A New Cold War Weaponizes Religious Diasporas in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region
By Darini Rajasingham Senanayake*
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka | 2 May 2025 (IDN) — Several geopolitical developments have occurred in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region. These include United States Vice President J.D Vance’s visit with his Indian-origin wife, Usha and their children to India in April and terror attacks on tourists in Kashmir’s Pahalgam, which were blamed on Pakistan. The same week (towards the April end), there was a massive blast in Iran’s port of Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf that opens into the Indian Ocean.
Earlier in the month, there were reports of the return of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives to the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. This was reportedly in consultation with the erstwhile proxy, the Taliban.
President Trump had stated that former President Biden made a mistake abandoning Bagram Base during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, given its infrastructure investments and proximity to China’s missile sites, not to mention Russia.
The Easter week attacks in Kashmir were similar to those of the Easter Sunday attacks in 2019 in Sri Lanka, mysteriously claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). These also targeted tourists, as well as churches and a Chinese research mission in the Seas of Sri Lanka — in a Hybrid operation.
Following the attacks in Kashmir, which killed 26 people, the global corporate media propaganda machine echoed the moment of “America’s Global War on Terror”.
India’s Adani-owned NDTV was full of “India’s War on Terror” moments, echoing rhetoric after the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, cheerleading a hard military response and possible war with Pakistan. This would destabilize South Asia, one of the world’s most impoverished regions, despite the Indian growth story economic hype. A battle between the nuclear-armed neighbours would, moreover, further weaponize religious diaspora networks and destabilize historically multi-religious South Asia.
What of India’s Push to be a Peace-Maker drawing on Spiritual Traditions?
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent push to be a global peacemaker in the Russia-Ukraine war, leveraging India’s spiritual traditions of Ahimsa (non-violence) in the Buddhist, Jain and Hindu Yogic and Gandhian legacies, appeared forgotten. Instead, there was a rush to deliver collective punishment to Pakistan’s farmers by withholding Indus Valley Waters, affecting food security, and putting the treaty on hold for sharing water resources. India and Pakistan were, in any case, a single country until the retreating British Raj Partitioned India in 1947, as it did Cyprus, Ireland, Palestine and other places as part of its Exit Strategy. Was this to retain British imperial and corporate economic and security interests, a different kind of GLADIO-style stay-behind operation in the “Jewel of the Crown” of a lost Empire?
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Indian State’s response to the attack in Pahalgam has been the metering out of collective punishment instead of a measured, calibrated and targeted response. In addition to holding in abeyance the Indus Water treaty, there has been a destruction of the homes of purported terrorists for the collective punishment of their kin. Is India drawn into the I2U2 mimicking the Israeli barbarism of collective punishment in occupied Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza Strip and forgetting Ahimsa?
Diaspora “Wags the Dog”: Weaponizing Religion for a new Cold War
It is now increasingly clear that along with the QUAD (the collective of Australia, Japan, USA, and India) and I2U2 (the collective of Israel, India, United Arab Emirates and USA) in the Western Indian Ocean, set up to target China, the Indian Diaspora in the US are being harnessed to “wag the dog” so to speak and lure India into the US military business industrial complex and NATO War Machine.
Although the Indian Ocean was declared a Zone of Peace on the initiative of the third world at the United Nations in 1971, at the height of the first Cold War, it has become highly militarized.
Bringing India into America’s new Cold War on China would also break the BRICS and Global South unity, which was perceived as a threat to the hegemony of the US dollar and the existing global trade and financial system.
Working with the Indian Diaspora in North America to draw India seems to be a bi-partisan agreement for Washington’s Republican and Democrat Uni-party.
Was the visit of US Vice President J.D. Vance with his Indian-origin wife and children dressed in Desi garb just days before the Kashmir, Pahalgam attacks a coincidence? Tulsi Gabbard, head of the US National Security Agency, is a Hindu, as is Kash Patel, the head of the FBI. Kamala Harris, the Former Vice President and Presidential hopeful, also had some South Indian roots.
Is the Indian diaspora being used to draw India, which had stood with Palestine during the heydays of non-alignment, to partner with Zionist Israel, which ironically also works with Saudi Arabian Petrodollars to promote the Muslim Fundamentalist (Muslim Zionist?) Wahabi-Salafi Islamist — ISIS, ISIL, Al Qaida, Al Nusra, Boko Haram, Al Shabab, Tariq Islam, Towheed Jamat, Lashkar-e-Taiba, offshoots and Islamist terror networks around the world?
