Deepak Vohra

My title reminds me of John Le Carre’s famous 1974 spy thriller: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

How would you describe China’s situation?

In January 2020, China shook the world with its virus.

In 2020, the world started coming together to challenge China on its virus.

In June 2021, the democratic world shook China.

Two years ago, the US launched a trade war against China’s most unfair commercial practices, and in June 2021, the powerful G7 group of the world’s largest economies and the European Union (60% of global net wealth and just above 40% of nominal global GDP) joined in.

China lashed out that the days when a "small" group of countries decided the fate of the world were long gone.

Two years ago, the US confronted China on the East and South China Seas demanding free passage through what China says is its private lakes. The Quad, at Summit level in February 2021, backed the US.

At its June 2021 NATO Summit, for the first time, the alliance placed China at the centre of its agenda and warned about "systemic challenges" from Beijing, including expanding its nuclear arsenal that threatened the "rules-based international order."

A rattled China promptly accused NATO of slandering its “peaceful” development” (when cornered, China falls back on its “peaceful” rise nonsense), claimed that our pursuit of “defence and military modernisation is justified, reasonable, open and transparent" and asked the grouping to "devote more of its energy to promoting dialogue."

China thinks it can con the world into talk-talk while it goes about messing up things.

Does China have a friend left?

In his 31 December 2019 address to his people, Xi PingPong had boasted that China had friends everywhere and swore to “make unremitting efforts for the creation of a beautiful future for mankind” (if it was a future with Chinese characteristics including repression, exploitation, abuse, humiliation and genocide).

Did someone say something about karma?

President Bill Clinton thought that admitting Russia in 1998 would enhance its international prestige and encourage its first post-Soviet leader, Boris Yeltsin, to hew more closely to the West. Russia resented being mentored and was booted out in 2014 for annexing Crimea.

The concept of a forum for the world's major industrialized countries emerged in 1975 in response to the exchange rate collapse of 1971, the Nixon shock, the 1970s energy crisis and the ensuing recession.

(Some say that the G-20 is more relevant, representing about 80 per cent of global GDP and three-fifths of the world’s population).

When the G7 Foreign Ministers met in May 2021 in London, two of India’s delegates tested positive for Covid on arrival in London.

As a measure of abundant caution and out of consideration for others, Minister S Jaishankar conducted his engagements virtually.

Had it been his Chinese counterpart at some such meeting, Beijing’s wolf warriors would have alleged a nefarious plot to humiliate China.

The June 2021 G7 Summit in London is the most important in its history because:

1) America is back (after Donald Trump’s abrasiveness during his Summits - in 2017 Angela Merkel questioned the transatlantic relationship, saying that for the first time since World War II, Europe “must take our fate into our own hands”)

2) the world faces an existential threat from the Chinese virus 

3) China seeks global domination through its Bilk and Rob Initiative

4) the free world must decide how to deal with Russia, a country too powerful to be ignored (so that the US can focus on its strategic rival, China)

5) climate change must be addressed, as the G7 produces a quarter of the world’s greenhouse emissions.

Even though other issues were discussed such as tax avoidance, China was the elephant in the room with the virus and the consequent global recession at the back of everybody’s mind.

There is almost irrefutable evidence that the virus was manmade in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and not produced by Shri and Smt Bat hanging upside down in their caves.

In his post Conference press meet, Biden wondered whether the deadly virus was a natural marketplace occurrence, or a lab experiment gone awry (a rather disingenuous way of asking whether it was a bioweapon).

More than 200 million people have been infected and over 4 million killed, according to America's Johns Hopkins University.

On his first overseas visit, Biden announced a major new initiative to vaccinate the world against Covid-19, and the G7 agreed to donate one billion doses by next year as part of “a comprehensive plan to help end this pandemic as rapidly as possible.”

According to US media reports, the Biden administration is buying 500 million doses for international distribution to developing countries.

“We were the arsenal of democracy in World War II. We’re going to be the arsenal of vaccines,” NSA Jake Sullivan said.

The US had said that it will distribute vaccines to India as part of its “strategy for global vaccine sharing” after External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar met key officials in Washington DC in May

Following the G7 Foreign Minister’s May 2021 meeting, Chinese media widely circulated a morphed image of the meeting in London with the slogan "G7 - the Invaders United Kingdom 1900", a reference to the attack on China by several western countries following the officially supported Boxer rebellion of 1900 that targeted foreigners

Following severe outrage, the King advised his wolf warriors to switch track and create a lovable, trustworthy, respectable image of China, to roll over on their backs like cute puppy dogs wanting their bellies scratched.

On his last day in office, President Donald Trump angered Germany by sanctioning companies and individuals involved in the controversial Nordstream 2 project, the twin pipeline to carry Russian gas directly to Germany (one pipeline already exists).

President Biden revoked that order, and Germany and Russia are relieved.

On 16 June, Joe Biden met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva whom he called smart, bright and tough…a “worthy adversary” (after dubbing him – for his domestic audience - a killer, without a soul).

Both leaders called their meeting “positive”, and Biden claimed: “I did what I came to do.”

It was a meeting of equals, and it seems that Russia is back in the fold. 

Drawing away an increasingly unhappy Russia from Beijing could be one of the game-changers in current geopolitics.

PingPong should be in the ICU.

Biden wants the Build Back Better World (B3W) plan to be a higher-quality alternative to China's exploitative BRI that helped finance trains, roads, and ports in many countries but saddled them with debt.

The G7 will promote a transparent infrastructure partnership to help narrow the $40 trillion needed by developing nations for infrastructure by 2035, the White House says.

"This is not just about confronting or taking on China," a senior official in Biden's administration said, "but until now we haven't offered a positive alternative that reflects our values, our standards and our way of doing business."

Sorry, it is all about taking on China.

