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Lenin is said to have coined the term “useful idiot” for the liberals who, often unwittingly, end up spreading communist propaganda among the people at large, thus affording considerable credibility to Marxist lies. The Communist Party of China has done even better: they even have a conservative, Lord Jim O’Neill, the chair of the British think tank Chatham House, to blow its trumpet in the West.
O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs chief economist who came up with the acronym BRICS, is among those who swallow every lie Beijing throws up hook, line, and sinker. So, he recently praised its “fast, aggressive” response to the coronavirus outbreak. He not just recommended that Western nations should follow suit but also went on to vilify India for… well, just for the heck of it.
“Thank God this didn’t start in somewhere like India, because there’s absolutely no way that the quality of Indian governance could move to react in the way that the Chinese have done,” O’Neill told a news channel. “That’s the good side of the Chinese model, and I think you could probably say the same about Brazil too.”
Of course, he didn’t mention the others sides of the Chinese model—penalization of the doctors who raised the alarm about the deadly coronavirus, suppression of facts, the absence of media, failure to report about the severity and virulence of the disease, pressuring the World Health Organization to tell other countries about the threat, Beijing’s disgraceful attempt to blame others for the virus, its refusal to accept the culpability.
Would the consequences have been apocalyptic had the coronavirus emanated from India? The answer is a big ‘no.’ First and foremost, Indians don’t eat bats, pangolins, and tigers—the likely sources from which the virus is said to have jumped to humans.
Second, Indians are not working on biological weapons, whereas there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest that something sinister was going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As we mentioned earlier, on November 12, 2015, the reputed science magazine Nature posted an article, which said, “An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus—one related to the virus that causes SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome)—has triggered renewed debate over whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks.”
And, finally, India is a democracy. There is a free media, an independent judiciary, and a vocal populace that would never allow any government to suppress the news of an epidemic. Nothing is perfect in Indian democracy, but it is still functional. It is surely not like China where the government can succeed in punish the doctors who raise alarm bells about an outbreak.
The magazine also reported recently about a model simulation by Lai Shengjie and Andrew Tatem, emerging-disease researchers at the University of Southampton, UK. It showed that “if China had implemented its control measures a week earlier, it could have prevented 67 per cent of all cases there. Implementing the measures three weeks earlier, from the beginning of January, would have cut the number of infections to 5 per cent of the total.”
Yet, O’Neill has the impudence to praise the Chinese.
Not just laud them, which is an act of humungous immorality and mendacity, but also disparage the world’s largest democracy as collateral damage.
India has a million problems—from poverty to environmental degradation to anything anybody can think of. But it is also true that India has never been a trouble for the world. Unlike China, India does not bully its neighbors, violate their territorial integrity, try to undermine their sovereignty, support terror and terrorists, call Islam an “ideological illness,” and torment ethnic and religious minorities.
One wonders what O’Neill has been smoking. Whatever it may be, it is good for the Chinese; they have got an influential and articulate useful idiot doing their work in the UK.
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