22-02-2022, 03:13 PM
Alex Lo
Published: 9:00pm, 20 Feb, 2022
......
China has long ago rejected liberal democracy. India under Modi makes a pretence of practising it. But you won’t hear many complaints from Biden and Johnson. This is because India is critical to the US-led containment strategy against China in the Indo-Pacific. So now you have the paradoxical situation of powerful Western democracies drawing ever closer to India while the country drifts unmistakably towards ethno-authoritarianism and Hindu supremacy.
As a result, whatever outrage or crime New Delhi or regional Indian states perpetrate, say in Jammu and Kashmir, they would be minimised or ignored in major Western capitals. But the slightest hint of misdeed, say in Xinjiang, would be blown out of all proportion.
By any objective measure, New Delhi’s revocation of the semi-autonomous status of Kashmir in 2019 – guaranteed under the country’s constitution and followed by widespread crackdowns – ought to be a bigger deal than Beijing’s imposition of the national security law in Hong Kong. Its equivalent would be Beijing’s scrapping the Basic Law, which constitutionally guarantees Hong Kong’s “high degree of autonomy”.
But we all know which issue Western politicians and media have chosen to exploit.
https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/art...l_scroll_0&pgtype=article&campaign=3167741
Published: 9:00pm, 20 Feb, 2022
......
China has long ago rejected liberal democracy. India under Modi makes a pretence of practising it. But you won’t hear many complaints from Biden and Johnson. This is because India is critical to the US-led containment strategy against China in the Indo-Pacific. So now you have the paradoxical situation of powerful Western democracies drawing ever closer to India while the country drifts unmistakably towards ethno-authoritarianism and Hindu supremacy.
As a result, whatever outrage or crime New Delhi or regional Indian states perpetrate, say in Jammu and Kashmir, they would be minimised or ignored in major Western capitals. But the slightest hint of misdeed, say in Xinjiang, would be blown out of all proportion.
By any objective measure, New Delhi’s revocation of the semi-autonomous status of Kashmir in 2019 – guaranteed under the country’s constitution and followed by widespread crackdowns – ought to be a bigger deal than Beijing’s imposition of the national security law in Hong Kong. Its equivalent would be Beijing’s scrapping the Basic Law, which constitutionally guarantees Hong Kong’s “high degree of autonomy”.
But we all know which issue Western politicians and media have chosen to exploit.
https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/art...l_scroll_0&pgtype=article&campaign=3167741