A Senior Obama-Era Policy Advisor Just Published A Cheap Political Hit Piece Against India

What stands out about Lazda’s latest lies compared to those countless other folks who’ve spewed similar such nonsense about India since February is that he’s a senior Obama-era official whose former colleagues exert immense influence over the incumbent Biden Administration. His twisted interpretation of India’s principled neutrality therefore shouldn’t be dismissed as the ravings of a random perception manager but as reflecting the current administration’s latest information warfare narratives.

The US-led West’s Golden Billion is furious with India for retaining its pragmatic policy of principled neutrality towards the Ukrainian Conflict, especially after its abstention from the latest UN vote against Russia, and it’s just recruited a senior Obama-era policy advisor to lead its latest information warfare offensive against that rising multipolar Great Power in revenge. Janis Lazda, who’s described by Politico as having been a political advisor in the White House and US Senate (which his LinkedIn reveals also included a stint on the National Security Council from 2011-2013), published a cheap political hit piece on Monday about how “India’s stance on the Ukraine war makes little sense”.

It builds upon the prior artificially manufactured narrative about India allegedly sacrificing Western values for the sake of immediate self-interests to absurdly claim that “it’s now standing on the side of Putin’s ‘Pan-Slavic,’ neo-imperialist ambitions to swallow an independent nation state.” Lazda then adds that India is siding with “a despot who relies on sham elections and referendums, violence, and propaganda to stay in power”, to which end it’s even” also providing crucial financial support for Russia’s brutal invasion and occupation of Ukraine.” Taken together, these allegations are clearly designed to misportray India as a rogue neo-fascist state that represents a global threat to democracy.

None of this is true whatsoever at all, and I extensively discredited the spirit of these information warfare attacks in three analyses here, here, and here responding to a unipolar liberal-globalist Indian intellectual, CNN, and a pro-American Indian policy influencer respectively. To summarize for those without the time to even briefly skim through my pieces, India’s bonafide neutrality in US-led NATO’s proxy war on Russia through Ukraine is driven by its desire to maximize its strategic autonomy in the global systemic transition to multipolarity, to which end it’s preemptively averting Russia’s potentially disproportionate dependence on China while also aiming to lead the Global South via the Neo-NAM.

What stands out about Lazda’s latest lies compared to those countless other folks who’ve spewed similar such nonsense about India since February is that he’s a senior Obama-era official whose former colleagues exert immense influence over the incumbent Biden Administration. He’s not just a run-of-the-mill propagandist or some think tank “expert” that few in the general public have ever heard of, but someone that’s well-connected with the ruling American elite. His twisted interpretation of India’s principled neutrality therefore shouldn’t be dismissed as the ravings of a random perception manager but as reflecting the current administration’s latest information warfare narratives.

This is crucial for objective observers to keep in mind since that hostile attitude adds credence to my prior analysis that the US is aiming to complete its envisaged grand strategic reorientation of South Asia that was set into motion by its post-modern coup against former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan in order to create the regional conditions whereby it can more effectively pressure and ultimately contain India’s rise as a multipolar Great Power. American strategists have clearly concluded that India won’t submit to becoming their declining unipolar hegemon’s vassal but will instead always proudly flex its strategic autonomy in order to advance its national interests, hence the need to aggressively manage it.

To be clear, those two still share concerns about China’s speculative superpower ambitions, but I recently argued that this alleged trajectory might have already been derailed by the systemic consequences of the Ukrainian Conflict so it’s possible that India therefore doesn’t need the US as much as before in this respect. That observation also seems to have dawned on American strategists too, hence their latest hostility towards India as evidenced by their escalating infowar against it in parallel with their gradual pivot towards Pakistan. Lazda’s significant contribution to it all is that this well-connected policy influencer showed the world just how far the US is willing to go to smear India.