File photo of Nobel Peace laureate Maria Corina Machado and US President Donald Trump. (Agencies)
I still miss the inimitable tag line, Tukde Tukde Gang, literally meaning ‘fragments’, after all these eleven tumultuous years of Indian politics. It was the political catchphrase invented by India’s ruling party, Bharatiya Janata Party, revelling in the sheer exuberance of its magnificent 2014 election victory to storm the citadel of power in Delhi, which it is still occupying, to mock at India’s neocons who blindly imitated the liberal international globalist agenda in the West, principally America, and were manifestly out of touch with Indian realities but nonetheless wielded a larger than life presence in urban India primarily due to their fluency and felicity of expression in English language and their communication skills and social connections — plus lavish western patronage, of course.
India’s neocons are far from an extinct species. They come out of the woodwork to present their antithesis at defining moments. The arrival of foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi from Kabul on a five-day official visit currently has been one such moment, as they come out to show their irritation that Modi government is according virtual recognition to the Taliban government in Afghanistan while women folk in the Hindu Kush do not enjoy the sort of ‘freedom’ that is in there in America.
Their argument is that unless women’s rights are recognised by the Taliban, it is premature to accord recognition, little realising that by such a yardstick, India too may have a problem of legitimacy even after seven decades of independence where the centuries-old Hindu caste system still prevails, which is, we all can agree, the apogee of man’s cruelty to man.
India’s neocons are celebrating as joyfully as Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would be doing in North America that President Donald Trump lost the race for the Nobel Peace Prize to an obscure Venezuelan agitator. The Nobel panel has once again placed politics over peace, true to its tradition. Indeed, the Swedish Committee cannot claim a single instance in its history of honouring a left-wing socialist battling autocratic / fascist regimes anywhere in the world.
In a curious twist to the tale, in this case, Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado, to celebrate her Nobel, acknowledged truthfully in an X post: “I dedicate the prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support to our cause!”
Machado qualifies as the candidate of the Deep State in the US. She was at the forefront of the CIA’s attempted coup in 2022 against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro (which almost succeeded) and subscribed to the so-called Carmona Decree dissolving overnight the country’s constitution and every public institution.
She is an ardent supporter of Trump’s ongoing regime change project in Venezuela under the pretext of ‘combatting narcotrafficking’; she advocates US military intervention in her country; she fully backs the US sanctions to cripple her country’s economy that brought untold hardships to the poor people; she recommends the reopening of the Venezuelan embassy in Jerusalem; she argues for the ‘privatisation’ of Venezuela’s oil industry so that Big Oil can return (Venezuela has the world’s largest reserves exceeding Saudi Arabia’s).
Plainly put, Machado is a blind supporter of Trump’s obnoxious, illegal, futile regime change project aimed at overthrowing the elected socialist government of Maduro where he and the Deep State are on the same page. By the way, Trump has also imposed 50% tariffs against Brazil to undermine the progressive politics of President ‘Lula’. Both Maduro and Lula are charismatic figures and their countries’ lodestars in the vicious class struggle under way in Latin American society. They symbolise the rise of the working class to the corridors of power in Caracas and Brasília. Madura was a truck driver by profession; Lula honed his political skills as a tough trade union leader.
India’s neocons probably never heard of Maduro or Lula, or couldn’t care less. It is another matter, though, that the Nobel Committee’s choice of Barack Obama in 2009 thrills India’s neocons although it remains ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, to borrow Winston Churchill’s phrase to describe a situation that is difficult to comprehend.
Can anyone tell what contribution Obama, who is qualified to enter the Guinness book of world records as the statesman who resorted to maximum number of missile strikes against foreign countries, to world peace? He didn’t even keep his electoral pledge during his 8 years as president to shut down the infamous Guantanamo detention camp where prisoners are kept in horrible sub-human conditions, including the common use of bell and chains as a correctional strategy, with no hope on earth for justice or even the milk of human kindness.
The stony silence of the neocons, be it in India or North America, vis-a-vis Guantanamo Bay, or the regime change projects in Venezuela and Brazil, only underscores the depth and intensity of their ideological dogmatism and moral depravity to mouth values they themselves do not practice. Why wouldn’t the Nobel Committee take a look at what is happening in Moldova currently — how the country’s president Maia Sandu manages to remain in power? Because, she’s an American citizen and an American proxy in a strategically important country which is to be ripened as Ukraine 2.0 in the Black Sea region?
Now, one may argue that Trump is no different than Machado. But that is not true. The cardinal difference is, Trump holds power and leads a superpower which is still the world’s number one military power. And he is a mercurial personality known to be capable of making wild swings in his public stance and policies. Machado’s main virtue, in comparison, is that she is a consistent right-wing reactionary who is a camp follower of the US in her politics.
In sum, Trump may use his power between now and January 2028 to strengthen peace or push the world situation even more into anarchical conditions than they are today. To my mind, a Nobel would have served the noble purpose of shackling Trump, so to speak — imprisoning him, making him captive as an apostle of peace, a cause he espouses at times. The world desperately needs such a Trump, since the US’ decline is irreversible but its obsessive desire to hold on to its hegemony is all too evident.
Unfortunately, the Nobel Committee has exposed its prejudices and confirmed all over again what many suspected all along, namely, that its decisions carry the imprimatur of the US Deep State. For, make no mistake, this is not only an insult to Trump but a retaliation against his politics — being overlooked in favour of a minion of the US Deep State.
As an embittered man who would know by now that he will never get the Nobel in his life, Trump can be more dangerous than a woman scorned going forward. Such a mindless decision with no sense, logic or merit should not have been taken in Oslo behind closed doors by a clutch of people without assessing its potential impact on the world situation at such a critical juncture when international security is at a crossroads with no certainty which way it leads to — a catastrophic Armageddon or, peace and a readiness to live and let live.
“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” The neocons, in their deep, visceral hatred towards Trump, are missing the woods for trees. Warts and all, Trump has been a man of peace, the best ever after Dwight Eisenhower, and the White House is unlikely to get another one like Trump for a very long time to come.