Fighting ‘God-less Communists’ and Independence Movements with Religion
Claiming to fight “God-less Communists” during the Cold War against Soviet Russia, the United States and its European allies weaponized religion, seen as a conservative force in the Third World, to buffer against de-colonization and national Independence movements seeping across Asia and Africa after the end of World War 2. National liberation movements were often Communist or Socialist. Internal ethno-religious proxy wars were promoted in the post-colony to deflect de-colonization and independence struggles and retain the economic and security interests of retreating European empires or transfer them to the rising American empire.
All ‘world religions’ are politically constituted and hence more or less weaponized; Islam is by far the most Weaponized religion on the planet. That is, excepting Southeast Asian Islam, which is softer and culturally diverse, given its proximity to polytheistic Buddhist and Hindu cultural traditions. This is demonstrated in the Indonesian State’s Constitutional commitment to Pancha Sila.
During the Cold War, Muslim networks were used at the handmaiden and cat’s paw of the Evangelical Christian Zionist empire to stage violence and destabilize multi-religious countries in Asia and Africa. There was also a concerted attempt to weaponize Buddhism, as documented in an excellent book, “Cold War Monks: Buddhism and America’s Secret Strategy in Southeast Asia”, albeit with less than spectacular results.
As academics like Diane Kirby have shown, in Cold War USA, evangelical Christians and the Jewish diaspora networks, particularly Zionism and the Chabad movement, helped fund and underwrite settler colonialism in Palestine. Simultaneously, Muslims were used as the handmaiden and cat’s paw to stage violence in the interest of the US Empire and Israel around the world, with the support of Evangelical Christian Zionist groups. There is, of course, a long tradition of Israeli security agencies, Shin Bet and MOSSAD, working to weaponize religions in Palestine to promote settler colonialism.
The Head of the Snake of Islamist Terror and the US Military Business Industrial Complex
The head of the snake of Islamist Terror around the world was Saudi Arabia, which, during the Cold War, spread Wahabi-Salafi fundamentalist Islam in cooperation with the CIA and Mossad, also targeting Persian/ Iranian Shia Islam, which had a more spiritual orientation. The Ayatollahs in Teheran had, after all, thrown out the US-backed Shah of Iran and nationalized its oil wells.
Saudi Arabia’s pole position in Islam as the county of the holy site of Mecca, the birthplace of the Prophet, and its Petrodollars enabled the spread of Wahabi-Salafi fundamentalist Islam throughout the Muslim world. This was in exchange for regime protection for the House of Saud. The US has massive bases in the Kingdom.
Of course, NATO’s Turkey and other neighbours of Palestine, which are complicit in the ongoing genocide there, along with the UAE, Qatar, Egypt etc. helped. Some were subject to blowback from the Muslim Brotherhood.
Once the Soviet Union, Red Peril and the Cold War ended in 1991, Islamist Terror became America’s official new enemy. The Global War on Terror” after the World Trade Center attacks were staged purportedly by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaida enabled the perpetuation the US military business industrial complex with a new Islamist enemy.
It is worth recalling here that President Dwight Eisenhower had warned the American people about the threat posed by the US military-business industrial complex in his farewell address. And sure enough, President John F. Kennedy, who wanted to draw down the US war machine in Vietnam, was assassinated a couple of years later in 1963, reportedly in an internal covert operation.
The covert links between Zionist-Evangelical Christianity and Islamist Wahabi groups that go back to the Cold War weaponization of Islam also to fight Russia in Afghanistan may partly explain why the Muslim-dominated Middle East and North Africa (MENA Region) is the most violent part of the world at this time. Muslim communities and networks around the globe were weaponized and used for terror. In contrast, others turned a blind eye to ongoing radicalization, particularly via the Internet, social media and Online religiosity. As Yasha Levine has detailed in his book, the Internet was a military invention for surveillance and control rather than to promote Democracy.[i]
Staging a “Clash of Civilizations” between Buddhism and Islam to destroy Asia?
Ironically, Prime Minister Modi was in Saudi Arabia when the attacks happened in Pahalgam, Kashmir, and he cut short his visit to the Kingdom to return to Delhi.
