My mother used to have a favorite expression: “I can put my ass where you cannot put your face”. That is the response that needs to be conveyed to some of the spin doctors of misinformation who are starting to flood the internet with articles that don’t address the issues raised over the Lugar Laboratory in Tbilisi, Georgia, but instead try to discredit the source of the revelations and blame it all on Russian disinformation.
Georgia and many countries close to the United States are caught between two fires, serving as a proverbial no man’s land between the competing interests of the United States and the Russian Federation. Such regions, and buffer zones, make me think of the famous World War II movie Casablanca, where an exiled American and former freedom fighter, Rick, runs the most popular nightclub in town.
There is always a flip side to anything. Same sex marriage in the United States, much derided by the religious right, has also become a new marketing niche, thus becoming acceptable by default amongst the same religious right by also satisfying free market principles.
Whenever national-level elections take place in any country, other countries have an interest in the outcome. Major powers want to make sure smaller ones continue to toe-the-line, or are ripe for conversion to their side of the argument. Smaller countries want to remain, or become, first in the queue when new aid or partnership arrangements are discussed. So every country tries to influence elections, in the same way they try and influence governments when they are in power.
The ongoing border dispute between India and China combined with the hyper-nationalist and religiously sectarian Hindutva politics of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, have led India to try and reinvent the wheel or more specifically, reinvented the road on which the wheels turn.
