EDITORIAL

The World Needs
Gandhi’s Non-Violent Direct Action

Aug. 22—This issue of EIR contains a report on the Aug. 20 Schiller Institute Forum celebrating the 75th Anniversary of India’s independence from the British Empire, including a transcript of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote speech. This is not merely an historic commentary, but a passionate call for the world to come together in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent direct action to counter the living ghost of that Empire now guiding the NATO war machine in economic warfare against Russia, China and the Global South, with the specter of global thermonuclear war and economic disintegration threatening civilization itself.

The British policies toward India today, followed by their “dumb giant” forces in the United States, have not changed since their forced division of India into warring camps—Hindu vs. Muslim, India vs. Pakistan—before allowing Independence to take place. The continuing animosity between Islamabad and Delhi is still carefully nurtured, while efforts to turn India against China are even higher on the agenda for “Global Britain” and “Global NATO.” The “Quad”—the “Quadrilateral Security Dialogue” between the U.S., Japan, India and Australia—was created in 2007 under the guiding hand of neocon fanatic Dick Cheney, then the “President of Vice” in the Bush Administration, with a primary focus of drawing India into an anti-China military bloc (sometimes called the Asian NATO) under the guise of defending “democracies” against “autocracies.”

But India has to a great extent maintained the “Spirit of Bandung,” based on the concept of non-alignment developed at the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, co-organized by Burma, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The Conference adopted the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence” first developed by China’s Premier Zhou Enlai and India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. While maintaining friendly relations with the West, India has maintained close relations with the Soviet Union and Russia, and despite occasional crises in relations with China, mostly related to border disputes, they have increasingly improved those relations as well.

Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, speaking during a visit to Thailand Aug. 18, said that an “Asian Century” could happen only if China and India came together, but it would be difficult for this to happen if India and China could not come together. This was most welcome in Beijing, where the reference recalled the famous meeting between Chairman Deng Xiaoping and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1988, where they agreed that an Asian Century depended on China and India cooperating in developing their economies.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) 2022 Summit will take place Sept. 15–16 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, bringing together the leaders of Russia, China, and India, as well as those of Pakistan, the Central Asian nations, and others. The nations of the Global South are increasingly turning to the association of nations in the SCO, both because the Western nations have abandoned development altogether, preferring permanent warfare—both economic warfare through sanctions, and military warfare directly and through proxies—as well as the cultish allegiance to green fantasies about global warming. The SCO meeting will be the scene of extremely serious discussions on countering NATO’s war plans against Russia and China, formulating new global financial agreements to escape the evil sanctions regimes imposed by the U.S. and Europe, and extending the “peace through development” concept of the Belt and Road Initiative to restore development in the midst of the global hyperinflationary collapse of the dollar-based financial system.

These issues will also be discussed at the upcoming Schiller Institute Conference on Sept. 10–11, under the theme: “Inspiring Humanity To Survive the Greatest Crisis in World History.” The conference will honor the life and the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, whose 100th anniversary of his birth falls on Sept. 8. For more information and to register, click here.