Vishwa Guru's game

On 29 October 2019, as many as 27 Members of the European Parliament, mostly from far-right parties, went on a pilgrimage to Indian-occupied Kashmir. The visit was an optical surgical strike against the unexpected perception of isolation enveloping New Delhi after the 5 August decision to revoke the territory's statehood and bifurcate it.

Unexpected, because every duck was supposed to be in a row. Pakistan was expected to shrug, reasoning that ending statehood did not alter the disputed status. A compliant international media, now influenced by Indian interests, was programmed to ignore it, while the foot traffic of world leaders would normalise the manoeuvre. Instead, Islamabad took a firm stand, pockets of Western media resistance fought back, diplomatic traffic halted, and the matter reached the UN Security Council. Desperate to manage optics, the Modi government flew in these MEPs, staging a global endorsement for domestic consumption.

But were these politicians duped patsies, or was their presence symptomatic of deeper ideological alignment? In 2019 and 2020, the EU DisinfoLab exposed the 'Indian Chronicles', revealing how the Delhi-based Srivastava Group used fake NGOs and resurrected dead experts to manipulate European politicians. Yet Modi's accession had rendered such outfits redundant. Why run a convoluted side hustle when mainstream global media and Indian civil society were already offering what Professor Timothy Snyder calls 'anticipatory obedience'? These far-right MEPs shared the BJP's pathological hostility towards Muslims, both capitalising on the war on terror's Islamophobia. Did a desperate Modi government seek help from ideological twins, then throw a redundant Srivastava Group under the bus to hide the true extent of this collusion?

Almost a year later, the FinCEN Files exposed a vast financial shadow economy, flagging 44 Indian banks for facilitating over 2,000 suspicious transactions. Between 2011 and 2017, they processed over $1 billion in flagged dark capital, much of it vanishing into shell networks. Crucially, that is the period that saw the revival and mainstreaming of the modern far-right, from the American Tea Party to ultra-nationalist European populists. The leaks hinted at a dark symbiosis. The dominant order manages such outbursts by misdirecting attention, so the world forgot the flagged Indian operations.

The symbiosis, one suspects, relies on a multi-phase playbook. The first phase was a massive intelligence and policy blind spot, engineered at the zenith of the Global War on Terror. Intellectuals like Samuel Huntington, platformed by editors like Fareed Zakaria, laid the theoretical timber by framing Islam and China as the world's inherent enemies. India positioned itself as the indispensable natural ally, securing sweeping concessions and elevating its elite into the West's highest echelons. By harvesting Israel's weapons-grade Islamophobia and the West's Sinophobia, India manufactured the blind spot for its domestic, regional and eventually global ambitions.

With international cover secured, the second phase normalised domestic extremism. The elevation of a leadership defined by the Gujarat riots, managed by a political enforcer who had faced tadipar (extirpation or exile) orders, signalled that secular moderation was over. The militant consolidation of the Hindu Right was mainstreamed, immune to Western censure because the West had locked itself into the GWOT blind spot.

The final phase of the Vishwa Guru project is reshaping the global order in India's image. By pitting the West against China and Islam, India makes itself diplomatically inevitable. It also dismantles the West's Enlightenment principles, Christian egalitarianism and human rights sensibilities by financing the rise of the Western far-right. As that far-right rejects egalitarianism, it retreats toward the "golden age" of pre-Christian paganism. India intercepts this retreat, appropriating global paganism under the banner of a shared "Indo-European legacy".

This osmosis is no accident; it realises a century-old blueprint. The project is fundamentally anti-Western and anti-Abrahamic, rejecting democratic equality for a rigid, birth-based order. VD Savarkar, architect of militant Hindutva, subordinated democratic principles to ancient hierarchical codes, declaring the Manusmriti "the scripture which is most worshippable after Vedas... even today it is the fundamental law of Hindus."

This reverence for caste over universal rights was globalised by Savitri Devi, born Maximiani Julia Portas. Disgusted by the egalitarian foundations of Judeo-Christianity, this European fascist relocated to India in 1932, convinced the caste system was the last living remnant of pure Aryan paganism. She left an indelible Nazi mark on the Hindu Right's formative years. In 1939 she met Savarkar, who backed her efforts to weaponise Hindu nationalism. She praised Hinduism because it "never admitted the absurd dogma of equality."

For today's Hindutva establishment, these are active operational directives. Devi's ideological virus remains potent, her texts hosted on platforms run by William Pierce, architect of The Turner Diaries. Backed by a rising economic state's processing power, this hatred of monotheism and equality escalates toward a global Brahmanic order designed to supersede Western democracy.

But what does this mean for Pakistan? The recent Shanghai Cooperation Organisation planning meetings in Islamabad gave a stark answer. In an exclusive PTV News interview during a rare visit, India's National Coordinator for the SCO, Alok Dimri, claimed that the SCO presidency had arrived in "our and the Persian civilisational neighbourhood". This was no gesture of inclusivity. By subsuming Islamabad into an Indian civilisational sphere on state television, New Delhi unveiled its own corollary to the Monroe Doctrine or the One China policy. After last year's May war, when India reacted with bitter tantrums to Pakistan's diplomatic attention, the establishment realised it needed a formalised doctrine of absolute subcontinental dominance.

For over a decade, the Modi government has strung the Pakistani establishment along with promises of a peaceful settlement, while investing in every conceivable Pakistani fault line to weaken the state from within. New Delhi has no genuine intention of making peace.

As the old adage warns: if the horse befriends the grass, what will it eat? To expect peaceful coexistence from a project built on hierarchical conquest is a fatal miscalculation. The diplomatic charm deployed in Islamabad is the anaesthetic for Akhand Bharat, a warning that the Vishwa Guru is no longer just consolidating its borders but executing its endgame.