In the wake of the attacks, the global corporate media echo chamber seemed taken with the prospect of a war between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. Although Pakistan had long been a ‘Garrison State’ with its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), being well-oiled by the CIA and funded by Saudi Arabia, it was painted as a proxy of China in the media.
Soon after the British Partition of India in 1948, as part of its Exit Strategy to continue to dominate the South Asia region, Pakistan was turned into a CIA Garrison State while India allied with the Soviet Union/Russia. The region has been kept in turmoil ever since — as a Cold War proxy war site. This also explains the lack of progress in SAARC, contrasting with Southeast Asia’s ASEAN.
It is increasingly clear that under Trump, the US is now focusing on China, trying to isolate it from Russia (Ukraine Peace deal), and correcting Biden’s mistake of pushing Russia into China’s arms while trying to break BRICS by courting India. After the Pahalgam attacks, there were Hollywood-inspired dreams voiced on social media of India’s Akand Barath, breaking up Pakistan, and partitioning Baluchistan given the new Chinese-built Gwadar Port, which the CIA had deemed one of the “String of Pearls” in the Indian Ocean.
If the US and its proxies succeed through a strategy of hybrid maritime and staged terror attacks in drawing India into its security architecture, this would challenge the rise of the BRICS and Global South cooperation, which threatens US dollar hegemony. This would also end the Rise of Asia and the Asian Century.
At this time, there are ongoing attempts to stage a new ‘Clash of Civilizations’ between the two great religious communities in Asia, Buddhism and Islam, to crash the Asian Century. This was signalled back in 2001 with the Taliban blowing up the ancient 6th century Buddhas of Bamiyan on the Silk Route in Afghanistan — before the 9/11 attacks on the WTC to inaugurate and legitimize America’s ‘Global War on Islamist Terror’ and is also evident in Myanmar with the Rohingya refugees and human trafficking issue.
Whiter India’s “Neighbourhood First” policy?
Over the past three years, there were US-backed regime change operations in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In 2022, when the popular democratically elected Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted and imprisoned, and Pakistan destabilized, India, the South Asian regional hegemon, looked on. Khan accused Donald Lu, then Secretary of South Asia, of spearheading the regime change in collusion with elements in the Pakistani establishment.
The same year, India capitalized on the US National Endowment for Democracy. Soros Foundation-funded social media coordinated the Aragalaya protest chaos operation to stage regime change and Sovereign Default in Sri Lanka. As South Asia’s wealthiest country was implausibly declared “Bankrupt” overnight due to a purported lack of US dollars to enable the IMF to upend its economic sovereignty, India was a good neighbour to the rescue.
However, last year in August, India lost a close ally who had just won the national elections, Prime Minister Sheik Hasina in Bangladesh, to another US-back regime change in South Asia. Indeed, the Modi government’s policy of self-interest sans principled Foreign Policy seems to belie proclamations of the ‘neighbourhood first” and has paid diminishing returns in the face of America’s horizon (OTH), operations and aspiration for Full Spectrum Dominance in South Asia.
Is it becoming increasingly complex for India to ‘run with the hare and hunt with the hounds’? The destabilization that OTH protests curated via remote social media platforms for regime change and staged economic crises have rendered South Asia, including India, poorer. The case of ASEAN clearly shows that countries develop only when their neighbours are stable and developing, too.
Increasingly, India’s growth story hype is belied by the reality of poverty due to external destabilization and staged OTH crises across South Asia. It may be time to fully embrace the BRICS and Global South in the Asian 21st Century. Otherwise, India may help normalize the Abraham Accords and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza that would legitimize a brutal “new world order” across the Indian Ocean World, which is entirely contrary to Hindu-Buddhist-Jain traditions of Ahimsa and peace-making.
Finally, it is high time for a global movement to shut down the 750 environment-polluting US military bases around the world, particularly those in the Indian Ocean, which should be again declared a ‘Zone of Peace’ in keeping with the Principles of Non-Alignment.
*Dr Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake is a social and medical anthropologist with expertise in international development and political-economic analysis. She was a member of the International Steering Group of the North-South Institute project: “Southern Perspectives on Reform of the International Aid Architecture”. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Image: India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi with US Vice President JH.D. Vance, his wife and children. Source: CounterCurrents.org
[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1US6sxgKrc
