America.

For China, America doesn’t need a state that cries victimhood all the time for American help. China is not Egypt, Syria, Hamas or Hezbollah. The Indian lobbies inside America are going to focus on this messaging. America would convince itself that India must be erected into this firewall against a superpower China. An India that becomes such an American darling would never want peace in this region because that would be giving up this elevated status. That only means rough days ahead for Pakistan and the region.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 6^th, 2024.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.