Explained: As People Laud Modi's Photo-Op With India-Hating Kissinger, TLI Takes A Deeper Look

Prime Minister Narendra Modi met the J.P. Morgan Chase International Council on the 22nd of October in Delhi to discuss his vision of making India a 5-trillion-dollar economy by 2024.

Amidst the current economic slowdown due to which the World Bank slashed India’s forecasted growth rate to 6% on October 13, the Prime Minister and his cabinet have strongly defended their current economic policies and projected 5-trillion-dollar dream.

Meeting the council, which is J.P. Morgan Chase’s high-profile annual event comprising of 250 members from 19 nations, he said that he had excellent discussions with these global thought leaders. The council is convened annually in a leading world city to gain perspectives on economic, political and social trends in key regions and countries so as to provide advice to the senior management of J.P. Morgan Chase – an American multinational investment bank and financial services company – on issues affecting its clients and business.

The members of the council that met in India for the first time since 2007, included former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Australian PM John Howard, former US secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Henry Kissinger.

The Prime Minister tweeted about his meetings with the visiting leaders and attached photographs saying –

“Very good interaction with the JP Morgan International Council, an illustrious gathering of top policymakers, thinkers, statesmen and stateswomen, captains of industry, innovators among others. Spoke about India’s efforts in health, education and becoming a $5 Trillion economy.”

However, what was stunning was the Indian nationalist Prime Minister’s warm reception of Kissinger who infamously had called former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi a ‘b**ch and Indians ba****ds, revealed by declassified papers from the White House and State Department in the US.

Another recorded conversation which was a part of the Nixon tapes has caught Kissinger characterise Indians as “the most aggressive ‘goddamn’ people around.”

It can be noted that the given picture posted by PM Modi, garnered the most number of likes for that evening’s events, far more than the previously posted picture with Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee. The tweeted pictures from the event, appreciated by many, featured people who have been allegedly involved in war crimes, genocides, and dirty politics.

How many war criminals and fascists can you fit in one photo (without the camera exploding)?

The death toll these monsters are responsible for numbers in the millions, easily.https://t.co/UHuPQ5eGCv

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 22, 2019

Dr Henry Kissinger

This September, Vermont Senator and US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called Kissinger one of the most destructive Secretaries of State in the history of his country while criticising the incumbent Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for meeting with him.

Kissinger is said to have led and supported Pakistan’s policy in 1971 when it conducted genocide in its east wing (now Bangladesh) killing almost 300,000 Hindu Bengalis, he not only helped the United States diplomatically support Pakistan after its defeat by India but also supplied it with arms.

Scroll.in quoted the research by academic Gary J Bass in his account of the Bangladesh War, The Blood Telegram, which showed that Kissinger was so intent on supplying Pakistan with arms that he was even ready to go up against his political opposition and bypass the US federal legislature.

He is also believed to be responsible for sending the 7th fleet of the US Navy, including its largest aircraft carrier, into the Bay of Bengal as a warning to India – a move that was meant to be seen as a threat to attack the city of Calcutta in 1971.

Kissinger and Nixon, who saw everything around them through the goggles of the Cold War have been caught saying vile and racist things about Indians. When the Nixon tapes were released, apart from him calling Indira Gandhi a “b**ch”, Kissinger added that “Indians are ba***ds and sons of b**ches”. A little later, former US President Nixon can be heard on the tape saying, “We really slobbered over the old witch”, and wishing that all of India suffered from a “mass famine.”

Gary J Bass wrote in his research that Kissinger harboured a “starkly personal and emotional dislike of India and Indians”.

But, in spite of Narendra Modi’s political party’s right-winged nationalist image and ideology, he posed with India-hating Kissinger and tweeted, “Glad to have met Dr Henry Kissinger. He has made pioneering contributions to international politics and diplomacy.”

In addition to Kissinger’s intentional sabotage of India in the 1971 crisis, the former Secretary of State has been accused of the following war crimes –

1. Diplomatically sanctioning the mass murder of 30,000 Argentineans in 1976
2. Bombing Cambodia killing an estimated 100,000 persons
3. Supporting George Bush’s Iraq Invasion that destroyed the Middle East
4. Determined support for General Yahya Khan’s dictatorship in Pakistan
5. Planning and executing the US invasion of Angola

Tony Blair

Tony Blair is considered to have spearheaded the forces that declared war on Iraq in 2003.

In pursuit of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, which were never found, he and his supporters (George Washington Bush being most eminent) did manage to leave the entire country and its bordering regions decimated and unstable.

The invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq which was presented as the US, UK, Poland and Australia’s combined effort to ‘liberate Iraqi people’, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of individuals as well as the displacement of over 4 million.

The decision to go to war was made over “flawed” intelligence, as per the Chilcot report that investigated into Britain’s involvement in the conflict.

The report found out that the UK joined the invasion of Iraq before all peaceful options had been exhausted and that military action was not the last resort.

As per a survey, over a third of Britons want to see Tony Blair prosecuted for his war crimes in Iraq but the British High court blocked his prosecution and ruled in 2017 that there is no crime of aggression in English law under which former PM could be charged.

Rice, Gates and Howard

Condoleezza Rice was the first African-American woman to be National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. Although hailed for her accomplishments, she is known to have stood strong by the side of the then US President George Washington Bush during the Iraq invasion. A controversial figure in American politics, she was one of the architects of the Bush administration’s ‘torture programme’ post 9/11 that was focussed on the interrogation of terror suspects. The programme wrongfully detained over a thousand brown-skinned people – most of whom had no terror linkages and were innocent – subjecting them to the cruellest and inhumane treatments. Permission to the CIA was given to waterboard, electrocute, mutilate the ‘suspects’.

Coming to Robert Gates, in a memo that was available in a selection of declassified documents on the website of US’s National Security Archive, it was found that he had pushed for the bombing in Nicaragua in order to “bring down” the leftist government which killed seven people including three journalists.

And John Howard who was the sitting Prime Minister of Australia during the Iraq invasion sent his troops to the war that was based on ‘lies and severe intelligence failures’.

Modi’s Photo-Op

It was under the watch of Condoleezza Rice that Narendra Modi was denied entry into the US for the 2002 Gujarat pogrom. The Iraq invasion that killed and displaced millions, was planned mutually between three people who stand in the picture tweeted by the Indian Prime Minister.

Proven racist and India-hating, 96-year-old Kissinger was found in close proximity to PM Modi, ironic to image the Prime Minister has built based on Hindutva pride and nationalistic identity.

In an elaborate explanation about ‘spectacle politics’, Shoaib Daniyal of Scroll said, “Given the Bharatiya Janata Party’s positioning as a Hindu nationalist party as well as its recent plans to award Indian citizenship to Bangladeshi Hindus, Modi’s photo-op with Kissinger is doubly ironic. Not only did Kissinger’s amoral foreign policy in 1971 harm Indian interests, but it also led to catastrophe for the Hindus of Bangladesh.”

Also Read: Unprecedented Action Against US Military, Inquiry For War Crime