If Joe and Boris want to take a great leap forward and constitute a global democratic alliance of 10-11 countries, it will be an important signal.

US officials want to prove that Western values can prevail. They argue that Chinese investment comes with too high a price tag, the forced labour of the Uighurs in Xinjiang is morally egregious and economically unacceptable as it prevents fair competition.

In any case, the Chinese Bilk and Rob Initiative has been killed by the virus.

It was the scam of the millennium.

At the end of 2020, more than 2,600 projects valued at some $3.7 trillion were linked to the BRI, although the Chinese foreign ministry said in June 2021 that about 60% of projects had been seriously or somewhat affected by the pandemic. 

An internal Pakistani report last year concluded that six China-funded power projects under CPEC had resulted in huge profits for the Chinese firms through over-invoicing and tariff charges (of several hundred million dollars).

BRI white elephants languish semi-finished around the world. 

Calling the G7 a “very outdated group” in May last year, Donald Trump had said he would like to include India, Australia, South Korea and Russia in the grouping of the largest advanced economies, and proposed that the grouping meet in September or November 2020.

That did not happen owing to the pandemic and the US elections’ outcome.

We fully qualify as the biggest democracy and an economy larger than half the members of G 7. As a country with friends around the world, we do better than almost everybody there.

We are the only big country that abuts China and there is no way that anybody will tame China without our active cooperation.

We are not weak, handicapped, or endangered today.

It is the world that needs us to control China and not us..

This is the second time PM Modi participated in a G7 meeting.

He had been invited by the G7 French Presidency in 2019 as a “Goodwill Partner” on the then pressing issues of ‘Climate, Biodiversity and Oceans’ and ‘Digital Transformation.’

The June 2021 invitation to India is a recognition of our growing clout in international affairs, not just a reflection of our Prime Minister’s hugoplomacy.

India has the world’s greatest capacity to produce generic vaccines at affordable rates, so the Quad vaccine plan seeks to use that capability.

Now the G7 will donate one billion vaccines by next year.

When AIDS was ravaging our planet, Cipla sold anti-retroviral drugs for less than USD 350 per person per year, as compared to USD 12,000 that the US giants demanded.

In 1998, Bharath Biotech launched its most affordable Hepatitis B vaccines at under 20 US cents per dose and in 2015 developed the gastroenteritis Rotavirus vaccine for USD 1 per dose as compared to USD 200 from Big Pharma. In 2016 came its Zika virus vaccine.

What is at stake for India in engaging with G7?

A lot.

India has long called for reforming global institutions to reflect modern-day geopolitical realities.

Trumps’ offer to expand G7 would give us a seat at the global high table, even while the UN was stuck in a time warp.

With China’s undisguised belligerence (all that nonsense of peaceful rise is over), the US wants all like-minded countries to partner in dealing with Beijing, since it too expensive to be the sole Rambo of the world.

It needs friends with a demonstrated capability to stand up to China, not just bluster or whimper.

In June 2020, India kicked China’s butt in Galwan without anyone’s assistance.

America sat up and took notice of our military strength. 

The world realizes that despite its current travails, India will bounce back.

Health has always been a top Indian priority.

The great thinker Chanakya had said that a person who stands by you in sickness is your true brother.

China tried to create a global health silk road. No one bought. The idea died.

Narendra Modi reaffirmed India’s commitment to a “collective” response to the pandemic, proposed a very sensible “one earth, one health” approach, and asked for temporary TRIPS patent waivers on vaccines that are a common good.

India generously gave of its vaccines (70 million doses) when it could to more than 80 countries, big and small, and is willing to share its experience and expertise regarding the pandemic with the world.

Remember what our sages said: the world is one family.

Pandemics do not need passports or visas to cross borders.

Yet vaccine nationalism is on shameless display across the yawning north-south divide. Just over a billion of the estimated 11 billion doses needed have been administered so far; only 0.2 per cent of these are in low-income countries.

10 countries are reported to have cornered three-quarters of the world’s corona vaccines, 55 countries have the remaining 25%, 135 nations have nothing, with the UN Secretary-General calling it wildly unfair, pointing out in February 2021 that 130 countries had not received a single dose of vaccine.

Vaccine equity is the biggest moral test for the global community.

The template for much greater mutual support and cooperation already exists. India established it.

The 19th-century German unifier Otto Von Bismarck famously said: A fool learns only from his mistakes, a wise man learns from the mistakes of others.

We may not still know what to do, we certainly know what not to do!

We have learnt the hard way; the world should not make the mistakes that we did.

The Chinese virus has changed our lives and damaged our world as we knew it, yet it shows a new quality of national and transnational solidarity. 

Our new timelines are BC and AC (Before Covid and After Covid).

As new mutants emerge every other day, doctors in India and the USA and collate and analyze data and prescribe appropriate treatment and drugs. 

Only in China is a medicine practised on the basis of what the Communist Party decrees.

After supporting the temporary vaccine patent waiver in the World Trade Organization, the US is stepping up its contribution of readymade vaccines to the world, after ensuring that it has enough for its own people.

The US has a virtual stranglehold on global vaccine production. No country, including Russia, can produce vaccines totally autonomously as some ingredients have to be imported from the US.

If TRIPS patents must be broken to save millions of lives (as India did with anti-retroviral drugs for HIV/AIDS) then it is a moral imperative to do so.

To the millions of sons and daughters of India may I say that Team India in the past has vanquished smallpox and diphtheria and poliomyelitis and AIDS and Yaws skin disease and maternal and neonatal tetanus despite having a poor doctor-people ratio?

Since our 1991 economic reforms, the international community has been eyeing India’s potential and its huge market. 

If the free world wants to decouple from China, India is the obvious choice.

Like the Pepsi ad said: Yehi hai right choice baby!