CCP NETWORKS ACTIVELY DISRUPTING INDIA-WEST TIES

Agencies and affiliates of the Chinese Communist Party have substantial linkages, including financial, with key policymakers in the US, Canada, the UK and other countries.

- MADHAV NALAPAT

Accelerated progress in overall India-US and India-Europe cooperation, including in matters of defence, since the Narendra Modi dispensation began in 2014 has ignited alarm bells within the Leadership Compound in Beijing. Now that Cold War 2.0 between China and the growing cohort of countries resisting CCP expansionism has become a reality, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would like ties between India and the US in particular to return to the frosty, prickly state that they were in during Cold War 1.0. between the US and the USSR. CCP influence and asymmetric operations networks have been active in a multiplicity of ways in seeking to disrupt and downgrade the India-West relationship. It ought therefore to come as no surprise that toxic accusations, such as that the Indian state was carrying out extra-judicial killings in other countries, are increasing in number. Such an accusation was first made by Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself levelled the charge, not in a private conversation but in Parliament.

Since then, elements linked to the ruling coalition in Ottawa have repeatedly sought to level the same accusation at India, and try and get support for such a view amongst member-states of NATO. It may be mentioned that the diversion of NATO attention back from China to Russia, and from the Indo-Pacific to the Atlantic, has been amongst the primary objectives of CCP influence operations within the 75-year-old security alliance. Hence, tension between NATO and Russia that spiked significantly since the February 2022 entry of Russian forces into parts of Ukraine came as a boon to the CCP, which is therefore interested in keeping the conflict going while it is operationalising moves designed to extinguish the sovereignty of the island country by 2027.